The Wastes of Time Talk by Lord Gawain Douglas at September's meeting.

Thanks to Alan McKinna and Jonty Driver for the following appreciations of a memorable meeting:

As We Liked It

On Friday 21st Septmber, Lord Gawain Douglas came to the Court Hall to recite to an audience of WLS members from his capacious memory some of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and to talk about learning, remembering and understanding them.  His recital of the sonnets was enriched by quotation of several of the most famous of the speeches from the plays: the “seven ages” and the “poor player”, for instance, and he sang to us too, “Blow blow thou winter wind” from As You Like It..  Listening to him makes one realise again the advantage of a musician’s training:  the words mean, but they also sing.

Some of us had heard Gawain’s reciting before, as a contributor to the JAM Festival in  past years: the whole of T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land, and – even more impressively – all of Eliot’s Four Quartets.  Since I am a better reader than listener, I went to the last-named with a text, and can confirm that the Douglas memory is not merely prodigious but very accurate:  in reciting the Four Quartets, he made just one transposition of adjectives, but otherwise was word perfect. Perhaps even more impressively,  this is not just memorised work: this is work memorised and understood.  Similarly with the sonnets: obviously, there was no way he could have managed all 156 in a single session, but he gave us a good selection of some of the famous and some of the less-known, ending as is only proper with perhaps the best-known of all: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds...”

It was a triumphant evening, a tour de force by a talented musician and poet.  CJD

The Wastes of Time

Over the weekend I looked again at “Shakespeare” by Ivor Brown (1949 Collins) in which Chapters 9 and 10 (‘My Lovely Boy’ & ‘Woman Colour’d Ill’) are devoted to The Sonnets. He writes..."The Sonnets are rarely a source of strikingly original opinion or emotion. But thought and feeling, at least in the best of them, have been delivered with such vehemence of spirit as well as such virtuosity of phrase that the reader, mystery or no mystery, must hang on every line, rapt by the splendour of the words and music. A volume which contained only Nos. 18, 87, 94, 97, 98, 116 and 129 would stand on the peak of English poetry. It is surely idle to worry overmuch about the identity of the persons: it is enough that they were the cause of writing which raises language to a higher power...."

A little later he writes... "Like most schoolboys I had been sickened of Shakespeare by education. I was wearied almost to revolt by this examination business of commentating and annotating. All too well did I know and was able to repeat on paper what the Rialto was;.... By the age of eighteen I was allergic to Shakespeare almost beyond hope of therapy. But cure did come...by way of a weekly paper called The New Age in which, under the signature of Jacob Tonson, Arnold Bennett commented on books of the day with a frankness and liveliness unusual at the time. When Frank Harris’s book, The Man Shakespeare and His Tragic Life Story, appeared in 1909 Bennett cried its merits high... as an admirable alternative to Dry-as-dust and professorial or pedagogue's Shakespeare of those days and bored young people into a total hatred of ‘Eng.Lit.’... some teachers of ‘Eng.Lit.’ are now discovered working in theatres and producing his plays with gusto and with excellent results."

Certainly we were privileged to hear Lord Gawain Douglas’s vehemence of spirit and impressive faculty of memory  –  ending as he did with an Ode from Horace to Sussex and Hastings.... how many more such odes has he written, I wonder? 

AMcK

Loitering with a good book, by Robin Whitehead, formerly Rector of Winchelsea

A few years ago when I was about to undergo major surgery and an estimated year of follow-on treatment, I decided, slightly hesitantly, to purchase a Kindle. I was reckoning, I suppose, that mobility or lack of would prevent my perusing in bookshops for some time.

I promised myself I wouldn’t upload or download (not sure what the difference is), non-fiction, as a good solid biography does furnish a room, but merely novels that I might not want to keep. The other day, I was looking with a degree of shock at the many books that I have placed into my eBook library in the intervening years and moreover realising there were still some I hadn’t got around to reading or maybe simply decided not to read at all. Even given the relatively inexpensive price of a book on Kindle, I calculated that I’d spent the equivalent of a few bottles of relatively decent whisky, even at Scottish prices!

I have to confess that I have rather gone off my Kindle these days and would far rather sit with a real book. Mind you, the advantage of the Kindle is that you can try a sample and if you don’t like it, you can quickly erase it. A new book is reviewed in the weekend newspapers, so you try a quick sample. You can see you won’t get far with it. You remove it from the device. Simple as that! My mother would have delighted in that. She was always casting off books that had, in her words, “no style.” But then again she would have had scant time for her favourite authors being redacted to eBook format. Anna Karenina on Kindle?  Never!

Now I don’t want to appear to be grumbling, but the library ordering system in Dumfries and Galloway has left a lot to be desired since we moved up here. The kind and helpful ladies in the Dalbeattie branch have been the first to agree and assure me that at long last a new system, soon to be up and running, may finally remedy the problem. However being an ardent supporter of my local library this has been a source of some frustration to say the least.

Thus, in the absence of the library coming up with the goods, and reluctant to download onto the eBook any further, I have discovered the uncontainable pleasure of rereading the books on my own shelves.

On occasions, I have searched fruitlessly for a book I was convinced I owned, only to recall sadly that we had had a cull during a previous move. At that point I have searched diligently through the Abe Books catalogue for inexpensive copies of favourite books and thus, as it were, “recluttering” the shelves. Ah, what pleasure!

I’m not sure whether I have just reached a certain age (others might advise me on this) but the joy of re-reading books after decades has become an unexpected boon for me.

 In conjunction with good weather and sitting in the garden in the sun, I have wandered back into the delightful lost world of Barbara Pym and given the privilege of time that retirement sometimes affords, I lately devoured the whole of Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy.

As always one author leads to another and following a recent television programme, I resolved to delve once more into the novels of the great Muriel Spark, again convinced that a few of them once sat proudly on our shelves.

I admit to “Abe- Booking” a copy of A far cry from Kensington but on a whim, I gave the library another chance and ordered Memento Mori and Loitering with Intent. With the computer still down, the librarian duly wrote the titles on a scrap of paper. I suppose if I had been quick enough, I might have remarked that Memento Mori translates as, “Remember you must die,” so she had better hurry up with the order. I daresay however, I shall be loitering for a good long time.

As I write this I am pondering whether it’s not so much an age thing, rather the state of the world just now that has lead me into an element of escapism. But whatever, I do recommend a little bit of reading nostalgia. I guarantee you’ll lose yourself in another world. If you’re in the garden over the summer with a book and a glass of something, much enjoyment awaits.  So grab that well- worn copy off the shelf or head down to your local library, hoping against hope that the computer is up and running.