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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. John Taylor: Remembering Pierre Chappuis
2. Leslie Stephen and Victorian intellectual life by Bruce Kinzer
3. Johanna Higgins: Ghost and a half-dozen more new poems
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. 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First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems byJohanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. 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Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. 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The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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Of cars, carpets, and chemistry.
A Fortnightly Review of
Which Yet Survive
by John Mills
Quartet | 268pp | £25 $28.82
By JOHN McEWEN.
JOHN MILLS HAS no Wikipedia or Who’s Who entry, which seems astonishing. As a chemist (b. 1928) he was a reforming influence on the Scientific Department of the National Gallery, which he joined in 1951 and where he worked for most of the next half century, becoming its director from 1984-1990.
He carries his expertise lightly. As he says of his pioneering research in steroid chemistry, which took him to Mexico in the late 1950s: ‘I will summarise my work now so as to get on to more readable matters.’ Accordingly most of the memoir is devoted to his friends, many of them in the arts, especially the visual arts; and, often inseparably, his global travels, professional and private, which began when he was posted to the Far East as a qualified wireless mechanic during National Service, and show no sign of abating.
A meticulous account of surely the most transformative years in human history, by a witness with the rare knowledge of both science and art.
The tone is elegiac – ‘always my favourite in poetry and prose’ – and readers over seventy should be warned that, thanks to the precision of the author’s memory and his stoical accounts of old age, there is much here that may cause tears of recognition. Attention to detail and dry humour will appeal to all ages. The detail has considerable sociological value as a meticulous account of surely the most transformative years in human history, by a witness with the rare knowledge of both science and art. For that reason it is equally recommendable to the young.
Just how much the world has changed is illustrated by his childhood memory of charcoal burners in the woods round Guildford, where he was born and raised. Exceptionally bright, Mills won a place at grammar school at nine. There he made lifelong friends, whose fortunes he follows in later chapters. Several achieved public distinction, including his best friend, the painter Victor Willing. It was through Willing, who went to the Slade, that Mills first planted one foot firmly in the art world. His widow, Paula Rego, their children and friends, among them writer and publisher Tony Rudolf, a vital supporter of this book, have for many years constituted his inner circle. Final and coincidental fruition finds him in old age a Ventnor neighbour of Victor and Paula’s daughter, the writer Cas Willing and her husband the sculptor Ron Mueck.
One way he contrasts past with present is by including prices. As he reminds us, British austerity was worse after than during the war, so every penny counted; but there was compensation in cheap foreign travel. In 1949/50 he and Willing rented a top floor flat in a Chepstow Villas mansion for about £4 per week; a Covent Garden gallery ticket cost 2/6 (12.5p; 30p for Wagner); and in Spain: 35 pesetas (35p) covered full board and lodging; a £2 booklet of train vouchers guaranteed 3,000 kilometres of travel. He was astonished to find Paris ‘a sort of Babylon… there appeared to be no shortage of anything’.
The fifties also marked his entry into professional life. In this he relied on ‘that most poignant of Shakespeare’s pensées’:
He adds a corollary: ‘start as you want to go on for almost certainly you will go an as you start…But chance – even luck – can also determine the course of one’s life.’ So it proved. In search of a job he returned one summer vacation to his deserted alma mater, Imperial College, and found an insignificant hand-written message on the notice-board. It offered interviews for two Nuffield Foundation scholarships to carry out research at the National Gallery. One was for a physicist to study the effects of solvents on paint and varnish. Nothing could better have combined his principal interests, science and art. He was accepted. The course of his life was set.
He describes his parents as kind; and kindness is the mark of his own nature, never more so than when for many years he voluntarily met the onerous demands of the Portuguese poet Alberto de Lacerda, when absent in the USA. It is epitomised by the magnificent trans-USA journey with which he rewarded his parents in their old age, a dream fulfilled which afforded them many traveller’s tales back in Guildford.
Kindness makes for professional and personal discretion but he can deliver a withering aside. He once heard Mary John sum up the bohemian life of girls at the Slade with the telling description:
And his readers are unlikely to visit Wellington in New Zealand – or Swindon and Wigan in England: ‘Wellington was the pits, it was like spending the day in Swindon or Wigan or some such place. How could they have chosen it for their capital.’ The one redeeming feature was Captain Cook’s ‘stunningly beautiful’ feather coat in the National Art Gallery.
Among other recommendations worth noting are Don Carlos, favourite Verdi opera; the cathedrals of Modena and St Bertrand de Comminges; the sixteenth-century Persian ‘garden carpet’, Jaipur Museum; Istanbul (but not in winter); George Gissing, one of his chief literary heroes; and the discovery that with age you begin to ‘understand’ the Baroque: note the cathedral at Piazza Armerina, Sicily, and the chapel of San Cataldo, Cosenza, Calabria.
The seeds of cypress trees, arising from his research of natural resins in California in the 1950s and presented by him to Kew, eventually grew to become a grove which he visited with pleasure in later years. Now we have this richly informative and moving testimony to a consummately civilised life, which bridges the cultural divide and spans the globe and most of the twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
♦
John McEwen is the author of Paula Rego and Paula Rego: Behind the Scenes. He writes the Favourite Painting page in Country Life and Bird of the Month, illustrated by Carry Akroyd, in The Oldie.
Also in the Fortnightly: The Curved Planks, Dear Paula, and a note on Paula Rego, by Yves Bonnefoy, and a note by his translator, Anthony Rudolf.
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Publication: Thursday, 29 March 2018, at 14:41.
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