My previous reports of the extinction of the Hull toad, or at least a halt to its further proliferation, turn out to have been exaggerated. Henry the Prince’s Avenue toad was auctioned off by mistake, to the annoyance of local traders who clubbed together for a replacement, Alfie, whom I initially mistook, pre-unveiling, for some manner of burqa toad, but no. I trust the sex shop across the road lobbied for Alfie to be a ‘horny toad’, let me add. Obligatory monkeying around with outsized novelty cheque safely out of the way this fine batrachian specimen was unveiled outside the Old Zoological pub earlier this afternoon.
The foremost living exponent of the kora was experiencing a loss of self-confidence. I’m no good anymore, he would tell himself. Strangely enough, he even didn’t seem to know who he was. A sad spectacle, and no mistake. Only reading some Yeats can cure me, he thought, and sure enough it did. Standing before the mirror, à la Travis Bickle, he began to recite: ‘No one can tell who has talent, if any. /Only one thing is certain: we are Toumani.’
And as chance would have it, I’m off to hear Toumani (and the Afrocubism roadshow) later today. I must try my little gag out on him down the Camel and Touareg afterwards.
Above picture taken on a mobile phone in Welton, a village near Hull and scene of the apprehension of Dick Turpin for the crime of obstreperous behaviour in the Green Dragon tavern, shooting the landlord’s poultry in his cups. What the landlord’s poultry was doing in... (insert remainder of Groucho Marx elephant-in-his-pyjamas joke here).
Married eight times though, eh. I am reminded of ‘Upon Batt’, a couplet I know from Geoffrey Grigson’s excellent The Faber Book of Epigrams and Epitaphs:
Batt he gets children, not for love to rear ’em, But out of hope his wife might die to bear ’em.
Mark Granier kindly helped me out here by touching up the original photo for enhanced legibility, knowing much more about these things than I do.
Grimacing panjandrum-in-waiting of the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha Charlie Windsor has delivered himself of a piece of diverting New Age hokum, I see, called Revolution, of all things. I’ve always had a soft spot for New Age guru types and prophets of new world orders, especially when they give us the chance to eat biscuits by royal appointment and generally rampage through the back catalogue of religions that don’t involve Jesus, and whose practitioners tend to be found slumming it in far-Eastern absolutist monarchies (‘the magical mountain kingdom of Bhutan’, as Terry Eagleton notes) or Wellness Centres in the Cotswolds or the Lake District (I like a good caffeine enema as much as the next man, I’m sure). (Since I mention Eagleton’s review, I can’t very well pass over his final zinger on ‘Bertolt Brecht’s parable about the troubled king of the east who summoned his wise men and commanded them to inquire into the source of all the miseries in the world. The wise men duly investigated, and returned to the king with the answer that the source of the miseries was him.’) But much as they add to the gaiety of nations (and there’s a lot of it about, to judge from the spirituality sections that infest bookshops these days with the rapacity of that patch of mould that’s been infesting my kitchen window), Chuck Windsor’s screeds nevertheless have the useful effect on me of making me wonder what if anything I believe in. Nothing, I suppose, is the answer: sorry, but nothing. I am a hollow soul. How do I feel about this?
I was having a discussion in a seminar the other day about Larkin and ‘Coleslaw’ Miłosz’s objections to him, as partially repeated by Seamus Heaney in his great Yeats v Larkin bake-off, ‘Joy or Night’. Larkin does not share the Pole’s zealous Catholic faith. Fine. But his spiritual hollowness is too great an affront, transports the bushy-eyebrowed Miłosz too far beyond the realms of agreeing to disagree: Larkin is worthless, vile. It’s an interesting one-way street, and not necessarily a defining condition of the conservative religious mind. Some of my favourite (‘some of my best friends...’ moments coming up, I feel...) modern artists are, by any definition, religious fundamentalist types: Messiaen, Rouault, Reverdy. But despite the hierarchical and authoritarian nature of their church, I find each of those three examples humble, ingenuous, open, whereas I find the personality I am describing, the religious nostalgist attempting to bludgeon this empty world of ours, this world of nectar points, free DVDs of TheMidsomer Murders in Sunday newspapers, and Bill Oddie not being on Autumnwatch anymore, bludgeon it, I say, into submission with protestations of the supremacy of the spirit: I find them, I say, narcissistic, deluded and closed. Also reviewing HRH’s book in The Observer, Rowan Moore notes how ‘he treats his views (...) as personal revelations’, which sums it up for me. They are not revelations. They are the entirely banal and tedious second-hand insights of a second-rate brain. And this is where I can return to and now stand over my self-diagnosis as a hollow soul. Art is not about revelation. On the contrary, it’s about learning to see in the dark. ‘This imminence of a revelation that does not take place’, Borges suggested, ‘is perhaps the aesthetic experience’. The great temptation, Adorno said in a quotation I can’t find now, is to make the spirit explicit. Or as he said in Hegelian mode in a quotation I can find, from Minima Moralia:
The shift to existence, always ‘positive’ and justifying the world, implies at the same time the thesis of the positivity of mind, pinning it down, transposing the absolute into appearance. Whether the whole objective world, as ‘product’, is to be spirit, or a particular thing a particular spirit, ceases to matter, and the world-spirit becomes the supreme Spirit, the guardian angel of the established, despiritualised order (...). In passing off determinate being as mind, or spirit, [occultists] put objectified mind to the test of existence, which must prove negative. No spirit exists.
{Quotation ends}
And that’s my life then, the collected mauvais quarts d’heure of a randomly agglomerated bake of chemical scum. Send me a consolation packet of biscuits if you must, HRH, but given a straight choice between your spiritual vision being true and lingering in the vestibule of the unenlightened, I choose darkness. Or as Beckett’s Krapp put it: ‘clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most – ’, except of course he can’t bring himself to say it. Much more of this kind of thing from me, though, and I’ll have to write some manner of... spiritual manifesto perhaps? I trust so.
When Ian Gregson and Carol Rumens edited their anthology of Hull poetry, Old City New Rumours, a while back, one poet with Hull connections who didn’t find his way into its pages was Oliver Reynolds (who took a drama degree there). But he’s someone who has tended to go missing on all manner of fronts in the last decades. It’s a pleasure, then, to see him break cover with a new collection, Hodge, which I review here. Small repetition of the word ‘again’ from sentence four to sentence five owing to interpolated sentence (i.e. not by me). Unfortunately too, a sentence about his poem ‘This poem has won no prizes’ has lost its second half: the poem ‘takes a laudable stand against prize culture, and one I would happily neutralize by awarding a prize, if I could.’ If anyone cares about these things (poetry prizes or missing half-sentences: take your pick).
A tin of sardines would be a more useful gift to the Johnsonian kitteh pictured above, surely.
In the US, where Tóibín will return for another semester after Christmas, he says ‘there’s a great rule, that if you’re invited to someone’s home you must be standing up leaving by 9.40.’ A couple of times he and novelist Jeffrey Eugenides, a colleague at Princeton, broke this rule and on one occasion a dinner ended in a row. He and Eugenides were on one side, defending their craft, while the art historians on the other side of the argument made the case for the avant-garde. ‘How dare you even mention Samuel Beckett’ was the gist of their attack, ‘when you’re pumping out old-fashioned social realist novels that middle-class consumers want to buy.’
It is amusing to try to find the least interesting subject Larkin thought worth setting down in a letter to Monica. For my money, the prize goes to a 1959 letter, which begins:
I have four rolls of pink toilet paper on my low table, more or less at my elbow, but their only significance is that I’ve been too lazy to put them away. Pink is a new departure for me – only just discovered Bronco (why Bronco? Talking Bronco) makes it.
(Philip Hensher reviews Craig Brown, sorry Philip Larkin’s letter to Monica Jones in The Spectator; though by the way, Philip Hensher, it was Larkin’s secretary, not Monica Jones, who destroyed his diaries).
An update. Sean O’Brien has been in touch and shared yet more old Hull pub names, such as the (now-departed) Golden Ball on Air Street, on the confluence between Wincolmlee and Bankside, in my single favourite part of Hull. A quick Google search turns up not just these fine pictures of it but a fascinating accompanying article, detailing the sad deaths of a group of intoxicated whalebone-scrapers, of all things.
Someone commission me to do it and I will happily write a history of the Hull boozer. Someone buy me enough drinks and I’ll do it for nothing. Wonderful stuff.
Finding myself in the area yesterday, I dropped in on Hull’s only Jewish-themed pub (those stars of David on the façade), the Alexandra Hotel on Ropery Street off Hessle Road. A quick look on flickr suggests claims the building is a former synagogue are mistaken, but that the surrounding area was formerly a Jewish enclave and that there is still (?) a Jewish home for the elderly nearby. There is also a small Jewish cemetery just behind the pub, and inside it, I’m pleased to report, a raucous African grey parrot called Sparky, who once told Archbishop Sentamu to eff off¸ or so I’m told. He’d turned up for the annual fishermen’s commemoration, in case you’re wondering. The pub’s wood panelling is superb, as is the sight of an old piano on a small raised stage. The opening hours are advertised as 6 a.m. to 3 a.m. and you can stay overnight (those tricky three hours...) for fifteen quid. There is not very much else to do in the area, let me be the first to admit, though I was pleased the neighbouring Inkerman Inn is currently open too, after an intermission in the realms of the closed.
Still on Hull pub lore, I was discussing just that subject with Sean O’Brien the other week when he stumped me by mentioning a pub called the Marrowbone and Cleaver. I can now report that this is the present-day and spooneristically renamed Barrowman on Hotham Road.
One thing I’ve noticed with pubs like the Alexandra Hotel is how many of them stock Chestnut’s Dark Mild, which you never get in pubs on Newland or Prince’s Avenue, despite the wide range of beers most Hull pubs stock. Goes down very pleasantly too. But young people won’t drink mild. So what will happen to these historic pubs when their few old drinkers all die off? There was a depressing feature in yesterday’s Guardian on the South Bank area of Middlesbrough, where multi-generational unemployment is rife and the recession is picking off whole streets, canned-up house by house, and what was once a working-class culture falls through the trapdoor into sub-Shameless destitution. It is an appalling sight to behold, and there is plenty of it round here too, and what am I suggesting we do about it? Drink pints of mild in quirkly old historical pubs, that’s what. Well, it’s a start.
Follow you up to Carlow? I rarely wake up thinking I will have wasted the day unless I visit Ireland’s bonzai county, but when Fiach McHugh O’Byrne tells you to do something it’s probably as well to listen. Oh, and that new O’Hara’s stout (from Carlow) ain’t bad, I must say. Finding myself in Ireland last week and in need of a good hangover cure, I took myself south through Wicklow to Glenmalure and the mythopoeic mountain of Ballinacor. Though to all appearances an unremarkable protuberance on the Greenan to Aughavannagh road, Ballinacor was the site of Fiach McHugh O’Byrne/Fiach mac Aodh Ó Broin’s mountain rath or fortress, Gabhal Raghnaill, from which he ruled over much of Wicklow in what was by then (the late sixteenth century) the last surviving Gaelic kingdom in Ireland, and one whose close proximity to Dublin and the Pale made his elimination all the more pressing in the eyes of the crown. He supported Rory Og O’More’s rebellion in 1577 and survived retaliatory raids on his territory after the murder of Sir Nicholas White’s son-in-law. He pledged allegiance to the crown in 1579, but continued in his cattle-raiding ways, and the following year engaged Baron Grey de Wilton and his 6,000 troops in the Battle of Glenmalure. The mountainous terrain and tactical naïveté of the English led to heavy losses on their side (up to 3,000 soldiers), as commemorated in ‘Follow Me Up To Carlow’, that goriest of Irish rebel songs:
Lift, MacCahir Óg, your face. You’re brooding o’er the old disgrace That black FitzWilliam stormed your place and drove you to the Ferns Grey said victory was sure and soon the firebrand he’d secure Until he met at Glenmalure with Fiach MacHugh O’Byrne.
Curse and swear Lord Kildare Fiach will do what Fiach will dare Now FitzWilliam, have a care Fallen is your star low Up with halberd out with sword On we’ll go for by the lord Fiach MacHugh has given the word, Follow me up to Carlow!
See the swords of Glen Imaal; they’re flashing o’er the English Pale See all the children of the Gael, beneath O’Byrne’s banner Rooster of the fighting stock, would you let a Saxon cock Crow out upon an Irish rock - fly up and teach him manners.
(Chorus)
From Tassagart to Clonmore, there flows a stream of Saxon gore But great is Rory Óg O’More at sending loons to Hades. White is sick and Lane is fled and now for black FitzWilliam’s head We’ll send it over, dripping red, to Liza and her ladies.
(Chorus)
Even after his triumph, Hugh remained a beleaguered figure. He assisted Red Hugh O’Donnell after his escape from Dublin Castle and flight across the mountains to Glenmalure. Coincidentally, since O’Donnell was one of the Gaelic lords who would end up in continental exile after the Flight of the Earls in 1607, it is worth noting that the court bard of another flighty earl, Cuchonnacht Maguire (Cú Chonnacht Mac Uidhir), Eochaidh Ó hEodhasa, spent some time at Gabhal Raghnaill. Hugh was forced to sue for peace on his knees in 1596, but various local skirmishes later was tracked down and killed in 1597. His staked body was displayed outside Dublin Castle and his pickled head brought to London for the queen’s inspection, before ending up in the fork of a tree in Enfield Chase, where I trust he is still remembered fondly.
The Leabhar Branach is the bardic praise book of the O’Byrne clan, containing many poems in praise of Hugh. It was edited by Seán Mac Airt for the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studied in 1944 and, let me assume, won’t be getting reprinted any time soon. Some of those mildewed old editions do and some don’t have facing translations. This is one that doesn’t, a fact that has ever so slightly hampered my ability to read all 200 melodious staves of the average ode extolling Hugh’s ability to put the Saxon infidel to the sword. I was all primed to buy a copy in Hodges Figgis on this last visit of mine, only to find it not there anymore, a purchase that must have caused some surprise and even shock to the sales assistant who finally got the thing off their hands. The next time, maybe.
The territory is also sacred to mysterious Irish-language poet Biddy Jenkinson, let me also mention, a writer whose work I study with much respect and varying degrees of basic comprehension.
Coming down the valley I was charmed to come across M. J. Byrne’s pub in Greenan, which I understand has been run by a pair of brothers for many decades now, its décor unchanged since 1921. It was not open for business as I passed, though I did encounter a pair of local halfwits preparing to drown some unwitting collie dog puppies in a bucket (see photograph).
They are one of only two species of oviparous monotreme in the world, they secrete poison from spurs in their ankles, they locate their prey in the water through a system of electrolocation, they close their eyes, ears and nostrils when they swim, they have ten sex chromosomes compared with two in most mammals, they are so awkward and ornery that having bred once in captivity in 1943 they refused to do so again until 1998 – and you can watch one live, here!
