The dishonesty of literature

Poets are not famous for writing what's actually in their heads. The chief function of poetry being for bespectacled geeks to get off with girls, they write what they think people want to hear. Take Yeats, for instance, who famously wrote:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

One knows in one's heart that the reality would be, rather:

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would sell them to a market trader of dubious repute
Spend all the money on beer and then
Lie down to recover under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my head.

John Martyn - a personal memoir

As most of you will know by now from assorted news and blogs and what-not, noted singer-songwriter John Martyn has passed away. A colleague mentioned this to me on seeing the news and asked if I'd heard of him.

"Heard of him?" I retorted, "I've supported him."

And oddly, this statement turns out to be true. Let me reminisce a moment...

In 1990, I returned from my first two-year stint in Indonesia and was living in a series of crapulous bedsits in Oxford while justifying my pointless existence on the grounds that I was 'a graduate student'. I had just scraped together enough dosh to pay one year's fees at a college which I knew would have me (I knew and had played gigs with my prospective supervisor), and supported myself thewhiles by a fissile mixture of TEFL and semi-professional music. I was for a time in a band that played for 'drinks and tips' at a muso pub down Cowley Road, at 'folk evenings' MC-ed by a chap called Frank Underwood whom I had known on-and-off for a few years. The next few years saw me yo-yoing between Oxford and Central Java on 'fieldwork' (usually arranged by getting TEFL jobs at places desperate for native speakers).

Frank's main paying gigs at this period were as part of the duo 'Mortlock and Underwood', Mortlock being a folk fiddler of considerable skill and charisma. Alas, in a rock'n'roll style breakup Mortlock threw his fiddle down on stage in front of a large crowd, called Underwood a few unparliamentary things and stormed off, leaving U grinning desperately at the audience and saying "Yeah! Baroque'n'roll!"

He now had the problem of how to do gigs for which 'Mortlock and Underwood' were booked, and asked me to fill in as an ersatz Mortlock for a while.

Thus in summer 1993 I came to be on a beach at Hastings playing to an enormous crowd at a free festival, immediately before the headline act, which was - I'm getting there - John Martyn.

There had been many acts before us, over the period of about 4 hours; and free drink provided to performers throughout. This is often a mistake, and with a heroic drunk like Martyn it was quite disastrous. The man - genius though he may have been - could barely stand up through his set. I watched from the side of the stage, beer can in hand, willing him to get through the set. He just about did, but there was a palpable sense of "WTF?" among the crowd, hundreds of whom had come down from London and elsewhere specially to see JM perform. I think the people who appreciated it most were those as sloshed as he was.

The dear old provost of my dear old college

A recent thread on Mrs Pouncer's Counsel caused me to recall my Oxford days, when my college - let us veil its identity by calling it Christnose - was presided over genially by a provost of the old school (or more to the point, the old wine-cellar). Let us veil his identity by calling him Lord Fnord.

Anyway, Christnose had a reputation (before more recent, academically-inclined killjoy management decided it wanted 'results') of having more gaudies (college feast nights) than any other house in either of the two universities. Some time after midnight on one of these evenings Lord Fnord emerged from the Hall and wove his way gently towards the Provost's Lodgings, past the library. A thunderstorm was in progress, and as he passed the library a bolt of lightning struck one of the carved stone eagles which decorated the roof. It detached itself from the fabric of the building and plummeted into the lawn.

Fnord stared at it for a while, then concluded he'd better tell someone. Turning around with difficulty, he wobbled all the way to the porter's lodge and tapped on the glass to attract the night porter's attention.

"Good evening your grace."
"Th'librarary eagle. 'Sh flown off the roof. Whoosh!"
"Yes of course it has, sir. Shall I get someone to take you back to your lodgings?"
"Nonononono - y'don't undershtand. Eagle. On liberarary roof. 'Sh f***ing flown orff."

The conversation apparently went in circles for some time before His Lordship gave up and went off to sleep face down in a flower bed. He was vindicated on the morrow, however.