been there, Donne that

Well. I have to apol­o­gise, just couldn’t resist the cheesey post title. But last night I went to an amaz­ing discussion/performance of the poetry of John Donne, hosted by an intrigu­ing organ­i­sa­tion called “Eng­lish Pen.” They are a group of intel­lec­tu­als ded­i­cated to the free­dom of writ­ten expres­sion (some of the monies they gather by sell­ing pens marked “Might­ier Than the Sword” go to efforts to free writ­ers cur­rently in prison). I had heard about the Donne event through my devo­tion to Google Alerts. Have you heard of these things? You ask Google to tell you who’s talk­ing about the things you love, and then you get emails telling you what news source, or even blog, is talk­ing about, say, the divine actress Har­riet Wal­ter. You may have slogged through my paeans of praise to Har­riet and to Edward Pether­bridge who recently per­formed at the Park Lane Hotel’s 80th birth­day cel­e­bra­tion. Now, that event I heard about because I belong to the Dorothy L. Say­ers Soci­ety, she being the author of the Wim­sey mys­ter­ies so won­der­fully per­formed on film and audio­book by my dar­ling Edward. But I decided after that evening that Har­riet Wal­ter was nearly equally won­der­ful, and thus I was led to an excel­lent blog about books and writ­ing (and other things that inter­est Sarah, the blog­ger), who belongs to “Eng­lish PEN” and there­fore knew that Har­riet would be per­form­ing last night! Got that?

Long story short (have you noticed that, in con­ver­sa­tion, by the time some­one utters this phrase it’s already been a long story?), last evening found me, after a pro­tracted acci­den­tal tour of the area sur­round­ing the Far­ring­don tube sta­tion (yes, I admit it, I got lost — again), at 60 Far­ring­don Road in the pres­ence of many peo­ple much, much smarter than I am. And fun­nily enough, instead of being dis­con­cert­ing, nay even depress­ing, it was really very ener­gis­ing. I don’t know about you, but I tend to live on a very quo­ti­dien plane, address­ing pretty much what needs to be done that par­tic­u­lar day, and not really stretch­ing my mind any fur­ther than direc­tions to my des­ti­na­tion (which granted, being me, can be every bit as absorb­ing as repro­duc­ing the Mona Lisa in marzi­pan). I think I am moti­vated enough now to be a lit­tle more intel­lec­tu­ally adven­tur­ous, dust off my PhD and really think about some­thing. Not every day, mind you, but…

Hav­ing finally found the drat­ted place, I was just in time to find a seat in the packed audi­to­rium and be greeted by the young and gen­tly effer­ves­cent Direc­tor of PEN, Jonathan Hea­wood, as he intro­duced the speak­ers. The cen­ter of atten­tion was one John Stubbs, author of the newly-published biog­ra­phy of Dunne, “John Dunne: The Reformed Soul.” I had to restrain myself from bop­ping him on the top of his tou­sled head, because the lad is but 29 years old. Now, with very few excep­tions I have for­sworn to have any­thing to do with peo­ple under 30, espe­cially if they have accom­plished any­thing that makes me feel inad­e­quate (which is painfully easy to do). This man was just adorable, I have to say: a sort of com­bi­na­tion of Harry Pot­ter and Pete Doherty, if either of them had gone to Oxford. Actu­ally, this boy looked as if he had been born and raised at Oxford and had never left. The com­pleat aca­d­e­mic, disheveled in a lovely jumper and Viyella-ish shirt, con­stantly flop­ping his hair off and back onto his fore­head, with an endear­ing sort of brainy stam­mer. And the sort of com­men­tary that I thought resided only in my fever­ishly bril­liant PhD tutor, Steven Z. Levine, a man for whom semi-colons were usable parts of speech. His hes­i­tant man­ner of answer­ing ques­tions was a bit uncom­fort­able at first, to lis­ten to, until it became appar­ent that he was hes­i­tat­ing not for lack of cer­tainty as to what to say, but because it took that long for him to sift through the enor­mous num­ber of pos­si­ble words to find just the right one. And, dear read­ers, he spoke some words I didn’t even know. I was ashamed of myself, and nat­u­rally I could not write them down because I had never heard them before. Plus some words that I recog­nised as being nom­i­nally part of my own mother tongue, but had never found occa­sion to utter, like “ter­tiary verisimil­i­tude” and “amaneunses”:

amanu­en­sis \un-man-yoo-EN-sis\, noun; plural amanu­enses, \-seez\:
A per­son employed to take dic­ta­tion or to copy man­u­scripts.

and “internecine”. Might he have said “pro­lep­tic”? Is that a word? And what’s more, he was inter­est­ing. Much of the dis­cus­sion, which was led by poet Ruth Padel, cen­tered on Donne’s atti­tude toward his Catholi­cism, in a time when the faith was pun­ish­able by impris­on­ment, or even being drawn and quar­tered. But almost best of all dur­ing the evening was the part that led me there in the first place, Har­riet Walter’s read­ings of the var­i­ous poems that were rel­e­vant to the discussion.

The intel­lect and sense of humor of the Eng­lish aca­d­e­mic are such a joy to me, and I had for­got­ten what it was like to lis­ten to them. The Direc­tor had intro­duced all the speak­ers by say­ing, “Ruth Padel is of course the great grand­daugh­ter of Charles Dar­win, and Har­riet Wal­ter is the niece of Christo­pher Lee. John Stubbs is not the rel­a­tive of any­one famous, although he does say he dreams of horses.” Of course this got a laugh, but only if I had been really pay­ing atten­tion to liv­ing in Lon­don (which I must say I have been) would I know that he was refer­ring to the equine painter George Stubbs.

Har­riet Wal­ter her­self was just sub­lime, like a Kristin Scott Thomas who can laugh at her­self, and very beau­ti­ful, these 20 years after her turn as Lord Peter Wimsey’s amour Har­riet Vane. And after­ward I screwed up my courage and asked her for her auto­graph, in my old copy of my favorite of all the Wimsey-Vane nov­els, “Busman’s Hon­ey­moon,” since Say­ers her­self described it as “a love story with detec­tive inter­rup­tions.” She was gra­cious and said, about the novel, “Oh, it’s the one that got away,” since for some untold rea­son the Say­ers estate sold the film rights to some­one who won’t let any­one make a film of it.

Oh, and on the way to the event, would you believe: I was on one of the many streets I wasn’t meant to be on, get­ting loster and loster, when I looked up to see… Avery’s PS 234 friend Phoebe, and her fam­ily, wan­der­ing hand in hand along the pave­ment! Her mother Liz had emailed me to see if we were around this week and would we like to get together, and then smack! there they were right in front of me. Per­haps din­ner tomor­row night.

Well, Avery has just made her first cake, from her first real-live cook­book recipe, and is now repos­ing in her bath and I’ve promised to read aloud. I’ll let you know how the cake turns out, and it could be Avery’s first recipe on my blog, prop­erly cited in its orig­i­nal con­text, of course. I must say, I get very sen­ti­men­tal when she likes some­thing I like, or liked as a child, and to pass along all my Gin­nie and Geneva books and have her enjoy them is very sat­is­fy­ing indeed. And with the won­ders of inter­net searches, you can get copies for your daugh­ters, too.