I recently spotted that the 1931 film Dracula was playing on the Horror channel, and duly recorded it with one eye on a seasonal blog (this) and another eye on a suitably creepy family night-in with a classic, justified by the proximity to Halloween. Frankly, I was sceptical about the latter, given that my mind’s eye visualisation of an idealised family event or shared experience doesn’t always pan out as imagined; I suspected that the obvious ancientness of the movie would turn off teenagers. Indeed, it did turn one of them off and she soon drifted vampirically off to her bedroom, but the other one, and her mother, were gratifyingly drawn into this atmospheric and trope-laden classic.
The cultural icon that is Count Dracula had had its treatment earlier than this movie: the German Expressionist filmmaker F W Murnau had filmed Nosferatu in 1922 (though without permission and subject to a copyright infringement claim brought about successfully by Bram Stoker’s widow). The first authorised adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel was the stage play written by Irish playwright Hamilton Deane in 1924 and revised for Broadway in 1927 by John L Balderston. The Broadway production cast Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the lead role, which helped him (though not without opposition from certain quarters) secure the role in the film version four years later.
Directed by Tod Browning, the film premiered at the Roxy Theatre in New York City on February 12, 1931. Newspapers reported that members of the audiences fainted in shock at the horror on screen. This publicity, shrewdly orchestrated by the film studio of course, ensured that people would flock to see the film, and indeed, within 48 hours of its opening, it had sold 50,000 tickets, and ended up being the biggest of Universal’s 1931 releases.
The mesmerising performance of Bela Lugosi was of course a key element in the success of the movie. It is said that he was quite an odd and quiet man; David Manners (who played Jonathan Harker) said: “He was mysterious and never really said anything to the other members of the cast except good morning when he arrived and good night when he left. He was polite, but always distant”. However, on screen he certainly looked and acted the part to the point of creating an enduring archetype.
The atmosphere of the movie is cleverly crafted, and it has all the defining features that you’d expect: the huge, cobweb-bedecked castle, with an impossibly large and ranging staircase, an inordinate number of candles and hovering bats at the window. Lugosi nails the Count’s stand-offish charm and of course the authentic eastern European accent, and there is a lingering, pervasive sense of danger.
Enjoy this clip, the excellent “mirror scene” in which, after a tense meeting between Dracula, Van Helsing, Dr Seward, Jonathan Harker and his fiancée Mina, Van Helsing notices something very unusual…
You could call this a “two for one” this week in that the poem that inspired Ralph Vaughan Williams’ masterful piece for violin and piano, The Lark Ascending, is itself a masterpiece. Written by poet George Meredith in 1881, and having the same title, it was a paean to the skylark and its song. Siegfried Sassoon called it “a sustained lyric which never for a moment falls short of the effect aimed at, soars up and up with the song it imitates, and unites inspired spontaneity with a demonstration of effortless technical ingenuity…one has only to read the poem a few times to become aware of its perfection”. For those whose appetite is whetted by Sassoon’s praise, the poem is at the foot of this blog; however, today let’s look at the beautiful music it inspired.
Vaughan Williams was one of England’s great composers. Influenced by Tudor music and English folksong, he composed everything from operas, ballets and choral pieces to chamber music and symphonies, spread over sixty years, and is a staple of the British concert repertoire. He continued to compose in his seventies and eighties, producing his last symphony months before his death at eighty-five in 1958.
Vaughan Williams loved poetry and was a keen reader of the great Victorian poets. The composer’s second wife, Ursula, herself a poet, wrote that in The Lark Ascending Vaughan Williams had “taken a literary idea on which to build his musical thought…and had made the violin become both the bird’s song and its flight”. It’s not hard to detect the allusion in the music.
Although completed in 1914, the premiere of The Lark Ascending wasn’t until 15th December 1920 at the Shirehampton Public Hall (given by leading British violinist of the time Marie Hall and the pianist Geoffrey Mendham). Rather like the Edwardian era itself, as viewed retrospectively from the other side of the Great War, it seems to reflect nostalgia for a partly mythological lost age of innocence.
Although most performances these days are orchestral versions, some have recreated the original version for violin and piano only, including this exquisite performance by Finnish violinist Kreeta-Julia Heikkilä, with Jaan Ots on the piano, at the Helsinki Chamber Music Festival 2019.
The Lark Ascending by George Meredith
He rises and begins to round, He drops the silver chain of sound Of many links without a break, In chirrup, whistle, slur and shake, All intervolv’d and spreading wide, Like water-dimples down a tide Where ripple ripple overcurls And eddy into eddy whirls; A press of hurried notes that run So fleet they scarce are more than one, Yet changingly the trills repeat And linger ringing while they fleet, Sweet to the quick o’ the ear, and dear To her beyond the handmaid ear, Who sits beside our inner springs, Too often dry for this he brings, Which seems the very jet of earth At sight of sun, her musci’s mirth, As up he wings the spiral stair, A song of light, and pierces air With fountain ardor, fountain play, To reach the shining tops of day, And drink in everything discern’d An ecstasy to music turn’d, Impell’d by what his happy bill Disperses; drinking, showering still, Unthinking save that he may give His voice the outlet, there to live Renew’d in endless notes of glee, So thirsty of his voice is he, For all to hear and all to know That he is joy, awake, aglow, The tumult of the heart to hear Through pureness filter’d crystal-clear, And know the pleasure sprinkled bright By simple singing of delight, Shrill, irreflective, unrestrain’d, Rapt, ringing, on the jet sustain’d Without a break, without a fall, Sweet-silvery, sheer lyrical, Perennial, quavering up the chord Like myriad dews of sunny sward That trembling into fulness shine, And sparkle dropping argentine; Such wooing as the ear receives From zephyr caught in choric leaves Of aspens when their chattering net Is flush’d to white with shivers wet; And such the water-spirit’s chime On mountain heights in morning’s prime, Too freshly sweet to seem excess, Too animate to need a stress; But wider over many heads The starry voice ascending spreads, Awakening, as it waxes thin, The best in us to him akin; And every face to watch him rais’d, Puts on the light of children prais’d, So rich our human pleasure ripes When sweetness on sincereness pipes, Though nought be promis’d from the seas, But only a soft-ruffling breeze Sweep glittering on a still content, Serenity in ravishment.
For singing till his heaven fills, ’T is love of earth that he instils, And ever winging up and up, Our valley is his golden cup, And he the wine which overflows To lift us with him as he goes: The woods and brooks, the sheep and kine He is, the hills, the human line, The meadows green, the fallows brown, The dreams of labor in the town; He sings the sap, the quicken’d veins; The wedding song of sun and rains He is, the dance of children, thanks Of sowers, shout of primrose-banks, And eye of violets while they breathe; All these the circling song will wreathe, And you shall hear the herb and tree, The better heart of men shall see, Shall feel celestially, as long As you crave nothing save the song. Was never voice of ours could say Our inmost in the sweetest way, Like yonder voice aloft, and link All hearers in the song they drink: Our wisdom speaks from failing blood, Our passion is too full in flood, We want the key of his wild note Of truthful in a tuneful throat, The song seraphically free Of taint of personality, So pure that it salutes the suns The voice of one for millions, In whom the millions rejoice For giving their one spirit voice.
Yet men have we, whom we revere, Now names, and men still housing here, Whose lives, by many a battle-dint Defaced, and grinding wheels on flint, Yield substance, though they sing not, sweet For song our highest heaven to greet: Whom heavenly singing gives us new, Enspheres them brilliant in our blue, From firmest base to farthest leap, Because their love of Earth is deep, And they are warriors in accord With life to serve and pass reward, So touching purest and so heard In the brain’s reflex of yon bird; Wherefore their soul in me, or mine, Through self-forgetfulness divine, In them, that song aloft maintains, To fill the sky and thrill the plains With showerings drawn from human stores, As he to silence nearer soars, Extends the world at wings and dome, More spacious making more our home, Till lost on his aërial rings In light, and then the fancy sings.
In 1942, Hollywood churned out over 500 movies, most of which, naturally enough, you will have never heard of (unless you happen to be a professor of Film Studies specialising in the forties, which is unlikely). When they were making Casablanca in that year, nobody was thinking that this was going to be the movie that would become an enduring classic still appearing near the top of “greatest ever movie” polls eighty years later. What makes Casablanca so great?
You already know the synopsis: it’s set in 1941 in Vichy-controlled Casablanca just before Pearl Harbor and America is stalling about entering the war. The Germans’ hold is tightening, and everyone’s fates are uncertain. Everybody is wanting to get out before it’s too late. Against this backdrop, American ex-patriate Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) runs a nightclub and gambling den, Rick’s Café Américain. He also has previous as a fighter in the Spanish Civil War, so he’s no slouch, and he knows a lot of people. He has also come by two “letters of transit”, valuable and authentic documentation that would allow the bearers to make their escape through German-occupied Europe.
Rick’s former lover, from when they met in Paris during the fall of France, Isla Lund (Ingrid Bergman), walks into his club. Her husband Victor Laszlo is a linchpin in the Czech resistance; they need those documents to escape to America and continue his work. When Isla confesses that she still loves Rick (she’s no hussy though: when they’d met in Paris she had thought her husband dead) we come to the nub: Rick’s moral dilemma is to decide between his love for Isla and the good of the world. He makes the right choice, and at the end of the film (surely this is no spoiler) sends Isla and Laszlo off, with their papers, to fight the good fight.
Let’s talk cinematography; it’s full-on film noir by Michael Curtiz. The use of light and shadow is used to dramatic effect: the morally torn Rick is often seen half in light, half in shadow. Laszlo, the bright hope for the future, is almost always in full light. Isla’s flawless and pearlescent skin is accompanied by eyes sparkling impossibly by the use of tiny lights. The venetian blind is a handy way to cast prison bar-like shadows on the protagonists.
The narrative is economical; there is no detail that doesn’t matter to the plot, no scene that is wasted. Sure, there’s corn (more corn than Kansas and Iowa combined, said its screenwriter Julius Epstein) but it’s Hollywood, what do you expect? And surely it’s no coincidence that so many classic lines were thus spawned: “Here’s looking at you, kid”, “We’ll always have Paris”, “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine”. I know that you already know that the line “Play it again, Sam” was never actually said, so we needn’t mention that!
But let’s look at that closing scene when Rick sucks up his personal loss and delivers that classic parting speech to Isla, to the emotional orchestral accompaniment of As Time Goes By. It is pretty marvellous stuff, isn’t it?
You know a writer has made their mark when their name ends up becoming used as an adjective: Dickensian and Orwellian spring to mind of course, but we also occasionally see Shavian to describe George Bernard Shaw’s didactic commitment to social purpose, Wellsian to describe a futurism reminiscent of H G Wells, or Tolkienesque for anything with elves or wizards in it. My favourite is Kafkaesque, which describes a nightmarish bureaucratic dystopia, a familiar theme to anyone who has tried to sort out a non-standard transaction with PayPal.
Franz Kafka (1883–1924) was born into a German-Jewish family in Prague and is widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th century literature. His work typically features characters facing surrealistic predicaments and faceless bureaucratic powers, and thus Kafka explores themes of alienation and existential anxiety. Few of his works were published in his lifetime, and all his best-known works such as Die Verwandlung (The Metamorphosis), Der Process (The Trial), and Das Schloss (The Castle) were published posthumously. In fact, Kafka had instructed in his will that these unpublished works be destroyed but, fortunately for posterity, his friend and executor Max Brod ignored his wishes.
I read The Castle as a young man travelling the world and spending lots of time in consulates procuring visas, and I remember being hooked. Fortunately, although I spent many an hour in consular waiting areas, my own experience of bureaucracy never matched that of “K.”, the unfortunate protagonist who arrives in a village and struggles to make headway with the shady authorities who govern from the castle on the hill.
K. spends much of the novel trying to secure a meeting with Klamm, the elusive official who might – just might – be able to stamp the necessary forms and obtain for K. his hoped-for residency in the village. Sadly, K. is frustrated at every turn, not least by Klamm’s gatekeeping secretary, Momus.
The novel was unfinished at the time of Kafka’s death from tuberculosis in 1924, though Kafka apparently told Max Brod that K. would continue to grapple with the castle authorities until his death: they would notify him on his deathbed that his “legal claim to live in the village was not valid, yet, taking certain auxiliary circumstances into account, he was permitted to live and work there”. A suitably ironic conclusion.
Before Raphael was Michelangelo, and before Michelangelo was Leonardo, and before Leonardo was Botticelli, and before Botticelli was Giotto. Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267 – 1337) was a painter and architect from Florence during the Late Middle Ages, working before the great flourishing in the arts known as the Renaissance. The 16th century art historian, Giorgio Vasari (incidentally, the first man to use the term Renaissance in print), in his Lives of the Painters, credits Giotto with breaking tangibly away from the prevalent Byzantine style and initiating “the great art of painting as we know it today, introducing the technique of drawing accurately from life”.
His two great masterworks were the design of the campanile at Florence Cathedral, and the decoration of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua. A third may well be the famous frescoes in the Upper Basilica of Saint Francis in Assisi, though this is disputed: sadly, given the period, many features of his life are hard to substantiate.
Vasari tells some stories about Giotto that sound decidedly fanciful. According to him, Giotto was a shepherd boy, discovered by the great Florentine painter Cimabue drawing pictures of his sheep on a rock. They were so lifelike that Cimabue approached Giotto and asked if he could take him on as an apprentice. Another story recounts how Giotto drew a lifelike fly onto one of his master’s paintings and laughed when Cimabue tried several times to brush the fly off. Yet another tells how the Pope requested to see an example of his artistic skill and Giotto simply sent him a perfect circle he had drawn in freehand.
Fanciful stories aside, there’s no doubting the achievement of the Scrovegni Chapel frescoes. The subject matter is not unusual for church decoration in medieval Italy, being centred on the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, but the style for the day was sensational: solidly three-dimensional, with faces and gestures based on close observation, and the characters clothed in garments that hang naturally and have form and weight. The expansive use of ultramarine blue pigment is remarkably effective: when you look at the chapel as a whole, it seems awash with blue (albeit faded with time, sadly).
I’ll finish with another story that’s probably apocryphal (but who knows?). The great poet Dante visited Giotto while he was painting the Scrovegni Chapel and, seeing the artist’s children flitting around, asked (rudely) how a man who painted such beautiful pictures could have such plain children. Giotto, who, according to Vasari was always a wit, replied, “I make my pictures by day, and my babies by night”.
Years ago I read The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, the remarkable account, by T E Lawrence, of his experiences while serving as a liaison officer with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks between 1916 and 1918. It’s a rollicking, rip-roaring tale, to say the least, replete with desert skirmishes, blowing up of trains and high-octane adventure but also much psychological struggle, with Lawrence having to ameliorate fractious tribal enmities in order to unite the Arabs against the common enemy. Then there is Lawrence’s own emotional turmoil in balancing his divided allegiance between the British Army, and its ultimate interests, and his new-found comrades within the desert tribes. The story was clearly ripe for an epic film to be made about it.
Suitable, then, that cinematic heavyweights Sam Spiegel and David Lean would be involved in the 1962 film version of these events, Lawrence of Arabia, and an array of big-name, dependable acting talents: Peter O’Toole (in the title role, of course), Alec Guinness, Jack Hawkins, Anthony Quinn, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains (alongside several hundred extras). Actually, Peter O’Toole hadn’t been the first choice for Lawrence: Albert Finney had been cast but was fired after two days for unknown reasons; Marlon Brando, too, had been offered the role; and both Anthony Perkins and Montgomery Clift were considered. However, O’Toole’s screen test and perhaps his resemblance to the real-life Lawrence edged it for him. With his blond hair and piercing eyes, he certainly looked good on screen: Noël Coward quipped: “if you’d been any prettier, the film would have been called Florence of Arabia”.
The movie was helped tremendously by the combination of Super Panavision 70 cinematography with the incredible backdrops afforded by the deserts of Jordan, along with a suitably majestic score by Maurice Jarre. It won seven Oscars, and is recognised as one of the greatest and most influential films in the history of cinema. Let’s take a look at Lawrence entering the desert for the first time…
The rise to stardom of the original Hollywood “Latin lover”, Rudolph Valentino, is a remarkable one. I’m pretty sure nobody who knew him in his childhood could have had the slightest inkling of what lay in store for him: he was born in 1895 in Castellaneta, at the top of the heel of Italy, to a captain of cavalry in the Italian army and a French mother. Although even as a boy he was known for his exceptional looks, he did poorly at school, squeezed a certificate out of agricultural college in Genoa, and couldn’t find work. As with so many others, he departed for the United States, and was processed at Ellis Island in 1913, aged 18.
Rodolfo, as he was then (real name: Rodolfo Alfonso Raffaello Pierre Filiberto Guglielmi di Valentina d’Antonguella), sought work bussing tables at various New York restaurants. He was fired several times, but eventually one skill that he did have – dancing – secured him work as a “taxi dancer” (hired to dance with customers) at Maxim’s Restaurant-Cabaret. He befriended a Chilean heiress there and became entangled in something of a scandal which motivated him to leave town, joining a travelling musical which took him to the West Coast.
It was on the West Coast that things started happening for Rodolfo; he was encouraged to seek screen roles and his “exotic” looks led him to win bit parts in several movies. His big break, though, came when he won a lead role in the 1921 silent movie, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which became a commercial and critical success and catapulted him to stardom. He was marketed as the “Latin lover” with a new stage name, and the movies The Sheik, Blood and Sand, The Eagle, and The Son of the Sheik all followed, each one cementing Valentino’s reputation and star quality.
He soon became the archetypal sex symbol of the silent movie era, alongside the fair-complexioned, all-American male leads Wallace Reid and Douglas Fairbanks Junior, as well as the other contemporary hearththrob matinée idol of foreign extraction, Tokyo-born Sessue Hayakawa (who decades later would appear as Colonel Saito in The Bridge on the River Kwai). Valentino’s status as a cultural icon was sealed in 1926 by his early death from peritonitis, aged just 31. Mass hysteria ensued, and indeed the events of Valentino’s funeral are a story in themselves (100,000 lined the streets to pay their respects, but so much disorder broke out that 100 mounted NYPD officers were needed to restore order).
Here is a montage of Valentino footage in various publicity shots and off-screen scenarios – if your only image of him is in costume and make-up (perhaps as “the Sheik”), then you might find this quite compelling and worth viewing to get an insight into the “real” Valentino and why the women swooned…feast your eyes!
In the historic centre of Naples lies the Sansevero Chapel, a former church converted into a family burial chapel by the noble di Sangro family in 1613. In the 1750s, Raimondo di Sangro, the Prince of Sansevero, committed the last years of his life to decorating the chapel with great works of art. He had already had a rich life of enquiry and experimentation in the sciences and was well-known for his inventions as well as a deep involvement with alchemy and Freemasonry. However, since Raimondo had had run-ins with the Inquisition and had elected to destroy his scientific archive before his death, it is his artistic legacy that remains.
In particular, he commissioned three sculptors to produce a marble sculpture each, namely Antonio Corradini’s Veiled Truth, Guiseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, and Francesco Queirolo’s Escape from Deception. By good judgement or good luck – or, some said, by the mysterious powers of the occult – Raimondo’s choice resulted in all three sculptures turning out to be amazing masterpieces of exquisite skill.
Let’s look at just one of them. The Release from Deception by Genoese sculptor Francesco Queirolo shows a man’s emergence from a fisherman’s net, guided by an angel hovering above a globe as he untangles the man from the net. Every piece of this incredible sculpture is carved out of marble, including the carefully crafted knots in the net draped around the figure of the fisherman. The scene depicted is both biblical and allegorical, the net symbolising sin, worldliness or wrong-thinking, and the angel helping the man to see the error of his ways.
The idea of one man, with his mallets and chisels and rasps and rifflers, struggling with one block of marble to “free the form trapped inside the block”, as Michaelangelo used to describe it, is a compelling one. I myself have only fleetingly passed through Naples, but if I ever return, I shall be seeking out the Sansevero Chapel; I’d like to see this “in the flesh”, so to speak!
High above the Calder valley in West Yorkshire lies the village of Heptonstall, and in its churchyard lies, rather incongruously, the grave of famous American confessional poet, Sylvia Plath. Hers is a wretched tale of depression, ending ultimately in her suicide in February 1963, but her literary legacy is a powerful one, albeit only fully recognised posthumously (she won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982, twenty years after her death). The majority of the poems on which her reputation now rests were written during the final months of her life.
Plath had arrived at Cambridge University from her native Massachusetts and had already won awards for her poetry when she met young Yorkshire poet Ted Hughes in February 1956. By June they were married. They moved to the States for a couple of years before returning to London, where Sylvia had her daughter Frieda, and later Tawnton in Devon, where her son Nicholas was born. In July 1962, she discovered that Hughes was having an affair and the couple separated.
Plath had already experienced difficult problems with her mental health and had already undergone electroconvulsive therapy by the time she’d met Hughes. The separation precipitated an even-further downward spiral. She consulted her GP, who prescribed her anti-depressants and also arranged a live-in nurse to be with her.
The nurse was due to arrive at nine on the morning of February 11, 1963, to help Plath with the care of her children. Upon arrival, she found Plath dead with her head in the gas oven, having sealed the rooms between her and her sleeping children with tape, towels and cloths. She was 30 years old.
I have selected this poem, Daddy, read aloud by Plath herself. Its theme is her complex relationship with her German father, Otto Plath, who had died shortly after her eighth birthday. It is haunting and disturbing, with dark imagery and the expression of an inscrutable emotional trauma that we can only guess at. Plath’s rendition of her poem, with its disquieting multiple use of “oo” vowel sounds, gripped me, when I first heard this, all the way through to its raw and brutal conclusion.
You do not do, you do not do Any more, black shoe In which I have lived like a foot For thirty years, poor and white, Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time—— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic Where it pours bean green over blue In the waters off beautiful Nauset. I used to pray to recover you. Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town Scraped flat by the roller Of wars, wars, wars. But the name of the town is common. My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two. So I never could tell where you Put your foot, your root, I never could talk to you. The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare. Ich, ich, ich, ich, I could hardly speak. I thought every German was you. And the language obscene
An engine, an engine Chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen. I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna Are not very pure or true. With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been scared of you, With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. And your neat mustache And your Aryan eye, bright blue. Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You——
Not God but a swastika So black no sky could squeak through. Every woman adores a Fascist, The boot in the face, the brute Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy, In the picture I have of you, A cleft in your chin instead of your foot But no less a devil for that, no not Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two. I was ten when they buried you. At twenty I tried to die And get back, back, back to you. I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack, And they stuck me together with glue. And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw. And I said I do, I do. So daddy, I’m finally through. The black telephone’s off at the root, The voices just can’t worm through.
If I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two—— The vampire who said he was you And drank my blood for a year, Seven years, if you want to know. Daddy, you can lie back now.
There’s a stake in your fat black heart And the villagers never liked you. They are dancing and stamping on you. They always knew it was you. Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) was Poet Laureate from 1972 until his death in 1984, though both poems that I discuss here in this blog were written way back in 1937 and 1941 respectively. He was a lifelong poet but also a journalist and TV broadcaster and something of an “institution” in Britain, popular for his bumbling persona and wryly comic outlook. He was known for being a staunch defender of Victorian architecture, and he played a large part in saving St Pancras railway station (and many other buildings) from demolition.
Indeed, Betjeman bemoaned all that he saw slipping away in the wake of the industrialisation of Britain. The town of Slough had acquired up to 850 new factories just before the Second World War and was the epitome of all that he saw wrong with modernity, the “menace to come”. His poem Slough begins:
Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough! It isn’t fit for humans now
Somewhat harsh, perhaps. On the centenary of Betjeman’s birth in 2006 his daughter Candida Lycett-Green apologised to the people of Slough on his behalf and said that her father had regretted writing the poem. He may well have regretted picking on a particular town but I doubt that his sentiments had changed regarding the changing urban architectural landscape.
The first poem of Betjeman’s I came across was arguably about another world in the process of being subsumed by the march of progress and the Second World War. The Subaltern’s Love Song is a gentle poem reflecting the middle-class culture of Surrey at the time it was written in 1941. The story is imagined, though the muse of his poem was very real: Miss Joan Hunter Dunn worked at the canteen at the University of London where Betjeman was working. He was so taken by her that he was inspired to write the poem, imagining himself as a subaltern (a junior officer in the military) in her thrall throughout a breathless series of summer activities that ends in their engagement.
Eleven quatrains of flowing ten-syllable iambic rhythm tell the unfolding story of the imaginary love affair, and it does it with wit and sparkle. Let’s leave aside the fact that its writer was married at the time!
Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Miss J.Hunter Dunn, Furnish’d and burnish’d by Aldershot sun, What strenuous singles we played after tea, We in the tournament – you against me!
Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy, The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy, With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won, I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won, The warm-handled racket is back in its press, But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.
Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk, And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk, And cool the verandah that welcomes us in To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.
The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath, The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path, As I struggle with double-end evening tie, For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.
On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts, And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports, And westering, questioning settles the sun, On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall, The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall, My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair And there on the landing’s the light on your hair.
By roads “not adopted”, by woodlanded ways, She drove to the club in the late summer haze, Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.
Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, I can hear from the car park the dance has begun, Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band! Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!
Around us are Rovers and Austins afar, Above us the intimate roof of the car, And here on my right is the girl of my choice, With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.
And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said, And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead. We sat in the car park till twenty to one And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.
John Betjeman
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