Pricking on the Plain

[steepholm]

I've been ludicrously busy the last couple of weeks, and have missed writing up several things I ordinarily would at least have mentioned. Here's a hurried rescue dig from the upper strata of my memory.

a) A week or so ago I found myself at a small local station in Clifton at around 9.45pm. Apparently, if I'd looked up (and there'd been no street lights) I might have caught a rare glimpse of the aurora borealis. However, my attention was caught instead by a row of around forty young men, clearly drunk, and dressed identically in shirts and ties, kneeling on the platform edge with their heads overhanging the track in a shoulder-to-shoulder row. Other drunk young men on the bridge overhead were enjoining them loudly to "Kneel!", but I could see no reason for their compliance, especially with the 9.51 due at any moment. It was bizarre rather than threatening, but I was relieved (if only for the driver's sake) that they stood up before the train actually got there, and even more so when they didn't board it. Instead, as we pulled away in the direction of Montpelier, they formed a guard of honour, hands clasped solemnly at their waists, so that looking out of the window I could see nothing but shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie-shirt'n'tie until we ran out of platform.

Apparently it was some kind of initiation ceremony for rugby players.

b) A few days ago my latest ABBA piece appeared, a meditation on the proposition that Atropos too is a weaver. That phrase has been hanging round my head for years now, to the extent that I sometimes think it's a quotation, but I'm pretty sure it's my own.

c) I received my contributor copy of The Reception of Ancient Greece and Rome in Childrens Literature. It's a snip at £97. All right, it's actually ridiculously overpriced - but it is a good volume, leaving my own contribution aside. If you want to read that - "The 'Grand Tour' as Transformative Experience in Children’s Novels about the Roman Invasion" - you can do so for free, should the fit seize you. (While fetching that link just now, I realised that this version is missing the illustration from Fletcher and Kipling's school history of England, showing ‘The Landing of the Romans’. That's a shame as it's well worth seeing for its evocation of the Kent seaside around AD 43.)





f) I watched Janina Ramirez's programme on The Faerie Queene with some trepidation, but was reassured: it was well judged, I think, considering it had only 30 minutes to play with and had to be pitched for an audience who would probably not have read (or perhaps even heard of) the poem. And we did get quite a few extracts read aloud, which is never less than a pleasure.

It's strange, though, how often people who don't like The Faerie Queene find it impossible to concede that other people might actually love it. Are they worried that they're missing something? Typical is this review from The New Statesmen by Rachel Cooke:

The series opened with Dr Janina Ramirez on The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, which she claimed to have loved ever since she first read it as a teenager (crikey, some teenager). I, for one, don’t think Dr Ramirez – the only non-celebrity to get a gig presenting an episode of this series – will have convinced too many Spenser virgins to try his allegorical epic, which is some 35,000 lines long and absolutely heaving with elves. There was something just a little unconvincing about her proclamations of its beauty, her insistence that what Spenser called its “darke conceit” had captured her imagination right from the off.

Well, Ramirez made it clear elsewhere in the programme that she'd first read it as an undergraduate, so an eighteen-year-old teenager, not a fourteen-year-old one - but why would even that be so very odd? I read it at 18 myself, and fell in love with it so deep that I wrote my PhD on it. Nothing can be to everyone's taste, of course, but if you have an ear for (and interest in) language, how can you not at least concede The Faerie Queene its own beauty, even if you're out of sympathy with it? "Absolutely heaving with elves" is the kind of sneer-as-substitute-for-criticism that Edmund Wilson practised on Tolkien (who was no great Spenser fan, by the way, though Lewis was). Oddly enough I've never heard it used to put down A Midsummer Night's Dream - though it would be equally true of that play.

Meanwhile, veteran sneerer A. N. Wilson's Return to Larkinland was less satisfactory. Despite having a whole hour to play with, this programme on Larkin's life and writing left out entire swathes (not just fractions of a swathe) of relevant material, including the very existence of any woman in his life other than Monica Jones (whom Wilson knew). Larkin's seven-year relationship with my aunt, including a two-year engagement, was not apparently worth mentioning - but there was plenty of room for extensive quotation from the semi-erotic schoolgirl fiction he produced at that time, and even - insult to injury - for a recitation of the damning assessment of The Faerie Queene with which he defaced a copy in the college library... as an undergraduate:

First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queene is the dullest thing out. Blast it.

Well, Homer nods.

Comments

[lilliburlero]

If the school fiction of the early to mid-20th century is anything to go by, there was certainly a time when (extracts from) The Faerie Queene were thought eminently suitable for 14-year-olds. I first read it at 18 too & love it (with reservations) though I can quite see why it mightn't be everyone's cup of tea (though not b/c elves, which seems an odd charge to bring against it when you think of the other charges that might be brought against it) And I actually don't buy Larkin's philistine posturing, either.

[steepholm]

And talking of young Spenser readers, who can forget Abraham Cowley? "I had read him all over before I was twelve years old, and was thus made a poet as irremediably* as a child is made an eunuch".

* This is the word printed in his 1668 Works, though an erratum slip "corrects" it to "immediately". I think it was right first time.

[lilliburlero]

I think it was right first time too: the simile reads very odd with 'immediately'. (It's an interesting simile.)

[steepholm]

It is indeed an interesting simile, and indicative of Cowley's deep ambivalence about poetry. If you're interested, I once wrote an article (partly) about that.

[thistleingrey]

For better or worse, I can one-up Cooke: we were to read bits of books I and III of FQ for a Chaucer-to-Milton intro survey. I became distracted in the campus bookshop by a Penguin translation of something that sounded kind of similar and ended up writing my essay (very clumsily) on Britomart and echoes of Geoffrey of Monmouth (of whom I'd never heard before, of course, being a US-born child of non-British immigrants). That's nail two in the coffin of my eventual medievalist focus; nail one was happenstance acquaintance with Graves's White Goddess when I was sixteen via a similarly chance reading of Adler's Drawing Down the Moon. People come to Real Literature(tm) from all kinds of randomness.

[steepholm]

Spenser had certainly dipped into Geoffrey, as witnessed by the potted British history read by Arthur in the House of Alma in Book II.

I fell into that same White Goddess wormhole at about the same age...

[thistleingrey]

Yes--it took me till nearly thirty to read the rest of FQ, which may have been for the best....

[cmcmck]

How in God's name did anyone supposedly able to use a brain find Beowulf 'boring'?

Arrogant little nit. No wonder I don't like his work!