Volodos and Mompou

Over the past few years I have bought fewer and fewer CDs, mainly because I now have so many that it seems perverse to add to an already unwieldy collection. However, I find that my acquisitions, though far less numerous and frequent, have tended to become more careful. Such is the case with the new Sony recording entitled Volodos Plays Mompou, which has received, as far as I can tell, almost universal critical acclaim. I picked it up the other day, and since then I have been listening to the pianist Arcadi Volodos with an increasing degree of wonder, admiration, and delight. He is one of those great artists whose technical brilliance and dazzling keyboard virtuosity is matched by the deepest possible poetical insight and subtlety of thought—I wonder why these qualities have so consistently combined and re-combined in the Russian character? In this sense Volodos is just as at ease performing on the grand scale as he is in miniature. One thinks of a mighty seascape in oils, as against one of the barely even minimal effects in watercolour on a page in one of Turner’s small sketchbooks. With these performances on the piano of short pieces by the Catalan composer Federico Mompou (1893–1987), Volodos similarly demonstrates supreme command, if that is the right word, over an intimate, impressionistic dream-scape of shadows, failing light and softness, of murmured phrases of rare beauty and, indeed, of silence itself. No pyrotechnics here, but rather an almost uncanny pianism with which Volodos coaxes infinite colour from at times deceptively simple musical phrases, even single notes. As the critic of the Boston Globe remarked—and it is hard to forget this as you begin to absorb the entire program—“chords melt into what Wallace Stevens called ‘the half colors of quarter-things,’” and Volodos has chosen a sequence of pieces with such ingenuity that we are led gradually from light into penumbral places, and, finally, to darkness. It would be foolish to alight upon one short piece over and above all the rest, however I will readily admit to occasional bouts of foolishness: Volodos is, like the late Vladimir Horowitz, a great improviser, and his own transcription of Mompou’s Damunt de tu, nomes les flors (which means “Upon you only flowers”) strikes me as a work of genius twice over. It is rather like learning to listen, really listen, all over again.

The Chattri

In the earliest stages of the Great War, before British casualties began to assume their calamitous scale, measures were taken to meet the needs of imperial troops, above all ordinary soldiers of the Indian army who were wounded in France. For this purpose the Royal Pavilion in Brighton was turned into a military hospital, and arrangements made there to accommodate the different dietary and other requirements of Hindu, Sikh and Muslim patients. There seems to have been some notion that the architecture of the Prince Regent’s batty Pavilion would provide more sympathetic surroundings for these Indian troops, in other words make them feel more at home than in the more humdrum surroundings of Rickmansworth or, indeed, the splendors of Cliveden and other ad hoc military hospitals set up in great country houses. One must presume that a more sinister reason was the urge to sequester and separate these men along the colour line. Thus in December 1914, 345 Indian soldiers took up residence at the Pavilion. Most of them recovered from their injuries, but several dozen soon died. The bodies of twenty-one Muslim men were buried in accordance with Islamic rites at the Shah Jahan Mosque in Woking, Surrey, but those of ten Hindus and Sikhs were taken from the Royal Pavilion to a spot on the South Downs above Brighton, overlooking the English Channel—in the middle of an exposed field belonging to the fourth Marquess of Abergavenny. A local undertaker, presumably in close consultation with old hands at the India Office who knew about this sort of thing, was prevailed upon to build a ghat or funeral pyre on which the remains were cremated, together with those of forty-three other non-Muslim Indian casualties from other military hospitals in the district. Their ashes were afterwards scattered in the English Channel; by ancient convention these must be returned to the life-giving element of water. About a year later, Sir John Otter, sometime mayor of Brighton, proposed the creation of a permanent monument over the site of the ghat. His plan was approved by Sir Austen Chamberlain at the India Office, who agreed to share the cost of building it with the Brighton Corporation, and a portion of the land was in due course ceded to the council by Lord Abergavenny. Private fund-raising proceeded throughout the war, though for obvious reasons at a gradually diminishing rate. At last, in April 1918, a design in Sicilian marble was produced by a young Indian architect, E. C. Henriques, in close consultation (until his death in 1917) with Sir Samuel Swinton Jacob, a pioneer of the synthetic “Indo-Saracenic” style of Anglo-Indian architecture. The contract was awarded to a firm in Manchester, and the Chattri was unveiled by the Prince of Wales on February 1, 1921, only a few months after the solemn interment in Westminster Abbey, “amongst the kings,” of the remains of the Unknown Warrior.

The Chattri is indeed a pungent place. Here, at the fringes of gentle, quintessentially English pastures—and a slice of primitive England, moreover, that enjoys inconceivably ancient associations—you follow a long and, at times, almost invisible bridle-path to which the only access is a little turn-off at Patcham, a few hundred yards east of the busy junction of the A23 and the A27 Brighton Bypass. Through an ordinary footpath gate, you walk a considerable distance up-hill until, passing over a succession of gentle rises, finally, far from the nearest road, you catch your first glimpse of a white marble dome hovering in a little wooded dale. Approaching nearer, the Chattri swims into full view—an elegant, slender pavilion, rising 29 feet to its finial from a plain square base set upon gently graduated terraces. Eight square columns supporting the dome shear into elegant, slightly tapering octagonals exactly halfway up; the shallow drum and its broadly flaring lip are likewise boldly octagonal. The plinth bears an inscription in English, Hindi, Punjabi and Urdu, the text of which was composed by Sir John Otter. It reads: “To the memory of all Indian soldiers who gave their lives for the King–Emperor in the Great War, this monument, erected on the site of the funeral pyre where Hindus and Sikhs who died in hospital at Brighton passed through the fire, is in grateful admiration and brotherly love dedicated.” When we approached it quite early on a brisk weekday morning in late spring, a flock of black-faced sheep was grazing peacefully in the compound, and low clouds scudded past admitting occasional flashes of sunshine. It was as if, once within earshot of shells exploding in northern France, the imperial story—the story of the Raj—had been partly repatriated, and prematurely laid to rest in the pastoral bosom of Sussex.

Ball's Pyramid

The soothing atmosphere of Lord Howe Island could not contrast more sharply than with the amazing sight of Ball’s Pyramid, a vertiginous shard of rock that rises 1,844 feet out of the Tasman Sea, approximately twelve miles southeast of Lord Howe Island. I took an alarmingly small motor boat to inspect this strange place, and found it to be worthy of the wildest imaginings of a Burke, a Beethoven, or a Byron—the perfect fodder for the Romantic imagination: wild, impossible, unthinkable, and home only to vast colonies of shearwaters and a particular type of stick-insect once thought to be extinct. The ocean swell was considerable, and a school of porpoises joined us for the last leg, not so much leaping playfully, as tumbling helplessly among the whitecaps. It was far too rough for me to photograph them.

As if conforming to my increasingly lurid imaginings, as we approached this outcrop a weird veil of cloud materialized around its summit, as if to proffer incontrovertible proof of its own dizzying height. This put me in mind of J. M. W. Turner, with grace notes of Franz von Stuck. Ball’s Pyramid and the rocks surrounding it are the remnants of an extinct volcano which few people have ever dared or even bothered to scale, although I gather this was once achieved in the 1960s by a party of brave students from the University of Sydney.

Perhaps the most thrilling thing, upon sailing around the southernmost part of the monolith and coming back around the other side, was this sight of Lord Howe Island to the north, reduced by distance to an almost meaningless spec, a small bump in an increasingly dark and tempestuous sea. There are, after all, in these days of anodyne airlines, relatively few opportunities to experience the Conradian dimension of travel. Fortunately I do not get seasick.

Lord Howe Island

Not long ago I visited Lord Howe Island, about 400 miles west-northwest of Sydney in the middle of the Tasman Sea. Lieutenant Henry Lidgbird Ball, commander of H.M.S. Supply, first discovered Lord Howe Island on February 17, 1788, while sailing from Botany Bay to establish a penal settlement on Norfolk Island. On the return journey Ball sent a party ashore to claim this hitherto unknown island as a British possession; there is no evidence that Polynesian mariners ever visited it. While today Norfolk Island remains an off-shore territory, Lord Howe Island is part of New South Wales, and indeed falls within the federal electorate of Sydney. In the 1820s the island became a provisioning point for the whaling industry, and was permanently settled in June 1834. The present population is less than 350, and most of the islanders are descended from those early whalers. The climate and vegetation are subtropical, and two lofty mountains, Mt. Lidgbird and Mt. Gower (2,871 feet, farther distant) endow the place with its undoubted natural drama.

Leaving these more formidable features aside, it is impossible to convey the air of serene isolation that soon overtakes the visitor to Lord Howe Island—no telephone, no internet, no cell phone coverage: utter peace. One or two vehicles pass along the single road from time to time, and a handful of bicycles. But otherwise lying in bed one hears only strange but appealing birdsong, the roar of the surf on the windward side, and, from time to time, the peaceful lowing of cattle grazing on the flats near the lagoon. I shall certainly go back.

The problem picture

One of the last bays of our exhibition Edwardian Opulence was dedicated to that now forgotten phenomenon the “problem picture,” in other words paintings in which, quite contrary to the academic conventions of Victorian history painting, the moral purpose of the scene or narrative was deliberately occluded. This was also the subject of an excellent essay in the catalogue by Pamela Fletcher. At best these Edwardian problem pictures raised more questions than they answered, and for that very reason achieved widespread popularity. Their meanings were the subject of much speculation in the popular press. I suppose no coincidence, however strange, ought to surprise me these days, yet I was astonished this morning to discover a reference to the problem picture in the concluding portion of a confidential dispatch from Sir Andrew Noble, British Ambassador to Mexico, to the Earl of Home, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs, dated Mexico City, October 1960. Not perhaps the most obvious source of light entertainment on a glorious morning in the fall, but the reason for this is that I have been doing a little work on the Castle of Chapultepec in Mexico City, which in 1864 the Emperor Maximilian made his official residence. Anyway, the relevant passage reads:

…The first post abroad in which I served was Rio de Janeiro, almost thirty years ago. In those days the Diplomatic Service regarded Latin America as a jungle, better perhaps than Central Africa, but no more important in the scale of world values. We paid lip service to the importance of the A.B.C. countries, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, largely because of the important British investments, and therefore dividends, to be protected; to be sent to any other Latin-American post was banishment. The Service view was aptly parodied by a small picture hanging in the room of Mr. Collier (now Sir Laurence Collier [1890–1976], the Head of the Northern Department [and sometime British Ambassador to Norway, 1939–50]). This reproduced one of his father’s problem pictures, which showed an older man sitting behind a desk in serious pose; opposite him was a young man clearly struggling with tortured apprehension. The caption below described the older man as the Diplomatic Private Secretary, then master of our postings, and put into his mouth the ominous sentence: “We want a really good man for Bogotá.”

If only I had fastened upon this, much as one might snatch a precious jewel from the dustbin, in time to craft a suitable footnote for the catalogue, or, better, to lob it to Pamela—so that she (and we) could demonstrate the long shelf life of the problem picture, even at the heart of Whitehall. Note that Sir Andrew did not feel it necessary to name Sir Laurence’s artist father, the Hon. John Collier, or indeed to apostrophize “problem picture.” Further evidence, if any were needed, that almost everything is connected and nothing much dwells in isolation.

Newport, Rhode Island

Several years ago—at around the time I began work on this blog—I went with a group of colleagues to visit Osborne, Queen Victoria’s residence near Cowes on the Isle of Wight. It is a strange but compelling place, and, midway through our visit, I found myself in the Queen’s shrine of a bedroom gazing out the window down across the terraces towards the Solent. In that moment, quite by chance, the huge Cunard liner Queen Mary 2 swung into view and with much stateliness sailed straight past, moving from left to right. It seemed as if this display of maritime splendor had been exactly timed so as to impress upon the visitor the former but fullest scale of British imperium. The night before last I was in Newport, Rhode Island, giving a lecture about George Stubbs to the local branch of the English Speaking Union, among the most active and certainly the most hospitable in the United States. The venue was a restaurant at the end of one of the innumerable piers that jut into Newport Harbor. My audience had their back to the picture windows that gave onto water, and, as I started to speak in the gathering dusk that selfsame Queen Mary 2 steamed sedately past, this time from right to left, heading out into the North Atlantic—just like that! These are the only two occasions on which I have ever set eyes upon her, and they will not easily be forgotten. I am not quite sure why it has taken me so long to resume my various bloggy ruminations here, nor whether the Queen Mary 2 has had a hand in it. I was obliged to leave off owing to the immense pressure of work throughout the spring season of Edwardian Opulence, after which I felt an extended period lying fallow was probably wise. One can talk too much. Now, however, I find myself ready to resume—always writing in those quite hours before dawn which so enchant and delight me, just now enhanced by the freshness, gold and russet of the New England fall.