Looked at a sample of sea-water – some wonderful diatoms & organisms, among them Ostracods, Tunicates & Dinoflagellates. It wd. be interesting to get samples from deep water but can’t imagine how. Maybe some kind of bottle with a sprung top which could be opened by a string at a measured depth?
V. perverse to be keeping a journal. The noise is all written down (long since) & most of it printed; why can’t the rest be silence? But something nags. Why shd. people in their sixties find their thoughts turning always & always to child-hood? Why are my dreams haunted by rivers, lost voices, sounds which can’t be notated? Everything says to me ‘long ago’, nothing very much says ‘now’. There’s a horrible account of poor Schumann in his madness sitting all day feebly making lists of rivers and place-names interspersed by musical dreams. He awoke from one of these calling feverishly for MS paper since he had heard the most angelic music too beautiful for human ears. He scribbled it down while it was fading – like Tartini and his ‘Devil’s Trill’ sonata or Coleridge and ‘Kubla Khan’ – and when Brahms came & read it he found an imperfect version of the slow mvt. theme of Schumann’s own vln. concerto. I wept when I heard that story – couldn’t help myself, it’s too close to something I can’t put my finger on. Maybe it isn’t written on the wind after all, maybe we’re taking our own dictation.
Whatever we’re doing I’m certain we began it in infancy. In those few short years, free of the least vestige of labour, the act of vision was completed. The lifework wh. followed was merely agonising & fallacious transcription. How mistimed it is, that silly reverence accorded the famous artist in his studio, the composer in his study, the poet at his table (hush! for a great work is taking shape!). For who on seeing a child poking a chrysalis with a twig or watching water flow around a stone while he plays on the river-bank could seriously suppose this very moment might be the true birth of a symphony? When I wrote to dear Nim (all those years ago) that the trees were singing my music or maybe I’d sung theirs – some such phrase – it wasn’t fanciful. No doubt they do sing a different song to each pair of ears; but those were precisely the notes which came to me as these ears heard what these eyes saw. They were what I had heard as a child down by the Severn and the Teme: the wind in the reeds & the willows, the slow slide of arterial England which at the time I idiotically supposed to be everlasting.
Miserable deception, all of it. The musical vision was so definite, the inner voice so urgent one always believed it did correspond to reality in some way – ‘this I saw & knew’ etc. Such were the notes, & only those notes, made by the wind passing through the trees & by the trees as the wind passed through them. Anyone who couldn’t hear it was deaf or had the soul of a stone. Alas for the years it took to see why I was wrong. When Alice died dear Frank Schuster showered me with ‘helpful texts’ – among them a Polish mystic called Rabbi Nachmann of Bratslav (born the same year as Beethoven, I remember) & a buddhist book wh. had a neatly illustrative story. A famous Patriarch & a novice monk are on a hillside together looking down at their monastery on its crag, prayer-flags fluttering in the pure Tibetan breeze. After a bit the monk asks ‘Is it the wind or the flag which moves?’ to wh. the Patriarch replies ‘Neither, it’s the mind.’ So a composer’s mind is his alone & what he may hear in the wind corresponds to nothing except in himself. Ah, gross fool to expect public acclaim for private vision!
But how deceptive & swamping that certainty used to be … In those days I think there was no quiver of a leaf, no furl of a wing, no veiled or flashing human glance which couldn’t render itself into music. I heard everything: the passing of a cloud, the passing of a waggon, the passing of a life – I cd. hear it all & still can when I manage to convince myself it’s worth the trick. The smell of toast or the slicing of a black pudding (especially the ones we used to get from Moxon’s, juicy, with skins that burst – pock! at a steel knife-point); the feel of a word like ‘owl’ or ‘slumber’; even ideas: all these things fall at once into notes, phrases, harmony, rhythm.
Why? How? It’s as if there were a single raw material of all art which different people perceive with different senses, according to talent. I happen to hear it; but when a tune first comes I don’t always recognise it as music straight away – I’m not quite sure what it is. Like Gerontius I’m uncertain: ‘I cannot of that music rightly say/Whether I hear or touch or taste the tones.’ Strange how only now do I dare admit to the private page (23 years on) that it was this passage in Newman’s poem which decided me to set it. I never even dared tell poor Alice that. The dear, sweet thing was blind to all but her ‘highest motives’. Yet the truth is it had nothing whatever to do with religion (& of course everybody was bound to misread it – ‘stinks of incense’, ‘too much Mary’ &c &c. Well, it was my mother who converted to Catholicism four years after she married and five years before I was born, not I. I was never a convert). It was not so much the quality of Newman’s verse – I could perfectly well see at the time it was patchy – but the dramatic poetic vision. It was wonderfully imaginative, that idea of a freshly-detached soul being borne along without either location or time. It’s never clear what he’s become, with what senses he perceives things, how fast he’s being impelled on his way by the ‘uniform and gentle pressure’. So when (meaningless questions!) one wonders where the divvel he’s got to and how long has elapsed since his death (is he dead?) it’s a real shock to us when he hears the voices of his friends singing the Subvenite around his deathbed. It was that which really convinced me: the being in two worlds at once, the dissolution of place & time. That & the stillness, the solitariness, the cessation of everything except music – whether of angels or devils, earthly voices or lofty pines. If I immersed myself in dogma beforehand it was largely to guard against the kind of solecisms for which I shd. have been publicly pilloried (& with what glee!). That & the fact that I was still not quite decided whether I mightn’t do the oratorio on Judas instead – a nice idea after all & not without its radical aspects in those stuffy days. Why a ‘religious’ work at all? I find myself asking with near-incredulity in 1923 in a world I share with Stravinsky, Schoenberg, Ravel. Because, damn and blast it, in England at that time a big choral work was the safest way of getting a serious hearing & ‘big choral work’ meant a pot-pourri of biblical texts for the leather lungs of massed Yorks. spinsters. That’s how far behind England was musically.
So my motivation in setting ‘G’ had nothing to do with any personal commitment to the Church & still less was it an expression of faith (or even much interest) in the notion of survival after death. But it would never have done to admit it. People – individuals as well as the Great British Public – are much too dense to understand such things. You always have to toe some notional line no matter what your real views. It’s odd the way publics never understand private matters, given that they after all consist of individuals, but they can’t or won’t. It’s like a conspiracy. So the critics saddled me with Rome & the wretch Gerontius (who is after all me and nobody else) had to make his own way in a hostile world after the worst launching in English musical history not as a poetic hero but as the eponym of ‘an oratorio’. Well they can weigh him down how they will: his wings will always lift him. There’s a vast heart in him; cut him anywhere & he still bleeds. Despite his name he’s a young man after all &, to these biased old ears at least, still fresh.
Later
The cabin boy with the aitches has just brought me a letter from Molly Air. She too appears to have a heart.
Dear Sir Edward,
If I were certain where the taffrail was I could probably say I was sketching there during luncheon; I seldom feel hungry in the sun. Your graceful apology is accepted with the alacrity it deserves. Might we not go ashore together at Funchal? I can show you what to avoid.
Most sincerely,
Molly Air
I call that generous and shall respond accordingly. Wherever Funchal might be it’ll be improved by feminine company, I shd. say.
Reading through
the above twaddle after a pleasant dinner marred only by the sound of a dance band somewhere not far enough away: the bit about there being a single raw material of all art strikes me still as a tenable theory but it certainly depends on how it’s phrased. That day I exploded at Roger Fry & his asinine remark about all the arts being essentially the same – I think I told him that music was written on the skies to be noted down & couldn’t be compared to some stupid imitation (I must have been thinking of those overpaid nude-lady painters like Long. Anyway it was a good lunch-time philosopher’s put-down). Since then, thanks to GBS who was also present, I’ve come to think Fry actually meant something not much different from my own idea: he just put it badly & at an unfortunate juncture – I’d had a bellyful of hearing about the vast sums of money & honours which hack painters & popular novelists get while musicians are fobbed off with a pittance & left practically to starve. Maybe au fond all the arts are the same but they certainly don’t get paid the same. Nor are all artists the same, not by a long chalk. One thinks of the Singing Dames Butt & Melba: solid humbug from first note to last. As for Edwin Long RA … The only decent thing he ever begat was the house Norman Shaw built for him & in which I lived until a few months ago. It beggared me. But then I don’t paint naked bits of stuff & so am not paid accordingly.
A propos being able to ‘put’ anything to music: I’ve since remembered Donald Tovey writing to me years ago saying he knew it sounded like balderdash but he’d often caught himself actually solving some mental problem in the key of A minor where he’d failed utterly to reason it out in words. How well I understand that. He went on to say that somebody in Shax – Hamlet, I imagine – was inexplicable if one stopped to analyse his character but perfectly convincing if one didn’t. Tovey claimed Shax achieved this by subtle artistic devices which were absolutely significant but quite beyond the reach of words & hence of analysis. Words, he said, do not represent actual ideas but only particular cases of ideas. The real idea goes on being in A minor just as Shax’s artistic methods are closer to being in (say) A minor than in words … Well of course Donald’s famous for being brainy & intelleckshul. But I always can remember the gist of that letter, if only to think how ironic it makes much of his own music criticism wh. relies all too heavily on wordage, much of it purple & fanciful to a degree. Luckily nobody in Germany’s read any of it or English music wd. have an even lower reputation for unseriousness than it has anyway.
Still, something in what he says rings true. In those dear old days when I used to go shopping for Alice on the bicycle (when she wd. let me out) I simply made a list in a certain key. Then all I had to do in the village shop was remember the key & the list would come back at once. I never forgot anything. Come to that, why was the hat I lost coming aboard this ship in E? I remember the very day I bought it & put it on: it sat on my head in E major & ever since then whenever I wore it the day changed key. This only sounds silly when you write it down: putting on an E major hat is after all no dafter than putting on a brown one.
There was something else, too, before going to bed – oh yes, about Gerontius. By not blabbing to people about its real origins I no doubt spared them dismay & myself no end of trouble. But one thing wh. did upset those ‘in the know’ was what Jaeger called the Prayer Theme. Richard Strauss told me he thought it was the precise shape of a man at prayer but I never informed him that this miraculously holy motif was originally suggested by a friend’s bulldog musing about having to wear a muzzle. Alice never said a word about that: I think she actually convinced herself she didn’t know. But she did. It was there in Sinclair’s visitors’ book at Hereford in black & white. I’m afraid people are generally rather silly about such things – going into shock on discovering that half the best bits of the ‘Christmas Oratorio’ were written as birthday greetings to the local Elector’s wife etc, starting life as rather risqué love-duets & suchlike. It’s the Great Public again. They do not understand art so they can’t understand creativity. They really believe there’s a distinction between religious & secular, poor dears. Gerontius was jolly secular. But I fear only God (doubtful) & I wot that. And now neither of us much cares.
That night as most of the passengers – including Edward – slept, the Hildebrand sighted a far-off lighthouse and ninety minutes later dropped anchor in Funchal harbour so that when they first came on deck in the morning they found themselves suddenly dwarfed by the threadbare mountains of Madeira seemingly at arm’s length. Instead of a great emptiness of sky the drabbish steep hills with their mufflers of terraced olives bore down on top of them. Pleased (in some cases downright relieved) to see land again many nonetheless intuited a sense of displacement. Where exactly were they? What were these islands? Detached remnants of Africa? Vestiges of scenery which hinted mockingly at remembered bits of Mediterranea? Certain of those on deck tapped their hats casually on the rail while waiting for the motor launches to ferry them ashore. There was perturbation in this gesture; it expressed an imaginative impasse to which they had come. If, their musing selves insisted, if on the straight line between the British Isles and the mouth of the Amazon were no dry land and if one could leave wintry Europe and a fortnight later reach malarial tropics, what would a theoretical halfway house look like? There was no answer to this, even though a few quite enjoyed the speculation of a gradually changing seabed thrusting itself up in mid-Atlantic to show how far the transformation had advanced. But however they imagined the result, Madeira was not quite it. Somehow the Portuguese element was wrong, the ochre and khaki rocks amid all that blue ocean too parched. Maybe the sight of the odd parakeet might have saved things: were these not also known as the Canary Isles? Many in the speeding launches rather thought they were.
Holding his straw panama on his knees and wearing a dandyish linen jacket, silk handkerchief fluttering in breast pocket, Edward was skimmed across the dimpled surface of the harbour. Beside him sat Molly. On her head was an intrepid hat which had the air of having come between many a torrid sun and its owner’s thick brown hair. It was the colour of sand and had around it a narrow ribbon of much the same tint but with a faint and mountainous line reminiscent of an effect of watered silk wandering up and down its surface. This delineated the tide-marks of sweat which had resisted all launderings. The hat’s broad brim bent in the launch’s breeze; the string beneath her chin was taut as she kept her head tipped back to survey the terraces with their scattering of whitewashed villas.
When they disembarked she asked: ‘Are you a good tourist, Sir Edward?’
‘I used to be an inveterate sight-seer, if that’s the same thing.’
‘It probably is if they’re the same sights as everyone else’s. I imagined that in your case they mightn’t be.’
‘Maybe one does try to bring a different mind to them.’
‘Well I can tell you there isn’t much in the way of sights here for people on a long journey with only a few hours to spend. There’s a sort of cathedral if you like sort of cathedrals. It’s got a quite pretty Moorish roof of cedarwood. More to the point, there’s a restaurant I happened upon which does beautifully tender squid stewed in their own ink. You can cut them with a fork. Are you partial to squid, Sir Edward?’
‘I’ve had them fried in Italy. I found I liked them better when they weren’t called “squid”: there’s something unappetising about that word. Disguised as calamari fritti, however, they were agreeably marine. “Stewed in ink” is not an enticing description, either, for anyone who has made his living with a pen.’
‘As someone who intends to make it with a brush I assure you they’re enchanting. A bed of white rice and black puddles strewn with fat pink shapes like finger-stalls with collar-stiffeners in them. The colours are most eccentric.’
‘Good heavens, Miss Air. If I were wearing my hat I should raise it to your stomach. There’s something about the colour black I don’t at all associate with food.’
‘Have you never eaten black pudding, then?’
‘Touché! You’ve
hit on a great favourite of mine. Only better not tell anyone or they’ll think you invented our acquaintance. Who was that gentleman you so recently described, now? Celebrated patriot, friend of Royalty, heir-presumptuous to the mastership of the King’s Musick? They’re not going to believe a stuffed ass like that eats black pudding. And comes back for seconds if there’s another pint of beer to go with it.’
‘My turn to cry “Touché!”, Sir Edward. Please don’t remind me.’
‘It’s already out of my mind. Not the black puddings, though. Do you know until quite recently I lived in Hampstead, which is not by any means the most deprived quarter of London. You can get most things in Hampstead, even some fairly exotic food for the various foreigners of substance who stay there from time to time. But do you think one can obtain something as stalwartly English as black pudding? I used to have to take the bus all the way down to Fleet Street and patronise a little shop which has them delivered fresh from Birmingham every week. My wife objected strenuously. She thought it was infra dig.’
‘Which? Bus or sausage?’
‘Both, I’m afraid. I was quite unrepentant. The one was a necessary economy, the other sheer pleasure. Not but what she wasn’t perfectly happy to eat it herself in the old days … Where are we going, incidentally? Have you any idea?’
‘Yes, to the top of Bella Monte. I took the liberty of buying us tickets from the Chief Steward. We get a round trip including a late breakfast at the top. Or an early luncheon.’
‘That’s absurd,’ said Edward sharply, then, ‘You’re too kind. One’s not used to having arrangements made by young ladies one scarcely … I’m a bit nonplussed.’
Gerontius Page 10
