Morris dancing and bikers - yes, it's May Day in Hastings

The Morris dancing started on the Saturday of the Bank Holiday weekend, though this year it was a little more diffuse and chaotic than last, as a result of the usual venue - Butler's Gap in George Street - being closed off because of the possible danger from a house in partial collapse in the street above.  As a result, confused Morris dancers were found here and there round the Old Town, looking for a place to do their bit.  We caught up with the ones above near the boating lake on the front.  They're of the rhythmic stick-bashing variety rather than the waving-handkerchief ones.  I'm hoping that next year Butler's Gap will be open again and we can get a better look.

Monday is the full Monty of folk battiness, with the Jack-in-the-Green procession and all and sundry dressed in green and/or wearing green face-paint.  One gym bunny we encountered in the afternoon had bodypainted the full expanse of his overdeveloped torso with green, but that may just have been an excuse to take his shirt off.  The procession wends its way through the Old Town and finally up to West Hill, where there are more jolly japes in the afternoon - including Morris dancing, of course.  You have to be a folk history expert to understand some of the allusions - go to The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, to understand the man with the stag's head.  During the whole weekend there were quite a lot of ladies of a certain age wafting around in yards of green muslin and tulle.  They came into their own in the procession, equipped with drums or waving hankies or just mincing along in a nice fantasy world of their own, joined by a host of others, beating drums, eating fire, or wearing other strange costumes involving green.  All good harmless stuff.
 Meanwhile the bikers were assembling on the front - row upon row of gleaming chrome, and a lot of chaps in leather, wandering around, a little displaced once they'd got off their bikes, rather like snails without their shells.  Facial hair and pewter tankards seemed to be points of convergence between the green-painted folk and the motorcycle fraternity, but in fact they inhabit very different worlds, and the buxom lady element seemed remarkably absent among the serried ranks of bikes.  This slightly weird combination of events was entirely good-humoured, and the weather was such that everyone drifted around in the sunshine with a smile on their face.  Perfick, as Pop Larkin would have said.

Antony Mair

Will Self and the Death of the Novel

Will Self, courtesy of WIkimedia Commons

I was interested by Will Self’s article in The Guardian last weekend, headed The Novel is Dead (this time it’s for real).  Stripped of the baroque ornament of his prose, Mr Self’s basic thesis is that the digitisation of literature has resulted in destruction of the writer’s ability to earn a living and of the reader’s ability to read in the required way.  As a result, the serious novel “will become an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music, confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse”. 

Personally, I think that this point may already have been reached.  More significantly, however, the fate of the novel, as predicted by Mr Self, somewhat postdates the fate of poetry.  “I’ve come to realise that the kind of psyche implicit in the production and consumption of serious novels… depends on a medium that has inbuilt privacy”, he writes.  Nothing could be more private or intimate than the world of many poems – and I’m not referring here to the declaimed works of performance poets, but the carefully crafted poems intended for the page, which account for the majority of what’s written.

Poetry, however, is not dead.  Far from it.  Its following may be small in number, but seems increasingly vigorous.  The internet teems with poetry blogs, online poetry forums, e-zines and online courses.

Unlike novelists, poets have not usually expected to earn a living from their poetry.  Daytime jobs have been commonplace – often, it is true, in academic life – with the writing squeezed in to spare time.  T. S. Eliot was able to achieve this, so why shouldn’t others?

Poetry has something of a longer history than the novel, going back to the mists of time with Homeric epics, continuing through the Middle Ages with verse both sacred and secular, and stubbornly operating as a medium, even today, for the expression of mankind’s deepest thoughts and feelings.  The serious novel, on the other hand, only came into being in the eighteenth century, and its nineteenth century successes were in part due to publication in serial form.    

Will Self may be right about the serious novel becoming a refuge for the academic and the grey-haired.  But the novel’s loss may turn out to be poetry’s gain.  If the public need for story is satisfied by other media – film, television, computer games – the need to express emotion in words can take no other form than the poem, that brief encapsulation of feeling that finds its echo in the hearts of listeners and readers alike.

Antony Mair

Honouring Louis MacNeice

The grave of Louis MacNeice, Carrowdore, Co. Down

In his introduction to Faber's 2001 selection of Louis MacNeice's poems, the Irish poet Michael Longley tells the story of how, in 1964, he visited Louis MacNeice's graveyard in Carrowdore together with fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.  MacNeice had died the year before, prematurely at the age of 55.  Mahon was the only one of the three who had met him personally, but all three were shocked by the death.  

Fifty years later, I found myself in the same spot, on our recent trip round the northern part of Ireland.  MacNeice enjoys a special place in my affections.  Not only do I admire him as a poet, but I realised comparatively recently that this admiration is something I inherited from my father - who also died prematurely, at the same age as MacNeice, though seven years later.  Among my books are three slim collections - The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939) and Plant and Phantom (1941), with my father's neat handwriting on the first inside page - the first having been bought in his last year at Oxford, the last during the war, in Edinburgh, when he was working for MI5.

MacNeice's reputation has lasted well, but he is gradually fading into obscurity - the 1988 Selected Poems  is half as long again as its 2001 successor, and there has been no Four Weddings and a Funeral to resuscitate his popularity as there was for his contemporary, Auden.  However, he was a great influence not only on Heaney, Mahon and Longley, but also on the younger poet Paul Muldoon, and consequently he is part of a continuity of influence that began before Yeats and will continue after Muldoon and his Irish successors.  Reading his poems now, I find them uneven, some snared in their time, but others beautiful and hopefully surviving for a long time in anthologies that will encourage people to read more of him.  One I am greatly fond of is Soap Suds:

   This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

   House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

   To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

   To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

   And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

   Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

   A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

   A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

   To which he has now returned.  The day of course is fine

   And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

   Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

   Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

   Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

   And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

   But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

   Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.  

Antony Mair