We all know that many people have lost their jobs, or part-time work hours, owing to the pandemic. Not far from here, 49%of children in Clifford Ward, Old Trafford are living in poverty.* After the pandemic it could be worse.
This won’t be solved just with food parcels. People need long term solutions. But they also need immediate help. Imagine not knowing where the next meal is coming from.
You can do something to help right now by giving to Stretford Food Bank.
It’ll take two minutes at most; and at least you’ll know you’ve done one worthwhile thing today!
“The foodbank was there when we really needed it, it was an absolute lifeline.”
Thank you!
* Figures from the ‘End Child Poverty Coalition’, whose major funders include Barnardo’s, The Children’s Society, Action for Children, NSPCC, and Save the Children.
Dr Robert Woof, with his wife, the Wordsworth scholar Dr Pamela Woof
In the current strange time of the Covid19 lockdown, one unexpected pleasure has been to hear – on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, of all unexpected places – Sir Ian McKellen’s reading of passages from William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem The Prelude.
It’s a fine reading, in McKellen’s thoughtful, resonant voice, of selected highlights – including the famous ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’ passage about the poet’s youthful optimism regarding the French Revolution.
But for me, a completely unexpected pleasure – though a very poignant and almost shocking one – was to hear, all of a sudden, the episodes being introduced each time by a few brief words in the voice of my old friend Robert Woof, Director of the Wordsworth Trust and Dove Cottage, Grasmere.
Robert (1931-2005) was the world’s leading Wordsworth scholar, and also an extraordinary man: humorous, difficult, charming, eloquent, devious, generous, loveable and much more. It was his work, at the head of a matchless team of staff, that turned Dove Cottage, Wordsworth’s former home, from a minor ‘heritage’ destination into a powerhouse of scholarship and creativity, nationally recognised as an exemplary museum and centre of culture and creativity.
Robert was Director when I went in the late 1970s to research my biography of Thomas De Quincey; and it was his idea that I should assemble a team to edit De Quincey’s complete works – a project which came to fruition in a 21-volume edition from the London publisher Pickering and Chatto in 2000-2003.
Robert was a source of endless wise advice and friendly comfort through these difficult projects. His wry sense of humour and his endless knowledge were great resources. He taught me resilience and a lot about handling people (I had a team of ten co-editors to work with!).
He was, above all, a wonderful reader and interpreter of Wordsworth. His rich, gentle, slightly grainy Northern voice was exactly right, and his understanding of the poetry was second to none. In fact, if anyone could have read The Prelude better than Ian McKellen, it might have been Robert Woof.
Sadly, Robert died in 2005, just after the completion of the Wordsworth Trust’s new Collections Centre – the ‘Jerwood Centre’ – into which he’d put his heart and soul. Indeed, I think that, though seriously ill, he willed himself to live long enough to see it complete and open.
It was a complete shock to hear his voice introducing a passage of McKellen’s reading. The presenter didn’t mention his name, the announcer never credited him; since the reading was clearly from an archive, I wondered if anyone at the BBC knew who he was, or even realised that he was there alongside McKellen. I’ll admit that I shed a few tears when I heard my old friend’s voice so suddenly, with all his old clarity and thoughtful eloquence.
In these strange days, it was oddly like getting a message from a friend who is gone, in one sense; but who is in another way very much present for me, and will always be.
We’re all appalled to hear that there are plans to put 10 hi-tech houseboats, with all the attendant infrastructure, noise and disruption, on the lake at Grasmere.
The plans are motivated purely by profit, and are the brainchild of the Lowther Estate, one of the largest and wealthiest landowners in the Lake District.
The extraordinary idea – it’s hard to believe it’s not a nightmare – is to put no less than TEN large powered residential craft permanently onto the lake. Grasmere is one of the smaller lakes, and has always been particularly tranquil. You can hire a rowing boat there for a few hours, and you can fish or swim. But these large crowded permanent powered boats would change the character of the lake and the whole area very much for the worse.
The writer and broadcaster Melvyn Bragg has written to the press that the plan would ‘rip the heart out’ of the peace and beauty of Grasmere. ‘Should the estate get permission then I would argue that the Lake District could and should lose its status as a World Heritage Site’. The boats – to be used by well-heeled holidaymakers – would, he says, ‘end up as 24-hour music-throbbing discos’. They would also require all the support structures – access roads, charging terminals and many other things – which would destroy the tranquil margins of the lake.
The National Trust are firmly opposed to the plan but they need support as the legal position is unclear
UNESCO World Heritage status depends on the Lake District continuing as a living and working landscape but also preserving its environmental and aesthetic character as a traditional landscape. Its literary heritage has also to be preserved, and the plans would have a seriously negative impact on Town End, the lakeside part of Grasmere village where William and Dorothy Wordsworth lived after 1799.
Claims that opposition to the plans are ‘snobbery’ are totally misguided. For a start, the plans are hatched by Lakeland’s wealthiest private landowner purely for private gain. Secondly, it is important that the diverse character of the various lakes be preserved. Windermere already has a ferry, a year-round steamer service, pleasure boats and houseboats. Many of these features are also present on Derwentwater and Ullswater. That’s where this kind of plan belongs. The smaller and quieter lakes need to keep their separate and varied character, not be pressed into service as noisy, expensive playgrounds.
Grasmere has come into the line of fire simply because it belongs to the Lowther Estate. No doubt their accountants see it as an ‘asset’ that isn’t being properly ‘exploited’. If that attitude had prevailed in the past, we wouldn’t have the National Parks.
So please sign the petition, tell your friends, send them the link, and do all you can to oppose this unpleasant plan!
I’ve recently finished The End, the appropriately-titled
sixth and last volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s epic ‘novel’ My Struggle.
An extraordinary book, and I think a very fine one.
That said, it has to be admitted that it’s not an easy read, despite being extremely gripping, suspenseful, stimulating and emotionally-wrenching at times. Indeed, I’d say that it requires as much effort to read this sixth volume as it takes to read all the previous five put together.
This isn’t just a question of length – though this final volume, at 1160 pages, is longer than any of the earlier ones. It’s also, more importantly, due to the nature of the material. The narrative is certainly gripping – when we have narrative (which we do for a good part of the time). This is partly because the autobiographical story has now caught up with the point where Knausgaard’s first volume, A Death in the Family¸ is being published. And (not surprisingly, given its utterly honest and completely unvarnished confessional realism) Knaussgaard finds that a lot of people really don’t like it.
Despite the fact that he has checked with everyone mentioned
explicitly in his narrative, and changed names etc when necessary, it still isn’t
enough. His uncle (who doesn’t really figure significantly in the earlier
volume) is beside himself with fury about the book, because it depicts the
alcoholic death of Knausgaard’s father (the uncle’s brother) in a filthy house
and the uncle feels Knaussgaard is letting the entire family down. He resorts
to threats of legal action (empty, because you can’t in any case libel the dead,
and no one else is criticised), abusive phone calls and any other weapon he can
find.
Knausgaard finds that the one thing people don’t want from a writer is honesty. And we get the impression that tidy, bourgeois Scandinavian society can’t face the truth about itself, even told with the best intentions.
Then there is a dreadful suspense that builds around the mental health of Knausgaard’s wife, who turns out to be bipolar and towards the end of the book is sunk in a suicidal depression from which it seems she may never recover. You read the last section of the book in profound concern about the outcome.
All of this is wonderful, and told with Knausgaard’s remarkable,
obsessive, close-up realism, which seems to give you every moment and gesture –
making you look freshly and closely at the details of your own life.
But the book turns away from these things and at certain points becomes a colossal essay, first on the boyhood of Hitler (of whom, despite his overall title – My Struggle – Knausgaard is absolutely not an admirer), and then on Paul Celan’s poem ‘Engführung’. And extraordinarily, even as he is writing these passages, to his near-disbelief the massacre of teenagers by Anders Brivik on Utoya Island takes place. Knausgaard’s treatment of all this is not in any way sensationalistic; indeed he writes so thoughtfully and with such care that many readers will probably be bored or just bogged down.
And the passages confirm my suspicion that Knausgaard isn’t
really a novelist at all. I think the best label for him is ‘existential
philosopher’. Like Kierkegaard, he’s using the material of his own life,
mercilessly, as the material for reflection. And though he writes in narrative
much of the time, it isn’t fiction, and we recall that Sartre, Nietzsche, and Kierkegaard
all told stories to embody their ideas.
How well Knausgaard’s work will stand the test of time remains to be seen. I’ve been gripped by it; and I think Volume I, A Death in the Family, is a masterpiece. Whether I’d plough through all the other volumes again I’m not sure. A Norwegian Proust (as he’s been called) he certainly ain’t. He doesn’t have the subtlety, the stylistic beauty or the contemplative poise of Proust. Knausgaard is angry, frustrated, often crude and impatient, often very funny. But he has done something wholly original and, I suspect, profound. I recommend him strongly.
I want to recommend very strongly the excellent film Mrs
Lowry and Son, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Timothy Spall and directed by
Adrian Noble. Based on the play by Martin Hesford, and essentially a two-hander
between Spall and Redgrave, the film is fascinating, intensely dramatic and
moving, and well worth seeing even if you don’t particularly like Lowry as an
artist. I have some doubts about his work myself (see below) but nonetheless
this is not just a wonderfully watchable film but a real statement about the
nature of art.
And don’t be put off if you didn’t like Spall’s portrayal of JMW Turner in Mr. Turner. I didn’t like that either; I found it overacted and unconvincing. But Mrs Lowry and Son is a completely different matter.
Redgrave is brilliant as the self-pitying, viciously manipulative
but also pathetic Mrs Lowry; Spall is patient, understated, exhausted and yet
at moments very close to the edge of violence as Lowry, relentlessly practising
the unrewarded painting that obsesses him in the face of relentless hostility
and discouragement from his terrifying mother. At one dreadful moment he loses
his control and starts destroying his own paintings with a knife. You feel that
he’s within an inch of turning the knife towards his mother. It’s emotionally wrenching
and terrifying – even though we know that Lowry will eventually find success and
acclaim.
No wonder that. long after his mother’s death, there was
something a little strange in Lowry’s attitude to women. There is, in fact,
another film to be made as a counterpart to this one: the film about Lowry and
his young female protégées (notably Sheila Fell) later in his life. Like so
many of these creative relations where an older artist features as mentor,
there is something both profoundly valuable and deeply creepy in the interplay
between young developing talent and old master, galvanised by an unexpressed
sexual tension. I hope someone will make this second film too; it would be
fascinating, and no less dramatic.
To give a broader view of Lowry, I’ll put in here a piece I
wrote some years ago for the Times Literary Supplement, reviewing a
biography of Lowry.
Shelley Rohde: L.S. Lowry: A Life (Haus Publishing Ltd). £25
ISBN 987-1-90495-049-3
Despite his huge popular following, L.S. Lowry remains enigmatic.
To some he is an essential British artist of the twentieth century, to be
spoken of in the same breath as Stanley Spencer or Francis Bacon. Others see
him as sentimental and inept, a naïf in the wrong sense. Lowry died more than thirty years ago, but Shelley Rohde is
still the only author to have attempted a comprehensive life, and although the
dust jacket calls the present book a ‘new biography’, is essentially a greatly
shortened version of the same author’s L.S.
Lowry: A Biography, published in 1999.
An unashamed advocate, Rohde attributes resistance to Lowry’s
work, bluntly, to ‘elitism’. This seems a misjudgement because, whether you
like Lowry’s work or hate it, there is certainly something odd about it, and it
contains elements which run strongly against artistic traditions which remained
largely unquestioned even during the twentieth century. The major problem – or the
great charm, depending on your point of view – arises from the disjunction in
Lowry’s mature work between figures and landscape.
Lowry’s townscapes – his terrace houses, factories, churches,
viaducts – are handled with a strong post-impressionist technique undoubtedly transmitted
by Adolphe Valette, the French painter who was Lowry’s most significant tutor
at the Manchester School of Art. Subtleties of colour and texture are
fascinating, flake white (an essential ingredient in the luminous overall
effect) and pale earth colours layered over one another to produce endless varieties
of tone. The composition is masterly, combining an emphasis on height, depth
and gradient with a decorative flattening of perspective.
Yet the figures which swarm in this setting might have been
painted by another hand. Stylised, cartoonish, calligraphically drawn and
without modelling, consisting most often of a few black lines and a blob of
colour, they tend to caricature. The grotesque, the maimed and the mad figure
largely amongst them.
In Lowry’s later paintings, mostly from the 1960s, groups of
figures lack an architectural setting and formulaic elements become still stronger.
Eyes are dots of black; all figures are round-shouldered, all feet encased in
enormous black boots.
A strangeness in Lowry’s relation to people was not confined
to canvas. Born in 1887, he was the only child of a Manchester ‘estate agent’
who was actually little more than a rent collector and took his family from one
unaffordable house to another in pursuit of the gentility craved by his wife, a
former pianist. Lowry’s mother spent most of adult life as an ‘invalid’, martyr
to undefined ailments which kept her immobilised all day on a couch.
Lowry’s father died in 1932, leaving substantial debts which
he had concealed from the family. His mother reacted by abandoning the couch
and taking to her bed, where her son tended to her meticulously until the day
of her death seven years later, brushing her hair, bathing her bedsores and
reading her to sleep every night. His reward for this was merciless
discouragement. She regarded his painting (which she referred to as ‘doing
nothing’) with contempt, and when the Manchester
Guardian invited him to write art criticism she squashed the idea by
laughing uproariously and telling him ‘You could never do it, Laurie’. Lowry
accepted her judgment but carried the Guardian’s letter in his pocket for years.
Painting was done mainly at night, by electric light, for
like his father Lowry had become a rent collector – a job he did meticulously
and without promotion for forty years, observing and sketching on his daily
perambulations around Manchester. The people whose money he took found him
friendly and considerate and seem not to have resented him.
Lowry kept this side of his life hidden from the art world, misleading
interviewers and fellow-artists into thinking that he spent his time only in
painting. This was part of a general policy: although he had friends, they were
kept in sealed compartments, each allowed to see only a facet of his life and
opinions. Those who had known him at work were quietly dropped when he retired.
It is perhaps the portraits which testify most strongly
against a cosy view of Lowry. Lowry’s male sitters glare fixedly ahead, as if
in a police mugshot. The heads are stylised and rigidly symmetrical, with much
black outlining of the features. The effect is terrifying; according to Rohde
more than one collector rapidly resold a portrait rather than live with it. Perhaps
the most powerful of these works is Portrait
of a Man (with Red Eyes), a self-portrait of 1938 (misdated 1927 in Rhode’s
index), painted at a time when the stress of caring for his mother had brought
Lowry to the brink of physical and mental breakdown.
Equally disturbing in a different way are the portraits of a
woman, or series of women, whom Lowry identified only as ‘Ann’. Evidently
representing a personal archetype rather than an individual, the ‘Ann’ pictures
show a woman with oval face, strained-back smooth black hair, pillar-box-red
lipstick and huge eyes thickly outlined in black eyeliner. The face is doll-like
and expressionless, pallid and smooth as if carved in soapstone.
It would be easy to take ‘Ann’ as a fantasy were it not for
the fact that in later life Lowry befriended, one after another, a series of
very young women whom he helped financially and educationally. All valued his
friendship immensely and they included the notable landscape painter Sheila
Fell, who was eloquent in her gratitude for Lowry’s mentorship. His behaviour
with these young ladies was entirely decorous but it is noteworthy that they
conformed closely to a single physical type – the type represented by the ‘Ann’
portraits. That there was something fetishistic about all this is confirmed by
the recollection of the artist Pat Cooke, one of his protégées, who recalled
that Lowry
was fascinated by my make-up,
particularly my eyes. He would watch me intently putting it on in the car,
asking ‘Why do you do that?’ or saying ‘Put on some more black stuff.’ He was
disappointed I didn’t wear nail varnish: he loved long red nails.
After Lowry’s death a collection of drawings came to light
showing what appears to be the same girl dressed in a range of bizarre
costumes: short, rufflike ballet-skirts; enormous collars or bows which
imprison her and from which she hangs helpless like an unstrung puppet. In some
drawings she is shown decapitated or wounded with swords or knives. They seem
to reveal a fascinated terror of female sexuality.
Rhode’s adaptation of her biography for this new edition has
entailed losses and gains. The new text is only half the length of the old,
and, strangely, it also seems much worse written, containing sentences like
this (on the 1976 Royal Academy retrospective): ‘It had been planned to take
place in his life time but Lowry, foiled
the plans of the RA to uniquely honour the living artist by dying nine months
previously.’ Admittedly this is a low point; but Rohde’s digressive and
partisan style means that in the sparser narrative of the new book it is often hard
to deduce in what year a given event happened, or what its actual significance
might have been.
Unlike the 1999 text this one lacks a proper index, supplying
merely an ‘index of names’. A substantial passage of text on page 95 reappears
almost verbatim on page 120, and there are innumerable misprints, some of them
risible – ‘cemetery’ appears as ‘ceremony’, ‘cited’ as ‘sited’ and ‘public’ as
‘pubic’. The quotation on the dust jacket, clearly intended as a keynote for the
book, is attributed to Maurice Collis but is in fact by Eric Newton. The book
has also been stripped of a large proportion of the previous edition’s
fascinating black and white photographs of Lowry and his world.
A small amount of new material has been introduced, notably
a 1964 interview with Lowry and an appendix giving a discussion by Professor
Michael Fitzgerald of Lowry’s supposed autism, which inevitably, coming at the
end of a biography, has a somewhat reductive impact. The space might better have
been spent on exploring Lowry’s success in exhibiting in France around 1930, or
his work as an Official War Artist, or his extensive collection of paintings by
Rossetti, all of which are mentioned in this and the previous book but hardly
investigated. No significant reference is
made to recent work in x-ray photography, which has revealed much about
Lowry’s technique and his overpainting of earlier work. His reading and his
love of music, both of which were profoundly important to him, are left
unexamined.
Those who want a full life of Lowry will still need to go to
Rohde’s 1999 book.
The one area where the present work improves on its predecessor is in its addition of some two hundred well-chosen colour plates. In these Lowry’s art, however eccentric or technically fractured, speaks eloquently of an industrial landscape which no one else documented with such delicacy or obsessive thoroughness, and of people who, perhaps of necessity, could never fit into their surroundings.
