John Hoyland, R.A.

On behalf of the director, Amy Meyers, and the whole staff of the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Connecticut, I come this morning as an emissary to pay our tribute to John Hoyland. We mourn the loss of such a distinguished Royal Academician, and, of course, we pay our respects to Beverley, to Jeremy, and to their family and many friends and colleagues. Last autumn John’s work was seen in abundance at Yale thanks to the generosity of Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Lurie, who have for decades supported John, and acquired a great deal of his work. We were delighted not only that John and Beverley were with us then, and gave so generously of their time, above all for our students—he really was a trooper—but also that John was able to know and derive satisfaction from the decision reached by Mr. and Mrs. Lurie to present to Yale their entire collection of his work. John has been a presence in the United States since the mid-1960s when in New York he attained the recognition of the powerful critic Clement Greenberg—not, I think, an easy feat because with that recognition Greenberg was famously parsimonious—but thanks to this remarkable gift henceforth John will remain powerfully present with us for as long as earthly things endure. And for that we give hearty thanks.

As the Rector pointed out in the beginning, light is at the heart of the Judaeo-Christian tradition, and there can be no color without light. If poetry is music set to words, as a colleague of mine suggested lately, then great paintings may be, can be, poems wrought by color. No doubt they are many other things too, but John’s work surely brings us in that direction. The death of a major painter, and a colorist as dazzling as he was, inevitably makes us wonder where that light came from, and what it means for talented individuals to harness and share it for the benefit of all who care to look. Though John has gone, the colors remain, reflecting the light—the sunlight of the Mediterranean and of tropical places: Jamaica and the waters of the Caribbean; the lush green hills of Bali; even the ocean beaches of southeastern Australia. But in a larger sense John’s work, his legacy, surely hints at what in this great parish church we call light perpetual. May it shine upon him.

St. James’s Church, Piccadilly
Thursday, October 27, 2011

Zoffany

Martin Postle’s exhibition Johan Zoffany, R.A.: Society Observed is taking shape here just now, and will open to the public next Wednesday evening. The process of unpacking and hanging the many loans is always exciting, and brings to mind what Brian Porter assures me Lady Woods once remarked to Miss Mountain at the conclusion of Speech Day at Merton Hall: “What a wonderful series of treats!”

Britannia

This week The Queen is visiting Australia for the sixteenth time since 1954. I have a vivid memory of the third of those official visits in 1970, to mark the bicentenary of the arrival of James Cook aboard H.M.S. Endeavour. I was five, and in the first grade at Grimwade House. Every schoolchild received a little medal to commemorate the event, and mine is somewhere. I must find it. Dad and Mum took me down to Port Melbourne to witness the arrival in Hobson’s Bay of the Royal Yacht Britannia. Not too far from Station Pier I waved my small Union flag with tremendous vigor, and was in every other respect beside myself with excitement. I have no recollection of seeing anything or anyone larger than a couple of brightly colored specks, descending the gangplank, and transferring to the snappy little tender that brought the sovereign, the Duke, Prince Charles (aged 21) and Princess Anne (19) all the way up the River Yarra, not I suspect an experience in those days that was ever likely to become etched upon their collective memory. Nevertheless, the drama created by the gradual approach of an ocean-going vessel as big, as sleek, and as glamorous as Britannia, and the certain knowledge that The Queen was definitely on board, these outshone anything that is now ever remotely feasible in the conveyor-belt desolation of a modern airport, even the patch of cement that is from time to time with pluck designated as the V.I.P. Apron. So to some extent when I think of The Queen, as I quite often do, I think also of that childhood vision of Britannia steaming up Port Phillip Bay. I think of the immense crowds, too, Maie Casey, Mr. Gorton, Jumbo Delacombe, Miss Mountain, Mrs. Woods, and the huge black Rolls Royce Phantom VI that I gather still lives in Canberra, and by no means in semi-retirement.

Lost

I have just now had a childhood recollection of almost stupefying vividness. What do these mean, and where do they reside for so long in some backwater of the brain before they jump out and scare us silly? One afternoon more than thirty-five years ago I took the tram home from Grimwade House as usual, but became so absorbed in reading a book that I failed to notice that instead of turning left from Balaclava Road into Hawthorn Road, my tram continued straight ahead into the completely unknown territory of deepest Caulfield, where I had never before ventured. I had evidently taken the number 3 tram without realizing it, instead of the number 69 (as it was then known). It would be useful to know what book induced in me such complete absorption, possibly Finn Family Moomintroll or Comet in Moominland by Tove Jansson? (I recall having a soft spot for the Hemulen.) I cannot remember what I did, other than to scramble off at the next tram stop, which was a considerable, panic-inducing distance farther ahead, and to run with my schoolbag slung over my little shoulder all the way back to the junction of Hawthorn and Balaclava Roads to wait patiently for the next 69. However, what I do remember with a shudder and much clamminess in the palms of my hands is the fright, the awful terror of looking up and out at a Melbourne streetscape that was completely alien to me—and the feeling, not entirely momentary either, of being horribly lost and alone. The afternoon was hot, dry, and dusty. There were no pedestrians, few cars on the road, and a couple of drunks lounging at the Balaclava junction. In a way, it now seems extraordinary that our parents entrusted us to the care of Melbourne public transportation when we were barely nine or ten, but nothing too dreadful ever seems to have happened to me whilst traveling on it other than this.

Stockholm

Before an all-male crowd impassively positioned in the granite loggia above, a white-bearded archpriest prepares to administer the solemn pagan midwinter rite of human sacrifice. Flanked by gold lions, weird, semi-hypnotized attendants, and a sacred tree, the facade of his temple sanctuary is sumptuously decorated with interlacing bas-relief traceries, and a polychrome sculpture depicting some terrifying Norse god with ruttish goat-headed supporters. Gloved trumpeters, horn-blowers, and frenzied blond dancing girls greet the victim, who, ecstatically discarding his wolf-skin cloak (though not his ceremonial gold diadem, armlets, and ring), enters, otherwise naked, on a massive gilded sacrificial sled. A detachment of four slaves drags this under heavily armed escort, attended by more temple prostitutes muttering over precious idols, while in the foreground, a flamen priest wearing a blood-red cloak reverently prepares to carry out the gruesome ritual with a single stroke of the gold-handled dagger he clasps in his right hand. Welcome to Sweden. This enormous mural by Carl Larsson is right at the top of the main staircase of the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, and contains much that is informative and useful for the first-time visitor, at least I found it so. Beautiful, arctic, nautical, Sweden carries her immensely long history with pride, certainly, but also with an air of burden, wearisome solemnity, almost resignation. There are more than seventy museums in Stockholm alone, and most if not all of them refer to the terrible things that routinely happened here before there was a Sweden—the dense pine forests that enclosed; gloomy seas that swallowed whole; ice floes that encased and engorged; bottomless lakes; sprites, trolls, wolves, and wicked magic; darkness that descends for months on end, and (as Fiona rightly points out) the sermons thundered by Pastor Bergman from his pulpit in the Hedvig Eleanora Kyrka, literally putting the fear of God into little Ingmar. In purely museological terms, lately in Stockholm I was again and again put in mind of P. G. Wodehouse, and observed by way of paraphrase that obviously there are few people in the world less elfin than a late nineteenth-century Swedish art collector.

North

I cannot understand the disinclination of most air travelers to gaze down at remarkable sights. Once I flew right over Niagara Falls, having been alerted by the captain to the prospect of this awe-inspiring view out to starboard. Afterwards I looked around and every single portly window-seat traveler was impassively glued instead to the television mounted on the back of the seat in front. Yesterday’s transatlantic journey was far more amazing. The flight to New York from Stockholm took an especially northern route—I’m not sure why. At first we headed north-west and out over the Norwegian Sea, across the Arctic Circle, eventually leaving Iceland far to the south. After some hours we then hugged the coast of Greenland for quite a long time, then crossed the southern end of it, heading in due course right across the Labrador Sea, onwards over the vastnesses of mainland Newfoundland and Labrador, not all that far south of Nunavut, into darkest Québec, then more or less due south over the mighty St. Lawrence and essentially down the Hudson Valley into Newark, N.J.: only seven and a half hours. The view of Greenland was wholly unimpeded, and there is something mind-boggling about flying for an hour or so over seemingly endless glaciers of incomparable scale and power, enormous territories without the merest hint of human habitation. Having just spent some days sampling the material culture of the Vikings, I was struck by the contrast between what they managed to do with longboats and broadswords and hemp and runes and the effortlessness of modern travel by jet. It could not be starker. The least one can do is to be amazed and humbled by it, to harness imagination to the eye, be in thrall, and not watch television. Unfortunately at length an elderly Swedish flight attendant with glossy scarlet fingernails ordered me to close my blind, so that was that. In a way I suppose the Vikings are still with us—certainly I was not inclined to resist, for fear of being brained with a Champagne-bottle (business) as with a cudgel at, say, the Battle of Hjörungavágr.

Imperious tone

The other day a thoughtful senior colleague gave me this photograph. I fancy it was presented to him in turn by a person who spotted the sign somewhere in Jamaica. In both cases one is tempted to wonder what exactly inspired such a charming gift, however I am sure my colleague merely thought that I would be tickled by it, and not necessarily endorse the sentiment. The wacky orthography—the work, perhaps, of some mad but self-disciplined child—made me wonder if this could be a real quotation, or else some sort of subversive Wodehousean fake or pastiche, genuine though it certainly sounds. However, thanks to the awesome power of the Internet it has taken me no time at all to track down what appears to be the original, or a slightly longer version of it. According to Alan Wykes, who used the text as an epigraph to the second chapter of his Abroad: A Miscellany of English Travel Writing, 1700–1914 (London: Macdonald, 1973, p. 54), this snippet comes from the unattributed preface to Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent (1908), and reads: “As a general rule it should be observed that English is always understood if it is spoken clearly and accompanied by appropriate gestures or mime. His Majesty the King Emperor is personified in every Englishman abroad and orders must be given in a suitably imperious manner. Shout if necessary, but never dissemble. God is your authority.” This was presumably the source for an almost identical but likewise sadly un-ascribed quotation that found its way into a humorous article about Englishmen abroad in Punch (vol. 269, 1975, p. 362) where but never dissemble was omitted, presumably to amplify the sound of imperial jingo (if that were possible). Maybe the sign was copied from Punch, and the substitution of tone for manner a simple truncation for space, though admittedly Punch made no mention of the highly suggestive year of 1908. One problem is that there is no record of the publication in 1908 or at any other time of a book entitled Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent—neither in the catalogue of the British Library, nor in that of the Library of Congress, nor anywhere else, as far as I can see, so the identity of its author is therefore maddeningly occluded, and indeed his very existence questionable. According to Clark Worswick (An Edwardian Observer: The Photographs of Leslie Hamilton Wilson, New York: Pennwick Publishing, Inc., 1978, p. 13), the text originally appeared in “a leading travel book of the time,” though naturally this is not cited, nor even in the boiled-down version of Worswick’s impressionistic essay that somewhat expediently appeared at around the same date in American Photographer (“Leslie Hamilton Wilson,” Vol. 1, No. 5, October 1978, p. 59). In both places, Worswick sharpened the emphasis along lines presumably similar to the excision in Punch, by giving always and God is your authority in distinctly un-Edwardian italics. However, an even more tangential and recent source quotes this text exactly as it appears in the sign (in other words tone not manner and nothing at all about not dissembling), and offers quite a different explanation for its origin, or possibly an intermediate step. In his The Lichen Factor: The Quest for Community Development in Canada (Sydney, Nova Scotia: University College of Cape Breton Press, 1998, p. 32), Jim Lotz suggests with much disapproval that the text was originally inscribed on a sign and attached to the exterior of a plantation house in Jamaica. The relevant footnote refers to Destinations magazine (November 1993, p. 9). Alas we do not appear to have that organ here at Yale. I suppose it is just conceivable that, inspired by a close reading of Experiences of a Missionary on the Dark Continent, that “leading travel book,” or something similar, a sugar planter in Jamaica took matters into his own hands; amended the wording; produced his own sign, from which in due course this version was copied. We shall almost certainly never know, but I live in hope.

Copyright infringement sonnet

When writing verse I’m not a heavy hitter,

Yet lately my adventures in haiku
Without acknowledgement turned up on Twitter,
And now I wonder what on earth to do.
My estimable agent tweeted first,
Remembering to name me when she did—
In vibrant social networks she’s immersed.
Re-tweeted thence, and spreading through the grid,
An editor it reached at The New Yorker,
Who, clearly tickled, thought it worth quotation,
Became effectively my umpteenth hawker.
That missing verse’s latest infiltration—
It’s mine, some terrible mistakes despite—
Is through the editor-in-chief, Die Zeit!

To unsung literary agents

Their labors rarely earn a lot of money
Except for publishers, and lazy hacks.
Some editors reject fine works and funny,
When profits plunge then shrivel prior to tax.
“Technology: a boon!” shriek twelve year-olds,
“Forget the book, just give me sexy apps;
Ten thousand zines my 4–G iPad holds,
I only want what goes on top of laps.”
That’s Penguin, HarperCollins, and the rest,
But crafty authors, watching titles vanish,
Besiege their agents, venture to suggest:
“I heard a fortune can be made in Spanish.
Translate me, please, for nothing would be finer
Than now to sell my book as well in China.”

Message in a bottle

If in New Haven, Conn., you live on the corner of two streets, one of which is technically a state route and the other a city street, as I do, and something happens, such as a tropical storm, and the power goes out through the entire neighborhood, and police road blocks go up over both city streets and the state route alike, encircling you like a snug and impenetrable noose, naturally you seek information, and, seeking it, you encounter the following problem: The City of New Haven transportation department refers you to the state of Connecticut department of transportation, and the state of Connecticut department of transportation refers you back to the City of New Haven transportation department. That’s if you can find the right telephone number in either case. It is understandable that under present conditions, in which everyone is working as hard as possible and doing all that they can to bring things back to normal in the aftermath of tropical storm Irene, there will be tiresome delays. However my neighbors and I can neither drive into nor out of our properties, in which there is no power, and all we are asking is for a rough estimate of how long this state of affairs is likely to continue, and, incidentally, since the barriers all around us read “CAUTION ENERGIZED AREA,” a wonderfully ambiguous phrase, what risks there are in our immediate vicinity of which we should obviously be made aware. I see no wires down, nor any risky trees. As usual, the United Illuminating Company (UI) are not easily reachable, and their online storm information impossible to decypher. The person I just spoke to did not even know what “CAUTION ENERGIZED AREA” means. No idea. So I am putting this message in a virtual bottle in the hope that someone else may come to our rescue. Until then the experience of returning home after dark at the end of the working day will continue to have a Cathy-and-Heathcliff dimension, with more prosaic stubbed toes thrown in. Thank you.