Chez Muse

Earlier in the month I published a post about Renoir's film La Bête Humaine and my happy discovery on the net of a song from it together with the lyrics. That recording was only one out of hundreds of French songs contained in a remarkable website which offers weeks of nostalgia to any francophile, or at least those who are out of puberty, for most of the songs are old and many of them ancient; some are unforgettable and others are deservedly forgotten; some are sung by famous singers and some by unknowns (outside France).

The site is here, but it is unwise to log on to it unless you have time to spare, for it is difficult to look up a single song: one thing leads to another...
Here are a few. Pour yourself a Dubonnet, light a Gauloise and relax.

Gitane
Mon coeur est un violon
(both sung by Luis Mariano: I had forgotten how good he was)

Les Feuilles Mortes
(sung by Yves Montand)

Amapola
Ma ritournelle
(both sung with incomparable elegance by Tino Rossi)

Le café au lait au lit
(written and sung by Pierre Dudan—who he? It's a very silly song)

C'est si bon
(sung by Fernand Gignac, not Eartha)

Les pieds de ma soeur
(sung by Claude Gauthier; exactly the sort of thing one would expect from a 1930s song with this intriguing title)

By the way, the song which I mentioned in a post earlier in the month, which became in French Les Adieux du Soldat, was Silver Threads Among the Gold. It has one of the cheeriest lines of any love ballad: "...life is fading fast away... "
Here's John McCormack.

A new offer

There has been no announcement yet and details are hard to come by, but experienced kirkwatchers have picked up rumours of a generous offer to be made soon by the Church of Scotland to disaffected Roman Catholic priests, bishops and cardinals.

This will provide a new workplace and community of clerics, where they will be welcomed into a specially-formed subdivision of Eaglais na h-Alba. It will appeal particularly to those who have tired of the constant stream of encyclicals and other kinds of Papal Bull pouring through their letterboxes, or who find popery in general a bit of a turn-off, or who simply want to get married. Open to them there will be, within the Protestant/Reformist/Calvinist/Presbyterian church which traces its roots back to the beginnings of Christianity in Scotland, a new group, to be called NIH (No Incense Here).

One of the difficulties of finding out what the Kirk is up to is that it doesn't have any leaders who can speak authoritatively or, as the new recruits would say, ex cathedra: the Moderator of the General Assembly serves for one year as the public representative of the Church, but beyond that enjoys no special powers or privileges and is in no sense the leader or official spokesperson. The current Moderator, the Right Rev William Hewitt, is online at The Mod's Blog but confines his posts mainly to pastoral chit-chat and not ecumenical matters.

This means that there is no-one in authority who can raise the matter with the pontiff and find out how he feels about it, not that anyone would care very much. Similarly, it is not possible to find out what the consensus is among the Kirk's 1,200 ministers or its 600,000 members. It asserts that it welcomes all from around the world, but there may be many who will be doubtful about the prospect of being joined—let alone being ministered to—by a bunch of newcomers fluent in Latin but unfamiliar with Gàidhlig and knowing nothing of single malts, Burns, or neeps and tatties.

So the offer will not be a completely open one. Likely exclusions are Opus Dei members and anyone under investigation or already defrocked. Certainly, the wearing of red hats will be forbidden, as will the veneration of holy relics, though there might be concessions for those who have their own private collections of such things as the kneecaps of St Boniface, and undertake to do their venerating in secret.

But the greatest controversy is likely to arise over any attempt by the NIH group to adapt their places of worship to their own tastes, and here the rule will probably be nothing gold or fancy and, in general, nothing with which John Knox wouldn't have been absolutely comfortable.

Taking it slowly

Other Men's Flowers is sometimes accused of making up anecdotes about music or the theatre and publishing them in such a way as to suggest that they are true accounts of actual events. In reply to such calumnies I point out that it is not always possible to verify stories that one hears and that if they are good ones it seems a shame not to pass them on merely because they could possibly be apocryphal.

Everything depends on the reliability of the source, of course, and here is a story which is of undoubted authenticity because it was vouched for to me personally by Sir Edmundo Ros, at that time the Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

A novice BBC announcer, about to make his first important announcement, was expressing his anxiety to an older colleague: "How on earth am I going to get all these foreign names right? I mean, look at this one: Romsky Kirkasov or something... I know I shall get it wrong".

"Don't worry, it's dead easy," said his experienced friend, "just keep calm, take your time, think about what you are saying... RIMSKY... KORSAKOV... and you'll find it will come out easily and absolutely correct."

The novice felt a bit better and went away to practise. Then came the great day when he stepped up to the microphone.....

"Good evening, everyone. Tonight's concert is being given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under their conductor Colin Davis, with leader Paul Beard. The first item on their programme is a descriptive piece from the opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, by Rimsky-Korsakov, entitled.......The Bum of the Flightle Bee."

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Quick question

...and quick answer required.

Suppose you are a manufacturer of wall calendars showing days and dates for twelve months (as calendars do). You have little imagination and always print them with the same picture.

You want to stock up for one hundred years. How many different kinds of calendar do you have to print?

If it takes you more than ten seconds to find the answer, you are probably on the wrong track.

The answer is HERE

A soldier's farewell to his mother

What is the English title of the old song known to the French as Les adieux du soldat?

It goes:
C'est l'adieu, petite mère
De ton gars qui va partir
Il prévoit la peine amère
Que ton coeur devra souffrir
Mais je sais que ta vaillance
Portera ce gros chagrin
Mets en Dieu ta confiance
Pour garder ton benjamin

...and was originally a poem by Eben E Rexford set to music by Hart Pease Danks in 1872; it has been sung from that day to this by hundreds of tenors and barbershop quartets, and is still a popular peace anthem in Sweden as Varför skola människor strida? (Why do men fight?)

You may think you don't know the tune, but you do, you do. I shall remind you of the English title next week.

Embarrassment for Giuseppe

Went to a violin and piano recital last Friday in a beautiful Georgian church, now an arts centre. The auditorium is huge, so for a recital it can be set out café style; for me, this always contributes greatly to the pleasure of a musical event: resting one's elbows on a table with a glass of wine on it is so relaxing, and during any longueurs it is easy to read discreetly: who is to know you are not enhancing your understanding and appreciation of the pieces being played by glancing at Grove's comments on them?

Actually, at this recital there were no tedious bits: Mendelssohn's Sonata in F minor, which he wrote when he was 16, and Schubert's Duo in A Major are both very lovely. The Elgar sonata with its Brahmsian first movement is rather less so; it has been described as a rich and introverted English piece, and so of course was he.

But I was glad to be reminded that the tempo of its last movement, allegro non troppo, sometimes written allegro ma non troppo, has an interesting story behind its origin. In 1863 Verdi, then at the height of his fame, was given a lavish fiftieth birthday party attended by the Mayor, the Director of La Scala and all the rest of the civic and musical notables of Milan. Sadly, in old age Verdi's mother had taken to the bottle, and all that evening the sparkling Franciacortia had been flowing very freely. Verdi had watched anxiously as his mother became increasingly rowdy until finally she seized a bottle, put it to her lips and leaped onto the table. In anguish, Verdi cried out: Allegro, Ma, non troppo! (Steady, Mother, not too much!).

Wilbur in France, 1908

No 24 in an occasional series of extracts from The Postcard Century

Aug 1908: America conquers Europe in this defining image in the public history of aviation. Wilbur Wright flies past the grandstand at Harandières racecourse to give the first demonstration of sustained and controlled powered flight. The brothers had made few flights since the 1903 triumphs at Kitty Hawk; while this display had a commercial motive it inspired a whole generation of heroic aviators, especially in France. Wilbur died young but Orville lived to hear of the Hiroshima bomb being dropped from an aeroplane.

Mr Munro in London received this card from J. T. Morgan in P.O. Seine, probably his first glimpse of a wonder of the age. Wright was showing the paces of the Flyer in the most advanced country in aeronautics at the time.

Getting down to it

The other day Prince Philip gave an interview celebrating the 50th anniversary of a Design Council prize which bears his name, and it was good to see that age has not diminished his notable lack of discretion.

The duke said that the quality of design had in some areas declined, and he picked television sets as an example. Harking back to an age when the sets were simple, he said that nowadays to work out how to operate a TV set you "practically have to make love to the thing".

And then he went on: ..."so you end up lying on the floor with a torch in your teeth, a magnifying glass and an instruction book".

Sold down the river

The expression probably first appeared in print around 1837: it was applied to slaves who had been troublesome to their masters in the northern slave states and were sold into much harsher conditions in Mississippi. Since P G Wodehouse used it figuratively in 1927 it seems to have established itself permanently as a boring old cliché pointlessly replacing betrayed.

Sad to see it appear twice in the Guardian last Saturday, applied to football fans who were deprived of a television viewing of England's World cup qualifier, and to the English hacker who was refused permission to appeal to the supreme court against his extradition.

Who is this man?

...and what's his game?

For weeks now my tracker has been telling me that a Mac user whose ISP is based somewhere near Dartford in Kent has been a persistent visitor to Other Men's Flowers.

Most of my visitors have found the site by accident and move on very quickly, never to return, but this one (let us call him Arthur, though of course she may be a Winifred) seems to have been devoting a substantial part of his spare time over the past few weeks to splashing about in its turbid waters. Last Saturday, for example, he was here at mid-day for 16 minutes, at 1.30 for 54 minutes, at 3.22 for 67 minutes and at 5.16 for 60 minutes, having visited a total of 61 pages.

Do I know him? What does he want? Why, after all those hours of reading, has he no desire to make any comments? Did he arrive one day by chance, set himself the challenge of finding something interesting somewhere among its 230,000 words and is now determined not to give up until he does?

One possible explanation is that some sinister agency is paying him to read every post in the hope that he will catch me out publishing sedition, treason, filth, or incitement to murder. If so, then clearly his employers have so far been disappointed; this is nice to know, though slightly worrying, for if his visits suddenly stop I shall suspect that he has reported on something reprehensible I have written and it is only a matter of a day or two before my door is smashed open and heavily armed men burst in, shouting at me to lie down on the floor.

So, Arthur, if you do simply get bored and decide to cheese it, please drop me a line and tell me.

La Bête Humaine

Zola's 1890 novel has been much filmed but the only memorable version was made by Jean Renoir in 1938; this greatly simplifies the plot and updates it to the 1930s. Jean Gabin plays the engine-driver Lantier, and it was said that Old Stoneface and his fireman spent much time rehearsing on a real engine so that the footplate scenes would carry conviction, which they certainly do.

It's not the all-time great film that the corny trailer says it is, but it's a thumping good melodrama. Lantier has a strange quirk which causes him to become homicidal at times of stress, or through frustration. He tries to sublimate his desires by being passionate about locomotives, as so many of us did when very young, but this doesn't really work; he becomes enmeshed in some splendidly sordid murders and finally kills himself by jumping out of the cab as the train speeds towards Paris. The fireman stops it and sadly walks back to find the body.

Zola's ending to the story is rather different. The train is carrying troops towards the front at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, and a fight between Lantier and his fireman breaks out; both fall to their deaths as the train full of happy, drunken, doomed soldiers hurtles driverless through the night.

There is one sequence which I could watch over and over again. They are holding a Railwayman's Ball, and there is much jollity in the dance hall while Lantier is strangling his mistress Séverine (Simone Simon) elsewhere. The scene cuts between the murder and the dance hall, where an orchestra is playing a waltz accompanying a man who is singing, beautifully, a song I have loved for years. His name was Marcel Veyran, but although he was a well-known actor/singer he was uncredited in the film and I could not find a recording. However, to my huge delight I have just found the tune—Le P'tit Coeur de Ninon—on the net, being sung in much the same style by Réda Caire.

A bad night at the opera

Except when they are selling cars, post-war Germans have generally played down their reputation for efficiency, not wanting to be associated with a characteristic to which the adjective "ruthless" has sometimes been attached (in the case of the Nazis, inappropriately: ruthless, yes, but also outstandingly incompetent). Nowadays, the Germans are known to be efficient and generally nice with it, but like to exhibit occasional failings so as to avoid the stigma of unlovable perfection.

Peter Ustinov saw this diffidence manifested when he was directing an opera at the Hamburg Opera House, then the most technically advanced opera house in the world. There, whole sets wait at an enormous structure beside the wings and slide into place at the touch of a button. The technicians were quite incredibly efficient and yet there was one man who was totally hopeless. With him, everything went wrong. He dropped a hammer from the flies, narrowly missing the Stage Director's head. Whole sets fell down as he approached. The computerised lighting track went bananas and darkness fell over all.

Eventually Ustinov asked him to explain exactly who he was and why they kept him on. "Ah, you see, they keep me here to humanise themselves."

An admirable reply, but surely there must be more to it than that? Ustinov went on to ask, "But why do you in fact make all these incredible mistakes?"

"Ah, you see, it's a long family tradition."

"What ? You mean there are more of you, a whole family?"

"Oh yes, you should have seen my father. He was Stage Director of the Klagenfurt Opera and he made the most incredible mistakes, much worse than anything of mine. But, one day he achieved the impossible: he got it all right. The opera was William Tell, very much the thing for Klagenfurt of course, and watching from the stage manager's place in the wings he could see that all was perfect—all the sets in place, the chorus in position, the animals behaving, the prompters ready to prompt, the singers singing and the orchestra (audibly) playing."

"So what went wrong?"

"Oh, just one little thing—the curtain wouldn't go up."

Towers of London

This was the name of a company started in 1946 by Harry Alan Towers, producer of cheap films, horror movies and soft-porn, and his mother. In 1961 he had appeared before a US grand jury on five counts of violating the White Slave Traffic Act; it was alleged that he had transported his mistress to New York for the purpose of prostitution, though she told the FBI that he was actually a Soviet agent "providing the Russians with information in order to complmise certain prominent individuals". Anyway, he jumped bail and returned to England to continue his productive, successful, and (the word must be used here) colourful career.

He recently died aged 88, still working on a film of Moll Flanders for which he had co-written the screenplay with Ken Russell; it stars Lucinda Rhodes-Flaherty in the title role, supported by Steven Berkoff and Barry Humphries in drag. This I wouldn't mind seeing, as well as some of his early TV movies, which included one with Basil Rathbone as Scrooge and one with Marius Goring as The Scarlet Pimpernel, but I am not particularly sorry that I missed the five which starred Christopher Lee as Fu Manchu.

For all the sleaze which often surrounded him, he was able to attract big name actors. His company sold various syndicated radio shows around the world, including The Lives of Harry Lime with Orson Welles, Horatio Hornblower with Michael Redgrave, and a series of Sherlock Holmes stories featuring John Gielgud as Holmes, Ralph Richardson as Watson and Welles as Moriarty. It is pleasant to imagine these three great men jostling each other round the microphone.

Return of Pooh

...to the Hundred Acre Wood. Well, he never went away, really: the last line of The House at Pooh Corner is : "... in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his Bear will always be playing".

Anyway, the title of a book being published tomorrow suggests that there has been at least a temporary (well, eighty-one years, actually) absence. The Milne estate has authorised a lifelong fan, David Benedictus, to write a new series of short stories. The cover adds to his name to those of A.A. Milne, E.H. Shepard, and Mark Burgess; happily, from the cover illustration it looks as if the latter's drawings, pastiche though they may be, pay proper homage to Shepard's originals, and we may hope that the text is no less admiring of Milne. Certainly, neither will owe any debt to Disney's charmless fat yellow blob in a red T-shirt.

E.H. Shepard's Pooh Bear at ease in the Hundred Acre Wood.

[Note: Since I wrote the above, the book has been published and reviewed to general acclaim. The US initial print alone is 300,000]

Selection 20

Recycled posts from 2005:

personal
Sleeping on a train with Emmanuel Lasker

words
Newsreader is maliciously joyful
(and read Samira’s comments)

literature
Christie, Tolkien and Terry Nation

Brideshead Revisited, revisited

I was not greatly impressed by Evelyn Waugh's 1945 novel, which is not surprising as it "deals with the unmerited and unilateral act of love by which God continually calls souls to himself", which only a Catholic convert would find a fruitful subject for a novel. When he re-read it five years later he was appalled, excusing it as the result of the difficult wartime days and subsequently finding its attitudes distasteful.

But the 1981 TV serial does stick in my memory, if only because of the beauty of Castle Howard, which stood in for Brideshead, and the mournful trumpet which sounded in each episode, giving a worthy air to this glamorous tosh. The series was re-broadcast recently at six in the morning over eleven days, a desperate piece of summer scheduling, but I did record it and watched the lot. It was no less repellent than the novel but a lot more entertaining; none of the characters is remotely likeable and only the fact that most the actors playing them had enormous charm made the thing watchable.

I don't remember how Charles Ryder (Jeremy Irons) came across in the book, but in watching the series I was struck by his silence throughout. The part cannot have taken long to learn because he has practically nothing to say, merely listening and somehow projecting sympathy and understanding, with a cigarette or a disgusting yellow pipe in his mouth, as the others go on about their problems; in real life people would get fed up with this and demand some sort of response from time to time, but almost everyone he meets falls about with admiration for him, especially the Marchmains who welcome him into the bosom of their awful family.

Typically, he and Julia sit by the fountain one night while she excitedly holds forth on her concerns about Sin, with interludes of sobbing. Throughout this long scene he says absolutely nothing and merely sits there looking glum. It seemed to me that each party had reason for giving the other a good clout, but at the end they inexplicably just walk away, without exchanging a word.

And another thing: Cordelia goes to Spain to tend the wounded in the civil war, but no details are given and which side she was supporting is not clear. By the time the novel was written Waugh wouldn't have wanted to show her as one of Franco's Fascists, but it is unlikely that Lady Cordelia would have been keen to change the dressings of a bunch of communist riff-raff.

Nowadays Waugh's snobbery and his veneration of the idle and pious rich no longer have the power to offend us; we can only marvel at his sincere and deeply felt regret that their days have passed.

Eurospeak

The Companion to British History defines this as suspect linguistic usage in which familiar expressions convey different concepts from those generally understood.

The most important cases are (fam means the familiar meaning in English, ES the meaning in Eurospeak):

Council: (fam) a local authority; (ES) the European legislature.

Directive: (fam) an important rule requiring obedience enforced by a sanction; (ES) a direction to a member country to alter its law, but not in force until it does so.

European: pertaining to the geographical European continent; (ES) pertaining to the area of the EEC or EU for the time being.

Parliament: (fam) a sovereign legislature; (ES) an official discussion forum at Strasbourg.

Regulation: (fam) a minor rule made under law; (ES) the most important kind of rule, superior even to an Act of Parliament.

On the banks of the cool Shalimar

By special request, another hippopotamus. This one is James Thurber's.

"What have you done with Dr Millmoss?"

Faites simple

...or, avoid all unnecessary complication and elaboration. This was Escoffier's advice to chefs but it applies to websites as well as it does to great cooking.

If you own a restaurant which offers a lunchtime tasting menu at £75 (£6 surcharge if you want the Duck Egg Mimosa with Cornish Lobster Mayonnaise as your starter), or a hotel which is a stunning Elizabethan manor house surrounded by 35 acres of renowned historic gardens and set in 1000 acres of ancient and exquisite forestry land, then you will need to promote it with a stylish website. So you go to the top people in the website design racket and tell them you want something really prestigious.

The trouble is, they need to justify the huge fee they are going to charge, so that they will have to make your website look and feel as if it's worth every penny; it will come replete with videos, music and every kind of whizzy feature, all bearing the hallmarks of top international graphic artists and web designers. It will certainly look terrific; it may also be confusing, awkward and generally irritating.

I know two sisters who inherited from their mother a house by the seaside which they let by the week for holidays. They asked me to make them a website to advertise it and since I was—still am, actually—in a relationship with the younger of the two I was happy to do so without charge. I am not much good at web design but I could make a virtue out of necessity by producing something very simple, with ten pages merely giving all the necessary information and making it easy to book. It was done with a nine-year-old version of Microsoft's now obsolete FrontPage, using one of its rather naff "themes", and the whole thing nowadays looks a touch dreary and old-fashioned (the website, that is, not the house, which is a very nice one). If you're curious, you can see both HERE.

This post is not touting for business, either for the house or my websites: I make websites only for friends and charities, and after several years of almost continuous lets the house is fully booked for a long way ahead. Of course, if you're really keen there are still a few weeks available for next year....

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The invasion of Afghanistan

Inhabited by some of the most warlike peoples on the face of the earth, the country has always been glowering, secretive and veiled in intrigue, little known to Europeans except by disrepute. The Afghans think trade an ignoble occupation and leave it to foreigners; their general character is at once savagely independent and desperately unpredictable. They can be lively, humorous, courageous and warm-hearted but can also be bigoted, sly and murderous. Split into tribal divisions subdivided into clans, they fight incessantly among themselves and are almost impossible to govern.

We British have known them longer and better than most, and at times have wished, on the whole, to preserve the independence of the nation, but when it became apparent that foreign influences at work there posed a threat to our interests, the decision was taken to invade, while proclaiming that "once the independence and integrity of Afghanistan is established, the British Army will be withdrawn".

The principal invasion force consisted of 9,000 troops, with 6,000 more not under our direct command. Progress was slow and laborious, for behind them there followed 38,000 camp followers. The army was to live off the country but nevertheless took with them thirty days' rations of grain and enough sheep and cattle for ten weeks. Every platoon of every regiment had its water-carriers, its sadlers, its blacksmiths, its cobblers, its tailors, its laundrymen, and there were the men who polished brasses, and the men who put up tents, and the cooks, the orderlies, the stable-boys—together with all their wives, all their children and often aunts, uncles or grandparents—and troops of prostitutes from half India, with fiddlers, dancing-girls, fortune-tellers, wood-gatherers—with herdsmen to look after the cattle, sheep and goats, and butchers to slaughter them. There were carts and wagons by the thousand, palanquins, drays, chargers, ponies and dogs.

All this great multitude stumbled away to war, each corps with its band playing, a regiment of Queen's cavalry, nine regiments of infantry, engineers and gunners. A mighty dust hung in the air behind them, as a sign that the British were coming.

As a military operation the invasion was a qualified success. Organized opposition seemed to be at an end, and on August 6th, 1839, the panoply of British imperial power entered Kabul. At their head was the king, Shah Shuja, whom the British had restored to his throne; he was a splendid sight, scintillating with jewellery, and rode a white charger accoutred in gold, but was greeted with sullen silence by the Kabulis, who didn't much like him.

Much of the army was now sent back to India, leaving a division of infantry, a regiment of cavalry and an artillery battery. The British settled in, built a racetrack, organised amateur dramatics and persuaded a few Kabulis to take up cricket. However, in 1841 a riot became a rising and the head of Her Majesty's Envoy and Plenipotentiary was paraded through the capital while the rest of his corpse was suspended from a meathook in the great bazaar. Despite this discourteous behaviour, General Elphinstone, who was in command in spite of being debilitated by a wound in his buttock, negotiated an agreement with the insurgents, who promised to see the army safely through the passes to Jalalabad on the Indian frontier. No-one really believed them.

On January 6th, 1842, the army began its retreat, the most terrible in the history of British arms, and some 16,500 souls struggled out of their cantonment. The retreat lasted just a week; by January 13th all had died or been slaughtered except for one army surgeon who reached Jalalabad hotly pursued by sabre-waving Afghans.

So the first of Queen Victoria's imperial wars came to its terrible end. The British returned to Kabul within the year, blew up the great bazaar as a reminder of their displeasure and subdued the Afghans until the next Anglo-Afghan war forty years later. Shah Suja was soon murdered, and Afghanistan provided perennial strife for the rest of the century.

The above was adapted from an account by the essayist Jan Morris in her trilogy Pax Britannica. She concludes:
As for the retreat from Kabul, though largely forgotten in Britain it is vividly remembered in Afghanistan. When in 1960 I followed the army's route from Kabul to Jalalabad with an Afghan companion, we found many people ready to point out the sites of the tragedy, and recall family exploits. I asked one patriarch what would happen now if a foreign army invaded the country. "The same", he hissed, between the last of his teeth.