The Happy Biography

 I don't know if I've read a happy biography. The ending is inevitably downbeat. Perhaps David Bowie's meticulously planned departure made an artful job of it, perhaps one shouldn't see the inevitable as downbeat or perhaps it's me, insisting on life's minor key passages or, indeed, mostly reading the biographies of poets who, as a type, may tend towards being troubled misfits.

It might have been a radio life of Bob Marley that first made me think of biography as a sub division of tragedy. The early days of the Wailers calling out of studio windows to passing girls - including, I think, Rita- were bound to seem ephemeral in the light of the strange circumstances of his untimely death, notwithstanding the outlandish success of a career that put Jamaica up among the top echelon of pop music-producing countries. Nothing lasts forever, Carpe Diem, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, etc, etc.

Georges Simenon was prolific, wildly successful at what he did, with an immense energy for it but he wasn't happy and the final chapters of Pierre Assouline's biography are essays of assessment, the most profound of which reflect on his offspring. His only daughter, Marie-Jo committed suicide aged 25, the victim of a number of neuroses but the comparison is made with Lucia Joyce. Both of them were deeply loved by their fathers but their fathers were unable to help. 

I'm not entirely convinced that any parallels that might be drawn are due to their fathers' devotion to their writing. There will be any number of desperate cases not recorded in the biographies of authors. It is also inconclusive whether writers are significantly more melanchloic than non-writers but Sartre's 'grocer who dreams' that he thought was 'an offence to the customer' has a life also but not one that is investigated and written about like that of a famous writer. Perhaps it should be. One dispenses fruit and veg for a living and the other writes books but that's essentially the only difference between them.

--

Next up is Harold Larwood by Duncan Hamilton. The real business of the fallout of the 'bodyline' test series of 1932-3 is yet to come but will soon enough as it is a quick, straight-forward read. What we have so far, though, is some evocatively written insight of what now sound like barbaric lives in mining Nottinghamshire, a regime of strict Methodism and improbable gentlemen and players apartheid. It was a hard ball existence and cricket was a hard ball game. 

Arthur Carr, captain of Notts, is an improbable hero in a cast of characters that by now belong in Ripping Yarns more than real life but there is evidence that they were real and anybody who thought the likes of Botham, Boycott, David Boon, Merv Hughes represented an age in which cricket had 'characters' might need to think again.

 

--  

One can suffer from fatigue in any undertaking. It is a tribute to the dedication of the likes of Larwood that they pressed on. I wouldn't. I've possibly seen enough of a season of horse racing by now and am happy to leave the annual plus where it is. I never quite realized how the football season drags on, either, until cashing in my bet on the divisions which now looks almost certainly a decision that passed up half of the profit. But, never mind. I won but should have won twice as much. It's just that it is a long haul, designed more than anything to persuade its followers to part with as much cash as it can. It's not the actual amounts that matter as much as that my little personal involvement could have been a yet more impressive win.

It is tiring, though, and good to have other things to turn to. The Easter recess put a hole in the music schedule but there's some good dates coming up, beginning with Inspīrātĭo Ensemble  It is to be hoped my adjectives come back refreshed as a very promising line-up of gigs leads up to summer.

Brahms has been composer of the month, or more, here, with the 6 discs of Piano Works so closely following upon the violin and viola sonatas. The pianists are a variety but that doesn't prevent it being a 'cycle'. For the most part it is pleasing if not compelling listening, and ideal accompaniment to reading as such but not always music that demands one puts the book down.

That is until disc 6 with the opus 116-119 sets but I had Stephen Hough  doing them already. It will not be filed on the shelves until I've been though from disc 1 again.

--

And, needless to say, something to write helps one to have a sense of purpose which isn't as easily come by as it was when attending paid work was a necessity.

A long, long time ago I can still remember when I regarded poetry as such a purist activity that I didn't want to write anything else but, like so many things, 45 years is long enough for things to go full circle. Even Larkin, by far best remembered for his poems, has a gravestone that says 'Writer', on account of his essays, jazz reviews and relatively minor novels. Yes, let's be that.

On a much less memorable scale, I'd put my poems first but I like doing the essays now, too. I have since done better than the one short story that appeared in print in the 1980's but I don't appear to be fitted for the prose job. That was convincingly demonstrated by the novel which was only done for the sake of having done such a thing. The play owes rather too much to All Gas and Gaiters but it is one. C20th serves as a poetry manifesto.

I need to improve in the novel department but you know it ain't easy, you don't know how hard it can be. Finding the lost, last ISBN number and in due course producing the last David Green (Books) title is more likely to be achieveable.   

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 Sometimes perhaps it's the little victories that are more pleasing than any one might have that could be regarded as significant.

Just now, I'd cashed out on the Henderson 'good things' at Exeter because non-runners in the 4.55 meant I could have a couple of quid profit without a horse setting foot on the track. Johnny Blue became a 1/6 shot and notwithstanding that there's no point in such a price, he wasn't rock solid business anyway.

And so it proved. And it's nice to be on the right side of a cashout for once. It's not only a couple of quid for nothing, it's an odds-on-sized stake saved.

 

Quietly, discreetly almost, creeping up the chess ratings at Lichess on 30-minute Classical games, this morning I got back up above a rating of 1900 for the first time in maybe three years. I did once achieve 1918 so a personal best is still three more wins away. 1900 is a minor landmark and 1919+ would be a better one. Feats don't fail me now but 2000 is still light years away.

 

One sees Maigret in a slightly different light on closer acquaintance with Simenon who made him up. It takes a prodigious talent to produce such a body of work but admiring the work for what it is isn't the same as loving him who it all. Of course he's going to be that which came to be known as 'alpha male' but that's not a guarantee of a good thing. All your Trump and Boris are 'alpha' but also unspeakably awful whereas maybe your Camus was more like a humanist saint, as if there could be such a thing.

 

I'm very gratified to see the 'metrics' of this chronic divulgence of words for word's sake looking as healthy as they've ever done while remaining well short of 'trending'. Thanks for being there. I often wish I could be a bit more Wittgenstein and say nothing when there's nothing to say but there's a difficult choice to be made between continuing to string words together because it doesn't feel as if there's anything else to do and not stringing words together and finding there isn't anything else to do.

Two Wiseguys at Cheltenham

Today, there was me, the bullishly self-proclaimed Racetrack Wiseguy and my namesake horse, Wiseguy, trained by the charming Mr. Henderson. I don't think of myself as brash and so am glad to have several years of records going back as evidence of the turf wisdom I've accumulated in sometimes hard-won ways. Today wasn't my most successful day at the track but a small helping of that wisdom was used to keep my financial liabilities on Wiseguy to an absolute minimum. Just because you and your namesake horse are at the same track on the same day doesn't mean one gets heavily involved on a 12/1 chance in the hope of a miracle. It was always a 33/1 chance in disguise.

Wiseguy has been an increasingly forlorn hope ever since winning at Exeter in the Autumn when it looked like a prospect over fences. I decided against asking Mr. Henderson for a photo opportunity in case he'd say, quite frankly, Mr. Wiseguy, you can take him home with you because I can't do anything with him.

But it's all in the game. Prestbury Park is God's own country and it was never going to be a bad day once Peaky Boy had landed the odds, workmanlike enough, in the first. I can't stand the mounting anxiety of races going by without having a winner so the main bet going in in race 1 is fine even if the pay out is much reduced by the fav not running. I might not have won if it had.

 

The celebrations that followed Manofthepeople's win the 4.25 were extraordinary and incomprehensible at first, outdoing the gobsmacked silence that greeted the Gold Cup winner, Norton's Coin, when I was there 40-odd years ago. Let's listen to the interview. Oh, I see. Paddy Brennan, stable jockey to the very local Fergal O'Brien had made it his last ride and retired then and there.

Some of the crowd at Cheltenham know their stuff. Not necessarily the chavvy blokes in suits or the alarming young ladies that some of them are with or those with more taste who aren't. They haven't got a clue and the bookmakers are very pleased to see them. Cheltenham is a 'cashless course' and you can't buy anything there without a card but bookmakers are keen to make it known that they'll take cash. They're not so fussy.

 

Win, lose or draw, it's a fine day out. It wouldn't be if the choice was only between lose, lose and lose but it isn't and the fun you can have reducing Radio 5, not least in its football coverage, to absurdam on the way home is an entertainment in itself. 

It's lucky for me that one of my friends is good enough to drive there once a year. He got no more than he deserved when he somehow picked out the last two very healthily-priced winners the day after being at Fratton Park to see his favourite football team win their league. I'm pleased for him. Sometimes the fates suddenly realize there's a good guy whose turn it is to have a couple of memorable days and so they make it happen. 

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

There might not be many pop albums worth reviewing these days - in my ungenerous estimation - but doing it is made easy on a computer, as above. You can have the album playing on You Tube, a lyrics website open elsewhere and type it in, all on the same screen. The old 70's gunslingers on the NME sat in an office with a record player, a record sleeve and a typewriter and that must have been quite complicated in comparison but at least they had better records to listen to.

--

I took part in the BBC's Abba vote where you can allocate 5 votes as you see fit across their list of tracks. I'm very much on an outsider with The Day Before You Came but it's a class apart. I gave that 4 votes and 1 to Knowing Me, Knowing You.

--

I see Rolling Stone had Dancing Queen at no.1 and that could be favourite but it's an open heat. On safer ground, I hope you all came here and heeded the Grand National advice particularly as I said I had a second free shot at the race but 'doubled down' on I Am Maximus because I couldn't find anything else I believed in so much and so now I Am Wiseguy-imus. 

--

It looks like our Saturday nights with Maigret on Talking Pictures have come to an end but they were a great pleasure and lasted for a year's worth. Bruno Cremer continues in French with sub-titles on Tuesday nights.

I was very pleased with myself below with my comparison of Simenon and Balzac but it seems I'm not the first to have made it. Pierre Assouline includes it in his comprehensive account. That wouldn't have been the easiest biography to write given the amount of books there are to have read.

There might be a lot of things to 'admire' about Simenon, such as the prodigious output and energy but, like a lot of writers, he doesn't seem easy to like - probably on account of the necessary self-possession necessary to be such. Not much came between him and his ambition and he negotiated a way through wartime France by means of as much good luck as good judgement or perhaps moral fibre. His politics were a confused business in as far as he had any which could be said of many 'right-wing' people and that's probably what he was although not in a Nazi way.

As a writer he wanted to be more than the Maigret and pulp fiction man and maybe he could have been but he was interested in making money, too, and the contrast between his monetizing of his art compared to James Joyce's makes for two different ways of approaching literary creation.

--

So, with my own monetizing activities in good order after Aintree, we go to Cheltenham well aware that Mr. Henderson's horses are capable of winning again and he will want to make up for lost time in what remains of the proper jumping season. That will be Plan A on what is often a wide-open card.

One mustn't fret about money lost or, by the same token, money not won. Cashing in most of my little escapade into football on Arsenal top 4 with Leicester, Derby and Wrexham to be promoted could easily have been a mistake but if Leicester falter further and go into the rigmarole of play-offs, that'll do. Otherwise I'll have to try to see it as an 8/1 shot landed rather than half of a 16/1 winner thrown away.

One has to be phlegmatic. Winning is the point of it and I'm doing that, worrying about by how much only makes one seem like a fat bloke wanting another pie.

Great Western Rail are repaying my journey back from Swindon in full after their usual hapless attempt to organize some trains so I got paid for hanging round at Westbury for two hours. It must cost them a fortune doing something they are so bad at. Perhaps they should move into water management or run the Post Office with a system designed by Fujitsu.

It's not funny, though. About 25 years ago I went to Winchester for a big meeting about problems with work computer systems that were provided by Fujitsu.

Plus ça change, plus la même chose, as it were.

The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade

 The Libertines - All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade (EMI)

Few pop artists are as good in their later work as in that which made them famous. Mozart and Rembrandt's last work was probably their best but on Hackney Diamonds the Stones were their own best tribute act and The Day Before You Came was a different sort of Abba but even the most talented of pop acts, whatever glories they achieve as they develop, don't seem to end up in a better place than some of those they had been to. Peter Doherty, though, whether with Carl Barat or not, and having survived that dangerous age of 27, is proving more durable than the mercurial phenonmenon that he looks as if he should have been.

If All Quiet on the Eastern Esplanade doesn't quite have a Can't Stand Me Now on it then we shouldn't have expected it to but it is an instant hit as soon as it begins and continues what has for the most part been an impressive catalogue.

The survey of broken England's dreaming is brought forward from 1976/77 and nothing new but it's the Clash more than the Sex Pistols he owes the bigger debt to, Mustangs bringing to mind All the Young Punks, the downbeat lives retaining a defiant optimism under 'dishwater skies' while I Have a Friend begins like the Buzzcocks. Merry Old England is a mordant meditation on the migrants who see it as a place of opportunity nonetheless.

Oh S*** is another of those in which Pete relies heavily on the degraded demotic, as he did in Gunga Din, but one of their signature guitar riffs makes it an immediate crowd pleaser. Using Swan Lake for a tune was done by Public Image Limited on the Metal Box album in 1979 so that's hardly innovative but stabbings weren't such an everyday occurence then. Untimely death has been a regular part of Pete's life and he takes a chillingly matter-of-fact view of it, especially when one realizes how much Songs They Never Play on the Radio owes to Karen Carpenter on Yesterday Once More. They are not so far apart given the breakdown of the genre barriers that pop music was once defined by. The irony is that wholesome, gorgeous Karen died aged 32 and delinquent Peter is still with us at 45. But after an album with hardly a missed beat on it, that was the track I played over and over.

 

His ongoing insociance and faux vulnerability combined with his smartarse self absorption makes for the sort of mystique that hangs around a certain sort of creative artist but all one has to be is any good and his formula goes on working and providing, disarmingly and often charmingly. For me he's the last of the English geezers. Pop music has been over for some time, commodified, sanitized, recondite and all been done before. It's the same with poetry in which I similarly have difficulty with anybody much under the age of 45, and 'classical' music by anybody much younger than me. Those ships have continued to sail without me. Doherty, though, is retro as well as keeping on giving. I was reminded that I picked up the Babyshambles Down in Albion album a couple of weeks ago. Once I got round to it, it was a bit makeshift and unconvincing. Anybody can have a bad patch because form is temporary but class is forever and he came through into an unlikely 'maturity', if you can call it that in someone who remains somehow child-like.

Songs They Never Play on the Radio

 

 

It's this week's Record of the Week at DGBooks and on DGBooks Radio.

We've not such a thing before and probably won't have one again but we're having one this week.

Oh, Babe, What Would You Say

 I don't think I'm exactly 'trending' but the metrics suggest that a few more than usual having been turning up here recently so you are all most welcome. 

Tomorrow is a particularly difficult day with a very fine concert in the Menuhin Room clashing with one of the last big days of horse racing until it goes literally flat for the most part until October, for me at least. It's an awful decision to have to make and if I hadn't landed the odds today I'd probably go to the music but I'm not a one-trick pony and there are other great music events lined up so it's all about Aintree tomorrow and right now I'm in that delirious moment of thinking that anything's possible and re-investing some of today's profit will land me five grand I won't know what to do with when my homework proves 100% correct and pays well over five grand. 

It might not, of course, but somehow horse racing brings out the optimist in those of us usually so devoted to pessimism.

--

Found in among the radio schedules this week was an old Great Lives on Radio 4Extra, the half hour in which a well-known person makes the case for a hero of theirs and, it seems, somebody else makes the case against. 

I always want to take part in any such enterprise but can't be sure who I'd nominate for that because I can often see the case against. From cricket, though, both Basil d'Oliviera and Derek Randall seem hard to find fault with; Elizabeth Bishop from poetry; I'd be glad to defend Danny Baker. And there are still one or two non-famous people from real life who haven't been far short of perfect.

But guess who Bernard Manning nominated - Mother Theresa of Calcutta. Not Roy 'Chubby' Brown. Mr. Manning had a serious, spiritual side, you see, didn't regard himself as offensive and didn't think it was proper for little kiddies in faraway places like India to be left in dustbins. He was not a complicated man. He knew what he thought and he thought what he liked. 

I wouldn't say he was provocative. One of the most underwhelming assessments of a poem at our local poetry group is 'thought-provoking'. But, no, not at all - what thoughts did it provoke.

Mr. Manning's insistence that he wasn't racist consisted of saying that he treated everyone the same and made jokes about all kinds of people and he once did a benefit gig for a little Pakistani kid. And, yes, maybe, or maybe not. But he made me feel racist by making me realize that it wasn't just Yorkshiremen I found rather too forthright, it was Mancunians, too, so perhaps having provoked such thoughts in me some 22 years after the fact, Mr. Manning should have appeared on Radio 4 more often. Like on Thought for the Day which I think continues on its dreary way. Or perhaps I'd go on Great Lives and nominate Boris Johnson or Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

Oh, I'm sorry, there seems to have been a misunderstanding. No, I don't think they led great lives but they thought they did.

--

An impressive life was lived by Georges Simenon as detailed in Pierre Assouline's biography. Even in its early stages Simenon possesses an energy and self-possession that few could hope to match. He knows what he wants and he knows how to get it, wise enough to know that he can't write the good books he aspires to without doing an inordinate, highly committed and opportunistic apprenticeship writing generic bad ones.

I was once impressed by the factory method by which Dick Francis produced his cliff-hanging thrillers, one per year, according to his plan. However, that is pedestrian and lazy compared to Simenon's timetable in which novels could be delivered on a 15-day timetable.

It is the literary equivalent of Tin Pan Alley, the hit factories and it doesn't mean that the end product is the worse for it but the definition of 'special' includes the idea that it can't be endlessly produced on a large scale. Even Tamla Motown disintegrated under such pressure in due course.

So many words, so many works, remain suspicious. There has to be a formula. Not every Shakespeare sonnet, Mozart symphony or Rembrandt painting is quite as good as the best of them. Perhaps not all of Bach is quite as good as the very best of him. And so Simenon, much as we might enjoy his work, benefitted from 'facility'. Like Balzac. He did it easily, not without hard work but without difficulty.

I'm impressed but I'm impressed in the same way that I've sometimes been by the way people have been brilliant at things that I don't want to do - Tiger Woods, Lewis Hamilton, Kirkland Laing. I still like to think that less is more, that a small number of truly great things is better than a vast pile of good things. That's the case for Elizabeth Bishop, not J.S. Bach but, as ever, there are no rules.