Pelle Molin

Nämforsen, painting by Pelle Molin c.1891

[Image source: Wikipedia .]

HARDY FOLK

Two red hill-villages stood opposite, each on its own high cliff; far down between them ran the strong black river, brawling and roaring through rapids and falls on its way to the sea.

Directly between the villages lay a stretch of calm water, but above it and below it the rapids ran foaming and white. 

This tale begins with the low-stone.

When the river ran high the low-stone lay far below the surface of the water, but at low water it sometimes thrust its sharp black head out of the depths. Like all larger obstacles in a current it formed a backwater below it.

The local name for it was the eddy. Whenever there was a drop in the powerful spurting of the lower fall, and the mountain wind Åk-vissla wasn't rushing down the dale, then you could hear a sound like the lowing of a cow from the stone on still and quiet nights, as the water ran over it. Thus it got the name "low-stone". 

Now, as everyone knows, the salmon rest up in such places, when they are tired of swimming against the current, and here they may easily be caught.

The farmers on the southern bank had fishing nets there, because the low-stone lay within their part of the river. Those who dwelt on the northern side looked on enviously and put out nets on their own side, but they caught nothing to speak of.

The biggest farmer on the south side was called Zakris, and he had a half share in everything that was taken. The biggest farmer north of the river was called Kerstop and he took a half share in all the northern farmers' sense of grievance.

And every time he came down to find nothing he brooded on a good way of making the salmon take the northern channel.

Late one half-lit summer night he rowed out on the river, and he had a strange contraption in the boat. 

Now the low-stone was so formed that its upper edge was narrow and high; below it there was a walled hollow and in this he placed a paddlewheel, lodged it in place, saw that it  could turn, and with a little smile rowed his boat back north until it dipped within the cliff's deep shadow.

The next day he stood behind a barn and watched the southside farmers pull in their nets. Not one creature! "Aye aye," said Kerstop. The next day he did the same. Not a single fin! "Fancy that," said Kerstop. He heard how they invoked the prince of darkness. 

The third day he had his own net out, but first he watched the others' catch. Not a thing! "Yes, but damn it," said Kerstop. He heard how their curses crossed each other.

Only when he saw the last blue cotton jacket disappear over the brow of the hill did he row out and take from his own net a heap of silver-scaled salmon.

*

The beginning of a story by the Ångermanland artist/author Pelle Molin (1864 - 1896), rather approximately rendered. The original is in old spelling with lots of northern dialect.

The feud continues into the next generation, until the day that Kerstop's son survives Zakris' wicked challenge to cross the river before the ice has set fast, and thus wins Zakris' daughter. 

The story was published in the posthumous collection Ådalens Poesi (1897). Ådalen is the valley of the big river Ångermanälven. Molin was born beside the river in Tjäll, just east of Sollefteå, but during his most productive years (1890-94) he lived further upstream at Näsåker, his mother's birthplace. 

[Internationally the name Ådalen is mostly known for the infamous shootings of striking workers in 1931. That was in the broad lower part of the valley at Lunde, south of Kramfors.]

On an 1895 trip in search of a painting subject Pelle Molin was trapped for several days in terrible weather on the Sulitelma massif. (At the time Sulitelma was thought to be the highest mountain in Sweden.) He fell seriously ill and died the following year in Bodø (Norway), shortly before his 32nd birthday.

*

Ådalens Poesi, complete online text. 

https://runeberg.org/adalen/

Contains page images as well as transcript; useful as there were a couple of transcription errors in the page I translated.

Swedish text of the above extract:

KÄRNFOLK.

Två röda fjällbyar lågo midt emot hvarandra på hvar sin höga nipa; djupt nere och emellan dem gick den kraftiga svarta älfven med larm och dån i forsar och fall, på sin väg mot hafvet.

Mellan byarne gick älfven i sel, som är spakvatten; men ofvan och nedan gick forsen skummig och hvit.

Vid råmstenen börjas denna historia.

Då floden gick hög nådde råmstenen på långt när icke vattenytan, men vid lågvatten stack han ibland sitt svarta slipade hufvud upp ur djupet. Som alla kraftigare hinder i en ström gjorde han nedanför sig ett bakvatten.

I bygden kallades detta eda. Bar ej sunnan det kraftiga hväset från nedra fallet eller fjällvinden Åk-visslans breda ljudström ned genom dalen, råmade stenen i vindstilla och tysta nätter, då vattnet gick öfver honom. Af detta hade han sitt namn.

Nu, som hvar man vet, hvilar laxen på dylika ställen, då han tröttnat i strömmen, och där fångas han gärna.

Bönderna på södra sidan hade nätfiske där, därför att råmstenen låg inom deras vattenrätt; norrborna tittade afundsjukt på, satte sina nät på sin sida, men funno ingenting att tala om.

Största bond’ på södra sidan hette Zakris och hade halfparten af allt som ficks. Största bond’ norr om ån hette Kerstop, och han tog åt sig halfparten af all norråböndernas förargelse.

För hvarje gång han gick ner till “inget“, funderade han på talande utvägar att få laxen att gå efter norra fåran.

Sent en halfljus sommarnatt rodde han ut på älfven och hade en konstig maskin i båten.

Nu var råmstenen så bygd, att öfre kanten stod smal och hög; nedanför var en fördjupning med väggar och i den satte han en kvarnkall, gjorde den godt fast, såg till att den var rörlig och rodde småflinande sin snipa norröfver, till denna dök in i nipans djupa skugga.

Dagen därpå stod han bakom en lada och åsåg söråböndernas vittje. Inte ett lif! “Jojo“, sa’ Kerstop. Följande dag på samma sätt. Inte en fena! “Betänk“, sa’ Kerstop. Han hörde hur de åkallade afgrunds-fursten.

Tredje dagen hade han sina egna nät ute, men såg först på de andras vittje. Inte ett lif! “Ja, men besitta“, sa’ Kerstop. Han hörde hur förbannelserna korsade hvarandra.

Först då han såg den sista blå bomullsjackan försvinna bakom nipkrönet, rodde han ut och tog ur sina egna nät en hop silfverfjälliga laxar.

Kärnfolk....  Kärn means "core". The term (often used in military contexts, though not here) connotes toughness, genuineness, reliability.

Sel ..... A Norrland term meaning a smooth, broad, calm stretch of river (hence possible to row across). The word appears in place-names dotted round Ångermanälven: Åsele, Långsele, Ramsele, Junsele...  A "sel" was then an important river feature, because infrequent. Nowadays the appearance of Sweden's big northern rivers has changed. They have become one long "sel", interrupted only by hydroelectric dams. The treacherous brawling river as described and painted by Pelle Molin belongs to history. 

Talande ..... "weighty" SAOB 10b, approximately. 

Kvarnkall.... the drive wheel of a mill, with paddles round the rim. Of course it wouldn't spin when totally immersed, but perhaps it would jiggle enough to frighten the fish.

*

I heard of Pelle Molin via another Ångermanland author, Bo R Holmberg in his YA novel Spådomen (The Prediction, 1988). 

Here Lasse's artist uncle Arne has shown up.

He usually came home once a year, but no-one knew when he was coming. 

Suddenly he just turned up, as a rule in a taxi from the station at Nybystrand [nb = Nyland].

But this time he had come on a Vespa.

-- I'm renting a cottage in Nordingrå, he said. I've been there a few weeks trying to capture the light. I borrowed the Vespa.

He was different. He had his own times. He sat up half the nights and read or drew, but in the morning when everyone else got up he slept on and dragged himself up only in time for elevenses.

Arvid had some downtime for a bit now. All the hay was in the barns. He sat at the table too, but in jeans and work-shirt.

-- I have just got here, Arne said. Riding a Vespa was an experience, with the wind in my face all through this monstrous nature that God created when he was both angry and smiling, as Pelle Molin put it.

He really spoke like that. It was hard to believe he was Dad's and Arvid's brother.

-- He's always been like that, Arvid used to say. He's flaky* and has never done a day's work in his life.

Arvid poured coffee in the saucer and slurped it.

Arne got up and stretched. He patted his stomach contentedly, pulled a cigarette from his breast pocket and flipped it around in his hand.

-- Here time stands still, he said and lit the cigarette. Here you walk between the cowshed and the cabin day after day. You've done it for thirty forty years and you'll carry on the same for maybe twenty more.

-- There are those who will do it too, said Arvid and his jaws tightened. There are those who understand about responsibility. 

* "en slingbirum". As often happens, most online occurences of this dialect word come from Holmberg's own books.

Lasse appreciates Arne's free and easy ways, the way he talks to the boys just the same as the adults. But he bristles at Arne's reductive view of village life. The chapter becomes a meditation on Lasse's own thoughts of being a writer.

(Arne's quote comes from Pelle Molin's lyrical prose piece "Gamla Ådalen".)

[Image source: https://www.svenskfilmdatabas.se/sv/item/?type=film&itemid=4223#plot-summary .]

A still from the 1947 movie Ådalens Poesi, based on the story "Kärnfolk". Olle (Kerstop's son, played by Carl-Henrik (Kenne) Fant) fights with Zakris (played by Adolf Jahr).

Lost leaves

*

Satisfaction

Nevertheless, I'm still worried. I dug him out of a hole, --  but not without a cost. Manchester Piccadilly. 74. 

And after a little pause he repeated:

No, decidedly not without a cost.

The whole time we sit here, I reflected, we do nothing but speak like short stories.

I smoothed my cheek and then picked at a little deformity. 

Do you ever come across one of those hairs that doesn't break through the top layer of skin, but goes on growing in a long thin silky coil  between the layers until eventually you find it and pull it out?

Fake query. Just want to talk about yourself.

I was prevented from continuing, but I smarted with the injustice of it. I had simply been going to remark how unretentive the roots of these hairs were, how easily they came out. And to wonder, why was that?

What was it the waves were always saying? I was old now, past my best. A surgeon turned butcher (a phrase I had just read in a music article about aged conductors). I sat on a balcony and looked at water, wrapped up in a coat. 

He rose unsteadily to his feet. His legs were a bit stiff from sitting.

All right?

I knew. I was still the child who knew though everything was wrong.

And the remarkable nutshell of a double-bass.

*

The plummet

A man went pike-fishing recently.

He stood at the end of a trembling wooden jetty and he fished in the black cap of the past, just as if there never were any hydrocarbons in Iraq etc., but nevertheless as if a very small can of oil, with the precious appearance of a spice, was permitted to a poor boat-owner out here and was mined not by Shell Gazprom or Statoil, not from the expiring ice-cubes of the global engine-rooms, not from clergy rockets of Basra and Kirkuk but only from the webbed inners of his own shed.

But you must never get oil on the spinner because the fish have a very strong sense of smell. The man drew the plummet down through the clean rag and into the misty air that rose from the lake, and the gravity of the apparatus drew it down smoothly until it broke the black surface of the water. Now the hooks weights and traces began to swim octopus lowering like a child propelling towards the bottom of the deep end. And still he could feel it falling like the octopus plastic bag in spasms, the lure through the water until the line lay among the clams and weed, the haunt of the grass-snakes. He could still feel via the tensed rod each jingle of its hooks lying in the deep lake bottom though the lake was black and everywhere the evening drew down.

Mosquitoes attacked his hat and wrists. The keys lay still on the weed for a moment, like a collapsed marionette. Then he twitched the rod-end and began a slow lazy reel to left and back. And just as the spinner began to ascend towards the trembling jetty where he stood, just then there was a single sharp and heavy blow. And a second later the lure came out of the water gleaming and dripping as if nothing in particular had happened to it.

He knew this fish. He had hoped the grandsons would catch it, but that didn't happen. Before they went home they caught a few jacks and a perch, just big enough to lay alongside the kebabs. But nothing more had been heard of the knockmeister since his own first chilly evenings on the lake.

The cottage was silent, everyone had gone back to their worlds except for them. Now in the warm swamp-dark evening he sighted the lake with his rod and his fifty years of pike-fishing. He dribbled the hinged lure along the weedpaths in the black water, patient, unhurried, interpreting the silence without emotion. The pike saw the twirling flakes of light but did not watch them. Only when it began to seem late, when the first thoughts of TV and coffee and Marika had passed by, only then. That was the time.

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum)

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 5 May 2024.

A briefly immaculate "lawn" of Fern-grass on a stony sloping bank in a Frome trading estate. 

Like most grasses it has been given numerous scientific names. It is now Catapodium rigidum but in the books of my youth it was Desmazeria rigida. 

It's a small annual grass of dry places. I usually see it in town on walls, stone-heaps, etc. I've read that it also appears on sand and chalk.

Fairly common in most of the British Isles: its heartland is SW Europe, N Africa, the Middle East and Macaronesia (which I had to look up... it means the volcanic island groups of the E Atlantic: Cape Verde, Canaries, Madeira, Azores...)

The Swedish name is styvgröe ("stiff grass") but it has only been recorded in Sweden as a rare urban casual (Gotland, Uppsala and a few other scattered places). 

It was recently found on Peberholm/Pepparholm, the 1995 artificial island where the Öresund Bridge (connecting Denmark to Sweden) becomes a tunnel, a place with no public access but visited annually by biologists studying natural colonisation. It now has 600 plant and moss species, and thirty species of nesting birds including a large colony of spoonbills. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 5 May 2024.

The rigidity/stiffness refers to the stem and the spikelet stalks. The English name notes the vague resemblance to a fern frond. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 20 May 2024.

Some fell upon stony places, where they had not much earth: and forthwith they sprung up, because they had no deepness of earth:

And when the sun was up, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away.

(Matthew 13: 5-6)

Fern-grass may be specialized for stony ground, but the Parable of the Sower still applies, it's a chancy sort of environment. A couple of sunny weeks later, you can see that a good few of the hopeful young plants have perished. The rest, however, are cracking on; seed dispersal has already begun. 

Fern-grass (Catapodium rigidum). Frome, 20 May 2024.

Man in the moon

Hawthorn: the preferred thorn for hedging in the British Isles. 

Man in the moon   stands and strides

On his pitchfork    his burden he beareth

It is much wonder    that he na down slides

For doubt lest he fall    he shuddereth and sheareth

When the frost freezes    much chill he bides

The thorns beeth keen    his clothing to teareth

No wight in the world    knows when he reclines

Nor but it be the hedge    what weeds he weareth

Whither trowest this man   hath the way take?

He hath set his one foot    his other beforen

For none haste that he hath   nor mishap may him shake

He is the slowest man    that ever was y-boren

Like as in the field    setting his stakes

In hope of his thorn-plants   to knit up his dooren 

He must with his twaybill    more trusses make

Or else all his day's work   shall be for-loren

This same man on high    when as he be there

As if in the moon    he were born and bred

He leaneth on his fork    just like a grey friar

This crooked dottard   sore he is a-dread

It is many days a-gone    since that he was here

I reckon of his errand     he must not have sped

He hath hewed somewhere   a burden of briar

And hence some hayward    hath taken his pledge

What if thy pledge be taken    bring home thy truss

Set forth thine other foot    stride over street

We shall pray the hayward    home to our house

And put him at his ease      to the Nth degree

Drink to him dearly    with full good booze

And our dame douce    shall sit by his knee

When he is as drunk    as a drowned mouse

Then the pledge from the bailiff    we shall redeem

This man hears me not     though I to him cry

I reckon the churl is deaf    the Devil him to-draw

Though I yell full loud    he will not hie

The listless lad    kens nowt about the law

Hop forth Hubert       hosèd pie

I reckon thou art swallowed      into the maw

Though I harangue him    till my teeth grind

The churl will not a-down    ere the day dawn

A medieval lyric that's an outlier in many respects. Nothing churchly about it, nothing courtly or romantic, no clear social or political message. And thus, more undisguisedly than usual, we come up against our deep ignorance of medieval life: why does this poem exist, why was it written, who for, what is the occasion and performing context?

Composed maybe around 1300 CE. From the celebrated Harley MS (2253). The meaning of some of the lines remains very debatable, partly because of unusual language and partly because the nature of the poem is unfamiliar and common conventions of medieval lyric don't help a lot. 

My rendering is basically focussed on trying to share the feel of the poem, eg. the elaborate rhyme scheme (abababab) combined with an Old English rhythm (half-lines with two stresses in each) and alliteration to taste. I've done my best to approximate the meaning too, but if you object that it's scarcely a translation, I couldn't disagree.

*

The poem embroiders on a legend of the man in the moon as a peasant carrying a bundle of thorns.  In many versions he's banished to the moon for committing an offence, and sometimes there's an association with Cain, and perhaps the idea that if you're stuck on the moon you'll never get beyond the sublunary zone and up to heaven.

Shakespeare refers to the legend:

QUINCE  Ay, or else one must come in with a bush of thorns and a lantern and say he comes to disfigure or to present the person of Moonshine  (Midsummer Night's Dream, III.1)

ANTONIO (plotting) ..... The man i’ th’ moon’s too slow .... (The Tempest, II.1)

STEPHANO (to Caliban) Out o’ th’ moon, I do assure thee. I was the

man i’ th’ moon when time was. (The Tempest, II.2)

*

Mandatory hedging was a big part of a medieval peasant's existence. The kind of hedging method referred to here is as follows:

1. Set a line of stakes, a meter or two apart. 

2. In the gaps (doors) plant young thorn plants. (Hawthorn is the preferred species.)

3. Cut and gather bundles of thorn, brushwood or briar and heap them over the living plants. This protects them and it also makes the hedge stockproof while they grow to maturity. Eventually the living plants will displace the cut material. 

The scenario posited in Stanza 3 is that the man has been caught by the hayward cutting briar (=bramble) improperly (e.g. on a Sunday) or from somewhere he wasn't supposed to; someone else's hedge, maybe. He's been forced to give a pledge (basically an IOU), which the hayward passes on to another officer, the bailiff, for safekeeping. The pledge must be redeemed by paying a fine.

The idea in Stanza 4 is presumably to use money pilfered from the drunken hayward to pay the fine.

(Cooking up this nefarious scheme constitutes "knowing about the law", it would appear!)

[More info:

R.J. Menner, "The Man in the Moon and Hedging", The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol 48 No 1 (Jan 1949), pp. 1-14 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/27714995 .)]

*

Here's the original Middle English text:

Mon in þe mone stond & strit

on is botforke is burþen he bereþ

hit is muche wonder þat he na doun slyt

for doute leste he valle he shoddreþ ant shereþ

when þe forst freseþ muche chele he byd

þe þornes beþ kene is hattren to tereþ

Nis no wyþt in þe world þat wot wen he syt

ne bote hit bue þe hegge whet wedes he wereþ

whider trowe þis mon ha þe wey take

he haþ set is o fot is oþer toforen

For non hiþte þat he haþ ne syþt me hym ner shake

he is þe sloweste mon þat euer wes yboren

Wher he were o þe feld pycchynde stake

for hope of ys þornes to dutten is doren

He mot myd is twybyl oþer trous make

oþer al is dayes werk þer were yloren

Þis ilke mon vpon heh whener he were

wher he were y þe mone boren ant yfed

He leneþ on is forke ase a grey frere

þis crokede caynard sore he is adred

Hit is mony day go þat he was here

ichot of is ernde he naþ nout ysped

He haþ hewe sumwher a burþen of brere

þarefore sum hayward haþ taken ys wed

Yef þy wed ys ytake bring hom þe trous

sete forþ þyn oþer fot stryd ouer sty

We shule preye þe haywart hom to vr hous

ant maken hym at heyse for þe maystry

Drynke to hym deorly of fol god bous

ant oure dame douse shal sitten hym by

When þat he is dronke ase a dreynt mous

þenne we schule borewe þe wed ate bayly

Þis mon hereþ me nout þah ich to hym crye

ichot þe cherl is def þe del hym todrawe

Þah ich ȝeȝe vpon heþ nulle nout hye

þe lostlase ladde con nout o lawe

Hupe forþ hubert hosede pye

ichot þart amarscled into þe mawe

Þah me teone wiþ hym þat myn teh mye

þe cherld nul nout adoun er þe day dawe

(Text from Frances McSparran's transcription of Harley MS 2253:  

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/HarLyr?rgn=main;view=fulltext . This poem is headed "Brook 30; Ker 81". The only thing I've changed is to separate the stanzas.)

The University of Michigan's online Middle English Dictionary is very helpful (select "Entire Entry" when you're searching):

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary/MED20777 .

*

I'm drawn to Matti Rissanen's idea of the poem as a recitation piece in a tavern context. (Stanza 4's "our house" being the tavern, and our "dame douce" the landlady). Though, as ever, it's hard to conceive how genuine oral minstrel work created in a popular context would be artfully rhymed and end up being recorded in a manuscript. Though the tone of "The Man in the Moon" is unique, its elaborate form has a general resemblance to other Harley poems. One of them, the doleful "Song of the husbandman", likewise speaks of haywards and bailiffs and pledges. Perhaps our poem's comedy connects with the four Anglo-Norman fabliaux that appear in the same booklet. The overall impression given by the Harley ms is of a resourceful and sophisticated trilingual  literary culture.

Still, a tavern feels like the kind of imaginary recitation context projected by the poem itself.

I also agree with him that "Hubert" probably relates more to the proverbial magpie than to the man himself. In other words Hubert isn't actually the name of the man in the moon, as some commentators assume.

[Matti Rissanen, "Colloquial and Comic Elements in 'The Man in the Moon'", Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, Vol 81 No 1 (1980), pp. 42-46 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/43343303 .)]

To build on the tavern idea, there's the delightful intuition that the reciter addresses (but is ignored by) a mute fellow-performer who represents the Man in the Moon by standing on one leg or hopping about. I'm not sure who came up with that, but I found it in the notes on David Haden's translation: 

https://potbanks.files.wordpress.com/2022/03/man_in_the_moon_mar_2022.pdf

The author even proposes that there's a third performer who represents the Hedge. Which perhaps too closely recalls Shakespeare's "rude mechanicals" with their Moonshine and Wall.

But if I was planning a school class, I would absolutely incorporate a performance along those lines!

*

On a vaguely related note...  How to tell common hawthorn from midland hawthorn:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/05/how-to-tell-midland-hawthorn-from.html

William Wycherley: Love in a Wood (1671)

Ranger and Lydia in William Wycherley's Love in a Wood (1671)

Love in a Wood isn't performed nearly as often as it merits and I couldn't find any stills, so I made my own illustration, incompetently pilfering Sir Peter Lely (Lydia is based on the beauty in "The Music Lesson", Ranger on Lely's portrait of William Wycherley himself).

Lydia and Ranger are one of the five very distinct couples with which the play ends, and I may as well start with this pair. But immediately I realise I've made a stupid mistake, because Lydia ought to be wearing mourning. We never learn why, but it's relevant to Wycherley's wonderfully intricate plot: Lydia tricks Ranger into mistaking her for Christina, who's also in mourning. (The trick backfires on her.)

When we first meet Ranger, drinking at the French House* with Vincent and Dapperwit, he's briefly called away to a lady in a coach; returning, he says: 

Ran. I have had just now a visit from my mistress, who is as jealous of me as a wife of her husband when she lies in:—my cousin Lydia,—you have heard me speak of her.

Vin. But she is more troublesome than a wife that lies in, because she follows you to your haunts. Why do you allow her that privilege before her time?

Ran. Faith, I may allow her any privilege, and be too hard for her yet. How do you think I have cheated her to-night?—Women are poor credulous creatures, easily deceived.

Vin. We are poor credulous creatures, when we think 'em so.

Ran. Intending a ramble to St. James's Park to-night, upon some probable hopes of some fresh game I have in chase, I appointed her to stay at home; with a promise to come to her within this hour, that she might not spoil the scent and prevent my sport.

Vin. She'll be even with you when you are married, I warrant you. 

(Act I Scene 2)

["Mistress" as used by the men is about as vague in its meanings as "girlfriend"; intentionally so, to preserve the atmosphere of masculine freedom and sexual boasting. In this case, the respectable Lydia is evidently Ranger's fiancée. (Whereas the reputation of young Lucy, Dapperwit's "mistress", is more in question; at the end Dapperwit's outraged that Gripe should outsmart him by marrying Lucy, his former "wench".)]

[* Probably Chatelain's French House in Covent Garden. It's about a 20 minute walk from there to St James's Park. Evidently Ranger has no intention of keeping his appointment with Lydia.]

Though engaged to be married, Ranger still wants his sexual adventures, at least for now. Lydia wants to keep tabs on him. Each plays tricks on the other; Lydia isn't taken in by this one, contrary to Ranger's belief in the credulity of women. 

On the whole the pair seem pretty well matched. Of the five couples at the end, they're one of the more hopeful prospects. I'd give them six months at least: not because Ranger has forsworn his rakish adventuring -- that's as maybe --, but because they intrigue with equal enthusiasm, they seem to understand each other, and they're both able to compromise. 

If you've ever surrendered to the fascinations of Love Island or Made In Chelsea or MAFS you'll recognize this kind of discussion. Love in a Wood has something in common with that kind of show. 

To be honest, we don't care very deeply about the post-show futures of the participants. What we relish is the behaviour, the dynamics, the untruths and awkward moments that unfold before our eyes. We love it when people talk behind each other's back, like Dapperwit while Ranger is downstairs.

Dap. This Ranger, Mr. Vincent, is as false to his friend as his wench.

Vin. You have no reason to say so, but because he is absent.

Dap. 'Tis disobliging to tell a man of his faults to his face. If he had but your grave parts and manly wit, I should adore him; but, a pox! he is a mere buffoon, a jack-pudding, let me perish!

(Act I Scene 2)

And we love it when people get to hear what their partners say about them, as when Lydia overhears Ranger saying this sort of thing to Christina:

Ran. .... Besides, I would not for the world have given her troublesome love so much encouragement, to have disturbed my future addresses to you; for the foolish woman does perpetually torment me to make our relation nearer ....

Ran. If she were here, she would satisfy you she were not capable of the honour to be taken for you:—though in the dark. Faith, my cousin is but a tolerable woman to a man that had not seen you.

(Act 2 Scene 2)

And we love that delicious moment when someone blatantly caught in the wrong tries to work out exactly how much the other person knows:

Ran. Indeed, cousin, besides my business, another cause I did not wait on you was, my apprehension you were gone to the Park, notwithstanding your promise to the contrary.

Lyd. Therefore, you went to the Park to visit me there, notwithstanding your promise to the contrary?

Ran. Who, I at the Park! when I had promised to wait upon you at your lodging! But were you at the Park, madam?

Lyd. Who, I at the Park! when I had promised to wait for you at home! I was no more at the Park than you were. Were you at the Park?

Ran. The Park had been a dismal desert to me, notwithstanding all the good company in it, if I had wanted yours.

Lyd. [Aside.] Because it has been the constant endeavour of men to keep women ignorant, they think us so; but 'tis that increases our inquisitiveness, and makes us know them ignorant as false. ...

(Act III Scene 3)

(Ranger's rapid calculations go something like this: She knows I broke my promise to visit her at her home, but she can't be sure I went to the Park... unless she was at the Park herself and saw me .... but if she was, then she also broke her promise to me ....)

Meanwhile Lydia, holding back from outright confrontation, at least gets some revenge for those overheard comments: 

Lyd. [to Dapperwit] Take him with you, sir. I suppose his business may be there to borrow, or win, money, and I ought not to be his hindrance; for when he has none, he has his desperate designs upon that little I have -- for want of money makes as devout lovers as Christians. 

Dap. I hope, madam, he offers you no less security than his liberty.

Lyd. His liberty! As poor a pawn to take up money on, as honour. He is like the desperate bankrupts of this age, who, if they can get people's fortunes into their hands, care not though they spend them in jail, all their lives.

(Act III Scene 3)

*

Let's briefly run an eye over those other couples:

Christina and Valentine. The posh pair, who look like they've stepped out of a heroic tragedy. Christina is simply a jewel. But let's hope that Valentine learns to master his jealousy and propensity for violence. 

Dapperwit and Martha. Dapperwit is a self-conscious wit, all the funnier because he's not actually very good at it, though he can certainly manage slander, lying and selfishness. And, with all that, a certain winning childishness. "A pox, I think women take inconstancy from me, worse than from any man breathing," he remarks at one point. Unceremoniously dumped by Lucy, he thinks he's struck gold when Martha is all over him; she's the only daughter of the aged and wealthy alderman Gripe. Then he learns that Martha is only marrying him because she's six months pregnant...

Gripe and Lucy .... and besides, the miserly old puritan instantly determines to marry young Lucy to prevent Martha inheriting his money. Secondary benefit, he obtains the object of his lecherous desires. Third benefit, he gets to reclaim all the money he previously had to pay Lucy to avoid a court case for assault. Lucy, willingly embracing a hard-nosed approach to life, wins big for her rapacious mother Mrs Crossbite and the seedy fixer Mrs Joyner. 

Sir Simon Addleplot and Lady Flippant. There's precious little enthusiasm on either side for this match, and that's before they learn the state of each other's finances. At least these two incompetent players in the marriage market have finally found someone they're capable of deceiving. They're both very funny, though. The widowed Lady Flippant's method is to haunt fashionable meeting places and take every opportunity to state how opposed she is to marriage. Sir Simon plumes himself on his Macchiavellian pursuit of two women, all the while adopting a clownish disguise that haplessly reveals his true character. 

*

I've now mentioned twelve of the main roles. There's one more: Mr Vincent, the pot-companion of Ranger and Dapperwit, and the friend of Valentine. He attracts our attention (more than he should?) because he's the one major character who has no stake in the game, either sexual or financial. And because his good sense is very much needed by his fellows. 

Dominic F. Martia argues that Vincent is placed in contrast to Mrs Joyner: he is a virtuous enabler who assists others, not to line his purse but from true friendship and principle. There's a lot to be said for this idea, but in the earlier part of the play there are distinct hints of a more mixed picture. He's a "good-fellow" (II.1), characterized by his fondness for a bottle or three. There are also hints that his relations with women are troubled, that he doesn't talk to them easily (anyway not without a drink) and that he sometimes raises his fists. (Some of this is Dapperwit's trash-talking, but not all.) If Vincent is admirably discreet and unjudgmental, if he deprecates airing others' dirty linen, it's maybe because he has plenty of his own.

Here as elsewhere Love in a Wood blithely sketches a London in which dazzle and squalor don't just coexist but are intertwined. It's celebratory in form, but its darker shadows are a crucial part of the picture.

[Dominic F. Martia, The Restoration Love Ethos and the Representation of Love in the Plays of William Wycherley, PhD dissertation (Loyola University, 1972). https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/1207 . Lively, informative and full of good ideas: recommended!]

*

Love in a Wood, William Wycherley's first play, was first performed during Lent (Feb-Mar) in 1671, at the first Theatre Royal in Covent Garden. It was published in 1672 (or perhaps late 1671). 

Online text of Love in a Wood:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55426/55426-h/55426-h.htm

This is W.C. Ward's 1893 edition of Wycherley's plays. Be warned, Ward numbers the scenes differently from the 1996 Oxford edition of Wycherley's plays by Peter Dixon that I've referenced here. 

Dixon's notes are a treasure trove; I just wish he'd added one on the play's opening speech.

Lady Flip. Not a husband to be had for money!—Come, come, I might have been a better housewife for myself, as the world goes now, if I had dealt for an heir with his guardian, uncle, or mother-in-law; and you are no better than a chouse, a cheat.

(Act I Scene 1)

Am I the only person who has no idea what Lady Flippant means by "dealt for an heir with his guardian," etc ?

*

The two emblematically confusing night-scenes in St James's Park are surrounded by scenes in nearby locations: the play is lovingly organized as a kind of gazetteer of fashionable London. The settings are:

I.1 Gripe's house in the evening (in the City)

I.2 The French House (Covent Garden -- evening)

II.1 St James's Park at night

II.2 Christina's lodging (in the "Old Pall Mall", i.e. the street called Pall Mall -- after midnight)

II.3 The street outside (Pall Mall -- night)

II.4 Vincent's lodging (near Pall Mall -- night)

III.1 Mrs Crossbite's house (in an obscure retired street -- or alley -- the next morning)

III.2 Mrs Crossbite's dining room

III.3 Lydia's lodging (the location isn't specific, but it seems to be near Covent Garden)

IV.1 Gripe's house

IV.2 Another room in Gripe's house 

IV.3 The Old Pall Mall (i.e. Pall Mall -- about 19:30)

IV.4 Vincent's lodging (near Pall Mall -- about 20:00)

V.1 St James's Park (at night)

V.2 The dining room at Mulberry Garden House (at the west end of St James's Park -- night).

*

A post about the Mulberry Garden, mentioned several times in Love in a Wood and the location of its final scene (gracefully glancing at the secondary meaning of the title, which primarily means "love in a state of confusion"):

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/04/mulberry-garden.html

Mulberry Garden

Black Mulberry (Morus nigra)

[Image source: https://www.moruslondinium.org/events .]

 

I remember plain John Dryden (before he paid his court with success to the great,) in one uniform cloathing of Norwich drugget. I have eat tarts with him and Madame Reeve at the Mulberry-garden, when our author advanced to a sword, and chadreux wig. -- Posterity is absolutely mistaken as to that great man; tho' forced to be a satirist, he was the mildest creature breathing, and the readiest to help the young and deserving; tho' his comedies are horribly full of double entendres, yet 'twas owing to a false complaisance for a dissolute age. He was in company the modestest man that ever convers'd.

(From the Gentleman's Magazine, 1745. The correspondent, a certain Mr W.G., being then in his 87th year.)

The correspondent seems to be remembering Mac Flecknoe: "coarsely clad in Norwich drugget". Dryden was attacking Thomas Shadwell, who did indeed come from Norfolk. (Dryden himself was born in Aldwincle, Northamptonshire.) Drugget was a coarse, cheap, semi-woolen fabric. (Incidentally, WG later remarks that "Shadwell in conversation was a brute.") 

Pace Scott, it isn't impossible that a fifteen year old WG should have eaten tarts with Dryden and Anne Reeve before the Mulberry Garden closed in around 1674. (And hence, I suppose, the point about Dryden's readiness to help the young and deserving.) But I do have to agree with J R Lowell that WG can't have remembered a time before Dryden paid court to the great. Dryden's first real success was the 1665 hit The Indian Queen, but he had been seeking favour ever since the Restoration (1661). In 1668 he was appointed Poet Laureate with an income of £200 a year -- the same salary Sir Peter Lely received as court painter. 

Perhaps the whole memoir is a fabrication. There's something almost too convincing about this picture of Dryden in his glory days, still inwardly so plain and modest. (Dryden's family had been Puritans.)

This Mulberry Garden was originally a four acre plantation of James I in c. 1609, at the west end of St James's Park. The north wing of Buckingham Palace now occupies the site. James wanted to kick-start a British silk industry, and he encouraged others to plant the trees too. Nearly all the trees were black mulberries, the ones with delicious fruit, though it was well known that they were inferior from the silkworm point of view; perhaps the white mulberry didn't thrive in Britain during the Little Ice Age. One aged tree still survives in Buckingham Palace garden. Anyway, the silk industry never took off, but the Mulberry Garden blazed briefly during the Restoration as a pleasure garden with refreshments, visited by Pepys, and celebrated in the plays of Sedley and Wycherley. (It's an easy but perhaps false assumption that the tarts were mulberry tarts; other sources mention the Mulberry Garden's cheesecakes.)

"Madame Reeve" was Anne Reeve or Reeves, a minor actress in Dryden's company. She was apparently Dryden's mistress from around 1671 to 1675. Dryden never said so, but it was a regular feature of his enemies' writings. (Dryden had married in 1663 and had three sons.) Anne, never a leading actress, disappeared from stage records around 1675. The tradition is that she entered a convent.

In S.G.'s poem on the previous page of the Gentleman's Magazine (to which Mr W.G. responds), Reeve is named in a list of actresses who had appeared in the first performance of Dryden's Marriage a la Mode (1673). A note adds: "Mrs Anne Reeve, Dryden's mistress, acted the part of Amarillis in the Rehearsal, &c. She died a religious." 

"A chadreux wig". More commonly Chedreux: a famous Paris maker of perruques. It doesn't seem to mean any particular style of wig, just the normal curled long-bottomed wig of the Restoration era. 

E.g  in John Oldham's Imitation of Juvenal 3:

What wouldst thou say, great Harry, shouldst thou view

Thy gaudy fluttering race of English now,

Their tawdry clothes, pulvilios, essences;

Their Chedreux perruques, and those vanities

Which thou, and they of old, didst so despise?

*

Sir Charles Sedley's play The Mulberry Garden,  first performed 18 May 1668. Pepys was at the first night and was unimpressed, but it proved popular. 

Wildish. What, is there store of game here, gentlemen?

Modish. Troth, little or none; a few citizens that have brought their children out to air 'em, and eat cheesecakes.

Wildish. I thought this place had been so full of beauties, that like a pack of hounds in a hare warren, you could hunt one for another: what think you of an arbor and a bottle of Rhenish?

The scene proceeds: Olivia and Victoria are secreted in the next arbour while Estridge and Modish are lured by Wildish into ever more outrageous brags about what they get up to with these ladies. (But if I were Olivia I am not sure the scene would make me more inclined to marry Wildish.) 

The Mulberry Garden has plenty of lively dialogue, switching into pleasing couplets for the "high" characters. But the stagecraft is rather basic; it's a sequence of situations rather than a logical development. The main issue is resolved by an external political event: the Commonwealth becomes the Restoration and everyone can be friends again. Its high and low characters don't interact, not in credible ways anyhow, and it doesn't build an organic picture of society in motion. All this is in marked contrast to Wycherley's brilliant Love in a Wood (below). 

If you want to read The Mulberry Garden online, ignore the ruinous Michigan text (OCR problems I suppose), and instead read it in the 1675 edition on Google Books.

https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/The_Mulberry_Garden_a_Comedy/mhNSAAAAcAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

*

William Wycherley's Love in a Wood, or St James's Park, first performed in Lent 1671. The final scene in Wycherley's park-ranging play takes place in "The dining-room at Mulberry Garden House". Wycherley may preserve the name of its proprietor: at one point he calls it "Colby's Mulberry Garden"; Sedley gives the name as Coleby.

L. Flip. Have I not constantly kept Covent-Garden church, St. Martin's, the playhouses, Hyde Park, Mulberry garden, and all the other public marts where widows and maids are exposed?

 (Act I Scene 1 -- Lady Flippant assuring Mrs Joyner that she has done everything possible to get a new husband.)

Mrs. Joyn. Your reputation! indeed, your worship, 'tis well known there are as grave men as your worship; nay, men in office too, that adjourn their cares and businesses, to come and unbend themselves at night here, with a little vizard-mask.

Gripe. I do believe it, Mrs. Joyner.

Lucy. Ay, godmother, and carries and treats her at Mulberry-garden.

Mrs. Cros. Nay, does not only treat her, but gives her his whole gleaning of that day.

....  

Lucy. But I have the boldness to ask him for a treat.—Come, gallant, we must walk towards the Mulberry-garden.

Gripe. So!—I am afraid, little mistress, the rooms are all taken up by this time.

Mrs. Joyn. Will you shame yourself again? [Aside to Gripe.

Lucy. If the rooms be full we'll have an arbour.

Gripe. At this time of night!—besides, the waiters will ne'er come near you.

(Act V Scene 1 -- Gripe trying to get out of spending any money.)

My post about Love in a Wood:

https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2024/05/william-wycherley-love-in-wood-1671.html

Another post about oat drink

 

New packaging of Arla Jord (Jörđ), March 2024

The rebrand of JORD (JÖRĐ) oat drink, in March 2024. The basic difference is that it used to be organic and now it isn't. 

That wasn't so hard to say, was it? Except for the company themselves, who have done their absolute best to bury this brute fact amid evasive fluff about their exciting refresh, with desperate emphasis on the added vitamins. (Once your base doesn't come from organic sources, you may as well add cheap vits that are also from non-organic sources.)

It's a common-or-garden lack of integrity, typical of companies addressing the public. Could it be done differently? Is a culture of deceit simply something we factor in? 

Pre-relaunch packaging of Jord (Jörđ), when it was an organic product.

*

Jörđ (pronounced "yerth") means "earth" in Old Norse and is also the name of the obscure goddess or giantess who was the mother of Thor. Not to be confused with Wagner's Erda, one of the Norns: her name (Urđr in Old Norse) meant "fate".

The product name is often simplified to Jord, which happens to mean "earth" in modern Swedish (pronounced "yood").

*

Also pictured above, Plenish oat drink, which is still an organic product. Of course we will now buy Plenish or organic Oatly instead of Jord. But Plenish doesn't entirely escape my strictures. The oats are labelled as EU agriculture, but the company website says nothing about their place of origin. My assumption is they're sourced from an EU-wide collection facility. Fine: it's not as romantically suggestive as a single source (like Oatly's Landskrona) or even the vague Nordic origin claimed by Jord, but it's hardly a disgrace. Why not be candid? Why automatically conceal your operations? 

*

What none of the vegetable drink suppliers talk  about is the basically non-recyclable nature of the packaging (cardboard bonded with plastic). It's an irony that plastic bottles of the kind used for fresh cow's milk are possibly better from a recycling point of view. (Though, I gather, not much better.)

For capitalism to proceed, there needs to be a certain shared blindness to its environmental and human costs. Consumers and employees alike need reassurance. It's what company literature is all about. 

Historic Oatly packaging: https://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/2012/04/specimens-of-literature-of-sweden-oatly.html

The men looked round the basement with flashlights.

 

1930s pressmen

[Image source: https://dk.pinterest.com/pin/88805423879125677/ .]

  "But Britten," asked one of the men, "why did the old man want this Erlone released?"

  "Figure it out for yourself," Britten said.

  "Then he thinks Erlone had something to do with the snatching of his daughter and wanted him out so he could give her back?"

   "I don't know," Britten said.

   "Aw, come on, Britten."

   "Use your imagination."

   Two more of the men buttoned their coats, pulled their hats low over their eyes and left. Bigger knew that they were going to phone in more information to their papers; they were going to tell about Jan's trying to convert him to communism, the Communist literature Jan had given him, the rum, the half-packed trunk being taken down to the station, and lastly, about the kidnap note and the demand for ten thousand dollars. The men looked round the basement with flashlights. Bigger still leaned against the wall. Britten sat on the steps. The fire whispered in the furnace. Bigger knew that soon he would have to clean the ashes out, for the fire was not burning as hotly as it should. He would do that as soon as some of the excitement died down and all of the men left.

   "It's pretty bad, hunh, Bigger?" Britten asked.

   "Yessuh."

   "I'd bet a million dollars that this is Jan's smart idea."

   Bigger said nothing. He was limp all over; he was standing up here against this wall by some strength not his own. Hours past he had given up trying to exert himself any more; he could no longer call up any energy  So he just forgot it and found himself coasting along.

   It was getting a little chilly; the fire was dying. The draft could scarcely be heard. Then the basement door burst open suddenly and one of the men who had gone to telephone came in, his mouth open, his face wet and red from the snow.

   "Say!" he called. 

   "Yeah?"

   "What is it?"

   "My city editor just told me that that Erlone fellow won't leave jail."

   For a moment the strangeness of the news made them all stare silently. Bigger roused himself and tried to make out just what it meant. Then someone asked the question he longed to ask.

   "Won't leave? What you mean?"

   "Well, this Erlone refused to go when they told him that Mr Dalton had requested his release. It seems he had got wind of the kidnapping and said that he didn't want to go out."

   "That means he's guilty!" said Britten. "He doesn't want to leave jail because he knows they'll shadow him and find out where the girl is, see? He's scared."

   "What else?"

   "Well, this Erlone says he's got a dozen people to swear that he did not come here last night."

   Bigger's body stiffened and he leaned forward slightly. 

   "That's a lie!" Britten said."This boy here saw him."

   "Is that right, boy?"

   Bigger hesitated. He suspected a trap. But if Jan really had an alibi, then he had to talk; he had to steer them away from himself.

(From Richard Wright's Native Son (1940).)

This is a relative lull in one of the elongated, crowded scenes for which Native Son is famous. The Daltons have made their appeals, the flashbulbs have stopped popping, surely the reporters will go away now. The reader's on edge, even if maybe Bigger isn't. We feel his exhaustion, but he's also excited, here at close quarters with white pressmen and with the white world of Chicago at a critical juncture, having this story unfold around him, a story that no-one yet suspects has Bigger at its centre. 

The natural thing might have been to run, but Bigger is back at the scene, he wants to steer and also to watch. Later on, the sole interest he'll retain is reading about himself in the papers. It isn't about fame but about power; the power to sway events, to write on the sky; a power that has always been denied to him until this day.  

The press pack is a brilliant example of the just-go-with-it way that Wright composed Native Son. Bigger registers their horrible eagerness when they know they're going to be fed some dope, their callousness in the midst of tragedy. At the same time there's a freshness in their outlook, the hungry professional alertness reflected in how they continue to throw their flashlights around the basement, as if a story lurks in its corners. The press are too self-interested to be inflexible, they are the controllers of prejudice not controlled by it.  They aren't worried about maintaining status over a black man. (Unlike Britten, who has all the predictable racist and anti-Red attitudes of his time, and who Bigger easily fools.) If everyone, black or white, is seen as just story material, what difference does it make?

The reporters even try to make clumsy overtures to Bigger (though no more clumsy than Jan's and Mary's were). The guy who addresses Bigger as "Mike" (America's commonest name) is evidently being friendly, saying "you're one of us" -- maybe he's genuine, but that's what you can never know with a pressman.

Bigger almost snaps at him. He's numbed to the institutional racism of being addressed as "boy" (he's 20) and answering "Yessuh". It's only when white people change the tune that he's shocked into feeling, and sees anew all his accumulated despair and hate and fury. 

It was a dangerous moment. Bigger recovers himself, and by the time of this extract he's coasting. 

But now the endgame approaches, with Jan's impressive roster of witnesses, and with, above all, the fateful cooling of the furnace. The strangely egalitarian temper of the press pack,  willing to muck in with the black boy's work, gifts them the story they've been looking for. From now on Bigger's hopeless power will be meted out only on his girl Bessie.

Men in Southside Chicago, 1940

[Image source: https://mymodernmet.com/southside-chicago-great-migration/ . One of Edwin Rosskam's photographs from Chicago's Black Belt, taken in July 1940. Richard Wright acted as the Rosskams' guide to the area. In 1941 they collaborated on the book 12 Million Black Voices.]

One of the billboard posters in the background advertises the touring production of The Man Who Came to Dinner, with Alexander Woollcott finally getting to play the lead role, originally written with him in mind. Another poster advertises Life With Father; both these hit plays were gently subversive and utterly inoffensive comedies.

In Native Son Bigger is keenly aware of billboards like these. They are a glimpse of -- indeed a hammered-home message about -- the world he's excluded from. 

Chicago skyline with snowstorm, 1930

[Image source: https://chuckmanchicagonostalgia.wordpress.com/2010/10/20/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/photo-chicago-skyline-panorama-aerial-sunset-with-snow-storm-note-building-under-construction-in-center-distance-1930/ . From Chuckman's collection of vintage photos of Chicago.]

Native Son is one of the most demonstrably significant novels. It changed the discourse about race forever; effectively, it was the first book to bring what we now call "institutional racism" into sharp relief, to show how it played out. The ground had been importantly prepared by Wright's first book Uncle Tom's Children (1938); an influential audience were already listening for what he did next. When Native Son was published on 1st March 1940 it was already a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the Club News comparing it to The Grapes of Wrath (1939). On 12th March Wright gave his brilliant lecture "How Bigger Was Born" at Columbia; it was published as a pamphlet soon afterwards, and is included in modern editions of Native Son.

Books as significant as this always have their detractors and in a way it's right they should, because they have already made the world a different place from how it was when they were written. There's a fine risky freedom about the writing both in the novel and the essay, a boldness of trusting to inspiration without worrying how it's going to be received.

What shall I play next?

Favourite pitches #1: halfway across this footbridge leading from the carpark to the shops and cafés. Lots of passers-by, not much road noise. Also used by other musicians, homeless beggars, Big Issue sellers, so I usually only play here at quiet times. If it's a market day, recorded music from a nearby stall can make it unfeasible. 

It's beautifully simple, but there's a process. Before leaving the van, I tune the guitar with my electronic tuner. Later adjustments I can do by ear, but I do like to start off knowing that my E really is an E. It stops me imagining that the songs all seem too low today, or too high. 

A classical guitar with two unclassical aspects: a strap and a capo. (The wide-neck capo, which cost £40, is my pride and joy.) I'm highly dependent on the capo, my vocal range being so limited; often a song is only singable in one key.

And of course a hat (ground-baited with a few coins), and a bottle of water. 

That's it. No amplification and no means of taking electronic payment (these are matters of principle). 

The audiences are lovely. They're local. Elderly people, young people, children who beg a coin from mum or dad so they can put it in the hat. Sometimes people are too generous (in my view), and I've had to learn not to reject this generosity. The whole thing's about respectful human relationships, outside the withering frameworks of commerce and institution. Often, of course, I earn next to nothing, and that feels fine too. I'm singing because I enjoy it. 

I'm always learning a new song, and others have gone rusty through not being played, but here's a list of what I think I could play today without needing to rehearse; a longer list than I expected! 

I'll take a glass

Sweet sixteen

Two songs Laura found on YouTube,  performed by Finbar Furey. The latter one dates back to the 1890s. Both of them strong and nostalgic, making an instant emotional connection.

La mer

The great song by Charles Trenet that he wrote on a demob train at the end of WW2, celebrating the unglamorous Mediterranean coast near his birthplace of Narbonne; and for his nation the half-forgotten possibility, at last, of something called leisure. For some reason I decided at an early stage to switch the rhythm to triple time. (My French accent is atrocious, but it doesn't matter.)

Singing in the rain

For obvious reasons, a handy song to have in a busker's repertoire. Just four chords, and loads of fun to play.

The weight

Robbie Robertson's 1960s classic of mundane hanging around and getting tangled up in complications, that somehow takes on a biblical resonance and encapsulates a new youth culture.  Lots of opportunity for neat little guitar fills. You'd think the chorus wouldn't work with just a single voice, but I enjoy trying.

A matter of time

Evangeline

Two songs I've lived with for forty years, since Los Lobos released their first album. Both in different ways songs about leaving home, the experience of Mexicans seeking a better life in the USA. I feel I do pretty well emulating the band's arrangement of Matter of Time, but the awesome guitar introduction to Evangeline still eludes me. 

Joanne

The Michael Nesmith classic, from Magnetic South; challenging falsetto bits, a bouncy rhythm and irresistible melody.

Grandpa (tell me 'bout the good old days)

Another song Laura put me on to, bringing back distant memories of the Judds. A song whose sweetness contains irony, doubt and anger.

Our last summer

The Abba song about a Paris romance in flower power days. I always (mentally) take a deep breath before starting it; it's all action, with no pauses for thought. Of course it's not unusual for me to make a mistake, in this and all the other songs, but that doesn't matter much when you're busking, when people are mostly just hearing snatches. The emphasis is on keeping going and communicating a feeling, and playing as loud as you can without it falling apart. It's a completely different skillset from the expressive dynamics and subtleties of playing in a quiet room.

Thanks for the memory

I discovered this on a CD by one of my heroes, Mildred Bailey. Fantastic swing era number; it's a lot of fun trying to emulate a swing band on an acoustic guitar. 

Georgia on my mind

This was on the Mildred Bailey CD too; it's from her I learnt the introductory verse, which Ray Charles and The Band didn't use. I rarely have the feeling that my British passers-by recognize this song or feel strongly about it, but I do.

Get set for the blues

Another jazzy song that steps from seventh to seventh. I heard it many years ago on Julie London's About the Blues, and I've loved it ever since.

Baby I'm feeling it now

Cloud

Lay all your cards on the table

Waltz 1

Waltz 2

Three songs composed by me, and two guitar pieces that have no titles. Waltz 1 really needs Laura's harmonica. 

Please help me I'm falling

I've been playing this song so long that I can't really remember how it came about. I knew Don Gibson's version, but that was in prehistory. I think I must have been reminded of it in more recent years by hearing it on a cheap country compilation during dull commutes. 

Den första gång jag såg dig

Så länge skutan kan gå

Dansen på Sunnanö

Sjösala vals

Sol vind och vatten

Fryksdalsdans nr 2

Five Swedish songs of various ages, and a schottische to get the fingers working. (On cold days I know it's time to stop playing when I can no longer manage the chord shape of C.) No-one in England has shown any recognition of these songs, but in Stockholm they did.

Calle Schewen's Waltz

Another Swedish song (by Evert Taube, like three of the previous) -- for some reason I tend to sing this one in my own English translation.

Who knows where the time goes

Sandy Denny's song, with a lovely easy progression based on the E shape, and added guitar twiddles that vainly seek to replicate Richard Thompson. As you've already seen, I often seem to be attracted to songs associated with women singers. I think detaching the singer from the song and its protagonist, as folk singers have always done, opens up many creative possibilities. There's something appealing, too, about applying my very limited vocal skills to songs sung by amazing vocal stylists like Sandy. (The song I'm learning at the moment is Al Green's Sha La La.)

I want to see the bright lights tonight

This is another one with a woman protagonist: a Richard Thompson song originally sung by Linda. 

Streets of Forbes

Australian folk ballad, the only real story song in my repertoire. It seemed appropriate to have a bare bones accompaniment using only the middle four strings, the right hand never shifting position. 

Hickory wind

You're still on my mind

You don't miss your water

Three songs I discovered half a century ago on the Byrds' Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The lovely melody of Gram Parsons' Hickory Wind, his song about growing up too fast, is astonishingly founded on  the most basic of three-chord tricks. You're still on my mind is a George Jones swing country blues about trying to treat heartache with alcohol. You don't miss your water is William Bell's song, originally from 1961. 

I won't let you down

An obscure song these days, wriitten by the great Albert Lee; it appeared on the final album by Heads Hands and Feet in 1973. A sweet song about love and memory with an extended coda of joyous guitar at the end.

Wide open road

The W. Australian classic by the Triffids; basically the same chord progression throughout, but you can be very inventive with it.

Atlantic City

Bruce Springsteen's song about drifting into crime, again mostly over a constantly repeated chord progression. 

You wear it well

The Rod Stewart hit, a song that's strong enough to flourish even without his voice.

Warwick Avenue

One of many fantastic songs on Duffy's first album. Like a lot of others here, I learnt the chords from online sources. Some of the online chords don't seem to quite match the complex original arrangement, but it's close enough.

(Working out the chords was so much harder in pre Internet days. Nowadays you can at least start with what others have made of it.)

Always on my mind

As sung by Elvis Presley, but my version comes mostly via Willie Nelson.

Celluloid heroes

By Ray Davies: a wonderful hymn to Hollywood's golden age as seen from Muswell Hill, though it feels rather different from the songs of the Kinks' greatest years. 

The water

Johnny Flynn's song, originally a duet, about dying: the river of life debouching into the sea of eternity.

The mayor of Simpleton

By XTC; their warm-hearted hymn to being a dimbo; great fun to play on an acoustic guitar. My tribute to my Swindon years. We often used to take a walk over the fields to the big council estate where, I later learnt, Andy Partridge and Colin Moulding both grew up.

Favourite pitches #2: beside what is now just a pollard stump, but last year was a fine clean-limbed lime tree. (The council were worried about the hollow at the base.) Plenty of people going past on this riverside walk. Well away from the noise of motor traffic. Sometimes I get drowned out by birdsong; not so much the constant low-register chatter of the rooks, as the piercing jubilations of the wrens. 

the little feast

 

Dewberry

Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea. There are circumstances in which, whether you partake of the tea or not—some people of course never do,—the situation is in itself delightful. Those that I have in mind in beginning to unfold this simple history offered an admirable setting to an innocent pastime. The implements of the little feast had been disposed upon the lawn of an old English country-house, in what I should call the perfect middle of a splendid summer afternoon. Part of the afternoon had waned, but much of it was left, and what was left was of the finest and rarest quality. Real dusk would not arrive for many hours; but the flood of summer light had begun to ebb, the air had grown mellow, the shadows were long upon the smooth, dense turf. They lengthened slowly, however, and the scene expressed that sense of leisure still to come which is perhaps the chief source of one’s enjoyment of such a scene at such an hour. From five o’clock to eight is on certain occasions a little eternity; but on such an occasion as this the interval could be only an eternity of pleasure.

(Opening of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady (1881).)

Well yes, I can relate to the last bit. It's like the tea interval during a test match, when you know that the longest and often most eventful session of play still lies ahead of you.

To really relish the "little feast" we seem to need an expanse of green and a lot of leisure. 

Perhaps, too, the absence of too much food: the outcome should be energising, refreshing us for a longer pull. Heavier meals slow us down, change our mood, break our impetus. But afternoon tea, not overly laden with cakes, prolongs it. 

And one final element of the agreeable hour (James' "hour" means a certain time of day, not a period of sixty minutes): the preparation of the tea should be carried out by others. Gardencourt, like everywhere else in this novel, is sustained by unnamed invisible servants. The characters in the novel need do no more than occasionally order a change of location. (It's a pitiful sign of Pansy Osmond's constrained position that she's always busying herself with pouring the tea.)

Who, actually, is experiencing this agreeable feeling? Most evidently the reader, guided by the pleasant narrator. We're perhaps being readied too for Isabel Archer's response to the scene when she emerges from the house in the next chapter. 

But as for this afternoon's three partakers (or non-partakers) it's a bit less clear. It's perfect weather for tea outdoors, though Mr Touchett must keep the shawl over his knees, Ralph insists. It's nice that Warburton has ridden over. (That's what Ralph calls him; the narrator wouldn't dare.) Still there's a consonance between the hour (mellow light, ebbing sun) and the sickly father and son, the father much declined in the last year. His tea, we'll learn later, is diluted. There isn't much to talk about. The younger pair spin jokes out of misrepresenting what they've said to each other. Father and son have gone over and over Mrs Touchett's cablegrams, teasing every possible ambiguity out of their fairly plain substance. It's evident that the unknown niece has been much talked of; Ralph is very clear about her name, though it isn't in the cablegrams. And she's very much wanted too, in these senescent, comfortably numb surroundings. The moment they see her in person, see that she's pretty and smart, both Ralph and Lord Warburton are powerfully stirred, and it's just as the elder Mr Touchett has foreseen: the crosscurrents of acquisitiveness and protectiveness that will ripple through his exclusive backwater.

The freighted word "interesting" is thrown around in relation to Miss Archer; that familiar euphemism, in 19th-century literature, for feelings of a romantic nature. Still, the word of which the gentlemen are most aware is "Miss". Isabel's availability, her not yet settled state, is apparently like the unsolved clue that people can't stop being pleasantly tormented by. The Portrait of a Lady is monomanically obsessed with marriage; this tiresome staple of mediocre novels fills its every nook.

Litter, weedkilled field

*

Marriage is apparently highly desirable, hyperinflatedly identified with the lover's self-realization and summation, yet the actual marriages we glimpse in The Portrait of a Lady seem quite out of key with that idea. If not patently unsatisfactory (like the Touchetts'), they're at best rather mundane: Lilian's you would call a happy marriage, but not a magical one of the sort that the suitors seem to think is in their grasp. Anyway, Lilian's anxiously aware that her own kind of marriage wouldn't appeal to her sister; and that Isabel might do something awful, like marrying a foreigner. 

It's crudely pictured, but her insight is sound. Lilian and Edmund are doers, their marriage and their life are productive. But Isabel doesn’t look like being one of life's doers; for her, marriage isn't about doing but about experiencing, like a visit to Egypt.

Only at the end does Isabel really do something, when she makes her small rebellion and travels to England, against Gilbert's wishes, to say goodbye to Ralph. When she goes back to Gilbert and Pansy, we hope it's to do plenty more, but that isn't an inevitability.

Blackthorn

Henrietta’s letters from Spain had proved the most acceptable she had yet published, and there had been one in especial, dated from the Alhambra and entitled ‘Moors and Moonlight,’ which generally passed for her masterpiece.

I think that's my favourite sentence in The Portrait of a Lady.

(Here, as often in Sherlock Holmes etc, "dated" refers to location as much as date.)

In his later prefaces Henry James fought a rearguard action against readers who saw too much in Henrietta Stackpole and Maria Gostrey, figures he saw as ancillary, or even light refreshment. He knew he couldn't dictate how his novels would be read, but he didn't want their central focus to be overlooked in a simplistic or perverse way. 

Nevertheless, I sometimes think he wrote most naturally and penetratingly when he wasn't so fixed on making out his theme; when he neither overtreated nor undertreated -- in fact did not "treat" at all -- but just allowed his fancy free rein. 

Late blackthorn, unopened hawthorn buds

Freedom is highly problematized here. It must be freedom to do something; if it's just freedom it's an empty set, for instance the idleness gently criticized by Mr Touchett in that opening chapter. Ralph has an idleness licensed by ill health; Lord Warburton's is maintained by a framework of opposing values (upper-class guilt, as it were) and we readily believe Ralph when he predicts that his friend, in consequence, won't do anything very much.

Mrs Touchett's freedom is mainly expended in asserting itself. For instance, by an uncowed judgment of "the great ones of the earth", or by proceeding with her own plans in proud disregard of her husband's or son's approaching deaths. Isabel "found her a strange and interesting figure: a figure essentially—almost the first she had ever met".

But that's a delusion; this isn't the kind of freedom that Isabel's looking for, which is something like freedom to fulfil her destiny. None of the Touchetts, enablers as they may be, can give her that freedom. It's a freedom that no-one can give you, you have to take it. 

Perhaps the wretchedness of being married to Gilbert Osmond confirms Isabel's youthful premonition that she, at least, needed adversity to fully come to life.

Weedkilled field

*

I wrote this after reading The Portrait of a Lady in the revised version published in 1908. 

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/2833/2833-h/2833-h.htm#link2H_PREF

It wasn't a conscious choice, and I might not have chosen the revised version if I'd seen Nina Baym's essay, in which she demonstrates how it overlays a rather different story onto the one James told in 1881. (But without completely obliterating it, producing a sometimes blurry impression of character and action.)

Nina Baym, "Revision and Thematic Change in The Portrait of a Lady", Modern Fiction Studies, Vol 22 No 2 (Summer 1976), pp. 183-200.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/26280289

The 1881 text can be found here: https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Portrait_of_a_Lady_(James)

Rainbow

The Portrait of a Lady ... The definite article is teasing. James liked a definite article; most of his novel titles begin with "The". It usually suggests something that the novel is about: a character (The American), a symbol (The Golden Bowl), a theme (The Awkward Age)... Yet in this case the simplest thought is that it refers to the novel itself: to James's remarkable attempt to draw a large novel out of his initial vision of a young woman. Which would more naturally be A Portrait of a Lady.... like A Tale of Two Cities.

So I find myself looking for possible acts of portraiture within the story; for instance Gilbert Osmond framing his wife as a living artwork; or Isabel's own behaviour being shaped by how she wants to see herself. I'm not sure it works out, but I'll keep on being bothered about it.