Literary Society outing to Ewhurst Green, 2 November 2018

R E Q U I E M  by C. J. DRIVER

  At the Church of  St. James the Great, Ewhurst Green, as part of the World War I Armistice Centenary, Friday 2^nd November, 2018 (All Soul’s Day).  Each of the Seven groups of verse were interspersed  by beautiful and restful excerpts from J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite (No. 1) played by Martin Bradshaw.    

Our deepest thanks are due to Jonty for his invitation to join him for a reading of his poem given in Westminster Abbey in September 2014 – at the start of the Nation’s four years of recollection of The Great War and remembrances of its losses. The poem was written in 1998 after two months study leave from Wellington College.

Sixteen members of the Society left Winchelsea in a Rye & District Community Minibus on a dry twilight evening, arriving at the Church to a warm welcome from Canon Christopher Irvine and his congregation. Many old friendships were renewed as we settled down to hear what Jonty describes “as a single poem in seven parts in the manner of Brahms German Requiem.  It moves from early morning to mid-afternoon to late night; from winter to spring to summer; from time present to time past and back to time present; from despair to rage to acceptance – and the forms balance not only each other but the structure, ranging from rhymed quatrains to the pentameter (broken and fragmented) to leisurely syllabics. Yet, for all its technical variety, the voice of Requiem is utterly personal: quiet, experienced, sombre, vulnerable.”

Below I have selected some stanzas from most of the seven sections to give examples of this very personal account of family and homes in South Africa and England – in the hope that readers who were not fortunate enough to be with us may get its flavour and wish to read the whole themselves.                    

                        A whole day is inspired by the last two verses of Psalm 39….

               “For I am a stranger with thee

                And a sojourner as all my fathers were

                O spare me a little that I may recover my strength

                Before I go hence and am no more seen.”

1.      Before Sunrise.        “There are ghosts in the garden mists….

                                                                ………………And there is silence

                                                            Like the dead walking in a dream.

                                                              

                                                            I dream constantly of the dead.

                                                      Into my sleep they come walking, walking,

                                                      In this frozen dark of mid-winter dawn -

                                                            The blank-eyed ghosts of Africa.”

2.       Love song in Twelve Fragments

       3. “I shall keep my mouth as it were with a bridle….” 

                                                     

                                                      “I have no desire to be young again,

                                                        Yet no desire for death, nor to be old

                                                        And sensible. For too long I have told

                                                        The young what I myself fail to avoid.

                                                        So what I want to know is just how long

                                                        Have I got – not detail, not to the day

                                                        Nor hour, just a stab at when I shall say

                                                        My last good-night, fail to rise from my chair,

4.     Halfway to Heaven  “Let not my slippery footsteps slide…”

                                                    

                                                       “Nowhere going

                                                         Nothing knowing

                                                         Silence only

                                                        Almost lonely

                                                        Striding streamwards

                                                        Trudging hill-high

                                                        Downland going

                                                        Upland slowing.”

                                                              ……………..

              “It is one of those days when you might almost believe in heaven;

               Early spring, well before Easter, and when you look across the fields

               It’s as if the harrowed lands had been washed with water-colour

               Or the sun had a green filter – cold still, so you half-wish for gloves….”

There are Three Elegies in 5.  The first is WAR-GRAVE

                                         

                                           “In Brown’s Wood; a cemetery in Northern France;

                                                                   ……………….

                                             I’ve come at last to view a single grave;

                                             My father’s father, Private Harry Driver,

                                             Killed in nineteen-sixteen, aged thirty-two;

                                             Survived a fortnight only, at the front.

                                                                   ……………….

                                                        ………….. It’s my grandfather’s grave,

                                              Is it from this death that I began to grow?

                                                                   ……………….

                                              I stand beside his grave to say a prayer

                                              For Harry Driver, and the rest like him,

                                              On whom the guns were trained before they moved

                                              That morning down the deadly sunken road.

                                              I cannot make the slightest sense of all

                                              These deaths. If God exists, He must have shut

                                              His eyes, or else would intervene to stop

                                              This slaughter. But God cannot hide His eyes.

                      After 6. Love-song in Old Age              

                       comes 7.  Late night:  Waking

                                              “Late at night I wake; l’m still downstairs;

                                                At the garden gate I stand, staring out

                                                At scented summer night. There’s too much light

                                                To see the stars, but even if I could

                                                I do not know my way around this sky.

                                                An owl is tracing maps below the house,

                                                From tree to lake to copse, and back again;

                                                Unlike this ancient exiled sojourner,

                                                He knows precisely where his place should be.

                                                                     ……………….

                                                Upstairs my wife is sound asleep. My son

                                                Stands by my side, to watch the shadowed lawn

                                                And hedges. I am at home in England,

                                                At home as much as I shall ever be.

                                                Lightly my strong son hugs me his goodnight

                                                And I reply in kind, my height to height,

                                                To flesh my flesh, and of my father’s, too.

                                                These garden ghosts have friendly eyes.

                                                                                                                                   Goodnight

        

The audience were plied with refreshments in the church by Canon Christopher and his team. The  Winchelsea party then repaired to The White Dog for a happy supper. We were grateful to Lorna and Hilary for organising such efficient transport to and from Ewhurst Green.

Alan McKinna

(The text of the whole of "Requiem" can be found on the blog as part of the order of service at Westminster Abbey in September 2014)

October 2018 meeting: Account by Bill Doherty of Richard Ormrod's talk on "Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; A duo to Remember"

The Lit. Soc. welcomed one of its active members, Richard Ormrod, as the October speaker. He had agreed to share the fruits of his earlier labours on a book about Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge with the Society. This colourful duo cut an exotic swathe through the London cultural scene in the 1920s and had strong associations with Rye. Even today these associations carry a whiff of sulphur, mainly arising from the scandal which enveloped Hall’s fourth novel, “The Well of Loneliness” narrating an explicitly lesbian love affair in terms which were far from sexually explicit.

After the novel’s publication in 1928 the nation was rescued from the mire of moral turpitude by the editor of the “Sunday Express”. In a quintessentially British fashion his moral outrage infected the higher echelons of the Conservative government and the judiciary through the shared social nexus of the Garrick club whose very walls echoed ricocheting epithets – “corrupt”, “corrosive”, “libidinous”! The book was banned as obscene. 

The wily publisher, Jonathan Cape, had the novel published in Paris where several openly lesbian salons flourished and copies of “The Well” flew off booksellers’ carts at the Gare du Nord where the sex-starved English travellers piled from “the Golden Arrow”. Sylvia Beach, who had published Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922 found her shop, Shakespeare & Company in the Rue de l’Odeon, could not keep pace with demand. Not everyone in England could muster the requisite moral fervour and a spoof version, “The Sink of Solitude” appeared. The “Well”  was published unremarked in England in 1949.

Hall cut an extravagant figure and, financially secure from a substantial legacy bequeathed by her grandfather, graduated from lyric poetry to novels. Examining their dust-jackets now, you see a liberal sprinkling of complimentary quotes from reviewers in broadsheet newspapers and literary magazines. She styled herself an “invert” and was convinced she was a man trapped in a woman’s body. No concessions were made to femininity. Her photo in Rye Library reveals a “dark, smouldering gaucho” with a masculine hair cut (barbered fortnightly), tailored lounge suit, bowtie and large signet rings. 

In addition to the notorious Sapphic ode, Hall wrote half a dozen other novels with the titles of the last four being chosen by Una. “The Sixth Beatitude”, (Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God).,   is set in an ” insanitary” town on the edge of Romney Marsh with an ignorant and  “unlettered” populace.  The main protagonist, Hannah Bullen, has three illegitimate children by three different men but passes the pure of heart test in the end. Both Hall and Troubridge were adult converts to Roman Catholicism and Hall’s works have strikingly religious threads running through them.

Una was less flamboyant – diminutive, gaminesque, page boy hair style and, like Hall, a monocle. She had shed her Betjaminesquely banal birth names and styled herself Una Vicenzo , Lady Troubridge. A sculptress, her much older husband Ernest Troubridge found himself enmeshed in a protracted naval court martial for lack of zeal in having the naval squadron he commanded hunt down two German light cruisers in the Adriatic at the outset of the Great War. His enforced absence allowed her liaison with Hall to mature to co-habiting lovers. 

Richard recounted, that although considered eccentric, the pair were favourably regarded in Rye and were associated with a number of properties in the town. After Rye, their domestic arrangements became more complicated when Hall’s last innamorata, a White Russian nurse called Evgenia Souline, joined the household. 

In 1943, Hall succumbed uncomfortably to bowel cancer in what she termed “my Gethsemane” and was buried in Highgate cemetery. Una lived on in Italy and her last wish, to be buried in Highgate also, was thwarted when she was interred in Italy. Richard’s eloquent account of the intriguing pair more than held our attention and from the Q & A at the end some audience members had clearly been stimulated to seek out evidence of the duo’s Rye footprint for themselves.