Bow down mister!

Here’s an Aubrey Beardsley for Christmas. I sometimes imagine that Beardsley’s at his best only at his most cheekily perverse, but it’s not necessarily so.

And he certainly knew how to use his white spaces.

It’s not right to kneel before princes, politicians, celebrities or billionaires. Nor before symbols of ‘sovereignty’. But faced with the mysteries of birth and childhood, how else should we respond?

As the song goes, bow down mister – and mizz.

Happy Christmas!

Eileen Agar’s fish tank

My ongoing catch-up reading has caught up with a couple of Oxfam bargains. The first is Michel Remy’s very useful 2017 monograph Eileen Agar. Dreaming Oneself Awake. (Useful for the biography and for the sheer wealth of colour images of Agar’s works, perhaps more than for the attempts to interpret them.)

Eileen Agar in 1935. Solarised photo by Helen Muspratt

British surrealist Agar turns out to have been a rather posh person, with a handy private income. Though she was mightily talented, some of her work – her collage in particular – seems light and uneven to me, and one wonders if it might have shown tighter quality if she’d had to graft for a living, rather than partying round the Med with the Surrealist artistocracy. (I’ve always considered The Apes of God, Wyndham’s Lewis’s merciless 1930 satire on the painting classes as privileged dilettantes, to be a little harsh, but sometimes you do wonder.)

However, much of Agar’s work is both skilfully composed and unexpectedly tasteful, including this evocative untitled box of 1935 (below), tastefully stuffed with netting, coral, a seahorse and a (readymade?) eye of Horus. All it lacks is (discounting the recumbent seahorse) some fish. I think it may pre-date narrowly the surrealist boxes of Joseph Cornell (n.b. an impoverished artist who was obliged to survive by menial work). It suggests, as Remy notes, a miniature theatre, but it also seems to me to sit in the traditions of aquarium design and prehistoric submarine landscapes.

I’m out of my zone here, but I seem to recall that home aquaria started with the Victorians. My late parents’ 1940’s Concise Household Encyclopedia has full instructions on how to knock one up from wood, slate and “cathedral glass”.

Interestingly, the version illustrated (above) is just water, fish and plants, with none of the complex drowned skeletons, submarines, wrecked pirate ships, steampunk spaceships etc that these days dominate display tanks in garden centres, sidelining the fish. I guess that ornamenting your tank with plastic clutter must have started in the ‘sixties. (In case you’re concerned that the fish here look a bit claustrophobic, a helpful note explains that they are rendered in scale with each other but not with the tank.)

To me, Agar’s box also hints at those visionary prehistoric underwater dioramas that have long been a staple of children’s improving popular science books; my 1950’s Time Life The World We Live In had some great fold-out plates of prehistoric panoramas of improbable busy-ness, including one chock full of swimming trilobites and the like. Losing myself in these other-worldly painted landscapes was about as far as I ever got with science. Above is an early version of the same idea – an “Ideal view of marine life in the Carboniferous Period” from my edition of Louis Figuier’s The World Before the Deluge of 1866. (One of many such plates in the book, mostly populated by oddly drawn dinosaurs biting each other, at least until Adam and Eve turn up in a primevally pastoral frontispiece.)

I did wonder about the detached eye of Horus in Agar’s box, until I noticed the squid-like thing in this diorama photo, whose eye floats among the fronds and tentacles, alone and disconcerting, in much the same way. This Ordovician diorama is in the American Museum of Natural History, and the photo is on the back cover of Celeste Olalquiaga’s The Artificial Kingdom. A Treasury of the Kitsch Experience (1998), which gallops exhaustingly through as many aquaria, cabinets of curiosities, paperweights and grottoes as you can handle. The text is academically impenetrable in some places but illuminating in others. Ms Olalquiaga’s very interesting website is here. (I emailed her about something kitsch-related in 2012 but I never had a reply.)

My wife and I, house hunting, once looked around a suburban semi that had been imaginatively done out by its owner, who claimed to be a builder and decorator. The kitchen was in black and white, with a chess themed ceiling, but the most impressive feature was a tank of tropical fish in the hallway, its front glass set flush into the hall wall, so that the fish, plants and pirate ships were completely recessed. The hallway turned out to be adjacent to the garage, into which projected the full depth of the tank.

Geoffrey Hill fails the bookcase test

Like many, I dare say, I’ve been diverted lately by the home decor behind online talking heads of telly pundits and politicians. The pictures on their walls (or lack of) often say more than they do. Bookshelves likewise, particularly of those who turn some books to face the front, more show-offy than narrow spines.

As I’ve run out of bookshelf length to absorb my unruly piles of unread lockdown purchases, I thought I might try doubling up like this. Once decked out, my bulging poetry shelves looked pretty good (see pic) – but where then to start the catch-up reading? It’s hard to rate priority among so much. Better to hand over selection to some mechanical or metaphysical agency, like the I Ching or whatever.

As some of my thicker layers of front-facing volumes began to wobble on their narrow cliff edges, it occurred to me that I could start by eliminating anything that fell off of its own volition. For a moment or two, nothing happened. Basil Bunting, quite rightly, stayed firm. Anne Sexton stood her ground. Even the Peter Russells, which I’d hoped to give a miss, declined to take a dive. Then, with a gratifying slap, three slim and unstable Geoffrey Hills toppled into a box of old envelopes and parcel tape on the floor below. My mind was made up for me.

Picking them up, I found that The Orchards of Syon (2002) had decided to fall open at XXVIII, where “the greatest living poet in the English language” (according to the back cover) starts off rather promisingly:

Wintry swamp-thickets, brush-heaps of burnt light,
The sky cast-iron, livid with unshed snow.
I cannot say what it is that best
survives these desolations. Something does,
unlovely; indomitable as the mink.

Excellent, love it, so far so good. But then, perhaps jolted off course by the intrusion of the mink, Hill interrupts his own progress with a mystifying memo to self:

Raise this with the sometime Overseer
for his stiff Compliments Book. Nothing left
to take leave of, if by any chance  
you happened to be dying before colour
variety leapt to the blank screen. That
helps me to place my thoughts …

The late Sir Geoffrey. With Intimidating bookcase.

It doesn’t help me to place mine. As so often when toiling up Geoffrey Hill, the overwhelming sentiment, as my friend and correspondent Bill Bennett said, is “What the hell is he on about?” I don’t know, but within a few lines he’s onto italicised words in unrecognisable languages, and referencing Hardy titles. You need a big bookcase just to look it all up. This is footnote or crossword stuff, and reveals little but the over-specialised character of Hill’s own bookshelves. A lofty mind of the first order seeks to demonstrate its ironic control of an inner core of sense feeling, but can’t resist showing off, and ends up, lazily, talking only to itself. My bookcase test is vindicated.

To get away, let’s go right back to “Genesis”, from For the Unfallen, Hill’s first collection of 1959:

Against the burly air I strode
Crying the miracles of God.

And first I brought the sea to bear
Upon the dead weight of the land;
And the waves flourished at my prayer,
The rivers spawned their sand.

And where the streams were salt and full
The tough pig-headed salmon strove,
Ramming the ebb, in the tide’s pull,
To reach the steady hills above.

And likewise for another four sections. A pity Hill’s work declined from here. I’ve been told that this is about Christopher Smart and his wrestlings with, and celebrations of, the exuberant barbarity of Creation. At any rate, I think it’s perhaps the most beautiful and treasurable poem by anyone that I’ve yet read, particularly the first two lines.

In their earlier outings – in Hill’s Fantasy Press booklet of 1952 and in G S Fraser’s Poetry Now anthology of 1956 – these two lines were actually three:

Against the burly air I strode,
Where the tight ocean heaves its load,
Crying the miracles of God.

The original second line is very fine, but I can see why the tight ocean was sacrificed. In the reduced couplet, Kit Smart strides alone, huge and stark against an empty sky. With not so much as a hint of a bookcase in sight.