TAKING TENNESSEE TO THE COAST
Whatever charms it may hold for others, Tennessee Williams strongly disliked St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent much of his early life. He was estranged from his father as a child and his mother as an adult. Despite his express request, verbally and in writing, that he be buried at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, where the poet Hart Crane committed suicide by drowning, his brother had his body interred in a cemetery in St. Louis, next to their mother.
He’d have loved its audacity:
the poetry of the idea
and the exuberance
of the execution.
It took the tight-knit group
of daring strangers,
(whose kindness, they pledged,
he would be able to depend upon)
a long while to plan,
over suitably liquid lunches
and post-theatre dinners.
They think of themselves
as a modern, American version of
the French Resistance:
in their case the French Quarter,
rising up, not against the Germans
but the unjustified imprisonment
of his body in the earth of a town
he’d spent his adult life
escaping from -
tunnelling out not with
an improvised tool, but
with his typewriter.
These résistants
are determined to liberate
him, to let him rest,
as he’d always intended and
often stated,
as close as possible
to the undersea grave
of his fellow poet Hart Crane.
And so, having taken Tennessee
from the ground before dawn,
they speed in the air
(the private plane a modern version
of Medici patronage,
albeit to a deceased artist)
all the way to the coast.
The yacht stands ready at the quay,
the crew, chosen for their looks,
a tableau vivant of Cocteau’s sailors,
welcome the group on board,
before the skipper gives the order
to sail.
On a calm sea surface,
under a blazing blue sky
the spot is reached,
‘We Have Not Long To Love’
recited, tears shed,
smiles shared,
his coffin, adorned
with a flag bearing
not a national symbol
but quotes from his plays
and lines from his verse,
is pushed over the side
to the sound of cheers -
whoops of pleasure
such as might greet
the releasing
of a captive dolphin
back into the ocean.
The coffin,
embracing the metaphor,
bobs for a moment on the surface,
as if thanking them,
then joyfully slips beneath the
waves, the wild waters that
Tennessee had always loved
and where, at last,
he can leave behind the restlessness
of endless hotel rooms,
cruise liner cabins,
and an unwanted tomb,
to swim in the depths
of the eternal sea.
Swimming a length of the local pool in Brussels,
aged fourteen,
I don’t so much slice through the water as
crash through the chlorine,
a thrashing style that,
were I to replicate it in the Caribbean,
would attract the attention of any passing shark,
whose nerve endings would tell it
that a large wounded fish was flailing
in its death throes, so hurry up and
help it into eternity
before anyone else gets there first.
Fortunately I’m in Belgium
rather than the Bahamas,
so my movements (and I am
at least moving forward,
and on the surface,
however clumsily)
attract, instead, the
entirely benign interest of
a good-looking undergraduate,
working this summer holiday
as a lifeguard.
Leaving his chair,
he comes to the side of the pool,
crouches down and in
a kindly way
places his beautiful face as close to mine
as he can safely manage
without falling in,
so I can hear him over
the general background noise
as he asks me:
‘Tu sais nager?’
‘Oui!’ I reply, trying to keep
the pool out of my mouth as I do so.
And, indeed, I could, but
over the years, as I have moved, often
inelegantly and erratically
through the waters of life,
I’ve sometimes thought of his
concern and how, if he’d seen
my journey from afar,
as a celestial lifeguard might,
he would several times have leant down
from the heavens and asked, solicitously,
‘Tu sais nager?’
He wakes up every morning first;
each day it’s just the same
before his eyes are opened,
he wants to speak her name,
to softly stroke her lustrous hair.
But it isn’t she who’s lying there,
his long-lost lover, tousled, bare.
For this is now, he’s middle aged
and ‘settled’, ‘safe’, adequately waged,
with a thicker waist, lines on his face
and a different woman, who he wed,
shares the sexless marriage bed,
the usurper of his true love’s place.
He gets up, dons his dressing gown
puts on his slippers, then heads down,
to prepare the frugal breakfast tray.
The ritual is the same each day.
And as the kettle starts to boil
he smells her cooking, olive oil,
exotic dishes she produced
when - as with sex - she introduced
his teenage self, gap-yeared away
to Italy, and heard her say,
between their kisses: I love you! I do!
English boy, do you love me too?
Three months it lasted. She said she’d write
but didn’t, nor phoned; now every night
they’re on the beach, or in her bed,
and after sex she lays her head
upon his chest - then his heart breaks
at realising, when he wakes,
it’ll never be, what he wants most,
and so he butters Mary’s toast
then climbs the stairs, gives her the tray,
and starts another half-lived day.
Paris, 1961. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, prepares to depart for America with her husband.
Seventy pieces, this time.
A few more than last, but she’s got a rival, now.
The Kennedy wife.
Presidents, as husbands, trump
ex-kings,
especially one in exile for
twenty-five years.
And the woman speaks French, too.
Still, she thinks, as the pugs scamper
round her feet,
while she clips the heavily-jewelled bracelet
to her increasingly thin wrist,
she can rise to the challenge.
The cars are ready
on the gravel in front of the house.
The gates stand open
to the Bois de Boulogne.
It’s a longish drive ahead,
with David wittering inanely beside her,
but she can almost taste
the sea-salt in the air,
feel the deep carpets of their
suite on the Queen Mary.
The servants start carrying
the luggage down
to the hall.
All those cases
and hat boxes,
each monogrammed with their
entwined initials
and capped with a crown.
The one he gave up for her.
How she despised him for that.
Using its loss to imprison her
by his side forever.
For how can she throw him over,
now?
So she stays with him,
returning each year to
the States not as Queen,
but as Duchess.
A socialite.
A witty and wealthy has-been.
Travel breaks the monotony,
in a way,
and the sea is a refuge,
a relaxant,
something she can, legitimately,
spend hours watching
- ‘For my health, David,
you know what the doctor said’ -
thus avoiding the eternal
need to keep the Duke
occupied, attended and amused.
Christ! She’d like to throw
all seventy pieces over the side
(well, sixty-eight. She’d keep the jewel boxes)
and him with them,
then start again.
A dream. Impossible.
It’s a life sentence.
For his life, anyway.
The man smokes like a chimney.
He’s bound to go first.
And when it’s her turn,
she smiles,
she’ll write in her will
that, all that royal precedence crap
cast aside,
instead of a coffin
she’ll be buried in
one of the trunks
the liner carries across
the Atlantic each year.
If she’s got to live in
this manner, she’ll die in it too,
passing over to
Paradise,
in a final display
of dry humour,
not in English oak
but Louis Vuitton.
Border control.
Always stressful.
Queues. Heat.
Does the official look officious?
Will a smile be responded to?
Positively?
Or will I seem to be trying too hard?
Suspiciously hard?
Why am I asking myself all these questions?
Wait and see.
‘The purpose of your visit?’
‘I’m here to promote a book.’
‘Whose?’
‘Mine.’
‘What’s it about?’
A hint of interest, here.
I’m making a change
from the businessmen.
And the students.
Good.
‘Life.’
His eyes narrow.
A smartass, he thinks.
Ice seems to frost the
bullet-proof glass window,
behind which he sits.
‘Well, aspects of it…’
I speak quickly, aware of
how the lighthearted reply
ran smack into the window, then
slid to the floor.
‘It’s poetry. A lot of it’s
about travel, actually.’
Actually. How English.
He knows I am, of course,
from the passport, but he
seems to like the confirmation.
I kick myself for not wearing
a tie. Or a hat.
A touch of the Edwardian
would have underlined the point.
Rendered me harmless.
Got me through quicker.
Will I get through?
‘You enjoy travel?’
The ice has cracks in it.
‘Yes. Especially here.
So much to see!’
The ice breaks. Suddenly.
He smiles.
Looks ten years younger.
A person, not a uniform.
‘Glad to hear it. Have a good day.’
The passport is returned,
my arrival is allowed and,
fed by the interchange,
a new poem forms…
A E Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad, was Professor of Latin at London and then Cambridge Universities. A seemingly dry old stick, despite his wildly romantic poems about handsome athletic youths (surely a clue to his real personality for anyone who thought for two minutes about it), he had a very Edwardian penchant for holidays in Italy, where many an English gentleman made a beeline for sexually available Venetian gondoliers. I like to think Housman did, too.
The black boat rocks gently as Housman gets in -
the gondolier offers his hand.
A civilised start to an hour of sin,
once they’re both out of sight from the land.
It's comfier, true, at the station hotel,
but delicious to do it this way!
The waves join the rhythm with gusto as well,
while the boy gives him pleasure for pay.
He smiles at the thought of his students at home,
what they’d make of him here having fun -
an alien concept to his dusty tomes.
They’d assume he’d stay out of the sun.
But it’s warmth that he worships as well as young men,
with their muscles, white teeth and strong parts,
which is why he’s in Venice again and again
yet ignoring the city’s fine arts.
Yes, churches are holy and ancient and fine
while canals are simply sublime.
But the Professor’s on holiday, south of the Alps
and love conquers all every time.
At the end of the month he will pack up his case
and return by steam train, then the ferry.
But for now, in the sun, in this marvellous place,
he’ll be damned if he doesn’t make merry!
I wrote this during a recent visit to Paris, having a glass of rosé on a boat/bar on the Seine. I was inspired by a hoarding on the opposite side of the river and the line of trees, in their full summer greenery, their backs towards it, facing me across the water. As I wrote it, the two nearest seats to me were, by a strange synchronicity, taken by a pair of Chinese men.
A line of trees, like stately Dowagers sitting out a dance.
Except that, rather than watching life take place before them,
as a new generation waltz and flirt,
their firm young faces touching,
these leafy ladies prefer - for historical reasons -
to turn their backs on Paris,
avoiding the outrages that a changing world has
flung across the pavements, cobbles and courtyards,
palaces and fashion houses behind them.
Instead, determinedly aloof,
they keep their well-bred gaze
on the fast-flowing,
yet comfortingly changeless,
river Seine.
How refreshing,
their branches nod in sisterly agreement,
to see the waters of La France profonde
move so quickly, with such purpose,
towards the embrace of the sea.
So much more restful
than contemplating
the events behind them,
from German Occupation
to rioting students in ’68;
the decline in manners and
unrecognisable dress codes,
or the petrol fumes above which they
hold their highest branches,
rather as women
would lift their skirts while they crossed
the dung-spattered roads
before the first cars pushed
horses off the streets and
into the history books.
Yes, their rustling confirms,
this way they can ignore
that other stream - of men,
machines and all that goes
with an increasingly crazed dance
through the centuries.
True, this means they miss
out on the signs of change,
the portents of what is about
to come.
A little price to pay,
they believe, smiling as the
waves from a tourist
boat's wake wash
against the stone of
le port des Saints-Pères.
Meanwhile, behind them,
on the imposing stone facade
of a wing of the Louvre,
towering elegantly above
the Quai François Mitterand,
workmen have erected a huge
canvas hoarding.
Presumably an advertisement of sort,
it is really more of a statement -
like the coat of arms on a banner,
announcing the power and prestige
of its bearer.
Showing a picture
of a futuristic-looking city,
it simply announces, in a
a very modern mix of English and French -
Fengxian: New City Shanghai Chine.
The river flows.
They watch.
The world turns Eastwards.
“Darling, can I be honest?”
Of course you can, dear.
You must be.
You will be.
Though honest does not do justice
to the judgment that
is an integral part
of your inability
to spare me
a home truth.
This is inevitably delivered
when I least expect
and am in no position
to reply, let alone riposte -
as when I lie, sweaty and disadvantaged,
using the duvet as a fluffy shield
against the reprimand that
rattles past your perfect white teeth.
(Yes, mine are indeed far from pearly.
Thanks for reminding me, in that
very honest way).
Darling, can I be honest?
Oh, no. Silly me.
That might hurt your feelings.
The Hotel d’Alsace, where Oscar Wilde died, penniless, in November 1900, was, in his day, distinctly cheap and badly furnished - hence his well-known quip: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’ Now a five star establishment simply called L’Hotel, one can hire the room where he lived at the end of his life and where his body was photographed on his deathbed. I stayed here not long after seeing Rupert Everett’s wonderful film (The Happy Prince) about Wilde’s last years, his exile in Italy and France and his death in this very room.
L’Hotel, Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris
Peacocks on the wall,
in a frieze of fin de siècle green.
How very apt.
The 19th century’s best-known dandy
would approve of the latest decor
of his final home.
His presence and his fame are remembered,
but not trumpeted.
A photograph or two of him in his prime,
a cutting of the death notice
from a newspaper.
A contemporary caricature,
unsure whether
to mock or reflect a grudging
admiration for its subject.
A framed bill on the wall,
reminder of a death
beyond his means.
And yet, let it be noted,
the manager not only wrote in
a beautiful hand, but the commercial necessity
of its message is expressed
in phrases of exquisite politeness
and respect.
He was also one of the
mourners at the funeral
of his most famous customer,
who died, here,
in the room where I’m shown
how to adjust the air conditioning,
where to locate the safe
and how delightful is the
private terrace outside the
French windows.
These seem to belong in a play,
but one with a lighter tone and happier ending
than that of Oscar Wilde’s last years.
His grave, in Père Lachaise,
was at risk of ruin. Not from
the hate its resident received in life,
but, in the sort of irony he loved to play with
during dinner parties, or express through
his characters on stage,
the damage here is done by love.
For the endless kisses,
the lipstick marks of affectionate greeting,
corroded Epstein’s stone sphinx tomb.
Ironic, yet appropriate, for
it was love that brought
him crashing down from Chelsea to
Reading, and led,
via a crumbling Neapolitan palazzo
and the Left Bank’s Hotel d’Alsace,
to this final resting place,
among 19th century worthies,
20th century singers and rock stars,
in Europe’s most famous cemetery.
Now, a glass box prevents the
lips from harming, yet records their
presence and accepts their simple yet
sensual tribute.
Those wishing to pay more intimate regards
to a fallen hero can, however,
for the price of a couple of hours with
an upmarket rent boy
(a measurement Oscar would have endorsed!)
check in at L’Hotel, in room 16,
and be the latest in a long line,
from the son of a Marquess to
telegraph boys,
to spend the night
in Oscar Wilde’s bedroom.
You fell asleep
on your back:
a sign of exhaustion -
a state that is
entirely self-centred.
Yet your posture
was also one of
groggy and gentle generosity:
an invitation for me to
cuddle you,
to continue
the lullaby of stroking
your chest
until the rhythm
took its effect
and I joined you
in unconsciousness.
I soundlessly accepted the offer
until I slept -
enjoying your shape,
your smoothness,
your barely perceptible
scent: a faint
perfume generated not by
a parfumier’s flowers,
but by the warmth of your skin.
The Italian aristocrat, one of the richest and most elegantly flamboyant patrons of the arts of the early 20th century, owned the Venetian palace now home to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Her money long since gone after years of extravagance, she died in 1957, in a small flat in London, and was buried a few minutes' walk from Earl’s Court tube station.
Her unique style, immortalised in numerous portraits, has continued to inspire fashion designers decades after her death, including John Galliano’s 1998 collection for Christian Dior and, more recently, Alexander McQueen, as well as Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel…
The Marchesa’s hearse is
passing through
the Knightsbridge streets,
watched by
moneyed matrons
for whom each new wrinkle,
sag, or sprinkling
of cellulite is the latest of
Death’s heralds
to give notice
of their mortality.
She senses their shudders
at the sight of her coffin,
feeling a brief regret
at the contrast between today’s
resentful reaction
and the (sometimes scandalised)
admiration that greeted
her appearance in her prime,
strolling down the most
fashionable streets and squares
of Venice, Paris and Rome,
kohled eyes blazing
beneath her flame-red hair,
a pair of cheetahs on a leash
clearing a path before her
as she paraded the latest
instalment in the artwork
that was her life.
A life of portraits by Boldini
and Augustus John,
photographs by Man Ray
and de Meyer,
dresses by Fortuny, Bakst and Worth,
dinners with Diaghilev
while writing him yet another cheque
for the Ballets Russes;
of parties whose extravagance
exhausted one of the
greatest fortunes in Europe,
until, a few fur coats
her only mementos
of what had been,
she ends her days
in a glorified bedsit
behind Harrods.
From there she is taken,
accompanied by mourners
who include her favourite
Venetian gondolier,
to her final rest, not in
San Michele or Père Lachaise,
but the spectacularly
inappropriate, bourgeois calm
of a grave underneath
a mis-spelt urn
in Brompton Cemetery,
whose day-time tedium
is disturbed, as darkness falls,
and to her amusement,
by the sexually-charged
choreography not of
Nijinsky's faun but of
leather-clad men rounding off
an evening in the gay bars
of Earl's Court…
Life is a battle.
Not necessarily set-piece Agincourts
(though they erupt now and then,
in a blizzard of metaphorical archery)
but in a succession of skirmishes:
spats at the office,
stroppy shop assistants,
and the jostler on the tube.
The difficulty is not in
fighting,
but in being prepared to do so -
every day.
For it is not your overall strategy
that lets you down,
but each casual carelessness,
an absence of adrenaline
and the ignoring of those few signs
that an otherwise unhelpful
universe
sends as a warning.
Just as peace can only be preserved
by a willingness to wage war,
so our safety now relies
on our awareness of
the potential
awfulness of the age.
As Hamlet said,
(though look what happened to him)
‘The readiness is all’.
The crack of leaves,
the smell of smoke,
the mist that forms at edge of eye;
the sense that winter won't be long,
the caw of rook - no happy song.
The overcoats of passers-by,
the clubmen snug with pots of tea
and toast with tangy anchovy...
the London Library's windows blaze
with light to mark the shortened days.
The summer's over, autumn's here;
the signals are the same each year -
and I come, scarfed, to smell and stare
at bonfires in St James's Square.
Lord Alfred Douglas (1870 to 1945), nicknamed Bosie, lived, in later life, in Hove. Here he is taking a winter walk along the seashore towards Brighton.
Ironic, he thinks
as he raises his collar
against the cold, his
shoes crunching on
the beach’s pebbles,
that he should end his
days on the Sussex coast,
rather than the Lido in Venice
or a hotel in Dieppe.
Oscar’s end was pitiful
but at least it was in Paris,
and with an audience.
He, however, finds himself
a lodger in a seaside town
past its best, stucco peeling,
in an England that’s
bankrupt and rationed,
his life a mere footnote
to that of his long-dead
lover - to whom his
one immortal phrase,
‘I am the Love that dare not
speak its name’
is invariably misattributed.
In his overcoat pocket
is a letter from a young poet,
an Oxford undergraduate who
has, to Bosie’s astonishment,
read and enjoyed his verse.
Could he look at a sample of his
own, enclosed, and give him some advice?
Advice? He’d had a similar letter once,
from a teenage schoolboy
called Betjeman -
a foreign name, yet the
lad, precociously talented,
seemed to have a very
English sensibility.
He’d written back, encouraging
him to develop his youthful
experiments, polish his skill.
Youth!
The very word takes him back
to the 1890s, to the beauty
that he basked in every morning
in his shaving mirror.
These days the reflection is
closer to Oscar’s horror-story
portrait in the attic:
every misdeed,
each unkindness,
all past rages,
carved on the old man’s face
that he’s been punished with.
He has no option but to
accept this delayed vengeance
for his teens and twenties,
but he can at least
hand on the torch,
the driving need to write:
the one thing
(apart from the love of a genius,
which must surely reflect some worth?)
that might redeem him.
The thought brings a smile
of satisfaction to his thin,
pale lips, while his back
straightens and his slumped
shoulders flex, defying
the chill of the sea breeze.
The pressure, as he turns,
is now behind him, harnessed
instead of fought against
as he heads back towards
the house, in his mind already
seated at the writing desk
having read the poems,
composing the letter
that he’ll send
as one poet to another,
the winter sunshine
turning his iron-grey hair
gold again, the years
slipping from his face,
his lips once more red
and sensuous, as if eager
for a more exciting tongue
than his own to part them -
transported from Hove
back to Oxford,
rescued from life by art.
MENU
Swimming a length of the local pool in Brussels,
aged fourteen,
I don’t so much slice through the water as
crash through the chlorine,
a thrashing style that,
were I to replicate it in the Caribbean,
would attract the attention of any passing shark,
whose nerve endings would tell it
that a large wounded fish was flailing
in its death throes, so hurry up and
help it into eternity
before anyone else gets there first.
Fortunately I’m in Belgium
rather than the Bahamas,
so my movements (and I am
at least moving forward,
and on the surface,
however clumsily)
attract, instead, the
entirely benign interest of
a good-looking undergraduate,
working this summer holiday
as a lifeguard.
Leaving his chair,
he comes to the side of the pool,
crouches down and in
a kindly way
places his beautiful face as close to mine
as he can safely manage
without falling in,
so I can hear him over
the general background noise
as he asks me:
‘Tu sais nager?’
‘Oui!’ I reply, trying to keep
the pool out of my mouth as I do so.
And, indeed, I could, but
over the years, as I have moved, often
inelegantly and erratically
through the waters of life,
I’ve sometimes thought of his
concern and how, if he’d seen
my journey from afar,
as a celestial lifeguard might,
he would several times have leant down
from the heavens and asked, solicitously,
‘Tu sais nager?’
Whatever charms it may hold for others, Tennessee Williams strongly disliked St. Louis, Missouri, where he spent much of his early life. He was estranged from his father as a child and his mother as an adult. Despite his express request, verbally and in writing, that he be buried at sea, in the Gulf of Mexico, where the poet Hart Crane committed suicide by drowning, his brother had his body interred in a cemetery in St. Louis, next to their mother.
He’d have loved its audacity:
the poetry of the idea
and the exuberance
of the execution.
It took the tight-knit group
of daring strangers,
(whose kindness, they pledged,
he would be able to depend upon)
a long while to plan,
over suitably liquid lunches
and post-theatre dinners.
They think of themselves
as a modern, American version of
the French Resistance:
in their case the French Quarter,
rising up, not against the Germans
but the unjustified imprisonment
of his body in the earth of a town
he’d spent his adult life
escaping from -
tunnelling out not with
an improvised tool, but
with his typewriter.
These résistants
are determined to liberate
him, to let him rest,
as he’d always intended and
often stated,
as close as possible
to the undersea grave
of his fellow poet Hart Crane.
And so, having taken Tennessee
from the ground before dawn,
they speed in the air
(the private plane a modern version
of Medici patronage,
albeit to a deceased artist)
all the way to the coast.
The yacht stands ready at the quay,
the crew, chosen for their looks,
a tableau vivant of Cocteau’s sailors,
welcome the group on board,
before the skipper gives the order
to sail.
On a calm sea surface,
under a blazing blue sky
the spot is reached,
‘We Have Not Long To Love’
recited, tears shed,
smiles shared,
his coffin, adorned
with a flag bearing
not a national symbol
but quotes from his plays
and lines from his verse,
is pushed over the side
to the sound of cheers -
whoops of pleasure
such as might greet
the releasing
of a captive dolphin
back into the ocean.
The coffin,
embracing the metaphor,
bobs for a moment on the surface,
as if thanking them,
then joyfully slips beneath the
waves, the wild waters that
Tennessee had always loved
and where, at last,
he can leave behind the restlessness
of endless hotel rooms,
cruise liner cabins,
and an unwanted tomb,
to swim in the depths
of the eternal sea.
Paris, 1961. Wallis, Duchess of Windsor, prepares to depart for America with her husband.
Seventy pieces, this time.
A few more than last, but she’s got a rival, now.
The Kennedy wife.
Presidents, as husbands, trump
ex-kings,
especially one in exile for
twenty-five years.
And the woman speaks French, too.
Still, she thinks, as the pugs scamper
round her feet,
while she clips the heavily-jewelled bracelet
to her increasingly thin wrist,
she can rise to the challenge.
The cars are ready
on the gravel in front of the house.
The gates stand open
to the Bois de Boulogne.
It’s a longish drive ahead,
with David wittering inanely beside her,
but she can almost taste
the sea-salt in the air,
feel the deep carpets of their
suite on the Queen Mary.
The servants start carrying
the luggage down
to the hall.
All those cases
and hat boxes,
each monogrammed with their
entwined initials
and capped with a crown.
The one he gave up for her.
How she despised him for that.
Using its loss to imprison her
by his side forever.
For how can she throw him over,
now?
So she stays with him,
returning each year to
the States not as Queen,
but as Duchess.
A socialite.
A witty and wealthy has-been.
Travel breaks the monotony,
in a way,
and the sea is a refuge,
a relaxant,
something she can, legitimately,
spend hours watching
- ‘For my health, David,
you know what the doctor said’ -
thus avoiding the eternal
need to keep the Duke
occupied, attended and amused.
Christ! She’d like to throw
all seventy pieces over the side
(well, sixty-eight. She’d keep the jewel boxes)
and him with them,
then start again.
A dream. Impossible.
It’s a life sentence.
For his life, anyway.
The man smokes like a chimney.
He’s bound to go first.
And when it’s her turn,
she smiles,
she’ll write in her will
that, all that royal precedence crap
cast aside,
instead of a coffin
she’ll be buried in
one of the trunks
the liner carries across
the Atlantic each year.
If she’s got to live in
this manner, she’ll die in it too,
passing over to
Paradise,
in a final display
of dry humour,
not in English oak
but Louis Vuitton.
Border control.
Always stressful.
Queues. Heat.
Does the official look officious?
Will a smile be responded to?
Positively?
Or will I seem to be trying too hard?
Suspiciously hard?
Why am I asking myself all these questions?
Wait and see.
‘The purpose of your visit?’
‘I’m here to promote a book.’
‘Whose?’
‘Mine.’
‘What’s it about?’
A hint of interest, here.
I’m making a change
from the businessmen.
And the students.
Good.
‘Life.’
His eyes narrow.
A smartass, he thinks.
Ice seems to frost the
bullet-proof glass window,
behind which he sits.
‘Well, aspects of it…’
I speak quickly, aware of
how the lighthearted reply
ran smack into the window, then
slid to the floor.
‘It’s poetry. A lot of it’s
about travel, actually.’
Actually. How English.
He knows I am, of course,
from the passport, but he
seems to like the confirmation.
I kick myself for not wearing
a tie. Or a hat.
A touch of the Edwardian
would have underlined the point.
Rendered me harmless.
Got me through quicker.
Will I get through?
‘You enjoy travel?’
The ice has cracks in it.
‘Yes. Especially here.
So much to see!’
The ice breaks. Suddenly.
He smiles.
Looks ten years younger.
A person, not a uniform.
‘Glad to hear it. Have a good day.’
The passport is returned,
my arrival is allowed and,
fed by the interchange,
a new poem forms…
HOUSMAN'S HOLIDAYS
A E Housman, author of A Shropshire Lad, was Professor of Latin at London and then Cambridge Universities. A seemingly dry old stick, despite his wildly romantic poems about handsome athletic youths (surely a clue to his real personality for anyone who thought for two minutes about it), he had a very Edwardian penchant for holidays in Italy, where many an English gentleman made a beeline for sexually available Venetian gondoliers. I like to think Housman did, too.
The black boat rocks gently as Housman gets in -
the gondolier offers his hand.
A civilised start to an hour of sin,
once they’re both out of sight from the land.
It's comfier, true, at the station hotel,
but delicious to do it this way!
The waves join the rhythm with gusto as well,
while the boy gives him pleasure for pay.
He smiles at the thought of his students at home,
what they’d make of him here having fun -
an alien concept to his dusty tomes.
They’d assume he’d stay out of the sun.
But it’s warmth that he worships as well as young men,
with their muscles, white teeth and strong parts,
which is why he’s in Venice again and again
yet ignoring the city’s fine arts.
Yes, churches are holy and ancient and fine
while canals are simply sublime.
But the Professor’s on holiday, south of the Alps
and love conquers all every time.
At the end of the month he will pack up his case
and return by steam train, then the ferry.
But for now, in the sun, in this marvellous place,
he’ll be damned if he doesn’t make merry!
I wrote this during a recent visit to Paris, having a glass of rosé on a boat/bar on the Seine. I was inspired by a hoarding on the opposite side of the river and the line of trees, in their full summer greenery, their backs towards it, facing me across the water. As I wrote it, the two nearest seats to me were, by a strange synchronicity, taken by a pair of Chinese men.
A line of trees, like stately Dowagers sitting out a dance.
Except that, rather than watching life take place before them,
as a new generation waltz and flirt,
their firm young faces touching,
these leafy ladies prefer - for historical reasons -
to turn their backs on Paris,
avoiding the outrages that a changing world has
flung across the pavements, cobbles and courtyards,
palaces and fashion houses behind them.
Instead, determinedly aloof,
they keep their well-bred gaze
on the fast-flowing,
yet comfortingly changeless,
river Seine.
How refreshing,
their branches nod in sisterly agreement,
to see the waters of La France profonde
move so quickly, with such purpose,
towards the embrace of the sea.
So much more restful
than contemplating
the events behind them,
from German Occupation
to rioting students in ’68;
the decline in manners and
unrecognisable dress codes,
or the petrol fumes above which they
hold their highest branches,
rather as women
would lift their skirts while they crossed
the dung-spattered roads
before the first cars pushed
horses off the streets and
into the history books.
Yes, their rustling confirms,
this way they can ignore
that other stream - of men,
machines and all that goes
with an increasingly crazed dance
through the centuries.
True, this means they miss
out on the signs of change,
the portents of what is about
to come.
A little price to pay,
they believe, smiling as the
waves from a tourist
boat's wake wash
against the stone of
le port des Saints-Pères.
Meanwhile, behind them,
on the imposing stone facade
of a wing of the Louvre,
towering elegantly above
the Quai François Mitterand,
workmen have erected a huge
canvas hoarding.
Presumably an advertisement of sort,
it is really more of a statement -
like the coat of arms on a banner,
announcing the power and prestige
of its bearer.
Showing a picture
of a futuristic-looking city,
it simply announces, in a
a very modern mix of English and French -
Fengxian: New City Shanghai Chine.
The river flows.
They watch.
The world turns Eastwards.
“Darling, can I be honest?”
Of course you can, dear.
You must be.
You will be.
Though honest does not do justice
to the judgment that
is an integral part
of your inability
to spare me
a home truth.
This is inevitably delivered
when I least expect
and am in no position
to reply, let alone riposte -
as when I lie, sweaty and disadvantaged,
using the duvet as a fluffy shield
against the reprimand that
rattles past your perfect white teeth.
(Yes, mine are indeed far from pearly.
Thanks for reminding me, in that
very honest way).
Darling, can I be honest?
Oh, no. Silly me.
That might hurt your feelings.
The Hotel d’Alsace, where Oscar Wilde died, penniless, in November 1900, was, in his day, distinctly cheap and badly furnished - hence his well-known quip: ‘My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.’ Now a five star establishment simply called L’Hotel, one can hire the room where he lived at the end of his life and where his body was photographed on his deathbed. I stayed here not long after seeing Rupert Everett’s wonderful film (The Happy Prince) about Wilde’s last years, his exile in Italy and France and his death in this very room.
L’Hotel, Rue des Beaux Arts, Paris
Peacocks on the wall,
in a frieze of fin de siècle green.
How very apt.
The 19th century’s best-known dandy
would approve of the latest decor
of his final home.
His presence and his fame are remembered,
but not trumpeted.
A photograph or two of him in his prime,
a cutting of the death notice
from a newspaper.
A contemporary caricature,
unsure whether
to mock or reflect a grudging
admiration for its subject.
A framed bill on the wall,
reminder of a death
beyond his means.
And yet, let it be noted,
the manager not only wrote in
a beautiful hand, but the commercial necessity
of its message is expressed
in phrases of exquisite politeness
and respect.
He was also one of the
mourners at the funeral
of his most famous customer,
who died, here,
in the room where I’m shown
how to adjust the air conditioning,
where to locate the safe
and how delightful is the
private terrace outside the
French windows.
These seem to belong in a play,
but one with a lighter tone and happier ending
than that of Oscar Wilde’s last years.
His grave, in Père Lachaise,
was at risk of ruin. Not from
the hate its resident received in life,
but, in the sort of irony he loved to play with
during dinner parties, or express through
his characters on stage,
the damage here is done by love.
For the endless kisses,
the lipstick marks of affectionate greeting,
corroded Epstein’s stone sphinx tomb.
Ironic, yet appropriate, for
it was love that brought
him crashing down from Chelsea to
Reading, and led,
via a crumbling Neapolitan palazzo
and the Left Bank’s Hotel d’Alsace,
to this final resting place,
among 19th century worthies,
20th century singers and rock stars,
in Europe’s most famous cemetery.
Now, a glass box prevents the
lips from harming, yet records their
presence and accepts their simple yet
sensual tribute.
Those wishing to pay more intimate regards
to a fallen hero can, however,
for the price of a couple of hours with
an upmarket rent boy
(a measurement Oscar would have endorsed!)
check in at L’Hotel, in room 16,
and be the latest in a long line,
from the son of a Marquess to
telegraph boys,
to spend the night
in Oscar Wilde’s bedroom.
The Italian aristocrat, one of the richest and most elegantly flamboyant patrons of the arts of the early 20th century, owned the Venetian palace now home to the Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Her money long since gone after years of extravagance, she died in 1957, in a small flat in London, and was buried a few minutes' walk from Earl’s Court tube station.
Her unique style, immortalised in numerous portraits, has continued to inspire fashion designers decades after her death, including John Galliano’s 1998 collection for Christian Dior and, more recently, Alexander McQueen, as well as Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel…
The Marchesa’s hearse is
passing through
the Knightsbridge streets,
watched by
moneyed matrons
for whom each new wrinkle,
sag, or sprinkling
of cellulite is the latest of
Death’s heralds
to give notice
of their mortality.
She senses their shudders
at the sight of her coffin,
feeling a brief regret
at the contrast between today’s
resentful reaction
and the (sometimes scandalised)
admiration that greeted
her appearance in her prime,
strolling down the most
fashionable streets and squares
of Venice, Paris and Rome,
kohled eyes blazing
beneath her flame-red hair,
a pair of cheetahs on a leash
clearing a path before her
as she paraded the latest
instalment in the artwork
that was her life.
A life of portraits by Boldini
and Augustus John,
photographs by Man Ray
and de Meyer,
dresses by Fortuny, Bakst and Worth,
dinners with Diaghilev
while writing him yet another cheque
for the Ballets Russes;
of parties whose extravagance
exhausted one of the
greatest fortunes in Europe,
until, a few fur coats
her only mementos
of what had been,
she ends her days
in a glorified bedsit
behind Harrods.
From there she is taken,
accompanied by mourners
who include her favourite
Venetian gondolier,
to her final rest, not in
San Michele or Père Lachaise,
but the spectacularly
inappropriate, bourgeois calm
of a grave underneath
a mis-spelt urn
in Brompton Cemetery,
whose day-time tedium
is disturbed, as darkness falls,
and to her amusement,
by the sexually-charged
choreography not of
Nijinsky's faun but of
leather-clad men rounding off
an evening in the gay bars
of Earl's Court…
You fell asleep
on your back:
a sign of exhaustion -
a state that is
entirely self-centred.
Yet your posture
was also one of
groggy and gentle generosity:
an invitation for me to
cuddle you,
to continue
the lullaby of stroking
your chest
until the rhythm
took its effect
and I joined you
in unconsciousness.
I soundlessly accepted the offer
until I slept -
enjoying your shape,
your smoothness,
your barely perceptible
scent: a faint
perfume generated not by
a parfumier’s flowers,
but by the warmth of your skin.
He wakes up every morning first;
each day it’s just the same
before his eyes are opened,
he wants to speak her name,
to softly stroke her lustrous hair.
But it isn’t she who’s lying there,
his long-lost lover, tousled, bare.
For this is now, he’s middle aged
and ‘settled’, ‘safe’, adequately waged,
with a thicker waist, lines on his face
and a different woman, who he wed,
shares the sexless marriage bed,
the usurper of his true love’s place.
He gets up, dons his dressing gown
puts on his slippers, then heads down,
to prepare the frugal breakfast tray.
The ritual is the same each day.
And as the kettle starts to boil
he smells her cooking, olive oil,
exotic dishes she produced
when - as with sex - she introduced
his teenage self, gap-yeared away
to Italy, and heard her say,
between their kisses: I love you! I do!
English boy, do you love me too?
Three months it lasted. She said she’d write
but didn’t, nor phoned; now every night
they’re on the beach, or in her bed,
and after sex she lays her head
upon his chest - then his heart breaks
at realising, when he wakes,
it’ll never be, what he wants most,
and so he butters Mary’s toast
then climbs the stairs, gives her the tray,
and starts another half-lived day.
Life is a battle.
Not necessarily set-piece Agincourts
(though they erupt now and then,
in a blizzard of metaphorical archery)
but in a succession of skirmishes:
spats at the office,
stroppy shop assistants,
and the jostler on the tube.
The difficulty is not in
fighting,
but in being prepared to do so -
every day.
For it is not your overall strategy
that lets you down,
but each casual carelessness,
an absence of adrenaline
and the ignoring of those few signs
that an otherwise unhelpful
universe
sends as a warning.
Just as peace can only be preserved
by a willingness to wage war,
so our safety now relies
on our awareness of
the potential
awfulness of the age.
As Hamlet said,
(though look what happened to him)
‘The readiness is all’.
The crack of leaves,
the smell of smoke,
the mist that forms at edge of eye;
the sense that winter won't be long,
the caw of rook - no happy song.
The overcoats of passers-by,
the clubmen snug with pots of tea
and toast with tangy anchovy...
the London Library's windows blaze
with light to mark the shortened days.
The summer's over, autumn's here;
the signals are the same each year -
and I come, scarfed, to smell and stare
at bonfires in St James's Square.
Lord Alfred Douglas (1870 to 1945), nicknamed Bosie, lived, in later life, in Hove. Here he is taking a winter walk along the seashore towards Brighton.
Ironic, he thinks
as he raises his collar
against the cold, his
shoes crunching on
the beach’s pebbles,
that he should end his
days on the Sussex coast,
rather than the Lido in Venice
or a hotel in Dieppe.
Oscar’s end was pitiful
but at least it was in Paris,
and with an audience.
He, however, finds himself
a lodger in a seaside town
past its best, stucco peeling,
in an England that’s
bankrupt and rationed,
his life a mere footnote
to that of his long-dead
lover - to whom his
one immortal phrase,
‘I am the Love that dare not
speak its name’
is invariably misattributed.
In his overcoat pocket
is a letter from a young poet,
an Oxford undergraduate who
has, to Bosie’s astonishment,
read and enjoyed his verse.
Could he look at a sample of his
own, enclosed, and give him some advice?
Advice? He’d had a similar letter once,
from a teenage schoolboy
called Betjeman -
a foreign name, yet the
lad, precociously talented,
seemed to have a very
English sensibility.
He’d written back, encouraging
him to develop his youthful
experiments, polish his skill.
Youth!
The very word takes him back
to the 1890s, to the beauty
that he basked in every morning
in his shaving mirror.
These days the reflection is
closer to Oscar’s horror-story
portrait in the attic:
every misdeed,
each unkindness,
all past rages,
carved on the old man’s face
that he’s been punished with.
He has no option but to
accept this delayed vengeance
for his teens and twenties,
but he can at least
hand on the torch,
the driving need to write:
the one thing
(apart from the love of a genius,
which must surely reflect some worth?)
that might redeem him.
The thought brings a smile
of satisfaction to his thin,
pale lips, while his back
straightens and his slumped
shoulders flex, defying
the chill of the sea breeze.
The pressure, as he turns,
is now behind him, harnessed
instead of fought against
as he heads back towards
the house, in his mind already
seated at the writing desk
having read the poems,
composing the letter
that he’ll send
as one poet to another,
the winter sunshine
turning his iron-grey hair
gold again, the years
slipping from his face,
his lips once more red
and sensuous, as if eager
for a more exciting tongue
than his own to part them -
transported from Hove
back to Oxford,
rescued from life by art.