Barthian blogfest

The 2010 Karl Barth Blog Conference has begun with an exchange about Barth's relation to Schleiermacher.

Wyndham Lewis

Wyndham Lewis

Walrus Magazine has an intriguing article about Wyndham Lewis, an unlikeable English writer and artist who, sadly, was born in Canada. 'Sadly' for him, since he despised Canada (especially Toronto), and 'sadly' for us, since he was a racist and anti-Semite, which is clear from his political tracts in the 1930's. Indeed, of all the literary and visual artists whose sense of judgment was impugned by their political allegiances in that 'low dishonest decade,' it's hard to imagine anyone who was as thoroughly discredited as Lewis, whose 1932 book on Hitler included a chapter called 'Adolf Hitler a Man of Peace'. To his credit, Lewis did at least come to oppose the Nazis (shortly before WWII).

It says a lot about Toronto in that era that when Lewis lived there during the war, he (bigot though he was) came to detest the city for its intolerance. That is one theme of the Walrus piece that did not surprise me. European intellectuals seldom had much good to say about 'Toronto, the good' before the 1960's. Another Englishman who spent some time in Toronto during the war was A. J. Ayer. He was learning how to kill a man 'with his bare hands' (according to his autobiography) at a secret spy school east of the city. He characterized the Toronto of that time as a 'cold, Scots Calvinist town.' Actually, according to what I've heard, the northern Irish did more to shape Toronto's Calvinist ethos than the Scots did (which might explain why the Belfast of Brian Moore's Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne seemed so familiar to me).

(This Irish Protestant influence was more pronounced in eastern Ontario, where the Orange Lodge still operates, and one can find an Orange Hall in several towns [such as Peterborough].)

A surprising discovery for me in the Walrus article was the revelation of Lewis's strong influence on Marshall McLuhan, as is attested by a 1967 interview in which McLuhan credits Lewis with the insight that 'the man-made environment is ... a programmed teaching machine.' Here's an excerpt:

Louis MacNeice on the net

Louis MacNeice, whose reading of 'Prayer Before Birth' you can hear at the Poetry Archive. His letters were published this summer by Faber and are reviewed by David Wheatley in the TLS and by Roy Foster in the Financial Times (and by Robert Giddings in Tribune). Here's a nice, long review of MacNeice's Collected Poems by Maria Johnston. (Other reviews and excerpts are complied here.)

Here's a BBC recording of MacNeice reading an autobiographical poem called 'Carrickfergus'.

MacNeice's admirers include Michael Longley, Derek Mahon, and Jon Stallworthy (MacNeice's biographer). You can hear Stallworthy, as well as Paul Muldoon and others, speaking about MacNeice in the mp3's gathered at this conference site. And, while Denis Donoghue's LRB article on MacNeice (1987) is behind a pay-wall, you can read the subsequent exchange of letters in that periodical between Donoghue, Edna Longley, Peter McDonald, and Jonathan Allison.

Some of MacNeice's poems have quite a musical quality, especially 'Bagpipe Music', the first of his poems that I read. Here's a recital of it:



Several of MacNeice's poems have been set to music. There's a musical reading of MacNeice's poem 'Autobiography' (about his childhood loss of his mother) by Andy White on Jackie Leven's Forbidden Songs of the Dying West. You can hear an excerpt from it on the Amazon site for Leven's recording. Tim Dalling has set some MacNeice lyrics to music. And on YouTube you can find a couple of MacNeice pieces set to music by Andrew Toovey. Before them all, though, MacNeice's writing was set to music by Benjamin Britten, including the poem 'Cradle Song'.

After WWII, MacNeice worked for the BBC, where (among other things) he wrote radio plays. Of these, the most prominent seems to be the 1946 play Dark Tower, which has been published by Faber (along with some other scripts). Britten wrote the music for Dark Tower. The play was based on Robert Browning's poem, 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came' (which drew its title from a line in King Lear). I wish I could find a recording (audio or video) of this play. It sounds interesting.

Here's a short, 1957 poem by MacNeice, called 'To Posterity':

   When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
   And reading and even speaking have been replaced
   By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
   Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
   They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
   And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
   Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

Finally, here's a nice clip from a series produced by Optic Nerve for the BBC, in which Tom Paulin, Kate Clanchy and Jamie McKendrick read and discuss 'Prayer Before Birth':