15 January meeting: Poetry Workshop, by Jonty Driver

Jonty has sent me this summary of his plans for his Poetry Workshop on 15 January:

"We are going to be looking at a number of poems by a variety of hands (some well-known, some not) as a way of thinking about the how of poetry as well as the what: about how poems are made, as an aid to understanding what effect they have on the reader or listener, what they are communicating. Jonty is especially interested in the division of poems into lines (the big distinction between verse and prose) and the balance of lineation and syntax, but he will also direct our attention to rhythm and metre, rhyme and off-rhyme, and stanza-form. He hopes this workshop will be more like a seminar than a lecture.

The poems - or extracts from poems - he will be using as examples will be in an attachment which will be circulated before the meeting;  will those member s of the WLS who have printers please bring a copy to the workshop?  Jonty will print some extra copies."

Winning verse by a member.(Victoria Wood, look to your laurels)

Gillian Southgate has won a prize in the monthly competition in the Oldie (which, incidentally, has improved a lot since Alexander Chancellor took over as Editor).She has kindly allowed me to reproduce it here:

You Always Dance in the Kitchen

You always dance in the kitchen and you twirl like a wild banshee,
You pirouette with a fat courgette as you snack on a mange tout pea,
You swing and shake with a fillet of hake, while the cat stands by aggrieved,
And your palais glide with a beef topside must be seen to be believed.
I come alive when I see you jive past the bowl of kiwi fruit,
That smart foxtrot with the eggs cocotte makes me faint, you look so cute.
You twist and shout round a nice brown trout and a plate of fennel gratin
Your entrechat is way above par when it’s poised over rhubarb tatin.
Your linzertorte as you pull up short in the middle of a tango,
Tastes quite divine, and I know you’re mine when you sashay round a mango.
Oh, you’ve always been my dancing queen; you come on like Pavlova,
(That’s cream and fruit and meringue to boot, and it really rolls me over).

John Davison's talk on Sir Walter Scott, by Gillian Southgate

On December 11^th John Davison gave an insightful talk to the Literary Society on Sir Walter Scott, whose enviable personality seems to have combined rationality, self-control and astuteness, with the ability to love, and to inspire love for himself in others. According to his biographer, he had ‘a wide ranging sympathy for, and a belief in, the human heart.’ Scott’s sympathies for doomed causes, as well as his fierce patriotism, led to novels featuring bold clansmen like Rob Roy, and noble heroes such as Ivanhoe, both made famous, in simplified form, in Boys’ Own literature in the early decades of the twentieth century. These works were hugely popular, featuring as they do dramatic scenes and characters, and revealing something of a loftiness of moral tone. Like Dickens’s, Scott’s characters frequently have whimsical names, or are the missing heirs to a fortune or an aristocratic lineage.  To look at Scott’s soul, John told us, we had only to read the Waverley novels. It wasn’t surprising, then, to discover that on one occasion Scott found himself on the brink of fighting a duel.  It was clearly what one of his heroes might have done.

A lawyer, the Sheriff Deputy for Selkirk, the founder of the Quarterly magazine and the editor of the Scots Ballads, he had a huge and influential circle of friends and admirers, two of whom were the Kings of England and France. His novel Marmion was a bestseller, and the Waverley novels were the most successful in the English language – overlaid, it has to be said, with a Scots dialect that sometimes became tedious for his readers. He was his own best critic, and generous in his praise for those he saw as superior poets – Lord Byron and he, though markedly different in character, liked and respected each other. He was also a close friend of William Wordsworth. Married and settled in his house ‘Abbotsford’, he showed the strength of his character when there was a catastrophic failure of the financial system in 1825, and he lost all his money.

His response to this blow was characteristic.  He wrote his way out of debt. His output was prodigious, and though not of the quality of Marmion and the earlier works, it eventually enabled him to pay off his debts. Eight years later, however, he was dead, and one has to speculate that the energy thrown into this enterprise actually wore him out.  Scott is acknowledged as the founder of the historical novel, and his fame resulted in the Waverley railway station in Edinburgh, and in a memorial monument so large and impressive that it eclipses even Prince Albert’s.  A good friend, an idealist but with a cool nature when he needed to call on it, an acquaintance of the high and mighty, but neither cynical nor pompous, he is famed for having also invented the cult of Scotland - tartan, pithy aphorisms and all.  Scott isn’t read much these days, and John enjoined us all to try him. Most  left the Court Hall resolving to do so. Even to his own most appropriate name, Scott could not have done more to put the character, landscape and culture of his homeland on the map, where it continues to state its case right into our own century.

Introduction to talk on Walter Scott by John Davison, 11 December 2015

In his day Walter Scott was the most successful novelist who had ever written, and the most famous Scotsman in the world. He knew practically everyone in British society from the King (George IV) downwards; his books were translated across the world, and provided the plots for more than ninety operas.

Beginning as a successful (and not very good) poet he began writing novels almost by accident, and became the most successful novelist ever to have written in English. He was the inventor of the historical novel; every writer of historical fiction from Bulwer Lytton to Philippa Gregory and Hilary Mantel is in his debt. His influence on the Scotland of his time was profound, both through his novels and his political involvement. It can be argued that he helped to create modern Scotland by  reconciling lukewarm Scots to the Hanoverian crown, and  helping to heal the rift between  the  romantically backward Highlands and the Lowlands of the Enlightenment.

To a remarkable extent he and his books are one: the themes he treats in fiction are those which concerned him in life, and his own was quite as heroic as any of his characters'.  He had the distinction of being loved by almost everyone with whom he came into close contact, from aristocrats to servants. He is one of the most attractive figures the gallery of English letters.  

A Vision of Hell or the tale of a True Patriot? by Lawrence Youlten

“I leapt up at the loudest noise one could imagine, along with a massive flash and then fire - fire everywhere. I saw window panes flying and falling. My first thought was 'electric' what else could it be? The flames were suddenly everywhere - beneath me, above me, and all around me. I thought with a sadness, that all the loonies were right 'the world will end in fire'. I screamed for my mother as any child does, then, convinced that this was a general state of affairs, I yelled for God to save me. I felt myself sinking, almost disappearing. . . spiralling down, my body and my clothes aflame .”

This was written by the victim of a terrorist bomb, twelve years old at the time she describes. Her name was Glynnis Burleigh and the incident left her needing extensive plastic surgery following her 80% body surface area burns. She was left with lifelong severe facial disfigurement. In spite of this horrifying experience she was able to say in an interview many years later that one of the advantages of being so badly disfigured is that you can know for sure that people like you for who you are, and not for what you look like. Her grandmother had died of burns sustained in the same explosion, and over twenty other members of the public had also sustained injuries. Glynnis specifically stated that she felt no animosity towards the African Resistance Movement, (ARM), a member of which was responsible for constructing the bomb and leaving it in the concourse of Johannesburg Park Station one afternoon in July 1964. The bomber was a white South African teacher, John Harris, subsequently to be the only white person among about 2500 hanged by the State in the apartheid era. Jonty Driver has written a well-researched account of the bombing, Harris’s trial and execution, and subsequent “rehabilitation”, culminating in the addition to his memorial tombstone of the words “True Patriot”. To me, Glynnis is the real hero of Jonty Driver’s new book, , “THE MAN WITH THE SUITCASE, The Life, Execution and Rehabilitation of a Liberal Terrorist”. (Details can be found below.)

The suitcase bomb, which included dynamite, two gallons of petrol and a timer, had been constructed and left in the station by John Harris. Harris made two telephone calls, one to the  Railway Police, the other to a newspaper office, warning that a bomb would explode at 4.33, and was booby-trapped to detonate prematurely if handled. He suggested that the station should be cleared by announcements on the station PA system. The timing of these calls suggests that less than 20 minutes warning had been given, which seems an unrealistically short time to get an evacuation organised. In any event, no Tannoy warnings or other measures to clear the area took place. It does not appear that any such measures had been instituted by 4.33pm, and cynics have suggested that this was a deliberate decision on the part of the authorities, in particular B J Vorster the Minister of Justice responsible for security.

The ARM seems to have included informers, and others ready to implicate Harris under predictably brutal interrogation. He was very quickly detained and beaten up, and sustained a fractured jaw from a kick in the face. He confessed and then unsuccessfully appealed against the trial verdict of capital murder on the somewhat unlikely grounds of insanity. He received a death sentence and was subsequently hanged.

This tragic story raises a number of issues. How effective is violence with members of the public as its victims in bringing about political change? Arguably, the IRA achieved more by blowing up Lord Mountbatten, Airey Neave and the Conservative Party Brighton Conference than by killing and maiming dozens of innocent members of the public, including children, in tea-rooms, shopping centres and at Remembrance Day services. Those associated with non-violent protest such as Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King and, most recently Aung San Suu Kyi, have achieved much more, without their consciences being troubled.

Jonty Driver, who was himself detained and then banished by the South African authorities around the time of the events described in his book, knew several of the protagonists in this harrowing episode. Questions about the personality of John Harris were raised in my mind when I was reading the book, some of which were addressed. Never having met Harris, on the evidence in this book, and in a radio documentary I heard some time ago, I imagine he was a sincere but misguided “Walter Mitty” figure. He was naïve if he thought that his bomb could achieve any good purpose, and that its predictably tragic consequences, both for his victims and his family were justifiable. His personality was, I think flawed, not only in his naïveté but even in his commitment to his family. Not only did he, by his action, effectively abandon his wife to bring up their baby son on her own, but he had earlier arranged with her for their first child to be given up for adoption, for no compelling reason that I can discern, apart from the inconvenience at that time in his life of coping with a baby. However, his letters to his wife, and his demeanour on his way to the gallows, singing “We Shall Overcome”, were moving, and highlighted what a waste of a life this was.

Postscript: On YouTube you can find "True Patriot", a recent documentary film covering these events: click here

Buying the Book

THE MAN WITH THE SUITCASE: The Life, Execution and Rehabilitation of John Harris, Liberal Terrorist, by C.J. (Jonty) Driver, Crane River Press

 You can purchase the book on Kindle at : click here

 or online from the South African distributor at click here

Jonty will be signing copies of his book (s) at the  Rye Bookshop in the High Street on Saturday 21 November between 11 am and 2 pm

There is a limited number for sale in the UK at £9 inc. If you wish to buy one of them, EFT to:    D Skinner   Lloyds Bank, Piccadilly     Sort 30-96-64    Account 31271568 (and notify douglas@cranerievera.com)

or send a cheque made out to Doug Skinner to:    21 Weston Park, Thames Ditton KT7 0HW and he'll send a copy in the mail.

“Jonty Driver’s book is a reliable and balanced account.  He knew all the main actors in the tragedy… He has been attacked for the word ‘rehabilitation’ in his title, but this is a shot from the hip. In fact Driver weighs all the arguments…Driver, who is a poet of some stature, includes a poem he wrote about these events in 1966 and even that is finely balanced.”  (R W Johnson in politicsweb.co.za)

Here is a link to Jonty's website: click here

Next Meeting, 20 November: Patricia Erskine-Hill

Dante’s Divine Comedy in English; Influence and Resonance

I am very grateful to our speaker for providing this brief synopsis of her forthcoming talk

"We start with a brief look at Dante the man, followed by an outline of the Comedy:  the basic story, the extremely intricate construction of the poem and its reception through the seven hundred years since it first appeared. This last is illustrated with some marvellous paintings, frescoes and sketches of the three canticles, starting from the early fifteenth century.

This is followed by a look at Dante’s sources and at how he manipulates texts and ideas to suit his purpose.  Finally, and most importantly, we look at how deeply the Comedy has penetrated Anglophone consciousness.  From the late eighteenth century, our language and our imaginations have been full of Dantean imagery, and this goes right down through the population, from the academic specialist to many who are not even aware of the poem’s origin. 

I hope to convey some of the fun, the beauty and the range of the Comedy for those who have not got around to reading it, and to shed a little light on one particular corner for those who know it well."          

 

Here is a useful link to direct you to lots of information about Dante and his poetry:

Dante website

Thanks to our speaker for providing this.

Sarah Moss: What is the Historical Novel for?

After September's well-attended and much appreciated talk, it was nice to be reminded that appreciation works both ways, as shown by this extract from Sarah's letter of thanks after the event. (Thanks to Richard Thomas for providing this):

".....I had a very good time.  I felt very welcome, .....and found the whole experience more civilised than almost any other literary event I've done.  And you produced an excellent audience....."

Reading by Jonty Driver of his poem "Requiem"

In July Jonty read his poem "Requiem", stanzas alternating with Bach music played by Peter Fields on the violin, in the church of St Mary in the Marsh. There was a good turnout, with one of our members, Alan McKinna, among the audience. I am grateful to Ann Driver for sending me the write-up, reproduced below, of this event in the Ewhurst Green parish magazine. The text of the poem is included in a blog post dated,11 September 2014, (click on 2014 archive link on right), in connection with its reading at a service in Westminster Abbey, part of the commemoration of the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War.

Jonathan Watts on Jonty Driver’s ‘Requiem’

Jonty Driver is perhaps the only modern head of a major public school to have spent a significant time in gaol – as a student activist against the iniquities of apartheid in South Africa, the country of his birth. He is a talented polymath – novelist, poet, essayist, political scientist, sportsman, musician, educationalist; his seven-part poem Requiem reflects with disarming honesty and openness on his emotional journeys, with a poignant focus on experiences of love and death: a friend has described it as ‘utterly personal: quiet, experienced, sombre, vulnerable’.

The evening was in aid of Hantam Community Education Trust near Colesberg, South Africa

His reading of the poem as part of the JAM on the Marsh festival in July was all the more moving because of his matter-of-fact delivery which let the exquisitely crafted verse speak for itself. The poem uses a number of different, but carefully constructed, forms and has a directness of language, content and imagery which is accessible and which – even though personal to the writer - resonate with the experience of us all, giving up more of its meaning with each encounter. The directness of Jonty’s poetic communication was heightened by the brilliant performance by Peter Fields of movements from Bach’s Cello Suite No 1 arranged for violin, with its deceptively simple, emotionally-charged lines – a wonderful counterpoint to the poetry in the immediacy of its appeal. All those fortunate enough to be at this recital encountered a performance of magical feeling and introspection, which only served to emphasise the shared experience of humanity.

First published in Ewhurst & Bodiam Parish News © Jonathan Watts / Ewhurst & Bodiam Parish News