The area of LA where my daughter and her partner live can be characterised as one of neat lawns in front of the houses and well tended cars parked on the streets. This photo from Google street view sums up the general feel of the area.
So one of the odder things which my wife and I spot as we take walks around the neighbourhood are the occasional rusty old bangers parked among the gleaming new cars. These photos, taken on a neighbourhood walkabout with our grandson a few days before we left LA, show what I mean.
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Some internet surfing has told me that the first car is a Buick Wildcat. The second I know well. It is a Jaguar E-Type which I remember admiring on the streets of London in my youth.
As I say, this habit of having cars which would look perfectly at home in a junkyard sitting on neat, clean, well tended streets appears odd to me. That being said, oddity is in the eye of the beholder, to slightly distort an old saw.
One of the oddest examples of this sub-genre of urban decor is old pickup trucks. So that my readers can understand what I’m talking about, here is a photo I took of one such pickup truck parked some ten houses down the street from my daughter’s place. I have taken it from both directions so that readers can admire its well-worn features.
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As sharp-eyed readers can see, this pickup is a Ford. Our daughter’s next-door-neighbour has instead a General Motor’s Chevrolet pickup truck.
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Normally, he also parks it on the street, but he must have been away when I took this photo, because it’s parked in his driveway.
It doesn’t finish there. On a neighbourhood walk my wife and I took the last time we were in LA on the nearby hill of Mar Vista (View of the Sea, and indeed you can see the ocean from the top of the hill), I spied another such pickup truck parked on the street. I didn’t take a photo of it, so readers will just have to take my word for it. That’s three old pickup trucks in a radius of a couple of kilometres or so.
I’m no expert on pickup trucks, but Google searches suggest to me that these are all from the 1940s or ’50s. Here are photos of particularly fine examples, the first from 1940, the second from 1950.
What on earth is going on here? Allow me to try out some hypotheses on you, dear readers.
Given the obviously poor shape these pickup trucks (and the other old bangers) are in, my first thought was that their owners were indulging in a subtle piece of Keeping Up with the Joneses retro-snobbery: “The neighbours all have the latest in swanky Teslas and what not parked in front of the house? Peuh, we have a beaten-up old pickup truck. Beat that!” Just for the hell of it, I throw in a cartoon or two on the phenomenon of Keeping Up with the Joneses.
But I’ve decided that I am probably being unfair to the good folk who live in the neighbourhood.
I then thought that the owners of the pickup trucks in particular were making a political statement about the days when certain segments of American society were “eating bitterness”, as the Chinese say. Certainly, when I see these trucks, all beaten up, worn and weary, they make me think of a passage from John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
The family in the story, the Joads, had to abandon their farm in the Midwest which had become part of the Dust Bowl back in the 1930s. They rode out West to California in a homemade pickup truck, a cut-down 1926 Hudson Super Six sedan, to try to find work and a new life.
“The house was dead, and the fields were dead; but this truck was the active thing, the living principle. The ancient Hudson, with bent and scarred radiator screen, with grease in dusty globules at the worn edges of every moving part, with hub caps gone and caps of red dust in their places – this was the new hearth, the living center of the family; half passenger car and half truck, high-sided and clumsy.”
This is what that pickup truck looked like in the film made in 1940 of the book, with Henry Fonda in the lead role.
And then I immediately think of that famous photo taken by Dorothea Lange of a mother and her children in a camp for migrant agricultural workers in California, where the Joads ended up.
But I suspect this is too high-falutin’ an explanation.
My internet readings in the little world of old car collectors suggests a simpler explanation. It seems that one important strand of car collection is made up of people who, once they reach a certain age and high enough income bracket, buy old cars and trucks to relive comforting memories of their youth (adding a little bit of political spice, when America was Great or something like that). In the case of pickup trucks, it could be youthful memories of Grandpa, and maybe even of Grandma, working on the farm with the family pickup, that spurs urban boomers of LA to buy these rusty old pickup trucks and have them quietly sit in front of their house on the street. The memories could be like this photo of a farmer in Texas unloading feed for his cattle, using what looks like a pickup truck from the 1940s or ’50s.
So that’s where my thinking currently stands on this intriguing LA phenomenon. If my readers have any better explanations, I would love to hear them. Of course, the next time we are in LA, I could just go up to the neighbour and ask him – but that’s so un-English …
I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while. But for reasons that I cannot explain, I have procrastinated. Nevertheless, I have finally got myself to put pen to paper and get to work.
The germ for the post was planted several years ago during a hike my wife and I were taking along the edges of Lake Como. We dropped into a café to have ourselves a cappuccino. There, on a shelf, the café owner had lovingly placed a long row of bottles of gin, all of them some strange colour: pastel yellow, blue, or even – I think – pink. I say “I think”, because the memory of it all is somewhat fuzzy now. At the time, I took a photo of that row of bottles to show to my readers – as I say, I thought immediately of writing a post about gin – but somewhere along the line I decided to delete it, convincing myself I would never get around to writing the post. This photo, which I created with a bit of photoshopping, will have to stand in for that initial vision of mine.
many sources
All those coloured gins startled me. I have since read on the internet that this is the latest fad in gin making – or perhaps, to put it a little more cynically, the latest way for gin makers to differentiate themselves from their competitors. As one internet entry puts it, “coloured gins are having a moment, the latest phase in the great craft gin revival. You can now choose from a whole spectrum, including pink grapefruit gin, Amalfi lemon gin the colour of a pale sunrise, bitter orange gin like alcoholic marmalade and lavender gins that change colour on contact with tonic. But the most popular is violet.”
I dislike to think of myself as a traditionalist, I’ve always been suspicious of tradition, but hello! coloured gin! what is the world coming to?! I am firmly of the opinion that gin should be a colourless liquid to which you add things to enhance its basic taste and possibly – just possibly – add colour.
Talking of gin’s basic taste, I think we all know that this primarily comes from the addition of juniper berries, from juniper trees like this beautiful example.
Juniper is after all in the drink’s name. The ancestor of British gin is Flemish/Dutch jenever. Jenever making was brought to England by traders or by English soldiers returning from fighting in the Low Countries. Linguistic laziness eventually shortened jenever to gin. But my surfing has shown me that today’s gin makers add other “botanicals” to their gin, to distinguish it from everyone else’s. Citrus “notes” seem to be important, imparted by the addition of the peels of lemon, or bitter orange, or lime, or grapefruit. Then small amounts of all manner of spices can be added: anise, fennel, caraway, coriander, licorice, orris, longan, baobab, savory, angelica, cardamom, grains of paradise, cubeb, cinnamon, cassia, nutmeg, almond, saffron … the mind whirls in front of this veritable cornucopia of spices.
And it doesn’t finish there. Even pine needles and cones can be added, or frankincense! Of course, which extra “botanicals” are added are closely guarded secrets.
I wouldn’t want readers to think I am a frequent drinker of gin – unlike the late Queen Elizabeth, who was, I was somewhat astonished to learn, still knocking back two gin-based drinks daily in her nineties: a gin and Dubonnet with lots of ice before lunch, and a dry martini after it.
Several sources
I will just have a gin and tonic from time to time, when the fancy takes me – and when the ingredients are available. Harking back to my earlier harrumphing, readers will see that a G&T is satisfactorily colourless.
I am glad to see that I am in good company in my fondness for G&T. Philip Larkin, a poet whom I greatly admire, was an aficionado. We have him here nursing a G&T.
He once wrote to his lover: “life is very narrow without glasses OF GIN AND TONIC”. Note the capital letters and the plural “glasses” – he imbibed considerably more gin and tonic than I do. He even devoted several lines of one of his poems, Sympathy in White Major, to the making of a gin and tonic:
When I drop four cubes of ice
Chimingly in a glass, and add
Three goes of gin, a lemon slice,
And let a ten-ounce tonic void
In foaming gulps until it smothers
Everything else up to the edge,
I lift the lot in private pledge:
He devoted his life to others.
But in my mind the G&T is also firmly anchored to the colonial period of India, where it was particularly popular among the British colonialists. I’ve read that their excuse for quaffing large amounts of G&T was to ingest quinine as a prophylactic against malaria – tonic water contains quinine. Malaria was certainly a problem in India – my father contracted it while a colonialist in India – but I’ve also read that actually this can only have been an excuse, because there isn’t enough quinine in tonic water to work as a prophylactic. In any event, I throw in a photo of two British colonialists languidly seated and being fanned by an Indian servant. On the table, one can make out what seems to be a glass of G&T.
Although I am now firmly in the G&T camp, my gin drinking habit didn’t start there. I began knocking back gin when I was 17, maybe even 16 – yes, it was easier to get served in pubs when I was young – and my gin drink of choice was what I remember being called a gin and lime, although the proper name for this drink seems to be a gimlet. Again, I am pleased to know that I was in good company. Gimlets play a not insignificant role in Raymond Chandler’s book “The Long Goodbye”.
Early on in the story, the hero, or maybe we should call him the anti-hero, the “hard-boiled” detective Philip Marlowe, meets a friend, who happens to be British, in a bar:
We sat in a corner of the bar at Victor’s and drank gimlets. “They don’t know how to make them here,” he said. “What they call a gimlet is just some lime or lemon juice with a dash of sugar and bitters. A real gimlet is half gin and half Rose’s Lime Juice and nothing else. It beats martinis hollow.”
My British grandmother often had a bottle, but not for making gimlets; I don’t remember her ever drinking anything stronger than a dry sherry. She would make lime drinks for us grandchildren, adding water to a generous portion of Rose’s Lime Juice. Yes, I have very fond memories of that cordial. My reading tells me, though, that today’s mixologists (strange word …) pooh-pooh on Rose’s Lime Juice in its modern form, considering it far sweeter than the Lime Cordial made by the original Mr. Rose. As a result, there is a cottage industry in the production of lime cordials considered to be closer to the Real Thing, and the gimlets made with these revisited cordials are claimed to taste much better. If ever I end up in some bar offering one of these alternative lime cordials, I might try a gimlet. Otherwise, I’ll stick with my G&T, thank you.
Chandler’s tales of Marlowe are great, by the way. If any of my readers have never dipped into them, I highly recommend they pick up a copy. And of course, a good number of his books have been turned into films over the decades. Liam Neeson is the latest well-known actor to play Marlowe, but there have been a number of others before him: Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, James Garner, Robert Montgomery. But to my mind by far the best Marlowe was Humphrey Bogart, who back in 1946 played him in “The Big Sleep”.
It was also Bogart who, in “Casablanca”, after Ingrid Bergman has entered his nightclub, talked to him, and left, utters the anguished phrase: “of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”
Marlowe’s friend in “The Long Goodbye” says gimlets beat martinis hollow. I wouldn’t know, I don’t think I’ve ever had a martini. But I’m sure James Bond – who must be the best known martini drinker in the world – would have disagreed. Here, turning to films again, we have Sean Connery, the greatest of all the James Bonds (at least that’s what I think), preparing himself a martini.
Mind you, I don’t think Bond’s martini is quite the Real Thing, which I read should be a mix of gin and dry vermouth – the precise ratio is of course a source of heated debate in certain mixological circles but the current consensus seems to be around 5 parts gin to one part vermouth. The two should be poured onto ice cubes, stirred not shaken, strained into a chilled cocktail glass, and served with a green olive or twist of lemon peel as garnish.
In his book “Casino Royale”, however, Ian Fleming has Bond ordering another kind of dry martini at the bar in the casino:
‘A dry martini,’ he said. ‘One. In a deep champagne goblet.’
‘Oui, monsieur.’
‘Just a moment. Three measures of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?’
Sounds like a bit of a Frankenstein martini, if you ask me. And Bond’s well known comment “shaken, not stirred” has mixologists shaking their head in disapproval; it should be the other way around. I’m sure that other famous martini drinker, the late Queen, would have pursed her lips in disapproval, even though, as we know since the 2012 London Olympics, she and Bond were BFFs.
This mention of the House of Windsor lets me segue smoothly to another gin-based drink which I have also never tried, a fruit-based punch using Pimm’s No. 1 Cup as the base. To make it, get a bottle of Pimm’s No. 1 Cup.
This is basically gin in which a whole lot of herbs and some citrus have been macerated; quite what herbs and citrus we are talking about is – of course, as usual – a closely guarded secret. Pour a slug of this potion into a jug, add a generous portion of lemonade, and then bung in sliced and diced vegetables and fruit; which vegetables and fruit exactly is up to you, but I’ve seen mention of cucumbers and celery on the vegetable side and orange and strawberries on the fruit side. The end result will look something like this.
This seems to be quite a posh drink. For instance, we see here King Charles, at a time when he was still a young Prince Charles, gulping down a Pimm’s at a polo game – note polo game, not a football game or rugby game or some other game which we normal mortals take part in or watch.
Following suit from the Royals, the other race goers deck themselves out in their finest, the ladies with those ridiculous hats English women love to wear, the gents in morning suits, which are equally ridiculous.
It’s also very popular at the Henley Royal Regatta, where anyone who is anyone wears a blazer (I think to signal that they belong to a boat club somewhere).
Although not quite in the same posh league these days, Pimm’s is also quaffed in large quantities at Wimbledon. Just because I find him very simpatico, I throw in a photo of Stanley Tucci at Wimbledon clutching his Pimm’s.
I think readers will get the general idea from what I have written above that gin is a very respectable drink these days. Which was certainly not the case a mere three hundred years ago. In the early 1700s, the British government decided – as an anti-French move (so what’s new…) – to greatly increase import duties on French brandy. At the same time, it made it much, much easier for people to get into the business of making gin: it broke the monopoly of the London Guild of Distillers on the making of spirits, it reduced taxes on the distillation of spirits, and it revoked the need for a license to make spirits. Add to this the fact that this was a period which saw a drop in the prices of barley – used to make the mash, which was then distilled to obtain the spirits – which very much helped to make the final product cheap. Add also to this the fact that there was a general rise in salaries (from absolutely wretched to slightly less so) and a concomitant general drop in food prices, which meant that the poor had somewhat more disposable income to spend on liquor. Add all of that up and you have the makings of a perfect storm. Thousands of people all over the country got themselves a pot still and started making gin. This is a pretty simple type of pot still.
Many of these new gin makers opened gin-shops to sell their rot-gut. Here, we have a print of a gin shop made towards the end of the 1700s (note that it’s all women and one child; commentators of the time were particularly exercised that this was not just a problem with men).
Many others simply made it at home in their kitchen for their personal consumption.
And rot-gut it was! Pot stills produced a very coarse product, and some pretty awful things were added to make it more palatable. Turpentine was one, to give the stuff “woody notes”. Sulphuric acid was another, although luckily the acid didn’t distill over with the ethanol; it merely reacted with it to form diethyl ether, which added a sweetish taste to the product.
The awful taste didn’t seem to matter very much. People, especially the poor, began drinking huge amounts of gin. What came to be known as the Gin Craze had started. Quite soon, the authorities realised they had a serious social problem on their hands as drunkenness and disorderly behaviour – especially among the poor and involving women as much as men – became endemic. William Hogarth’s print, “Gin Lane”, gives an idea of how the governing classes saw the problem.
By 1736, the Middlesex Magistrates had this to say: “It is with the deepest concern your committee observe the strong Inclination of the inferior Sort of People to these destructive Liquors, and how surprisingly this Infection has spread within these few Years … it is scarce possible for Persons in low Life to go anywhere or to be anywhere, without being drawn in to taste, and, by Degrees, to like and approve of this pernicious Liquor.”
Already in 1734, the story of one Judith Defour had shocked the nation – or at least the superior Sort of People. Judith had taken her two year old daughter out of the workhouse, where she had placed her earlier, for a visit of a few hours, and had met up with her friend Sukey. The court records document what followed:
“On Sunday night we took the child into the fields, and stripp’d it, and ty’d a linen handkerchief hard about its neck to keep it from crying, and then laid it in a Ditch. And after that, we went together and sold the coat and stay for a shilling, and the petticoat and stockings for a groat. We parted the money, and join’d for a quartern of gin.”
The little girl died in the ditch. Defour was found guilty of murder and sentenced to death, and hanged at Tyburn (note the grandstands; this was spectacle indeed).
The public outrage over this story forced Parliament to act. Over the next fifteen years, various laws were passed which eventually brought gin drinking under control.
It’s hard not to read about the Gin Craze and think about today’s opioid crisis, or the crack epidemic of the 1980s, or the many previous epidemics of heroin, amphetamines, morphine, and on and on. Different chemicals, same problem: the desire – the need – to dull the pain of living, and a ready supply of cheap chemicals to do it.
And on that sombre note, I will finally crack open a bottle of – colourless – craft gin someone gave us, aromatised – so the label informs me – with juniper of course, but also orange peel, cardamom, angelica root, coriander, ginger, cinnamon, and maybe a few other things, and, more or less in Larkin’s words:
I’ll drop four cubes of ice / Chimingly in a glass, and add / Three goes of gin, a lemon slice, / And let a ten-ounce tonic void / In foaming gulps until it smothers / Everything else up to the edge. / And then I’ll lift the lot and ask myself:
“Am I a superior Sort of Person or an inferior Sort of Person?”
A few days ago, I realised with a start that it was my father’s birthday. He would have been 106 years old had he made it this far – a venerable age indeed. But he shuffled off this mortal coil some twenty years ago already, and hopefully is singing with the choirs invisible (although he was terribly tone deaf; hearing him sing was a sufferance).
I am now at an age when I can reflect on my father more as an equal than as a Father Figure. We were never really that close: a generational thing, I think – he was a child of the severe, repressed, melancholic post-War 1930s, I was a child of the optimistic 1960s. But the gap between us was intensified by our different characters – he was a brooder, I never brood. I don’t suppose it helped that I hardly grew up with him. From the ages of 8 to 18 I spent three-quarters of the year away from the family. Most of that was in boarding school, but one school holiday a year was also spent with relations; for all of my life my father worked outside the UK.
But in one thing, I recognise a deep similarity; he was, and I am, a romantic. In my case, I feel it is of a piece with my cheerful character. But in his case, it was quite surprising. Normally, he was a measured man, carefully balancing all things, and pronouncing well argued verdicts; not surprisingly, he had spent much of the first half his working life as a judge and spent the second half ensconced in a law school as a professor. But when it came to poetry, my father’s romantic side emerged into the light and he was floridly, lushly, ridiculously romantic. It seems to me that his 106th birthday is a good excuse to pay tribute to his poetic inclinations (very different from mine, I have to say), through flashbacks of moments when he bared his romantic soul to me through poetry.
Omar Kahyam’s Rubaiyat, or rather Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of it, was a favourite of his. I still have memories, fond ones now, pleasantly blurred by the passage of time, of my father declaiming quatrains from Edward Fitzgerald’s – very loose – translation of the Rubaiyat. This was one of his favourite quotes – I still see him in my mind’s eye declaiming it at lunch one day.
A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A Jug of Wine, A Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!
He once asked me what I thought of Fitzgerald’s poetry. In the callowness of my youth, I found it precious and somewhat ridiculous, but I smiled diplomatically and I think – at least, I hope – I managed not to sound too, too negative (although I have to say that even with the wisdom of old age I find Fitzgerald’s poetry too precious for my tastes). After his death, when my mother invited me to go through his books and take those I wanted, I took his copy of the Rubaiyat. It still graces my shelves.
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Once my father retired, he gave freer rein to his poetic inclinations. On one of my infrequent trips to visit my parents, he confessed to me an adoration of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso. He declared that when he read Dante – in the original, old Italian; he was a gifted linguist – the verse would grip him in his vitals. I was rather startled by this turn of phrase from such a measured man. One of my sisters bought him a large, expensive, limited edition, book of Dante’s Inferno and Paradiso, complete with pictures. But that I didn’t take. In the first place, it weighed a ton. But in addition I was also mindful of what my father said to my mother-in-law when my parents came down to Milan to meet her for the first time. She had proudly shown him one of her treasured possessions, an exact replica of the Bible of Borso d’Este. It’s a beautiful book, enlivened throughout with lovely miniatures.
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But my father told her that he was interested in reading books rather than admiring them. The poor woman was quite deflated.
I join him in loving Dante – although in my case, in modern Italian “translation” – but our differing characters brought us to diverge on which parts we liked most. Thoroughly romantic as he was, it was the parts where Dante dwells on his impossible love for Beatrice in Paradise which he delighted in most.
There was also a time when the opening lines of Inferno resonated with me:
When half way through the journey of our life
I found that I was in a gloomy wood,
because the path which led aright was lost.
Have we not all asked ourselves at some point in the later years of our lives if we have strayed from the path we should have taken? What if I had taken that other job, gone to that other university? … What if … what if …?
Another set of books – notebooks, actually – that I took after my father’s death was the diary he wrote from the ages of 16 to 22. This is the first volume.
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The diaries start abruptly at the beginning of 1934 – perhaps the result of a New Year’s resolution – and finish equally abruptly in 1939, a piece of blotting paper still sitting between the pages waiting to dry the next entry. Reading them was wonderful. Suddenly, the older man with such gravitas that I had known became a young lad doing silly things with his friends. It is really quite endearing. In the later diaries, when he’s at University, he tells of how he meets my mother, the French friend of his sister’s who is in the UK to brush up her English. Knowing how the story ends (and personally very thankful that it ends that way, allowing me as it does to be born!), it’s a treat to read “hot off the press” how their relationship unfolded. The first thing my father did was to take my mother up to his rooms for tea and cake (I was quite surprised he was allowed to do this, perhaps he smuggled her in) and they read poetry out loud. He chose to read “The Isles of Greece” by Byron.
The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.
The Scian and the Teian muse,
The hero’s harp, the lover’s lute,
Have found the fame your shores refuse:
Their place of birth alone is mute
To sounds which echo further west
Than your sires’ ‘Islands of the Blest’.
The mountains look on Marathon—
And Marathon looks on the sea;
And musing there an hour alone,
I dream’d that Greece might still be free;
For standing on the Persians’ grave,
I could not deem myself a slave.
It goes on a good deal longer but I think my readers get the picture. Definitely not a poem I would have chosen, but my father was overwhelmed with emotion, confiding to his diary that “there were tears in my eyes most of the time and I was quivering all over when I had finished.”
My father writes that my mother read a French poem, although he doesn’t report which one she chose. I’m sure it was in a romantic vein; my mother also had a wide romantic streak running through her soul.
My father’s diaries show that the Young Him imagined himself as quite the man about town. Even while building the relationship with my mother, he continued flirting outrageously with other women. In some cases, he was even moved to turn his hand to writing poems about them. As I went through his papers after his death, I came across a cache of these poems, typed up; my father was an intensive user of the typewriter, the rapid click of its keys being a constant soundtrack to my youth. In truth, the poems are not very good, but I treasure them. And at least he tried to write poetry. I have never dared, except for one light-hearted “poem” (rhyming doggerel, really) which I wrote many years ago in response to a poem my son had written at primary school – both poems hang on the wall, side by side, in our apartment.
In his fifties, my father turned back to an earlier love, that of Latin poetry; he had studied Latin and Greek at school and did Classics at University, and he had never lost his deep admiration of the Classics (an admiration he tried to instil in me with embarrassing results; I barely scraped a pass in Latin and Greek at O-levels and then escaped from these hated subjects forever). He was particularly fond of the love poems of Catullus and dedicated his spare moments in his later years to translating them. I remember him trying out one of his translations on me. I think it was of this poem, which is one of Catullus’s better known love poems (I give it in translation, although not translated by my father).
Let us live, my Lesbia, let us love,
and all the words of the old, and so moral,
may they be worth less than nothing to us!
Suns may set, and suns may rise again:
but when our brief light has set,
night is one long everlasting sleep.
Give me a thousand kisses, a hundred more,
another thousand, and another hundred,
and, when we’ve counted up the many thousands,
confuse them so as not to know them all,
so that no enemy may cast an evil eye,
by knowing that there were so many kisses.
I remember that his version had the line “Kiss me, Kate” in it somewhere. I suppose he was trying to modernise the poem, Lesbia not being a name one hears nowadays. Why Kate? Maybe it gave him a rhyme, maybe he found the double K pleasing. In any event, I smiled and murmured something noncommittal before escaping. Quite recently, I laughed out loud when on a family WhatsApp group my younger sister confessed to doing the same when my father buttonholed her to try out one of his translations on her. Where did those translations go, I wonder? I found no trace of them among his papers. Perhaps he despaired and threw them away.
I wanted to finish this post with a poem written by a son to his father, but the only one I could find which was half-way satisfying was the poem by Dylan Thomas where he is talking to his dying father. It starts:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Alas, the poem is too late for my father, the dying of the light happened twenty years ago for him. And anyway I’m not sure he would have burned and raved at the close of his day. He believed in God and an afterlife (another difference between him and me) and I’m sure he saw Death as merely a doorway to be passed through to another life.
So let me finish instead with a poem which I dedicate to my wife – my Lesbia, my Kate, my Beatrice. It is a sonnet written by Shakespeare, and it speaks of the love one has in the late autumn of our lives. More satisfying, I think, than the lush romance my father delighted in.
That time of year thou mayst in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day
As after sunset fadeth in the west;
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self, that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death-bed, whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.
My wife and I have finally made it down to the sea. It took a while; we’ve been back in Italy for three weeks. We got here just in time to witness the – very low key – official celebrations on 4th November of the end of the First World War for Italy: the Austro-Hungarian Empire collapsed a week before the German Empire did.
Among other things, a fresh wreath has been fixed to the plaque posed on the wall of the house near the village church where Francesco Solimano was born back in 1918.
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The plaque states:
HERE WAS BORN
SOLIMANO FRANCESCO
SERGEANT MAJOR IN THE ALPINE REGIMENTS
GOLD MEDAL FOR MILITARY VALOUR
SORI 1918 – RUSSIAN FRONT 1943
Italy’s “Medaglia d’Oro” is the highest award an Italian soldier can get for bravery on the field of battle. I would say that it’s equivalent to the UK’s Victoria Cross or the US’s Medal of Honor. Readers can imagine, then, that Francesco is the pride of his native village. Along with the plaque on his house, he has received that great accolade of having a village street named after him – the same street, it so happens, which our apartment is located on. A couple of years ago, while we were in the municipal building trying to understand something related to one of the local taxes we were paying, we also stumbled across a photo of Francesco hanging in the corridor.
My photo
Readers will note his hat with the feather, the typical hat that all “Alpini” – soldiers in Italy’s Alpine regiments – wear at the various get-togethers which they regularly have. This, for instance, is a get-together in Genova for the Ligurian sections of the Alpini, which Francesco would surely have attended had he lived.
If his photo is anything to go by, Francesco seems to have been a sympathetic fellow. But it wasn’t a smile or a joke that got him his Gold Medal. The official website has his official citation for the medal.
“At the command of a 45-mm mortar squad, during the retreat from the Don he showed exceptional steadfastness by keeping his team steady and efficient, and at its head he participated with legendary valor in repeated hard fighting that took place during ten days of retreat. In the course of the violent offensives, he kept his team at full efficiency by recovering abandoned weapons and ammunition, and so was able to oppose the enemy with renewed ardour and tenacious resistance and react with daring counterattacks. Wounded during a cavalry charge that overwhelmed our lines, he refused aid from the survivors, urged them to fight to the bitter end, and rather than save himself preferred to share the fate of his wounded comrades left on the frozen steppes. An admirable example of absolute dedication to duty and stoic firmness. January 17-26, 1943”
This lyrical description of personal courage skates over the overarching military disaster that the “retreat from the Don” constituted for the Italians. Let me try and describe the titanic battle which took place in late December 1942-early January 1943 between the Soviets and the Axis powers, a battle in which Francesco Solimano and his squad were but a tiny cog.
Francesco Solimano’s squad was part of the 1st Alpine Regiment, which was one of three regiments making up the 4th, or Cuneense, Alpine Division, which, together with the 2nd, Tridentina, Alpine Division and the 3rd, Julia, Alpine Division, made up the Alpine Army Corps. This in turn was one of three Army Corps making up the 8th Italian Army. In early December 1942, the 8th Army was holding a 230-km front along the River Don, north of Stalingrad. Already, attacks by the Soviets in September 1942 had shown that the line was too extended given the Army’s strength and the rather poor weaponry at its disposal. It had consequently been reinforced with German units, but most of these had been shifted southwards as the battle of Stalingrad sucked in more and more German troops. On its left (north-western) flank was the 2nd Hungarian Army, on its right (south-eastern) flank was the 3rd Romanian Army, both even weaker than the 8th Italian Army. The Alpine Corps held the 8th Army’s northernmost sector, next to the Hungarians. Here we have Italian troops moving into new positions in the winter of 1942.
On 11th December, the Soviets attacked the 8th Army, with the strategic intention of annihilating it. Naturally, it chose to attack the Army’s weakest sector, which was on the right, southern flank. Despite being outnumbered 9 to 1 by the Soviets, and facing a huge disadvantage in weaponry, the Italians managed to hold out, though at huge cost. A week later, the Soviets attacked the Romanians, who, already weakened by the battle around Stalingrad, crumbled. The 8th Army was in danger of having its flank turned. Orders were given to retreat but the Soviets now attacked the divisions at the center of the Italian line. After eleven days of desperate fighting, what remained of these divisions was surrounded and surrendered.
It was now the turn of the Alpine Army Corps, which had been relatively unaffected by the fighting in December and were still in their positions on the Don River. By early January 1943, the position of the Alpini had become critical. The Italian Divisions to their right had collapsed, but so had the Hungarian Army to their left, which the Soviets had attacked shortly after starting their attacks on the Romanians. They were ripe for encirclement. The Soviets started the attack on 14th January. They very rapidly smashed through what was left of the Hungarians on the left and a Panzerkorps, which had been thrown in to fill a gap, on the right. The Alpini started a chaotic retreat. Only the Tridentina Division was still capable of conducting combat operations; the Julia and Cuneense Divisions had been decimated in the initial Soviet attack. The Tridentina Division led the retreat, with the remains of the other two Divisions, mixed in with survivors from the German and Hungarian units, following behind. The soldiers fought their way back towards the west, with the Russians continually trying to cut off their retreat. They managed to break though a first Soviet encirclement on 20th January, then a second on 22nd January, then a third on 25th January. Finally, what was left of the Tridentina Division managed a breakthrough on 26 January at a place called Nikolayevka, and after a few more days of retreating westward made it to the safety of the German lines. Those who didn’t make it in the final breakthrough were surrounded at Valujki, some 40 km to the south of Nikolayevka, and surrendered on 27 January.
And where does that tiny cog Francesco Solimano fit into all of this? From the dates given in his citation, it looks like he led his squad back in the retreat, managing to keep them together as a fighting force, fought through several of the Soviet attempted encirclements, and fell a day before what was left of his Division finally surrendered.
Maybe Francesco was right to exhort his comrades to fight to the bitter end. Imprisonment turned out to be a fate worse than death. Some 65,000 Italian soldiers were captured in the fighting, one-quarter of all the soldiers in the 8th Army. 10,000 died on the forced marches eastward to the internment camps.
Another 44,000 died in the camps, mostly during the winter of 1943, of starvation and disease. Only 11,000 made it back to Italy after the War. As for the 150,000 who escaped encirclement, the aftermath was also pretty grim. 34,000 were wounded or frostbitten. They had lost all their weaponry. The Soviets had accomplished their objective: the 8th Army was no more. The Fascist government dissolved the Army and repatriated the survivors to Italy in March and April 1943. Appalled by their appearance and fearing a backlash from the population if the real news of what had transpired on the Russian steppes ever came out, they kept them hidden out of sight. The news filtered out anyway and helped topple the Fascist regime later that year.
Francesco and his comrades who died on those frozen steppes are not buried in nice, neat cemeteries. The Soviets probably just dug mass graves or burnt the bodies. Why should they have given an honourable burial to soldiers who had invaded their lands? And anyway, they had their own dead to bury. But the Italian government never put up a monument honouring its dead in Russia either; the whole saga quickly became enveloped in Italy’s post-War ideological conflicts between the (American-backed) Christian Democrats and the (Soviet-backed) Communists, with accusations and counter-accusations flying back and forth. And anyway, there was the embarrassing fact that the Italians had fought for the “wrong” side in the War. It was left to the survivors themselves to honour their dead, and a few monuments were put up here and there to remember those who died in Russia. Perhaps the most arresting is a monument that was erected in the 1950s in Bologna.
Francesco and his comrades have another type of monument, in the written memories of a number of survivors. Mario Rigoni Stern wrote “The Sergeant in the Snow”. He was a sergeant-major in the Tridentina Alpine Division, and was one of the lucky ones who broke out alive of the Soviet encirclement. In the book he describes the disastrous retreat from the Don.
Giulio Bedeschi wrote “A Thousand Mess Tins of Ice” and “Nikolayevka: I Was There Too”, both about that terrible retreat from the Don. He was in the “Julia” Division, one of the very few from that Division to break out alive of the Soviet encirclement.
Source
Nuto Revelli wrote “The Road of Davai” about the Italian POWs (“Davai” was what the Soviet guards shouted all the time at the prisoners on their forced marches into internment; it is Russian for “Keep moving”). Revelli was a Lieutenant in the Tridentina Division and managed to get out alive from the retreat from the Don.
All these books, and others, are perhaps the best monument to Francesco and the thousands of other Italians who suffered and died for really no good reason out there on those frozen Russian steppes. They pull back the curtain of forgetfulness and force us to remember what happened to all those young men, badly equipped, badly dressed, badly fed, sent to their fate by a bunch of sinister jokers sitting in Rome, spouting ideological nonsense and strutting on the political stage.
We’re out at last! First day post-lockdown in Italy. Like Basil Fotherington-Tomas, I was saying, “Hello clouds! Hello sky!” as I skipped (well, walked) along.
For those of my readers who are not familiar with this character, he appears in the book “Down with Skool!”, written in the 1950s, purportedly by one Nigel Molesworth, a boy in an English Prep school.
The delightful cartoons which pepper the book’s pages are by the great Ronald Searle.
Molesworth’s judgement of Fotherington-Tomas is severe: “you kno he say Hullo clouds hullo sky he is a girlie and love the scents and sounds of nature … he is uterly wet and a sissy” (Molesworth’s spelling is also quite erratic).
Well, I’m not utterly wet and a sissy (although I do admit to being a bit of a nerd), but my joy of finally being let out of my apartment is uncontainable.
Hello sky!
my photo
Hello birds! (even if they are filthy urban pigeons)
My photo
Hello tree!
My photo
Hello ancient church!
My photo
Hello canal of Milan!
my photo
Hello bridge over the canal! (even if you are a pretty ugly bridge)
my photo
It’s great to be out here and see you all again!
We now just have to hope that we don’t get too much of a spike back up in the numbers, otherwise they’ll send us once more into lockdown …
I was recently reading The Lying Stones of Marrakech, a volume of essays by one of my favorite authors, Stephen Jay Gould.
My writing style in these posts owes a great deal to his essays. If any of my readers have an interest in natural history in general and paleontology specifically, I can highly recommend his books. Tragically, he died of cancer at the age of 60.
In any event, I had just started reading an essay entitled “Of Embryos and Ancestors”, which starts by Gould quoting the phrase “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better”. He then writes that the phrase was invented by a Frenchman by the name of Émile Coué.
Coué, Gould informs us, was “a French pharmacist who made quite a stir in the pop-psych circles of his day with a theory of self-improvement through autosuggestion based on frequent repetition of this mantra”. Gould mentions in passing that the phrase in the original French reads “tous les jours, à tous les points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux”. I suddenly sat up – I was reading in bed – as if electrified.
To explain my reaction, I have to recount a little bit of the history of the French side of my family. As I have mentioned in an earlier post, my maternal grandfather contracted tuberculosis in the 1920s. This was in the days before antibiotics, so it was essentially incurable; 50% of the people diagnosed with active tuberculosis had died of it within 5 years, and it was the cause of 1 in 6 deaths in France at that time. Tuberculosis surrounded one on every side. Edvard Munch painted his sister Sophie, who died of tuberculosis at the age of 14, sick in bed (his mother also died of the disease).
Claude Monet painted his first wife, Camille, on her deathbed, killed by tuberculosis.
Literature was full of people who died of tuberculosis: Marguerite Gautier in La Dame aux Camélias, Fantine in Les Misérables, Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Coming fast on the heels of my grandfather having lost all his money – actually my grandmother’s dowry – in a failed business, his contracting tuberculosis spelled economic catastrophe. My grandmother was forced to take a job as personal secretary to a rich English woman by the name of Mrs. Green, down in Menton on the Côte d’Azur where the lady and her husband would spend the winters. Mrs. Green stipulated that my grandmother could not live with her husband, for fear that she would contract the disease and – this was the real point – pass it on to her employer. So my grandfather was forced to live hidden away in Nice, where my grandmother would visit him from time to time in secret. In the summer, when Mr. and Mrs. Green returned to England, my grandparents would come up to the house they had managed to hang on to near Mâcon. But even here my grandfather lived apart, away from the children, in a room of his own, using his own sheets, his own towel, his own napkin, even his own plate and cutlery, all in an attempt to avoid infection.
To no avail. One day, my grandmother was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Catastrophe reared its head again. Mrs. Green would fire my grandmother the moment she heard her coughing. But my grandmother was not one to give in to anything. As my mother recounted it, she began to repeat every morning, “je vais de mieux en mieux”. And by God it worked! The tuberculosis was stopped in its tracks. I had always thought that this was just one more example of my grandmother’s indomitable will overcoming yet another setback in life. But reading that phrase in French in Gould’s essay immediately persuaded me that my grandmother had actually been using Coué’s method of autosuggestion.
I was even more convinced of this when I read a bit more about Coué’s method. It was very straightforward. He said that people who wanted to get better should quickly, mechanically repeat the phrase “tous les jours, à tous les points de vue, je vais de mieux en mieux” twenty times, morning and night, while running a string with twenty knots in it through their hands. My mother’s detail that my grandmother had uttered the phrase every morning jibed well with the Coué method.
How my grandmother might have heard about the Coué method is now lost in the fog of time. Perhaps she bought one of Coué’s books, very popular at the time; his best-seller was La Maîtrise de soi-même par l’autosuggestion consciente, published in 1926.
Perhaps she read an article in the newspapers about him. Perhaps she heard the record which he made to reach as many people as possible (I’ve heard it in Wikipedia, a thin, scratchy voice from a long time ago). Perhaps one of her friends told her about it. If she did decide to use the Coué method, she never told her daughter about it; perhaps she was a little ashamed of using something that appeared akin to magic.
Of course, as a scientist Gould is dismissive of the method, seeing it only as an example of the placebo effect. I’m sure he’s right, but it – or something very like it – seems to have helped my grandmother overcome her tuberculosis. Which is just as well. My grandfather died of his in 1936. If my grandmother had also died of it, who knows what would have happened to my now-orphaned mother (and her brother). For sure she would not have met my father, so I wouldn’t be around. So thank you, placebo effect! And thank you, Monsieur Coué, if you indeed helped out here!
Back in 2011, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) came out with a report in which it said that one-third of all food grown on farms around the world goes to waste. One-third! When you think that there are still millions of people who go to bed hungry every night, that is a truly shocking statistic. And, mark you, it is an average. We in the richer countries waste about 100 kg of food per person per year, most of that perfectly good food which for one silly reason or another gets thrown away somewhere between the supermarkets and our table. This is ten times – ten times! – the amount of food wasted per person in Sub-Saharan Africa and South/South-East Asia, and there most of the wastage happens between the farm and the market because of poor post-harvest practices: once food is on the table it is not wasted.
Ever since that report came out, I have been haunted by the need not to waste food. I always was careful, fruit, I suppose, of parents who made sure that we ate everything on our plate, but now I am extreme. Everything on my plate, bar pips, stones, bones, and peels, gets eaten.
Everything. Even those silly garnishes they put on your plate in restaurants to make it look pretty.
In this post-festive season, when celebratory family dinners are the norm, when poor unfortunate avians of various types get consumed leaving behind piles of incompletely stripped bones, and when more food than is reasonable gets bought and languishes uneaten in the fridge, I am especially taken by a frenzy to recycle everything. My favourite recycling format is a sort of thick chunky soupy thingy.
So it was this year. I took one look at the bones of the chickens lying scattered on our plates and snapped into action. Out came the pot, in went the bones, split open to maximize marrow yield. In went the giblets. In went a carrot or two, a parsnip, a couple of onions, all left over from some side servings planned for the chicken. But I didn’t stop there, no sirree! In went the can of baked beans which my daughter had planned to take with her but forgot (I will never, ever voluntarily eat baked beans as a main dish). In went a small container-full of a barbecue-type sauce from a take-out meal hurriedly ordered when friends of our son arrived hungry and ready to eat. In went the stem and leaves of the broccoli and cauliflower heads that accompanied the chicken (dice the stem small and it’s perfectly edible). In went the scraggly-looking outer leaves of the Brussels sprouts, stripped off to make the sprouts look nicer. In went the rind of the Parmesan cheese, cut into bite-sized chunks (once softened, perfectly edible). In went the remains of the beaten eggs used to make breaded veal. In went pieces of the breaded veal which somehow got left over. In went the peels of tomatoes left over from making a tomato sauce. In went the dregs of several wine bottles. In went a few left-over caper berries as well as several spoonfuls of their salty, vinegary juice to give the soup a tangy taste. Make-up water was added, along with a bouillon cube or two. The back burner was turned on, the whole was left to simmer for several hours, et voilà!
I grant you that the result might not have looked three-stars, that one might be led to poke doubtfully at all those different bits and pieces bobbing around in the plate, asking what they were (my wife, God bless her, tends to do this with my recycled soups although she nobly follows me on these culinary experiments), but it was actually really most delicious, even if I say so myself.
The way I describe the ingredients going in one after the other might lead a reader to think they all went in together. But actually that’s not so. Once I start on one of these soups, they can endure for several days, eaten from and then replenished with newly generated cooking wastes or further discoveries in the further back reaches of the fridge. They will change physiognomy, colour, and taste over the several days of their life. In that sense, they belong to the noble culinary tradition of pot luck – not the modern sense of that term, where everyone brings a dish they have prepared to a communal dinner, but the old sense of the term, of having an unscheduled guest partaking in whatever might be cooking at that moment on the hob, as in this quote from Charles Dickens’s “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”:
“You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than outside; pray stop and dine.”
“You are very kind,” said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.
“Not at all,” said Mr. Grewgious; “YOU are very kind to join issue with a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck.”
I actually prefer the French term for pot luck: pot-bouille, or pot boil. This describes better what I’m doing: getting a nice big pot, throwing a bunch of stuff in it, and boiling it up with much judicious stirring. The French writer Émile Zola, thirty years Dickens’s junior, used the term pot-bouille in a figurative sense when it became the title to one of his books. In it, he described the goings-on in one of Paris’s then new apartment blocks, where various bourgeois families and their servants were thrown together and stewed in their own juices, as it were. The book was a stinging criticism of the French bourgeoisie and its hypocrisies, a feeling well caught in this cartoon from the period.
Note the flies expiring in the foul exhalations escaping from the pot. From the looks my wife sometimes gives me as I move into full gear on my recycled soup-making, she no doubt would agree with this sentiment. She looked particularly alarmed when in this latest round I wondered out loud if tea leaves could be added to one of my recycled soups. After all, according to a web-site I had just read, most of the nutrients in tea get left in the leaves, and as I recall for centuries the green tea which the Tibetans brought up from the Chinese lowlands was the only vegetable they consumed during the long winter months when they ate it as an ingredient in butter tea.
I think I’ll go easy on this one, to give her time to get used to the idea. I’ll not mention yet my plans to try recycling orange and mandarin peels into some edible dish. And I wonder what could be done with olive pips?
A week or so ago, I was in Cambodia for some official business relating to a project we are about to start there to reduce dioxin emissions. But actually, that is irrelevant to this post. What is relevant is that I was staying in a hotel room half of whose lights were blue. Why, is a mystery. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that the hotel claimed to also be a spa; perhaps people in spas like the rather cold light that blue creates. Or perhaps it had something to do with the modern furniture that graced the room; it was Nordic-looking in its design, cool, remote, and the blue light made it all that much cooler. But I’m just hazarding guesses here; perhaps blue bulbs were simply the cheapest on the market at the time the hotel was purchasing its light bulbs.
Whatever the reason, this blue light turned me blue. I only realised it when, skyping my wife, I noticed with astonishment that in the small icon which held my image I was a lovely blue hue. Basically, I looked like this fellow:
The very youngest amongst us will immediately tell us that he is a Smurf. They are wrong – well, not quite right. He is a Schtroumpf; Smurf is the Dutch translation, adopted later by the English-speaking world.
Aah, the Schtroumpfs …they are my youth! This fellow may look young, but actually I am just a few years older than him. I burst onto the scene in 1954, the Schtroumpfs burst onto the cartoon scene in 1957, invented by the Belgian cartoonist Peyo.
But here I have to clarify something. My real love was not the Schtroumpfs. It was Johan and Pirlouit, invented some years earlier by Peyo. Johan came first, hustling into the lives of little fellows like me in 1952, before I was even a gleam in my parent’s eyes, in the story Le Châtiment de Basenhau, The Punishment of Basenhau. This was the cover of the album (Johan is the young fellow dressed in ragged brown).
The details of the story are irrelevant. The important point is that Johan lived in the Middle Ages and that he was a dashing young fellow. After Le Châtiment de Basenhau came Le Maître de Roucybeuf, The Master of Roucybeuf, in 1953
and then in 1954, when my mother was heavily pregnant with me, came Le Lutin du Bois aux Roches, The Imp of Rocks’ Wood, in which Peyo introduced us to Pirlouit, who was to become Johan’s bosom buddy.
Pirlouit is the little blond-haired fellow holding the very large hammer. While Johan was the serious, Boy Scout type, straight as an arrow, Pirlouit was the joker, a hilarious guy who was always doing silly things. But when push came to shove, he was there by Johan’s side, as they fought off the assorted Medieval baddies they had to deal with. From now on, the two were to be inseparable.
Their stories of derring-do, wielding sword, shield, bow, and other assorted medieval weaponry, galloping through dark, forbidding forests – Johan on a horse, Pirlouit on a goat (he was a little person, remember), dealing with sorcerers and their potions, … these were so thrilling to that young me – I was, what? ten-eleven years old when I discovered these albums, when Peyo was already famous throughout the length and breadth of France. I whiled away many a wonderful summer afternoon at my cousins’ house, tearing my way through the collection:
La Pierre de Lune, The Moonstone
Le Serment des Vikings, The Oath of the Vikings
La Source des Dieux, The Spring of the Gods
La Fleche Noire, The Black Arrow
Le Sire de Montrésor, The Lord of Montresor
to arrive at La Flûte à Six Schtroumpfs, The Flute with Six Schtroumpfs
This is where the Schtroumpfs first made their entry onto the world stage. And this is where I start to cry.
Understand me, the Schtroumpfs were nice enough, they added a fun element to the story. But in my view they were minor characters. It was Johan and Pirlouit who were firmly centre stage.
Alas! I was in a minority. The junior readers of Spirou magazine – the stories originally came out in serialized format – wrote letters to the magazine enthusing about the little Schtroumpfs. The editors of the magazine, and Peyo himself, saw the commercial possibilities. And so Peyo took the first steps down the slippery slope. He started with minor albums of Schtroumpf stories. He graduated to major albums. He got involved in animated films. First, in Belgium. Then in the US. Then the breakfast cereal companies came knocking on the door: they wanted Schtroumpf statuettes in the Cornflake packages.
And after that the advertising firms came knocking at the door, asking to use the Schtroumpfs in various advertising campaigns. As this photo shows, the demand from advertizers continues unabated.
Peyo always said yes. And John and Pirlouit disappeared; he was too busy with the Schtroumpfs. Peyo managed one more great album, La Guerre des 7 Fontaines, the War of the 7 Fountains.
To me, it was his best, a wonderful story of Fall and Redemption. After that, he managed only a few more albums, pale copies of what had come before. The Schtroumpfs had eaten up his life. He had his first heart attack when he was 41, his last when he was 64.
And I am left with the memories of my youth, those golden afternoons in the France of the early ’60s, with medieval jousts and battles echoing faintly across the fields.
I don’t know why, but yesterday the tune of a song which my mother used to sing popped unbidden into my head. As I hummed along, I was trying to remember the words. Snatches came back but there were frustratingly large holes. I decided it was now or never: either I dredged up the words today or they would be lost to me forever. Well, my memory is shot, but there is the internet. As I have had cause to mention before, the internet really is a wonderful thing. There is a lot of rubbish, but there is also a veritable treasure trove of stuff ready to be mined, put there by devoted souls. In this case, the devoted soul turned out to be Google, for after trying out a few key words and remembered phrases of the song, I finally found a book from 1843 entitled “Chants et Chansons Populaires de la France”, which Google had scanned as part of its Google Books initiative. There, tucked in among lots and lots of songs that I had never heard of, was mine.
The authors of the book are vague about the date of the song, but I reckon from some words it uses that it was written in the sixteenth century or thereabouts. Its title is “La Vieille”, which can be loosely translated “The Old Crone”, and it is a deliciously malicious take on the foolish desire of some old people to stay young and on the power of money. In a few words, the song tells us of an eighty-year old woman who wants not only to join the young people in their dance but also to be coupled with the youngest and handsomest man there. Not surprisingly, he tells her to go away, adding that she is far too poor for him. After she intimates that she is actually very rich, our young man immediately changes his mind and calls her back to the dance. In fact, he rushes her off to a notary public to be married and no doubt to make sure that a will is prepared leaving all her wealth to him.
He then takes her back to the dance, where she dances so energetically
that she expires.
Unceremoniously, her young husband and his friends look in his dead wife’s mouth, no doubt searching for her gold teeth, but find only three teeth, “une qui branle, une qui hoche, une qui s’envole au vent”, one which moves, one which wobbles, and one which is ready to blow away on the wind. They then look in her pockets and find only three small coins: “Ah, la vieille, la vieille, la vieille, avait trompé son gallant”, the song concludes; ah, the old crone had fooled her young paramour. Anyone who is interested in the original words can find them at the end of this post (although in the interests of brevity I’ve cut the repetitions of which the song is full).
My mother loved to sing, and had a really quite beautiful voice (whereas when my father – blessed be his memory – sang, it resembled the croaking of a crow). By the time I knew my mother – that is, by the time I was old enough to judge her – she was of course a decorous middle-aged matron, but also one who had had to endure the slings and arrows of life’s misfortunes. So, apart from the hymns in Church which she delivered with gusto, the songs she sang tended to be soulful and mournful. Edith Piaf was a favourite: “Ils sont arrivés se tenant par la main, l’air émerveillé de deux chérubins”, “they arrived holding hands, with the look of wonder of two cherubs”. But then they were found dead, together, in the hotel room they had rented to make love for the last time. There was another, a haunting lament, about a wife waiting for her husband knight to return from the wars so that she can announce to him that she is with child. He comes back, but only to die in the same bed where the child was conceived, of his wounds. There was also “A la claire fontaine”, which is a somewhat trite song about lost love, but has a beautifully quiet melody.
But when my mother sang “La Vieille”, a mischievous glint would come into her eye and I could see the young, cheeky girl which, in the autobiography that she wrote for us children, she confessed to having once been. The same glint would come into her eye whenever she told droll stories of her family. There were the two brothers, for instance, great-uncles, who were “of the left”, and fervent anticlericals (we are talking of the great anticlerical moment in French history during the late 19th Century). Every Good Friday, they would take a table at the window of a restaurant close by the cathedral and make sure to be eating heartily and mightily when the poor souls came out of Church hungry from their Lenten fasting. One of these same brothers indicated in his will that when he died he wished to be buried in a simple pine coffin like a man of the people. But his daughters, whom I have mentioned before, were having none of that. They found their father embarrassing enough in life, they were not going to be embarrassed by him in death in front of their bourgeois friends. He was buried in a sumptuous coffin, and with a church ceremony to boot. Then there was the uncle, Oncle Jacques, who had been a dashing rake in his youth. Why, he had even been a daredevil pilot, this at a time when it was lucky if planes stayed together in the air. A somewhat older woman, Renée, had fallen hard for him, and in a standard tactic announced that she was pregnant, a pregnancy which mysteriously vanished when he did the Right Thing and married her. In the event, the marriage held and they did eventually have children. But Tante Renée shed many a bitter tear during the marriage over Oncle Jacque’s serial infidelities. This last set of stories were delivered the day before Oncle Jacques and Tante Renée came to make one of their annual visits to my grandmother, using the little train which I’ve mentioned in an earlier post. I still have a memory of the pair, arriving in the garden to effusive welcomes after the walk up the long alleyway from the train station. Tante Renée was hideously made up with pink powder, bright red lipstick, and rinsed hair, and as she bent over to give me a peck on the cheek I was drowned in the overpowering scent of a very sweet perfume. Oncle Jacques, on the other hand, stood there looking distinguished in his old age and with a mischievous glint in his eye.
Ah, memories, memories. Come, let’s finish with the refrain from another old French song, this one about the capture of an English ship by a smaller French ship in the early 1800’s during the Napoleonic wars:
Buvons un coup, buvons en deux
À la santé des amoureux
À la santé du Roi de France
Et MERDE au Roi d’Angleterre
Qui nous a déclaré la guerre.
Let’s drink a cup, let’s drink two
To the health of all lovers
To the health of the King of France
And BUGGER the King of England
Who went and declared war on us.
As I mentioned in the postscript to my previous posting, I was in Budapest these last few days. One evening, in search of a restaurant, I came across this fountain:
As the pictures suggest, the fountain consists of a sheet of water moving as if it were the page of a book being turned. I rather like that idea. I didn’t notice it at the time, but I have since discovered that two venerable Hungarian universities, Eötvös Loránd University and Péter Pázmány Catholic University, both of whose foundations reach back to the 1600’s, are located across the street from the fountain. I would guess that the fountain is linked to them: aren’t Universities places which revere books? Maybe the fountain is telling us that books water our intellectual life. But that’s a bit too fanciful, perhaps.
My curiosity piqued, I started looking around for pictures of other sculptures where books play the lead role. And of course someone has already helpfully put together a gallery of such photos! It’s on a site called Book Riot, which promotes reading of book reading and writing about them, my kind of site. I have shamelessly lifted a number of their photos to put here. Most of them have obvious connections to book-related institutions.
Stacking books is clearly a popular design motif. Here’s a fairly straightforward stack in a sculpture in front of the Nashville public library
Here is another, a little bit more untidy and making the connection between books and children (which perhaps explains the untidiness of the stacking?). It adorns the public library in Coshocton, which is (and I had to look this up on Google Maps) in Ohio. The sculpture is composed of 100 books, each one representing one year of the library’s service to the community.
Here is another stack of books, this time from Berlin.
This particular sculpture no longer exists, alas. It was part of a set of six sculptures celebrating the football World Cup of 2006. After a few months, they were taken away, who knows where to. This particular sculpture, set up in Bebelplatz opposite Humboldt University, celebrated Johannes Gutenberg who invented the modern letterpress in the German city of Mainz in around 1450.
The stacking motif continues with this sculpture, although a spiraling twist has been given to the whole.
The sculpture is in front of Beijing’s Xinhua bookstore, although I must confess to never having noticed it.
Here, the stacking has turned into a triumphal arch, located in Atlanta, at Georgia State University.
This is a very obviously symbolic statue. It was created by the sculpture students at the University and is entitled “No Goal Is Too High If We Climb With Care And Confidence”. A visual metaphor dear to the hearts of many a University Professor, I’m sure.
This one, from Charlotte North Carolina, is quite different. Like the sculpture in Coshocton, it makes a connection between books and children, but here it becomes equivalent to playground equipment, showing books as something for children to play with, on, in.
As for Kansas City library, it dispenses with sculptures altogether and has just built the books right into its façade
Another approach to book-sculptures is to consider the book a brick to be used to build structures. The Czech-Slovak artist Matej Kren has created a number of such structures, a couple of which I have photos for. The first is in the Prague municipal library
I’ve not seen it, but I read that if you look inside you get the impression of an infinite tower. It seems that Kren has made clever use of mirrors to get this optical effect.
I don’t know where the structures in these other two photos are to be found
The last could easily be an old farm house in southern Europe somewhere. The following site shows a couple more such structures made with books by Kren and other artists.
This last photo brings me to another structure made with books, but of an altogether darker tenor. It is the Holocaust memorial in Judenplatz, Vienna, a memorial to the more than 65,000 Austrian Jews killed by the Nazis before and during World War II. On my way back from Budapest to Beijing through Vienna, and with the book fountain still fresh in my mind, I decided on the spur of the moment to quickly revisit the memorial before boarding the bus for the airport.
From far away, it looks like one of those squat, windowless blockhouses which dotted the battlefields of World War II. But when you get closer, you see something else.
You see that the walls of this blockhouse are made of shelves of books. But the books are facing outwards rather than inwards as would normally be the case on a shelf. So unlike the sculpture pictured above in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, we know neither the author nor the title of any of the books. The shelves of the memorial simply appear to hold endless copies of the same book, which can stand for the vast array of faceless victims. The choice of books as the design motif perhaps alludes to the idea of the Jews being a “People of the Book”. Fittingly, another name for this memorial is the Nameless Library. Around the edges of the structure are carved the names of the camps where Austrian Jews died
At the other end of Judenplatz is a statue of the writer Lessing, staring so it seems at the Holocaust memorial.
This is the same Lessing whose name appears on one of the spines of the sculpted stack of books in Berlin’s Bebelplatz, a photo of which I included earlier. A connection which allows me to segue into my next memorial, in that same Bebelplatz, a memorial to the campaign of book burnings, orchestrated by the German Student Union, which took place there and in 34 other German university towns in May 1933, shortly after the Nazis had taken power. The purpose was to ceremonially burn books by classical liberal, anarchist, socialist, pacifist, communist, Jewish, and other German and non-German authors whose writings were viewed as subversive to the new regime. Many came from Humboldt University’s libraries. The students first marched in torchlight parades “against the un-German spirit”. Some 40,000 people then gathered in Bebelplatz to hear Joseph Goebbels deliver a fiery address:
“The era of extreme Jewish intellectualism is now at an end. The breakthrough of the German revolution has again cleared the way on the German path…The future German man will not just be a man of books, but a man of character. It is to this end that we want to educate you. As a young person, to already have the courage to face the pitiless glare, to overcome the fear of death, and to regain respect for death – this is the task of this young generation. And thus you do well in this midnight hour to commit to the flames the evil spirit of the past. This is a strong, great and symbolic deed – a deed which should document the following for the world to know – Here the intellectual foundation of the November Republic is sinking to the ground, but from this wreckage the phoenix of a new spirit will triumphantly rise.
Then the students joyfully threw the books onto the pyre, with band-playing, songs, “fire oaths”, and incantations.
In Berlin, some 20,000 books were burned. Looking back at the stack of books which make up the sculpture put in this same square 83 years later, Heinrich Heine’s books were burned, as were those of Anna Seghers, Karl Marx, Heinrich Mann, and Bertolt Brecht. In all, the works of some 60 German authors and 25 non-German authors were consigned to the flames.
The memorial to this shameful episode consists simply of a glass plate set into the square’s cobble stones, below which are visible empty bookcases, enough of them to hold the total of the 20,000 burned books.
Next to it is a plaque, with a line from Heinrich Heine’s 1821 play Almansor: “That was only a prelude; where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people.” Heine was referring to the burning of the Muslim Quran by the Christian Inquisition in Spain. But looking back at the Holocaust memorial in Vienna’s Judenplatz, how prescient is that line! And the book burnings haven’t stopped, as a Wikipedia article eloquently shows.
the heart thrills 
