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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. On the spirit of poetry in a time of plague by Richard Berengarten
2. More trouble with genre. Markku Nivalainen in conversation with Simon Collings
3. Plum Pudding books: Anthony Howell reviews Michael Hampton and Marius Kociejowski
4. Why I am not a philosopher, or The Annoyances of Philosophy, by Alan Wall.
5. ‘oracle’ and ‘Mary Does Laugh’. By Kate Ashton
6. Of Peace and Strife by W.D. Jackson, illustrated by Alan Dixon. A verse-column
7. J’accuse…injustement, Anthony Howell considers Stephen Glascoe’s account of being falsely accused
8. Passion, framed by silence. Michelene Wandor reviews James Runcie.
9. The Hills and the Desert: Claude Vigée and Edmond Jabès, by Anthony Rudolf.
10. ‘A Way to Dismantle’ and four more poems by Ion Corcos.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections and Blind Summits
Previously: More below. Scroll down.
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but YOU CAN START HERE: Four short texts by Jeff Friedman | Hacheston Halt by John Matthias | Disinterest and Aesthetics Pt 1/Pt 2 by Tronn Overend | Out of the house and into the business district by Martin Stannard | We need to talk about Vladimir, by Jonathan Gorvett | Two new poems by Fred Johnston | Several dwarves and one pet by Meg Pokrass The wheel in the tree: An appreciation of Penguin Modern Poets 12. By Ian Seed | Wonder Travels: a memoir by Josh Barkan | Five poems from Fire by Jaime Robles | Three instructive texts by Rupert M Loydell | On John Wilkinson’s ‘Wood Circle’, by Rupsa Banerjee | The Ringstead Poems by Peter Robinson. With an afterword by Tom Phillips | From Dialyzing: poetry by Charline Lambert. Translated by John Taylor | The O.E.D Odes by Lea Graham | Demarcation and three more poems, by Pui Ying Wong | What are poets for? Alan Wall on Nathaniel Tarn’s Autoanthropology | Martyrdom. Anthony Howell on the Russian invasion of Ukraine | Bard-think: Anthony O’Hear on teaching with Shakespeare | The Pleasure of Ferocity: A review of Malika Moustadraf’s short stories. By Michelene Wandor | Pastmodern Art. By David Rosenberg | Central Park and three more new poems. By Tim Suermondt | What Is Truth? By Alan Macfarlane | The Beatles: Yeah x 3. Fab books and films reviewed by Alan Wall | The Marriage by Hart’s Crane of Faustus and Helen by John Matthias | Young Wystan by Alan Morrison | Nothing Romantic Here. Desmond Egan reviews Donald Gardner | Parisian Poems, by César Vallejo, translated by César Eduardo Jumpa Sánchez | Two sequences of poems by David Plante, introduced by Anthony Howell | Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Big Noise in the Night: Film commentary by Simon Collings | Gli Ucelli and two more poems by Michael Anania | Interior and three more prose poems by Linda Black | For Britney (or whoever) by Fran Lock | The wages for reading is rage: Reflections on the Book Revolution in Texas. By Christopher Landrum | Selfies by Rupert M Loydell | The Loves of Marina Tsvetaeva by C.D.C. Reeve | My Mother’s Dress Shop by Jeff Friedman | The Bride’s Story. Grimms’ No. 40. An elaboration by W. D. Jackson | Poetry Notes: Early titles for 2022, by Peter Riley | Short Icelandic Fiction: Fresh Perspective (Nýtt sjónarhorn) by Aðalsteinn Emil Aðalsteinsson and The Face and Kaleidoscope by Gyrðir Elíasson | Exercises of memory: Prose poetry by Adam Kosan | Species of light and seven more poems by Mark Vincenz | Two Micro-fictions by Avital Gad-Cykman | Pictures, with Poems: A two-generation collaboration. Photographs by Laura Matthias Bendoly, with poems by John Matthias | In Famagusta, a revisit by Jonathan Gorvett | Shakespeare’s Merchant by Oscar Mandel | Toughs by Anthony Howell | Holding the desert, a sequence of poems by Richard Berengarten | Two pages by Michael Haslam | Contusion not Rind by Peter Larkin | Four poems by Katie Lehman | Blind summits, a sequence of poems with an audio track, by Peter Robinson | The Censor of Art by Samuel Barlow | Small Magazines, and their discontents (as of 1930) by Ezra Pound | Modern Artiques by Robert McAlmon | Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Blavatsky in violet: poetry by Alan Morrison | Everything that is the case: A review of John Matthias’s Some of Her Things by Peter Robinson | Khlystovki by Marina Tsvetaeva, newly translated by Inessa B. Fishbeyn and C. D. C. Reeve | A king and not a king, a poem by W. D. Jackson | Violet, an essay by John Wilkinson :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
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Anthony Howell: The new libertine in exile.
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The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
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Prohibition’s ‘original Progressives’.
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European populism? Departments
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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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