Number Seventy News

Polanski’s film of the true-life story of a Pol­ish Jew­ish pian­ist, incar­cer­ated in the Warsaw ghetto and saved by a mix­ture of luck, arbit­rary kind­nesses, and heroic actions by local Poles, is almost unre­mit­tingly dark in tone (as you would expect).  The sur­vival of a very very few, in the end, does not coun­ter­act the bru­tal­ity and atro­cit­ies which form the core of the film.  There was an exhib­i­tion of black and white pho­to­graphs of the Lodz ghetto at the Side Gal­lery in New­castle in 2011 — had I not seen that I would have found some of the things por­trayed in the film unbe­liev­able.  The film is a black and white movie in colour.

One might almost be put off a book called “In Search of Eng­land” which adds, on the front cover “Glor­i­ously Uplift­ing: Daily Mail”. How­ever, as the author is Roy Hat­ters­ley, it seemed unlikely that there would be much in the way of jin­go­istic diatribes, and, indeed, there are none.  Hat­ters­ley, brought up in a hilly sub­urb of Shef­field, a Labour Min­is­ter, and long-time colum­nist for vari­ous news­pa­pers (includ­ing the above-mentioned rag) is an unashamed con­ser­vat­ive with a small c.  His book, which is a col­lec­tion of his news­pa­per pieces, organ­ised by theme, is a lov­ing cel­eb­ra­tion of Eng­land, and even more par­tic­u­larly, of York­shire.  And, like me, he thinks wind-farms are things of beauty, just as the great rail­way via­ducts are, which enhance the coun­tryside, rather than des­troy it.

Eric Newby, on the other hand, doesn’t so much cel­eb­rate “Round Ire­land in Low Gear” as endure it.   There are moments when he glor­ies in a view, a sun­set, a ruin, an excel­lent, if eccent­ric, B & B, but the over­all impres­sion is that Ire­land in 1986 suffered con­tinu­ous gales, bear­ing with them rain, sleet and snow, at almost any time of the year.  Why Newby and his wife organ­ised all their bicyc­ling to head west­ward, given the pre­vail­ing winds, is a mys­tery.  Ireland’s many pubs are men­tioned, but every time they find one which is both open and serves food, it seems a mir­acle.  They are clearly mas­ochists, the Newbys, since they chose Novem­ber , Janu­ary, April and Octo­ber for the bulk of their adven­tures, although June seems, if less windy, as wet and more foggy.  And for all the descrip­tions of towers and demesnes and places of pil­grim­age along the way, none of it makes me want to take my bike and see them for myself.   But I think I’ll go back to “The Great Red Train Ride,” if only to see if Newby’s vis­ion is equally bleak across Siberia.

Radio 4 is doing A.S. Byattt’s “Pos­ses­sion” over 3 weeks in dram­at­ised 15-minute seg­ments. It’s pretty good, and cap­tures the story-line of the ori­ginal very well.  I can see why the adaptor has provided a sort 0f frame of Roland and Maud look­ing back on the events and how they felt about them, and that works, though there are also some added lines of dia­logue for vari­ous char­ac­ters which don’t seem neces­sary either in mov­ing the plot for­ward or estab­lish­ing char­ac­ter.  Com­pared to the book (which I have just re-read) the rela­tion­ship between Roland and Maud always seems more cor­dial but the radio ver­sion also brings out much more clearly the par­al­lels between the romance of Ran­dolph Ash and Crista­bel LaMotte and that of Roland and Maud.  For sev­eral epis­odes, until I checked, I thought the dir­ector was doing what is often done in “A Mid­sum­mer Night’s Dream” and hav­ing the two par­al­lel couples played by the same act­ors.  But no.  Of the other parts, I par­tic­u­larly liked Val’s tone of whiny dis­sat­is­fac­tion and Leonora’s brash transat­lantic aca­demic feminism.

Michael Hildred’s poetry book “Late Flower­ing”, illus­trated by the author, ranges more or less chro­no­lo­gic­ally through his life exper­i­ences, from child­hood in Selby dur­ing the war to liv­ing, still in York­shire, in the 21^st cen­tury.  I’m famil­iar with Michael’s dra­matic style of read­ing aloud, often long poems from memory, and I do won­der how some of these appear on the page to someone not famil­iar with his read­ings.  In a way, I can answer my own ques­tion, because I was par­tic­u­larly struck, and moved, by four poems which I have never heard him per­form: “I Didn’t twig,” “Black­bird”, “Deep Scan” and “Another Place”.  The first two of these are very per­sonal, about dev­ast­at­ing loss, but approached so obliquely that only at the end of the poem is the true force of emo­tion revealed.

www.stairwellbooks.co.uk

V.S. Naipaul’s “A Bend in the River” was first pub­lished in 1979 and I must have first read it soon after it came out in Pen­guin in 1980.  It’s a tale of post-colonial Africa, set some­where deep in the interior of the con­tin­ent, in a town which acquired a ven­eer of west­ern civil­isa­tion dur­ing the colo­nial era (French, prob­ably). Re-reading it now, hav­ing observed, at a dis­tance and through the pages of the press, a fur­ther 30 years of African his­tory, I am impressed by how com­pre­hens­ively Nai­paul dram­at­ised the stages, the stresses, the eth­nic ten­sions of emer­gent coun­tries whose peoples often have noth­ing  in com­mon but the fact that they exist within lines drawn on a map by the colo­nial powers.  The nar­rator is an eth­nic asian, a minor­ity amongst non-African minor­it­ies. As a trader he serves a pur­pose for the African com­munity within which he works, but he is not part of the new Africa, for all his family’s his­tory. He requires a new iden­tity, at the same time as Africa is in tur­moil around him, and for him, as, it seems, for all non-natives, it has to be found out­side Africa.

It’s a cosy little exhib­i­tion at the Fitzwil­liam, and free !!   What it does, rather than show off lots of Vermeer’s paint­ings of women (there are a few) is set Ver­meer in con­text, his por­traits in con­text, the detail and the mean­ing in con­text.  Really excit­ing to see so many Dutch interi­ors (mostly) of the 1600s, and appre­ci­ate the num­ber and vari­ety of artists work­ing at the time.  And who knew peel­ing apples was going to be such a pop­u­lar subject ?

Aside from that, an amble round some of Cambridge’s cloistered col­leges and nar­row lanes, and an atmo­spheric late after­noon visit to King’s Col­lege Chapel.