Basically, you look inside your work. (I should think this is good as a measure of both the self you find, and the work.)

From Tim Adams’ interesting article about the always-interesting Alan Bennett:

“For a long time, years even,” Bennett recently wrote, “it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate you do not put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there.”

It seems that his new Auden/Britten play, The Habit of Art, is largely about how you find yourself in it. But in a practical sense that will be hard to do; tickets are virtually unobtainable now.

I’m sitting here with a sore throat, streaming eyes and a slight headache, listening to the Battle of Waterloo local kids’ fireworks. London is bristling with them – even more so than on Thursday, which was actual Guy Fawkes’ Day. Mlle B is I believe at Alexandra Palace, which I can see out my window – but of course, I can’t keep an eye on her. Maybe I’ll see some fireworks later off the balcony, though. I’m here waiting for someone who may never arrive, so badly clogged are the roads with would-be firework-goers – I keep getting rather mournful texts.

All this reminds me that on Tuesday, the night of the full moon, I did something I’ve never done before. I went on a ghost walk. It was in honour of a book I’m actually in (pseudonymously; there are two of us called Katy), as I’ve said before – telling a few of the ghost stories in my vast (and true, however much the reviewers liked to refer to it as ‘true’) repertoire. It’s Andrew Martin’s book, as you can see from the cover, and Andrew led a fascinated group of us on a tour of haunted Mayfair, beginning in Berkeley Square (nightingale-free, but with a maid apparently frightened to death by an apparition at number 50). He took us to the site of the hotel in Jermyn Street where a famous spiritualist, Daniel Douglas Home (pronounced Hume) astonished the seance-going classes with his manifestations and levitations; Arthur Conan Doyle was apparently much impressed, and listed his four separate types of mediumship. Here is one:

He also took us to a particular house in St James’ Place where a woman’s previously deceased sister appeared to her, and to everyone in the house in their separate rooms, as she lay ill on her deathbed. (Andrew is particularly interested in corroborated ghost stories.) Lovely little house, probably worth a few million now. Then we all went for a drink, kindly supplied by his publishers, Short Books.

So what we need now is for some friendly manifestation to clear the traffic between Mile End and here; otherwise I’m cooking dinner for the Dutchman.

So says Milton! His Satan is the one we all think of, whether we know it or not, when we think of the Devil. In this passage from Book Six of Paradise Lost, the armies of Heaven and Hell are preparing for epic battle. The Council of Hell is discussing its chances in battle. So far, Heaven is winning. But Satan has something up his sleeve…

Whereto with look compos’d Satan repli’d.
Not uninvented that, which thou aright
Believst so main to our success, I bring;
Which of us who beholds the bright surface
Of this Ethereous mould whereon we stand,
This continent of spacious Heav’n, adornd
With Plant, Fruit, Flour Ambrosial, Gemms & Gold
Whose Eye so superficially surveyes
These things, as not to mind from whence they grow
Deep under ground, materials dark and crude,
Of spiritous and fierie spume, till toucht
With Heav’ns ray, and temperd they shoot forth
So beauteous, op’ning to the ambient light.
These in thir dark Nativitie the Deep
Shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame,
Which into hallow Engins long and round
Thick-rammd, at th’ other bore with touch of fire
Dilated and infuriate shall send forth
From far with thundring noise among our foes
Such implements of mischief as shall dash
To pieces, and orewhelm whatever stands
Adverse, that they shall fear we have disarmd
The Thunderer of his only dreaded bolt.
Nor long shall be our labour, yet ere dawne,
Effect shall end our wish. Mean while revive;
Abandon fear; to strength and counsel joind
Think nothing hard, much less to be despaird.
He ended, and his words thir drooping chere
Enlightn’d, and thir languisht hope reviv’d.

(Got that? He’s told the devils that there is an invention that can save them, made out of the very elements of the fiery earth. He says the angels will fear that they have taken the thunderbolt of Thor himself. Here I’m giving you a little break, so you can catch your breath and then plough on into the description of the invention.)

Th’ invention all admir’d, and each, how hee
To be th’ inventor miss’d, so easie it seemd
Once found, which yet unfound most would have thought
Impossible: yet haply of thy Race
In future dayes, if Malice should abound,
Some one intent on mischief, or inspir’d
With dev’lish machination might devise
Like instrument to plague the Sons of men
For sin, on warr and mutual slaughter bent.
Forthwith from Councel to the work they flew,
None arguing stood, innumerable hands
Were ready, in a moment up they turnd
Wide the Celestial soile, and saw beneath
Th’ originals of Nature in their crude
Conception; Sulphurous and Nitrous Foame
They found, they mingl’d, and with suttle Art,
Concocted and adusted they reduc’d
To blackest grain, and into store convey’d:
Part hidd’n veins diggd up (nor hath this Earth
Entrails unlike) of Mineral and Stone,
Whereof to found thir Engins and thir Balls
Of missive ruin; part incentive reed
Provide, pernicious with one touch to fire.

And there you have it: the hellish invention of gunpowder. The “future days” Milton’s Satan refers to had, of course already come to pass when Milton wrote his poem. But I think we can agree that he foresaw how out of control the thing was capable of getting. Have a great bonfire night everyone; devilish day. Don’t blow anyone up. And you can read the rest of the epic here.

Okay, this has just come my way, literally a few minutes ago. Sweetshop territory: I’d never heard Larking speak before! What a gorgeous voice he had, and what humour in it. It’s delightful just to see him laugh… and Betjeman of course is National Treaure incarnate: equally wonderful. The chat in progress between them at the end is delicious. This is the first of three sections so apologies if you now find your day a little crammed…

Meanwhile, I have just found out that I have a new JOB in the pipeline! Excellent and reassuring to hear Larkin saying he thinks the whole thing about work is that it “forces you to think about something besides yourself, and your own poems,” and is “positively good for you.” Unlike looking for work in a deep recession, which certainly forces you to think about things other than your poems, but is not so good for you.

I swear to God these are, word for word, the three spam messages sitting in my spam inbox right now (bold is the title, with the thumbnail bit following):*

Lloyd returned when she had gone – when I awoke, ‘I don’t know if you’ll be able to do anything with her,’ said the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo!** ‘It all starts again.’

It’s a new genre: spam flash fiction. You heard it here first. And this.

* N.b., punctuated by me.

** okay, and Edward Lear.

Coming soon, probably: some kind of a rant about Bright Star.

Laetitia Pilkington and the Hellfire Club

Can you imagine. I was asked to send some poems for consideration in the new online literary site Praxilla -  so I put together a submission of about five poems – well, okay, exactly five poems – and they wrote back saying they wanted all of them! Some of them are very new.

The page leads with “concept sonnet”  I wrote for the Pink Floyd Trip to Cirrus Minor evening earlier in the summer – so thanks to Simon, Isobel & Chris for organising that – goes down through one I wrote about the art installation by Francis Alÿs, Fabiola, which my friend Julia took me to – thank you Julia – through a few more, and down to one that John McCullough really liked about oh five years ago, and keeps talking about, so I’ve resurrected it – thanks, John! I will also, while we’re on this theme, thank Laura, the editor, for asking me. She’s a very funny lady and clearly very discerning.

I’ve never had five poems taken all at once before.

In other news, I’m reading a gripping book about a woman who could have done with more help from her literary friends – though what help she did have came from high places. Laetitia Pilkington, early protegée of Swift, ambitious poet wife of a cocksure, philandering literary curate called Matthew Pilkington, was thrown out and divorced in 1736 – without her money or her kids – on a trumped-up “in flagrante” charge. The TLS review describes it well:

Matthew and his bought witnesses, a mere twelve watchmen, burst into her bedroom late one night to find her with a book in her hand; a young surgeon called Robert Adair, who owned the book, was sitting nearby, waiting patiently for her to finish reading it. Although she concedes that it was not entirely proper for a young wife to find herself alone at such an hour with a young man who was not her husband, Laetitia denies any wrongdoing.

It was on this dramatic, disputed moment that the life of Laetitia Pilkington turned…

She went to London, where she wrote – often selling poems to men to pass off as their own – and made quite the name for herself in the literary salons. Scandal never far away, of course, however a lone woman might try to get by. Swift, who had been treating her as a favourite for years, called her “the most profligate whore in either kingdom.”

Years later the poet laureate Colley Cibber persuaded her to write her Memoirs – “just as you relate it . . . . I’ll engage it will sell.” Her erstwhile husband, along with the entire literary establishment, tried to block publication (which consititute the first biographical writing about Swift), so she went back to Dublin and published the thing herself. A very funny thing from Michael Caines in the TLS:

Laetitia returned to Dublin in 1747, not long after telling Samuel Richardson that “the world is the world, and I am quite sick of it”. But she was soon looking up her old acquaintances, warning them of her anecdotal intentions; they were invited to make an appropriate, pre-emptive gesture before it was too late. Had they ever thought about subscribing to the first volume of a forthcoming work of non-fiction? … The comedian Henry Woodward sent her up on stage, at Dublin’s Smock Alley theatre in 1748, as the “Mrs Pill-Kill-Tongue” who hissed “Subscribe, or else I’ll paint you like the Devil”… [Matthew's] sometime lover, a Mrs Warren, declined the invitation to subscribe, though her reply was thought fit to print: “I aboar yow and yowr Filthy Idyous. It is not in your Power to defamatonous my Corrector in your wild Memboirs”.

According to Alibris: “Laetitia Pilkington’s memoirs caused a scandal when they first appeared, owing to their details about her divorce and the many would-be Lotharios who subsequently pestered her.” She died at 41 & her son Jack published the final volume posthumously. Her children were cut off with a shilling in their father’s will.

She’s my new hero.

In case you were wondering, her memoirs are republished in 2 vols in the USA, & seem to go for a mere £50 or so a volume  online.

The biography, Queen of the Wits, is by Norma Clarke, published by Faber at considerably less. It reads so easily I’ve recommended it to Mlle B when I’m done. In the meantime, I’ll be offering poems for a substantial amount to anyone who craves a spurious poetic reputation – but be warned, you won’t make any money with them.

This Living Hand

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou wouldst wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.

—John Keats

Now I realise that isn’t exactly a birthday poem. And Keats’ death still has the power to be very upsetting. And I don’t mean to cheapen the poem in any way by using it for conventional Halloween thrills-n-spills. The point is that Keats created an amazing effect of death-in-life-in-death with that tiny poem, a sleight of (sorry) hand that almost defies poetic analysis. It is affecting, of course; deeeply moving, as it is almost the last poem he wrote, when he was in fact dying; and I still also find it genuinely scary, in that way that’s deeper than anything Asda can conjure. Scary because it is completely felt – and because, with the effects he’s conjured out of the conditional tense, he seems really to make the living hand die and come to life again. The Cambridge Companion to Keats talks about the “aggression” in it, interestingly; what I also feel in it is Keats’ huge wishing, and his anger at himself for it.

Halloween is the night the dead come back. That’s how serious it is. So happy birthday, John Keats.

Picture: Keats on his deathbed, in Rome, by his friend Joseph Severn

Okay – and Edgar Allen Poe.

And our friends at E-Verse Radio, who brought this wonderful thing to the Baroque attention. (And there’s lots more Vincent Price there.)

Vincent Price was, by the way, a constant presence in the Baroque childhood. He was just always on TV. When he died on the same day as my grandmother it was, strangely, a comfort. (And just the sort of thing she would do: she knew everybody… you can imagine him arriving at the pearly gates and St Peter saying, “So you’re a friend of Millie Evans!”)

Anyway, there’ll be even more Halloween tomorrow. And if I can get my act together maybe some kind of catch-up on the week. Meanwhile, hope your day is spooky (and relentlessly rhyming).

(Editing in to say:  my friend Kris reminds me in the comments that there is a proper, pukka Baroque in Hackney Stoke Newington connection here, I should have said. Edgar Allen Poe, when he was ten years old, went to school in Stoke Newington Church St, where the Fox Reformed wine bar now is. His foster father was a Mr Allen, whose name he adopted as a middle name, and who I think ran the school… pleasant to think of the morbid little Edgar spooking himself out in the grounds of the old St Mary’s Church, with its ruined Tudor sections…) (N.b., Abney Park was not a cemetery yet, and the Vixctorians were the ones who restored Old St Mary’s – so it will hsve been in a bad shape.)

“Earth has not anything to show more fair…”

Hmm, okay. I’ve landed back in London to an absolute whirlwind, which so far has been mainly a whirlwind of sonnets, one way and another… my desk is a mountain of sonnet books, plastic folders full of old sonnets, opened bills, letters from various agencies telling me what they need (argh), piles of books (Wilde and James prominent, Ellman in gargantuan hardback, other books I thought might have sonnets in them), and scraps of papers with forlorn, scrawled to-do lists… Elsewhere, mounds of washing. Clean. I’m hoping tomorrow I’ll have a chance to catch up, but today I have five things to do, in different places, requiring different paperwork, portfolios, books, outfits, etc… and there’s no printer paper in the house at ALL. Feck.

But it is autumn! Saturday will be Halloween. And what could possibly be more autumnal than a nice sonnet? Eh? And who knows more about seasonal celebration than the author of this exultant, Whitmansesque tribute to autumn? Not really anybody. If you were in Connecticut you would totally know what he’s getting at with those gourds. I got out, but some people have to navigate that stuff year after year… little did the Pilgrims realise what they were starting.

So it made perfect sense when I came home and found Colin McEnroe on my Facebook wall, talking about sonnets. Why wouldn’t he be? McEnroe is one of the funniest guys in Connecticut. And also (it’s so often the way with funny people) one of the smartest. Else why else would he run an amusing chat show about sonnets? (Recently he did a show on memorising. And one about tea. You see?)

And thus, tonight – that is, at 1pm New York time – I will be on NPR radio talking to Colin on his new show.  I’ll be on the phone, of course, and Colin will be in the studio with the poet (and editor of Drunken Boat) Ravi Shankar, and the erudite and jolly esperantist Humphrey Tonkin. If you’re in CT, you know what to do. If not, or whatever, you can catch it afterwards on the WNPR website.

And now I have to go get ready for the first thing… I’ll be emailing people by phone today, I think.