Blindboy talks about autism.

The Book Club

The Book Club continues its appreciation of A-level bangers with an episode on the novel recently named the second best of all time in the Guardian’s list, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987).

The Booking Club

Without Will Self there would be a Will Self-shaped hole in the culture. Many people recently learned the word ‘fissiparous’ – relating to fission, splitting into pieces – from a widely shared essay in which he says, ‘Britain is now a fissiparous society — fragmented into competing legal, managerial, ethnic, algorithmic and economic jurisdictions’. In this episode of The Booking Club he discusses his new novel, The Quantity Theory of Morality (2026).

Fresh Air

I can’t embed a Spotify link for this, but the episode is ‘David Sedaris wants to be better (at everything)’ (26.5.2026). Sedaris says, ‘I started writing in my diary one day, when I was twenty years old, and I’ve never not done it. […] oh my goodness, the thought of not doing that. Boy, the earth would just spin off of it’s axis.’

Growth Mindset Psychology

This is my favourite recent episode of my friend Sam’s podcast, an interview with Stephen Porges, the psychologist behind polyvagal theory.

My Martin Amis

Jack Aldane speaks to Irish writer and academic Kevin Power about Amis’s 1991 novel, Time’s Arrow.

Novara

I’d label these Novaran insights ‘To be used with some caution’, but I appreciate the way the hosts theorise the bleeding edge, in this case of what they call ‘British weirdness’.

Past Present Future

David Runciman begins a new series on ‘Great Political Fictions’ with Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). Like everyone since Neil Postman, Runciman finds the novel’s prophetic quality to be ageing like fine soma.

Subtext

My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow.

Until next month.

8.40 a.m. Bike lock key: check. Barcode key ring: check.

Our dress changes with the seasons, from long sleeves and gloves in the winter to shorts and vests in the summer. Some of us wear milestone T-shirts bearing the totemic numerals: 25, 50, 100, 250, 500.

Some of us travel not to our nearest Parkrun but slightly further, to our favourite, passing on the way the packs of poorly behaved blokes on bikes doing their aggressive laps of the park.

We arrive, lock up, maybe do some stretches. We look around for fellow regulars with whom to feed our Saturdaily dialogues.

We gather to hear the run director welcome us – and here we join in, cult-like – to ‘the best Parkrun in the world’. Sometimes we feel embarrassed about how patient the run director is having to be with murmuring people and barking dogs.

Then we walk to the starting line. On one occasion, just before we were going to set off, the director said to everyone, ‘Raise your hand if you think Parkrun is a good idea.’ Everyone dutifully raised their hands. Then he said, ‘Keep your hand raised if it was your idea’, and we all looked around to see a thin smiling man in sunglasses with his hand up – it was Paul Sinton-Hewitt, who founded Parkrun in 2004.

9 a.m. We are told to ‘Keep off the grass!’ and ‘Mind the puddles!’, or, if there are no puddles, ‘Mind the dust!’ Then there’s a countdown. Sometimes ‘Five, four, three, two, one’, whistle. Or my favourite is the charming amateurism of ‘Ready, steady, go!’

Then we’re off, overgrown schoolboys and girls doing cross-country, thundering towards the first left turn on to a tarmac path. Sometimes a trumpeter-volunteer even plays ‘Chariots of Fire’.

The 5K run is waymarked by kilometre posts, and the going to the first is uphill and for some of us decidedly sluggish. But at the top of the hill we get a view of the City and the Shard, which injects some competitive zeal into the stiff-kneed bouncing descent.

Ours is a one-lapper and what a devotee of the turf would call a ‘galloping course’. We turn left, and left again, pass the three-kilometre post in the shade of a wood, and then emerge on to what, for some reason, I think of as the Plains of Sarum, an old name for Salisbury Plain.

At this point regulars are aware of where everyone belongs, and who’s going slow or fast. The final kilometre is also uphill, but less sluggish than the first, as we give everything we’ve got. Parkrun is ‘a run, not a race’, but a run with certain race-like characteristics.

We finish and take our tokens and barcodes to be scanned by the wonderful volunteers.

At this point the runner-autists try to remember that the end of the run is the start of the real point: being sociable. For some it’s a bit like the locals’ response to Bill Bryson when he moved to Yorkshire:

[G]radually, little by little, they find a corner for you in their hearts, and begin to acknowledge you when they drive past with what I call the Malhamdale wave. This is an exciting day in the life of any new arrival. To make the Malhamdale wave, pretend for a moment that you are grasping a steering wheel. Now very slowly extend the index finger of your right hand as if you were having a small involuntary spasm. (Notes from a Small Island [1995])

Similarly, after running with someone for a couple of years, you might exchange the Parkrun nod. To make the Parkrun nod, establish eye contact, smile, and make a brief inclination of the head. If you’re feeling exuberant you might also initiate a conversation.

You might remember the idea of the ‘big society’ and its laudable attempt to create a culture of volunteerism. Well, never in the field of voluntary enterprise has so much been done for so many as by Parkrun. (Wikipedia comes to mind as a comparison.) This is why the first rule about Parkrun is you do talk about Parkrun – to get your friends to come. It’s not really a cult but it does have a culture, which I’ve tried to give a sense of – my little corner of it.

Once we’ve got our breaths back and had a chat, we disperse. Most of us probably go and enjoy a post-Parkrun coffee and feel that life is good. Then we start looking forward to next time: when Saturday comes.

Dedicated to all the Parkrun volunteers
Image credit ©George Hardwick

Cummings was born in Barnstaple where, after leaving school, he was an apprenticed journalist, but his real passion was naturalism, zoology in particular, which took him to London:

He rejected the prospect of a career in local journalism and aimed to gain a position in natural history at the end of his apprenticeship. In pursuit of this ambition he undertook a strenuous programme of self-education […] In 1912 he took up an appointment at the Natural History Museum in South Kensington as one of the five new permanent staff appointed to the insect room, soon to be renamed the department of entomology. These positions carried considerable research and curatorial responsibility; his appointment was a remarkable achievement for one who had no formal training in the subject. (DNB)

He writes of London ‘spread out before me, a vast campagne’, but also calls it ‘a lonely place’: ‘London bewilders me. At times it is a phantasmagoria, an opium dream out of De Quincey.’2 Here is his journal entry from 26 September 1914 – it is representative of the ‘disappointment’ by which he defines himself:

In short, I lead an unfathomably miserable existence in this dark, gray street, in these drab, dirty rooms—miserable in its emptiness of home, love, human society. […] I visit about two houses in London—the Doctor’s and R——’s [a friend’s] Hotel. I walk along the streets and stare in the windows of private houses, hungry for a little society. It creates in me a gnawing, rancorous discontent to be seeing people everywhere in London—millions of them—and then to realise my own ridiculously circumscribed knowledge of them. I am passionately eager to have acquaintances, to possess at least a few friends. If I die to-morrow, how many persons shall I have talked to? or how many men and women shall I have known? A few maiden aunts and one or two old fossils. I am burning to meet real live men, I have masses of mental stuff I am anxious to unload. But I am ignorant of people as of countries and live in celestial isolation.

This, I fear, reads like a wail of self-commiseration. But I am trying to give myself the pleasure of describing myself at this period truthfully, to make a bid at least for some posthumous sympathy.

Harold Bloom said that one of the reasons we read is that ‘we cannot know enough people profoundly enough’,3 and Cummings here shows the corollary, that we write because we cannot be known by enough people profoundly enough. In this spirit, literary criticism can be a sociable sharing of books and persons, which is my hope for this essay. My edition of The Journal is published by Faber Finds – reprints of ‘found’ classics – which feels appropriate.4 Finding and sharing books must be one of the most pleasurable things you can do – ‘with your clothes on’, as someone once said.

So what kind of person is Cummings?

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The Book Club

Dominic and Tabitha have released several episodes this month, and my favourite was this, on Sally Rooney’s Normal People. I liked the novel a lot, perhaps because I read it seven years late, post-hype.

The Booking Club

Two conversations from Jack Aldane, one with Ross Barkan, editor of Substack-based The Metropolitan Review, and the other with Jay McInerney, who wrote Bright Lights, Big City (1984).

The Common Reader

I have no particular interest in Agatha Christie but this was so good I loved it anyway.

The Exchange

New Statesman editor Tom McTague interviews Anthony Seldon about the latter’s book The Path of Light: Walking to Auschwitz.

The Honest Broker

The Godzilla vs. Kong of literary Substacks.

The Long Read

A thoughtful, first-hand exploration of what AI is doing to English teaching.

New Books in Literary Studies

This caught my eye because I attended David Womersley’s lectures on Jonathan Swift in 2011. He has written a new book called Thinking Through Shakespeare, and Womersley’s story of its origin alone is fascinating on Shakespeare’s uniqueness. He recounts what he was told, by the director of a theatre in Munich, about taking productions of Shakespeare around the world: ‘it was clear that there was always some kind of palpable connection between the audience and what was on-stage, and […] that was not true of other things they put on’. Incidentally, the New Books Network recently published its thirty thousandth episode!

The New Society

The title is clickbaited but this is a good episode: Haitian film-maker Raoul Peck on what Orwell means to him.

Past Present Future

And more Orwell. This is the first of a four-part miniseries on ‘Orwell’s War’ from David Runciman. I don’t agree with everything Runciman says – for example, I don’t think there was something ‘clownish’ about Orwell being anti-war up until 1939, even if that turned out to have been a mistaken position. But Runciman is always worth listening to, and I appreciate his treatment of Orwell as still indispensable. (I’ve written about Orwell here.)

Until next month.

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                                               I hate the Moor:
And it is thought abroad that ’twixt my sheets
He has done my office: I know not if’t be true,
But I, for mere suspicion in that kind,
Will do as if for surety. (I. iii. 375–79)

This is the speech Coleridge described as ‘the motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity’. Do you believe in the rumour Iago has heard?

In the next scene Iago witnesses Cassio kiss Emilia – ‘’tis my breeding / That gives me this bold show of courtesy’ (II. i. 109–10) – and responds,

Sir, would she give you so much of her lips
As of her tongue she oft bestows on me,
You would have enough. (II. i. 111–13)

Her ‘tongue’ here could connote kissing, but more overtly suggests that she talks too much. When Desdemona defends Emilia (‘Alas, she has no speech’ [II. i. 114]), Iago goes on:

Marry, before your ladyship, I grant,
She puts her tongue a little in her heart
And chides with thinking. (II. i. 117–19)

He claims – to use the phrase he coined in the first scene of the play – that sometimes she does not wear her heart upon her sleeve. Iago goes on with his sexist comedy about women being ‘pictures out of doors, bells in your parlours’ etc. (II. i. 121–). In this scene it is sort of true that Emilia ‘chides with thinking’, in that she says little in response to her husband’s provocations. Then again, what she does say is to disagree and contradict him: ‘You have little cause to say so’; ‘You shall not write my praise’; ‘How if fair and foolish?’ (II. i. 120, 127, 147).

In Act 3, Scene 1 Emilia unwittingly(?) aids Iago’s plans by helping to arrange for Cassio to speak privately to Desdemona. Then in Act 3, Scene 3 she knowingly gives Iago the handkerchief. Having said that, he doesn’t have much choice in the matter – stage directions in most editions say that he takes/snatches it.

In Act 3, Scene 4 we find that in her cynicism about men Emilia somewhat resembles her husband: ‘They are all but stomachs, and we all but food’ (III. iv. 108). There’s a parallel between this and Act 2, Scene 1, where Iago says what he thinks women are like. Emilia also uses that resonant J-word:

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       jealous souls will not be answered so;
They are not ever jealous for the cause,
But jealous for they’re jealous: it is a monster
Begot upon itself, born on itself. (III. iv. 166–69)

She is referring, in effect, to motiveless jealousy. John Vyvyan has a good line on this: he says, ‘Iago is jealousy, and jealousy is the flaw in Othello’s character.’ But is there something self-fulfilling about Iago’s and Emilia’s cynical expectations that the other (sex) will be cynical? More evidence relating to this comes in Act 4.

In Act 4, Scene 2, Emilia defends Desdemona’s reputation to Othello, then Iago:

I will be hanged if some eternal villain,
Some busy and insinuating rogue,
Some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office,
Have not devised this slander[.] (IV. ii. 146–49)

The slander that Desdemona is a whore, that is. This exchange is obviously heavy with dramatic irony, since the villain, her husband, is standing right next to her. In each production the actress playing Emilia, and the director, can decide whether to imply that she already suspects Iago.

Then we see a contrast between the two women. Desdemona says, ‘If any such there be, heaven pardon him!’, while Emilia responds, ‘A halter pardon him!’ (IV. ii. 151–52), i.e. a hangman’s noose. Mercy and justice; forgiveness and revenge; ‘an eye for an eye’ and ‘turn the other cheek’ (see Matthew 5: 38–39).

Act 4 ends with Emilia’s longest speech, but the build-up is important too. The scene begins with Othello ordering Desdemona to ‘Dismiss your attendant’ (IV. iii. 7–8), which she never does, so the entire scene (including the tender ‘willow song’) is a kind of transgression of the feminine against the masculine. Martin L. Wine:

The so-called willow or bedchamber scene between Desdemona and Emilia [iv iii] is, as Carol Thomas Neely points out, the only scene of genuine friendship in the entire play and is sadly and ironically ‘sandwiched between two exchanges of Iago and Roderigo’[.]

Even if Emilia sometimes ‘puts her tongue a little in her heart’, this scene does not show her doing so with Desdemona, as Iago alleged. She says forthrightly, ‘I wish you had never seen him [Othello]’ (IV. iii. 18).

Some rare frustration breaks out of Desdemona – ‘O, these men, these men!’ – and she asks Emilia a question: ‘Dost thou in conscience think […] That there be women do abuse [deceive] their husbands[?]’ (IV. iii. 63–65). This introduces a fascinating dialogue for understanding Emilia:

ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ There be some such, no question.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Why, would not you?
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ No, by this heavenly light!
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ Nor I neither by this heavenly light:
I might do’t as well i’th’dark.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ Wouldst thou do such a deed for all the world?
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ The world’s a huge thing: it is a great price
For a small vice.
ᴅᴇsᴅᴇᴍᴏɴᴀ In troth, I think thou wouldst not.
ᴇᴍɪʟɪᴀ In troth, I think I should, and undo’t when I had done. Marry, I would not do such a thing for a joint-ring, nor for measures of lawn, nor for gowns, petticoats, nor caps, nor any petty exhibition: but for all the whole world, why, who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch? (IV. iii. 67–80)

What was your answer to the earlier question of whether you believed the rumour Iago claims he has heard, that Emilia has slept with Othello? Even if we still do not buy the idea that she has, she says here in terms that she would be willing to cuckold her husband. It is just one example in the play of Iago saying something bad about someone and then – in the Iagoan world of Othello – it turning out to be true: Othello is a threat to Desdemona, Emilia is a would-be cuckold, Cassio is a bit of an arse. My final contrarian take on what Emilia says is that in a way she is being loyal to her Machiavellian (and perhaps sexually weird?) husband. Wouldn’t Iago think it a good deal to be cuckolded if it made him a monarch?

The scene ends with Emilia’s speech. I think of it as being analogous to Shylock’s speech in The Merchant of Venice: ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ etc. (III. i. 40–49). Hath not a woman (wandering) eyes? Hath not a woman a stomach? asks Emilia:

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     I do think it is their husbands’ faults
If wives do fall. Say that they slack their duties
And pour our treasures into foreign laps,
Or else break out in peevish jealousies,
Throwing restraint upon us, or say they strike us,
Or scant our former having in despite:
Why, we have galls, and though we have some grace,
Yet have we some revenge. Let husbands know
Their wives have sense like them: they see and smell
And have their palates both for sweet and sour,
As husbands have. What is it that they do
When they change us for others? Is it sport?
I think it is. And doth affection [desire] breed it?
I think it doth. Is’t frailty that thus errs?
It is so too. And have not we affections?
Desires for sport? And frailty, as men have?
Then let them use us well: else let them know,
The ills we do, their ills instruct us so. (IV. iii. 89–106)

If ‘They are all but stomachs’ is a claim of victimisation, this speech is instead a claim of equality. But consider a disturbing thought, namely that in Emilia’s case equality with her husband might be related to complicity in his crimes.

Tony Bromham states,

Emilia’s […] speeches […] suggest that the husband’s treatment of his wife is an encouragement to her to take lovers. […] there is something of Iago’s cynicism about Emilia’s speeches on married life and one can only feel that there is a level of bitterness here which derives from her own experience of being married to him. She believes it is right to respond to hurts done to her by hurting in return[.]

As if Emilia and Iago are locked in a ‘gender war’ of self-fulfilling sexist assumptions.

Emilia experiences ‘a divided duty’, to employ Desdemona’s earlier phrase (I. iii. 197), between Iago and Desdemona. (So often the terms required to analyse Othello are to be found in the play.) When does she definitively shift her loyalty from the former to the latter? In some productions it is in Act 4, Scene 2, during her ‘some eternal villain’ speech, but if not then, it happens unambiguously in the final act. Her bond with her mistress defines her throughout – it is the source of her utility to Iago and ultimately his reason for killing her. In this play only Desdemona deserves her good reputation, hence, as Emilia puts it, it is to ‘belie [slander] her’, as Othello does, to say ‘she was a whore’ (V. ii. 153–54).

Emilia overhears, without quite knowing what she hears, Othello murder Desdemona, and is then told by him, ‘Thy husband knew it all.’ ‘My husband?’, she responds (V. ii. 161–62), and utters these words six times over the course of the scene.

In her last interaction with Iago, like her first, he tells her to be quiet: ‘charm your tongue […] hold your peace’ (V. ii. 209, 248). If Desdemona is something of a sacrifice, Emilia is something of a martyr. For indicting him so vehemently, Iago kills her. ‘O, lay me by my mistress’ side!’, she says, adding to what Lodovico calls ‘the tragic loading of this bed’ (V. ii. 271, 408).

Harold Bloom calls Emilia ‘a figure of intrepid outrage, willing to die for the sake of the murdered Desdemona’s good name.’

Emilia’s heroic victory over Iago is one of Shakespeare’s grandest ironies, and appropriately constitutes the play’s most surprising dramatic moment […] That Emilia should lose her worldly wisdom, and become as free as the north wind, was the only eventuality that Iago could not foresee. And his failure to encompass his wife’s best aspect—her love for and pride in Desdemona—is the one lapse for which he cannot forgive himself.

Emilia truly is Desdemona’s lieutenant and ensign.

Step 1

Lime bikes are not bicycles. They are mopeds.

Step 2

Leaving a large, heavy, ugly lump of plastic wherever you like is not ‘docking’, it’s fly-tipping.

Step 3

Lime bikes are the parakeets of the pavement.

Step 4

My government will proscribe LimeBike, Inc. as a terrorist group.

Step 5

When passing a Lime bike that is blocking the pavement you gotta give it that hawk tuah. Spit on that thang.

Step 6

Fuck you and the Lime you rode in on.

Step 7

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a Lime bike riding over a human face – forever.

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Roman London was half a square mile, about the size of Hyde Park. In ᴀᴅ 65 it was being rebuilt after the Boudiccan revolt, and a thousand years later Greater London – over six hundred square miles – was established under the government of Harold Wilson. To move between these, imagine an immense systole, which in a second contracts the pools of the Port of London, the chambers of Thamesis, and transports you along twenty-mile tributary-arteries to places that still haven’t quite accepted their swallowing by the metropolis, and beyond to those Home County swathes within the orbit, since the mid-1980s, of the M25.

In search of day trips I have found myself walking the waterways, always Thameswards and listening to an audiobook, through this zone, the grey-green belt, river basin of the Middle Saxons, country of the coal-tax posts, what Orwell called ‘the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’. This is from the final sentence of Homage to Catalonia, published in 1937. The following year the Green Belt Act was passed, thanks to which, even ninety years on, much of it still isn’t very built-up, hence places like Crews Hill, in Enfield, now being proposed as locations for new towns.

What are these places like? They certainly don’t have the status of Hampstead. There are horses but they’re not horsy. There are England flags, standard of the displaced cockney. The unmaintained infrastructure is what the state thinks such people deserve – blocked paths, few benches, signs for trails and greenways, put up by various authorities, that last for a couple of miles and then disappear. I sometimes wonder how much it would cost to put all this right compared to a few hours of pensions and government procurement. But maybe if they spent a billion getting rid of all the litter and dog shit, it would just come back in a few weeks. They have the quality evoked by the word ‘chase’ in ‘Enfield Chase’ – half-wooded; half-enclosed but half-wild. I like them. I like the angler posing for photos with an enormous mirror carp he’s just taken out of the Basingstoke Canal. And I like the heedless birdsong sung over the dim roar of something, bourdon note of a distant organ. This is the score of the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London’s manorial wastes.

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A road falls away down the hill we must just have climbed. Very worn tarmac, but worn smooth, not pot-holed. A stone at the edge is blanched by the white light of the sun. Deep blue sky, white clouds. The road is between dry-stone walls. Because the sun is off to the left, the wall on that side, broken by a wide farm gate, is shaded black. The other is deeply textured by the shadows of its warm stones. This could be southern Europe. Near the gate, dappled shade is cast on the road by a tree on the other side of the wall.

I try to conjure what the moment must have felt like. Twisting round to take the photo, feet flat on the road, the tubular steel crossbar of my too-big bike.

Wednesday, 5 June 2013

My friend Tom and I are cycling south out of Brecon, the town in which we have grown up. The obvious way to cycle the fifty or so miles to Cardiff is to use the Taff Trail – the obvious way, but not the best.

The Taff Trail comprises, between various points, forestry track and towpath, and my impression is that it’s quite difficult to follow. We are on road bikes with thin tyres, so the challenge was to find an alternative route that also avoided the A470, the main arterial road between North and South Wales. Tom has planned much of the route we’re to follow over the next ten days – clockwise around the Welsh coast – but today’s route is mine.

We do in fact cycle out of Brecon on the canal but only as far as Brynich lock, where we join the B4558, a marvellous cycling road and one we know well. At Talybont we turn off on to the small road that takes us over the Beacons and down to the Valleys below. The high point of the road is Torpantau, once the site of a station on the Brecon and Merthyr Railway. I am as, to quote Herman Melville, ‘a mule carrying a pair of overburdening panniers’. If you’re touring on a heavy old bike, and something going wrong will cause you serious difficulties, you develop a ginger approach to applying force on steep hills – just enough to maintain momentum. But on a hill this steep it’s chain-snapping strain or nothing, so I get off and push to the summit.

We’re keen at all costs to avoid the Heads of the Valleys Road, a tight broiler of a would-be motorway. So we pass under it at Pant, round one of its roundabouts at Dowlais, ride alongside it for a while, and finally pass under it again at the start of the bleak road to Bedlinog. From Bedlinog we ride along the Taff Bargoed Valley to Nelson, and from there climb up a hill between dry-stone walls, over the unfenced common, and down to Senghenydd in the Aber Valley.

After skirting around Caerphilly, we descend into Cardiff down the wooded hill through Rhiwbina (sounds like ‘blue china’), which must be the finest way to enter Wales’s capital – north to south, mountain to coast, farmland to port. The sun has been shining brilliantly all day and my forearms are glowing, pumped full of rays.

Day Two

We make a complacently late start and by lunchtime have got no further than the pretty village of St Hilary in the Vale of Glamorgan, a region of quiet beauty.

This spot has the enclosed, safe feel that’s there in the word ‘vale’. There’s no view ‘over there’; we’re among it – the glowing green of the sun through leaves, and the deep, curious green of a high hedge on the shady side of the road. I place my left foot on the ground and right hand on the saddle, twisting to look at a bench on a green triangle of grass, and to wait for Tom to take the picture. The sunlight glints on the curved surface of my rear mudguard, a day star for Tom to follow. A house to the right is white, though in fact it is probably a light shade of pink.

We go south to the coast at Llantwit Major before joining up for the first time with the National Cycle Network’s Route 4, which runs from London to Fishguard – a cyclist’s A40. We hope to pass through Fishguard in three days’ time, so want a good working relationship with Route 4, but before long we hit a Taff Trailish rocky patch. At Margam Country Park the route turns suddenly into a stone track. We have little choice but to continue. So, like two adulterers down to their last Durex Fetherlite, we put our faith in delicate rubber.

We make it back to the tarmac punctureless, but the road turns out to lead into Port Talbot’s gargantuan steelworks. We double back. We are lost, and with the evening drawing in still have twenty-five miles to go.

A little panicked, we adopt an A-to-B attitude: having identified a route on the A483 and 84, we reach Swansea and climb the monstrous Townhill. Maybe this strikes some of the pedestrians who see us as an unusual thing to do. Our panniers weigh us down and also signal that we are from elsewhere – wanderers. We carry on westwards and, as the sun is setting, cross the river Loughor (rhymes with a guttural ‘sucker’).

After dropping our stuff at the B&B, we slap up at a Hungry Horse. I enjoy the synthetic, aerated-tasting food, but wake in the night with indigestion, an unhungry and dyspeptic horse.

We set off at nine on the Millennium Coastal Path out of Llanelli, a CGI landscape of curving smoothness set out for cyclists, and so unlike the track above the steelworks. The day’s ride takes us through Kidwelly, Carmarthen, St Clears, Saundersfoot, and Tenby. It’s another full day in the saddle but pleasanter for the pleasanter route, beyond the influence of the M4 corridor.

The hostel at Manorbier has it all: friendly staff, an excellent kitchen, and beeches nearby. We talk to a couple of German fellow-hostellers and learn that ‘youth hostel’ comes originally from translating the German ‘jugendherberge’; as in ‘harbourage’, ‘lodging’.

We stand at the edge of the paving around the hostel and look out at Caldey Island, which is home to a small community of perfumer-Trappists. Our shadows grow together towards a vanishing point, because the sun is so low. My shadow wears shorter shorts. We look like characters from a cartoon in which everyone is drawn in an elongated style. I can almost hear us, earnestly praising the hostel.

Manorbier to St David’s

I make a habit of getting sunburnt in unlikely places, such as Pembrokeshire and my ankles.

We don’t ride far as the crow flies, but spend much of the day right by the sea, climbing in and out of beachside villages under a clear sky and a hot sun.

Tom and I are getting on each other’s nerves. One source of unmentioned tension is that my bike is older and heavier than his, so I can’t go as fast as he can. Once we get to the hostel – a couple of miles beyond St David’s – we go off for separate grumpy walks. I see badgers in the woods behind the hostel. Foxes are urban, rabbits complacent, and birds are everywhere. But there is something enchanting about a badger – like we’re not meant to see each other. I climb Carn Llidi for a view of Ramsey Island, which is a bit bigger than Caldey, but is uninhabited except for two RSPB wardens.

In the 5th century St Justinian, a nobleman from Brittany and a friend of St David, became a hermit here (although accompanied by his servants). Like many another hermit, he was much beset by demons, which eventually possessed the bodies of his servants who, thus rendered malevolent, cut off his head. (Brewer’s Britain and Ireland)

Emerging from the twisted, low, spiny scrub where the badgers live is like coming out above the clouds – the air contains the heat and light of the sun, even as it settles beyond the horizon.

Tom tells me that in the middle of last night a new hosteller came into the dorm. He smelt of sweet, oriental spices, wore a brown cape, carried a staff, and left again before I woke up. And, as far as I can ascertain, Tom isn’t joking. We name the unknown randomer Radagast the Brown, after Tolkien’s minor wizard.

Our respective walks last night have done us good and we set off with camaraderie restored.

At a bend in the road there are three gates, three points gathered. The middle gate is face on, square, and the other two make angles towards the sky whose warm blue is lightest at the horizon. Behind the wooden gate on the left is emptiness, a distant prospect, the field falling away out of sight. The middle gate is of thin metal bars, a couple warped so that they bow upwards in the middle. Behind that there looks like an embanked track, shade cast by thorny little trees, which maybe opens up a way along. On the right is another wooden gate, hinged on a chunky stone. The field slopes upwards, defined by a wall that is a pile of stones with bracken and long seed-covered grass stuffed under it. The grass in front of the gates is worn most closest to the road by cars passing. A shoe ground on this bald, dry patch sounds like a peppermill.

We ride in blazing heat, via Fishguard, to Poppit and the youth hostel at Poppit Sands. Despite its having all mod cons and a spectacular view of the sea, we’re the only guests. The manager kindly upgrades us from the twin room we booked to our very own dorm with a sea view.

We walk the couple of miles to the village of St Dogmaels, where we have a pub supper and a couple of pints. St Dogmael was a Welsh monk of the early sixth century. I read that his feast day is 14 June – this Friday – and wonder what species of carnage is planned here in his eponymous village.

After a welcome rest day at Poppit Sands, we ride the length of Cardiganshire: we set off in drizzle for Aberaeron, where we stop for lunch and see, for the first time, the mountains of Snowdonia in the distance; then fast to Aberystwyth on the A487 and slow to Borth on the B4572, dropping down to the seafront village on a one-in-five hill.

Borth is squeezed between its superb beach and the rectilinear River Leri, which in 1863 was canalised by the builders of the Cambrian Railway. It is also – not quite so long ago – where my granny used to come on holiday when she was little. She and her family would catch the train from Birmingham and stay at one of the many guesthouses of what was then a thriving seaside resort. It is no longer thriving in the same way, of course: the hostel feels a little run down compared to those in Pembrokeshire, and we hear rumours that it might be closed.

It is said that Borth was the inspiration for Morrissey’s ‘Every Day is Like Sunday’, though I’ve been unable to find any evidence for this.

Trudging slowly over wet sand
Back to the bench where your clothes were stolen.
This is the coastal town
That they forgot to close down.

One person who apparently did forget about Borth was Richard Beeching. Tom and I visit the unmanned station on the Cambrian line to find that the next train is for New Street, Birmingham. My granny is pleased when I tell her.

Borth itself seems canalised into strips in line with the coast. Strips to the left: seaside-Edwardian houses, narrow front gardens, pavement, parked cars, road, pavement, street lights, verge, paving, slope of the flood defence; then a wide strip that begins at my feet – the path on top of the flood wall – and disappears at a point over there at the base of the headland. Strips to the right: one wide – the beach – and one narrow, almost edged out of frame – the sea. The bench (where your clothes were stolen) is two pebble-dashed lamas looking away from the sea, linked by six stocky lengths of timber, four for sitting and two for leaning back on and inclining towards the sky.

Four estuaries lie between Borth and Criccieth. The first is the River Dovey’s, on which a ferry service once operated. A guidebook from the 1930s informed visitors that ‘a loud halloo will bring the boatman’, and indeed ‘Borth’ is Welsh for ‘(place of the) ferry’, as in ‘port’. Borth may still be ‘place of the train’ but the ferry is long gone, so Tom and I go inland to Machynlleth. Doing so edges us, unexpectedly (and absurdly), into our home ‘county’ of Powys, Wales’s eighty-mile-high amorphous blob of a local authority area. From Machynlleth we go directly back to the coast on the A493, which then goes round the estuary of the Dysynni, before following a picturesque, single-track section of the Cambrian line.

Strangers are more likely to chat to a cyclist. I think this is because a bike makes you safe – with a bike you’re harmless. An example today. We stop for a rest at a lay-by and walk down some steps to a little beach. Leaving Tom by the sea, I walk back up the steps towards our bikes. Halfway up I meet a couple of men on their way down to fish. The first man – quite fat and wearing a Network Rail polo shirt – starts chatting to me about the weather or something like that. And then before I know it he’s telling me that ‘Richard the Lionheart should have finished the job when he was over there killing the fucking Muslims.’ His friend, who I assume has heard the routine once or twice before, doesn’t hang about; and nor does mine when he reaches us on the steps and catches the gist of what is being said. The only other thing I remember my interlocutor saying is that in the 1970s he worked in Hackney for London Transport.

The third estuary can be crossed on the magnificent Barmouth Railway Bridge. Tom and I agree that ‘Barmouth’ sounds like a town in Yorkshire famous for its oatcakes. It is in fact an English corruption of ‘Abermowth’, ‘mouth of the River Mawddach’. We stop briefly at Harlech Castle, which was one of several fortifications built for Edward I to secure his conquest of North Wales.

There’s a road bridge over the fourth and final estuary, to Porthmadog, but when we get to the turning there’s a sign saying that it’s closed. To save us a seven-mile diversion, I convince Tom we should go and have a look – and when we get there the workmen kindly let us across.

The last stretch of the ride is wet and it’s a relief to reach our neat B&B. Criccieth is, apparently, an attractive seaside town, but we can neither confirm nor deny this on account of the view-cloaking weather.

We have supper in a pub and, for the first time since leaving Brecon, I hear Welsh being spoken.

It’s only twenty odd miles to the hostel near Snowdon, so we set off west to extend the ride via the Llŷn Peninsula. In heavy rain we get as far as the coastal village of Porthdinllaen. We stop at the Tŷ Coch Inn, which is only accessible on a path through a golf course (or by boat, I suppose). On its website, the Tŷ Coch calls itself ‘arguably the best pub in Wales’; and the enormous ploughmen’s lunches we enjoy – soft, warm bread and an obscene amount of delicious cheese – argue the point with force.

The last part of the ride is on a magnificent road that runs along the bottom of a steep valley. The landscape reminds me of the Lake District, grander and more sublime (in the Burkean sense) than much of Wales.

High up, the clouds are the colour of smoke from a bonfire of crackling evergreens. The road surface is consistent and unpot-holed, but made of spread crunchy peanut butter, so riding on it creates a rumbling slapping. We’re in the valley of a big half-pipe, mountains scooping off to either side, tumbled scree. Stopped on the left of the road, I am at the right angle of a stretched triangle, one line extending from me, the one on the right growing closer to it and meeting it at a bend in the road way ahead. Beyond that a mountain beneath the bonfire-smoke clouds.

There is a downside to being further north and next to a lake: as we lock our bikes behind the Snowdon Ranger hostel, next to a wringing-wet wall, we’re blitzed by midges.

Rhyd-Ddu, Caernarfonshire to Llanidloes, Montgomeryshire

The first half of the day is grim. Having avoided the A470 on day one, today we spend all morning on it in torrential rain.

The sky is road evaporated. A tree keeps its centre of gravity low and its surface thorny – protection from whatever might come up behind it. The lines and catseyes dividing the lanes mean this is no jolly bummel-ride. We’re not quite part of the modern world, but we’re moving through it. It rushes past us at intervals, always heading towards where the lane lines merge. Is perspective a Renaissance technique imposed on reality, or was it an aspect of reality waiting to be discovered? Against the grainy sky the telegraph poles have no connection.

After lunch in Dolgellau and a little more A-road, we get on to National Cycle Route 8. It takes us through the western moob of mighty Powys – Montgomeryshire – past the Clywedog Reservoir and all the way to Llanidloes.

Much of the last day of our ride is through the Cambrian Mountains, southern Britain’s largest wilderness; an area covering over ten per cent of Wales but with just a few hundred inhabitants.

The highlight for us is National Cycle Route 818, a seven-mile routelet between Llangurig and Cwmystwyth. About halfway along – at a ford over a tributary of the River Ystwyth – the road turns into a track, with just a tarmac strip running up the middle. Perhaps it was once a drove road, though if cattle have ever been driven along it, a Google Street View car has not.

One of the hills nearly gets the better of me. But this desertedness is the kind of thing we cyclists go out for. I loom over my front wheel, which has grown in thickness. My crawling pace means I must avoid any debris on the tarmac strip. Stationary between each downward push, I lack even the momentum to go over a small stone.

My drivetrain makes a high-pressured ticking, which I can feel in my feet as well as hear. But we’re at that stage in the ride when I believe that not one of the old, fallible parts of my bike will in fact fail. It’s not blind faith, it’s induction – they haven’t failed yet.

I look up at intervals, seeing our surroundings as a series of snapshots – a drover’s road through a technical wilderness. Human eyes can see just a sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum, and right now I can see only the grey-green sliver of the sliver. But with the never-still, vibrating variation of light, I shouldn’t say ‘only’.

At the top of the climb the clouds let through a patch of friendly sun, which throws the shadow of some clumpy grass over the left-hand gully, and lightens the strip of tarmac, our thin connection to all the other roads we will ride over the next five years.

Fingers adjust from pulling the dropped handlebars upwards, against the thrusting foot, to squeezing down on the brakes to pinch the suddenly runaway wheels.

From Cwmystwyth we follow the B-road east to the Elan Valley, which was damned and flooded at the end of the nineteenth century to create four reservoirs. The aqueduct goes the same way as the Cambrian line, to Birmingham. The church, chapel, mill, farms, cottages, and fields were submerged, and the Welsh-speaking community dispersed. At the bottom of Garreg-Ddu, the last reservoir we pass before the visitors’ centre, lies Cwm Elan House. This mansion once belonged to cousins of P. B. Shelley, and, holidaying there in the spring of 1812, he wrote ‘The Retrospect’, which has been called his first poem of real imaginative complexity. As in Wordsworth’s more famous ‘Tintern Abbey’ – about fifty miles and fifteen years distant – the poet contrasts how a place seems in the present to how it seemed in the past. Shelley’s memory of the Elan Valley is of ‘coldest solitude’, but that has been converted to ‘peaceful love’ by the companionship of his wife, Harriet. He reflects on how difficult it is to pay enough attention to the present to notice it properly; to hold and analyse experience before it passes;

To trace Duration’s lone career,
To check the chariot of the year
Whose burning wheels forever sweep
The boundaries of oblivion’s deep—
To snatch from Time the monster’s jaw
The children which she just had borne,
And ere entombed within her maw
To drag them to the light of morn
And mark each feature with an eye
Of cold and fearless scrutiny[.]

Even if we cannot control what happens to us, we can affect the quality of our memories by choosing in what form to place experience in the kiln. Shelley is advocating true, high-resolution memories, even if painful, over the shapeless creations of avoidance.

Our final encounter with the A470 is, oddly, a pleasant one. A new section between Newbridge-on-Wye and Builth Wells was opened in 2011, and the abandoned stretch is now set aside for cyclists and walkers.

From Builth we are on the familiar Brecon road over the Epynt, a mountain and upland area owned by the Ministry of Defence and home to a sixteen-thousand-hectare firing range: ‘unexploded shells provide a lethal deterrent to anyone who might wish to enjoy Epynt’s delectable uplands’ (The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales).

We manage to avoid the shells.

Up on the Epynt, the sun comes out; and, just before we reach Tom’s house, his mum goes past in the car and toots the horn – an impromptu heroes’ welcome.

So why do I look grumpy in the photo that was taken of us when we got back to Brecon, standing in front of a wall next to the house Tom grew up in? He’s making an effort to smile, raising a glass of champagne. Our bikes are behind us, leaning on the wall, symmetrical, facing each other. Tom’s panniers from Amazon, not waterproof. Mine from my dad’s friend, also not. Why did I take that heavy D-lock all around Wales? We were a pair of profligates, ciphers of time and effort, not fully conscious of what was passing through us as we moved our pedals around and around.

2. Between

I love a public road: few sights there are
That please me more; such object hath had power
O’er my imagination since the dawn
Of childhood, when its disappearing line,
Seen daily afar off, on one bare steep
Beyond the limits which my feet had trod,
Was like a guide into eternity,
At least to things unknown and without bound.

This is Wordsworth’s description of all my favourite of the photos I’ve taken on bike rides with Tom. Ekphrasis is the Greek term: ‘a literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described’ (OED). This passage describes a class of experience rather than an example. The important part is the depth of field into which the line disappears afar off. The visible road ahead is known: you can see where you’re going. Its disappearing represents things unknown, which could be anything, including the best that things could be.

The year after Wales we cycled between John o’Groats and Land’s End. I had a new bike and, attached to it, a pair of panniers to make any cyclist feel invincible – black, waterproof, and German.

Saturday, 16 August 2014

‘That’s the wrong way, isn’t it?’

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I really like this series. I’ve thought for a long time that Podcastistan needs more literature, so this feels like it’s being made for me. If the subject I tutor, A-level English literature, isn’t quite dead yet, I like to think Dominic and Tabitha will enthuse a few sixth-formers by showing that novels can be read as novels, rather than unintentional indictments of the author, the period, or both. Another reviewer accused Tabitha of ‘bellowing into the mic’, but that’s all part of the fun for the ‘famous chums of yore’. The only question remaining is why this Goalhanger series is not called The Rest is Literature – perhaps they didn’t think they could compete with yours truly’s Substack.

The Book Club (2)

The Spectator’s books podcast had the name The Book Club first, and in this episode Howard Jacobson discusses his new novel, Howl. He has a sharp sense of dismay and is sharp in expressing it.

The Common Reader

I knew next to nothing about the antiquary and biographer John Aubrey (1626–97), known for his Brief Lives, so this was fascinating. Interview by Substack colossus Henry Oliver…

Conversations with Tyler

…himself interviewed here by Tyler Cowen on what is for my money the best podcast series of them all, in terms of minute-for-minute ‘value’.

The Honest Broker

The Honest Broker, from another Substack colossus, Ted Gioia, now has its own podcast series, presented by Jared Henderson. So far it’s been excellent. In this episode the guest is Naomi Kanakia. Quite a lot of the discussion is about publishing, from the writer’s point of view.

How I Write

Also about publishing but from the publisher’s point of view, namely that of Jon Yaged, CEO of Macmillan.

The London Review Bookshop Podcast

Recording of a live discussion about the British Jewish writer Alexander Baron (1917–99), featuring Iain Sinclair, Susie Thomas, and Ken Worpole. Good if Hackneycentric.

My Martin Amis

Jack Aldane’s My Martin Amis has been going since 2023, and in this episode Aldane welcomes two young New Statesman editors to discuss Amis’s memoir, Experience, one of his best (and most likeable?) books. I’m also looking out for Aldane’s new Substack series The Lit Path.

Novara

I’ve heard the authors of Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed speak in a couple of interviews and this is the more in-depth one.

Subtext

This is only new to me, since a friend put me on to it a few weeks ago. The hosts, Wes Alwan and Erin O’Luanaigh, have built up a fantastic archive of analyses of literature (and film). This is the first one I went to, The Great Gatsby.

Within Reason

Not a literature series, but the second appearance by Adam Aleksic, the ‘Etymology Nerd’, on Alex O’Connor’s Within Reason.

Thinking about it, the first appearance was better: here.

Until next month.

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In his truly fascinating essay ‘Inside the Whale’, George Orwell distinguishes between two schools of literature, one with a political viewpoint and one with

a viewpoint not only individualistic but completely passive—the viewpoint of a man who believes the world-process to be outside his control and who in any case hardly wishes to control it.

The latter is that of ‘a willing Jonah’.1 On the face of it, the writers of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Prelude embody these respectively and therefore could hardly be less alike. One could even argue that they were able to become great writers only having experienced opposite realisations. William Wordsworth believed in the French Revolution as part of the world-process, was disillusioned when it descended into the Terror, and responded with the literary internalisation we call Romanticism. Orwell, on the other hand, looking back through his work, wrote, ‘it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.’2 However, I will argue that in several areas they are alike in their significance, including with regard to ‘the whale’.

They both dealt in their work with post-Christianity and crises of faith, involved themselves in idealistic revolutions abroad, later evolved deep and influential patriotisms when Britain was threatened with invasion, suffered apostasy from the left for this reason, but then generated, in death, extraordinarily influential cultural legacies. Dying in 1850 and 1950 respectively, they did more to define Englishness in the second half of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries than almost any other figures.

Orwell made very few references to Wordsworth, but those he did make are significant. In a 1944 column for Tribune, he includes a list of English institutions: ‘tea, cricket, Wordsworth, Charlie Chaplin, kindness to animals, Nelson, Cromwell and what-not.’3 (We would now include Orwell himself on this list.)

My subtitle is from Ruskin. He was talking about painters, but I think it applies to Wordsworth and Orwell:

All that the rest can do partially, they can do perfectly. They do it, not only perfectly, but nationally; they are at once the greatest, and the Englishest, of all our school.

The Englishest—and observe also, therefore the greatest: take that for an universal, exceptionless law;—the largest soul of any country is altogether its own.4

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1. Inside the Whale: Of Wanderers and Clergymen

I am not going to focus on The Prelude or Nineteen Eighty-Four, but two of my subjects’ most maligned works, Wordsworth’s epic poem of 1814, The Excursion, which Harold Bloom labelled ‘an aesthetic disaster’, and Orwell’s second novel, A Clergyman’s Daughter (1935), which the author himself later called ‘bollox’.5 Neither of these judgements is anywhere close to being fair.

Jeffrey Meyers argues that Orwell was thinking of A Clergyman’s Daughter when he wrote the passage quoted above about ‘lifeless books’, but it isn’t a lifeless book at all.6 The portrayal of twenty-seven-year-old Dorothy Hare is touching, her experiences of parish life, hop-picking and teaching engage and inform, much as Orwell’s non-fiction does, and the Joycean experiment of Chapter 3, set in Trafalgar Square, was never going to be another Ulysses, but that doesn’t mean it has no merit. I suspect many of the negative assessments that A Clergyman’s Daughter has attracted exist partly because they were licensed by Orwell’s own.

The Excursion has been somewhat neglected since the end of the nineteenth century, but this makes its story of the Solitary and his despondency no less compelling. Moreover, it is widely thought to contain some of Wordsworth’s finest writing in blank verse, so to call it an aesthetic disaster is far too sweeping a statement. And even Bloom – that judgement notwithstanding – credits the poem with enormous influence:

[T]he Wordsworth who dominated nineteenth-century poetry from his own time onward was the author of The Excursion […] This Wordsworth, though he overtly preaches against the Solitary’s errors, nevertheless fathered the poetry of his century th[r]ough the figure of the Solitary.

For this reason, ‘Wordsworth was the inventor of modern poetry’, no less.7

It would be a valid criticism to say that neither The Excursion nor A Clergyman’s Daughter is exactly ‘well-made’, but that need not concern us.

In The Road to Miniluv: George Orwell, the State, and God (1975), Christopher Small says,

By the time he was writing A Clergyman’s Daughter [Orwell] had, on the evidence of his letters, abandoned any religious belief […] but, if only in memory, he was able through Dorothy to say with intense conviction what in one aspect at least it was like. In the same way and with the same conviction he could describe its loss.8

Of Orwell’s religious belief at this time, his biographer Bernard Crick wonders, ‘was he uncertain himself?’ Peter Davison, editor of The Complete Works, refers to Orwell’s ‘religionless Christianity’.9 And in another Tribune column from 1944, Orwell himself had this to say:

Western civilisation, unlike some Oriental civilisations, was founded partly on the belief in individual immortality. […] the modern cult of power-worship is bound up with the modern man’s feeling that life here and now is the only life there is. […] the decay of the belief in personal immortality has been as important as the rise of machine civilisation. […] I do not want the belief in life after death to return, and in any case it is not likely to return. What I do point out is that its disappearance has left a big hole, and that we ought to take notice of that fact. […] Most Socialists are content to point out that once Socialism has been established we shall be happier in a material sense, and to assume that all problems lapse when one’s belly is full. But the truth is the opposite: when one’s belly is empty, one’s only problem is an empty belly. It is when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation that we shall really start wondering about man’s destiny and the reason for his existence. One cannot have any worthwhile picture of the future unless one realises how much we have lost by the decay of Christianity.10

Wordsworth sensed this early. With his famously perceptive hearing, he could discern the melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of the century to come. J. S. Mill said that in Wordsworth’s poetry he ‘seemed to learn what would be the perennial sources of happiness, when all the greater evils of life shall have been removed.’ That is, when we have got away from drudgery and exploitation, but also (therefore?) from religion. Mill said he found Wordsworth’s poems ‘a medicine for [his] state of mind’, i.e. his ‘habitual depression’, which is what afflicts the partly autobiographical figure in The Excursion known as the Solitary.11

In his youth the Solitary showed promise. He became an army chaplain and married, but then it all went wrong, as Wordsworth’s summary of contents puts it:

His domestic felicity—afflictions—dejection—roused by the French Revolution—Disappointment and disgust—Voyage to America—disappointment and disgust pursue him—his return—His languor and depression of mind, from want of faith in the great truths of Religion, and want of confidence in the virtue of Mankind.12

After the deaths of his wife and children his

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

                                                                  Soul
Turned inward,—to examine of what stuff
Time’s fetters are composed; and Life was put
To inquisition, long and profitless! (III. 704–07)

In this state the French Revolution appeared as a cause and distraction into which he could throw himself with zeal: ‘To the wide world’s astonishment, appeared / The glorious opening, the unlooked-for dawn’ (II. 223–24):

Thus was I reconverted to the world;
Society became my glittering Bride,
And airy hopes my Children. (III. 742–44)

Another character, the Wanderer – a voice of ‘the great truths of Religion’ – describes the Solitary with a combination of sympathy and Burkean judgement: ‘he was sincere / As vanity and fondness for applause, / And new and shapeless wishes, would allow’ (II. 239–41). But with the Terror came a meaning crisis, and the Solitary eventually ‘sate down by very chance, / Among [the] rugged hills’ of the Lake District (II. 235–36). His ‘bare Dwelling’ (II. 359) can be identified with the real Bleatarn House, between the Langdales, and thinking about it now it reminds me of Barnhill, the isolated house on the Isle of Jura in which Orwell wrote Nineteen Eighty-Four. Returning to the period of A Clergyman’s Daughter, Christopher Small’s words could be applied to the Solitary:

[L]oneliness, from the beginning of her story, is Dorothy Hare’s lot; loneliness, it can be inferred, was [Orwell’s] continuing experience […] That this life was deliberately chosen makes no difference: the self-isolation of one who shuts himself away is not therefore less desolating.13

From Wordsworth’s classless Cumbria to Orwell’s class-ridden East Anglia:

It was just half past five, and coldish for an August morning. Dorothy (her name was Dorothy Hare, and she was the only child of the Reverend Charles Hare, Rector of St Athelstan’s, Knype Hill, Suffolk) put on her aged flannelette dressing-gown and felt her way downstairs. There was a chill morning smell of dust, damp plaster, and the fried dabs [fish] from yesterday’s supper, and from either side of the passage on the second floor she could hear the antiphonal snoring of her father and of Ellen, the maid of all work. With care—for the kitchen table had a nasty trick of reaching out of the darkness and banging you on the hip-bone—Dorothy felt her way into the kitchen, lighted the candle on the mantelpiece, and, still aching with fatigue, knelt down and raked the ashes out of the range.14

Chapter 1 describes Dorothy’s self-sacrificing life of holding the parish together and dealing with her selfish, unpastoral father:

Probably no one who had ever spoken to the Rector for as long as ten minutes would have denied that he was a ‘difficult’ kind of man. The secret of his almost unfailing ill humour really lay in the fact that he was an anachronism. He ought never to have been born into the modern world; its whole atmosphere disgusted and infuriated him. A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home. Even now, if he had been a richer man, he might have consoled himself by shutting the twentieth century out of his consciousness. But to live in past ages is very expensive; you can’t do it on less than two thousand a year. The Rector, tethered by his poverty to the age of Lenin and the Daily Mail, was kept in a state of chronic exasperation which it was only natural that he should work off on the person nearest to him—usually, that is, on Dorothy.15

Her Christian faith is genuine but punitive: ‘She made it a rule, whenever she caught herself not attending to her prayers, to prick her arm hard enough to make blood come.’16 What takes her, with the Solitary, to a ‘want of faith’, is simple if clunky. She experiences an attack of amnesia – a mental breakdown, we infer – and ‘wakes’ in London with no memory of how she got there and eight days unaccounted for. Her excursion takes her to the hop country of Kent, Trafalgar Square, ‘a repellent suburb ten or a dozen miles from London’,17 and finally back to Knype Hill. A longer essay than this one could compare her companion, the tramp Nobby, to Wordsworth’s Wanderer, and Chapter 4, in which she becomes a teacher at a ‘fourth-rate’ private school,18 to Book IX of The Excursion, since both function in effect as treatises on education. But I want to focus on the way in which, though her memory returns, her faith categorically does not, and her response to this. While working at the school, though ‘her faith had vanished’, she attends church and looks forward to it,

For she perceived that in all that happens in a church, however absurd and cowardly its supposed purpose may be, there is something—it is hard to define, but something of decency, of spiritual comeliness—that is not easily found in the world outside. It seemed to her that even though you no longer believe, it is better to go to church than not; better to follow in the ancient ways, than to drift in rootless freedom.19

Aged thirty-six, in Grasmere, Wordsworth returned to being a regular churchgoer, and might have had some of the same thoughts as Dorothy – I don’t know. But she is much more black-or-white than any Wordsworthian figure, even the Solitary. After speaking to her atheist friend Warburton – to whom I will return in a moment – she reflects on her lack of belief. She is back to her selfless parish work, with ‘a big job on hand—costumes for a pageant that the schoolchildren were going to have on St George’s Day, in aid of the organ fund.’ Having put her glue pot on the stove, she considers

the deadly emptiness that she had discovered at the heart of things. […] There was, she saw clearly no possible substitute for faith; no pagan acceptance of life as sufficient to itself, no pantheistic cheer-up stuff, no pseudo-religion of ‘progress’ with visions of glittering Utopias and ant-heaps of steel and concrete. It is all or nothing. […] the solution to her difficulty lay in accepting the fact that there was no solution; that if one gets on with the job that lies to hand, the ultimate purpose of the job fades into insignificance; that faith and no faith are very much the same provided that one is doing what is customary, useful and acceptable.20

There is a stoicism here, but aside from that it is hardly less bleak than the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a total departure from anything one finds in Wordsworth. In thinking about why, it is necessary to say a bit more about the kind of pin-pricking faith that Dorothy has lost. Back in her old life, in Chapter 1, bicycling home from her morning visits, she stops for a few moments’ respite in a meadow full of flowers:

Her heart swelled with sudden joy. It was that mystical joy in the beauty of the earth and the very nature of things that she recognised, perhaps mistakenly, as the love of God. As she knelt there in the heat, the sweet odour and the drowsy hum of insects, it seemed to her that she could momentarily hear the mighty anthem of praise that the earth and all created things send up everlastingly to their maker. All vegetation, leaves, flowers, grass, shining, vibrating, crying out in their joy. Larks also chanting, choirs of larks invisible, dripping music from the sky. All the riches of summer, the warmth of the earth, the song of birds, the fume of cows, the droning of countless bees, mingling and ascending like the smoke of ever-burning altars. Therefore with Angels and Archangels! She began to pray, and for a moment she prayed ardently, blissfully, forgetting herself in the joy of her worship. Then, less than a minute later, she discovered that she was kissing the frond of the fennel that was still against her face.

She checked herself instantly, and drew back. What was she doing? Was it God that she was worshipping, or was it only the earth? The joy ebbed out of her heart, to be succeeded by the cold, uncomfortable feeling that she had been betrayed into a half-pagan ecstasy. She admonished herself. None of that, Dorothy! No Nature-worship, please! Her father had warned her against Nature-worship. […] Dorothy took a thorn of the wild rose, and pricked her arm three times, to remind herself of the Three Persons of the Trinity, before climbing over the gate and remounting her bicycle.21

The term ‘nature-worship’ was actually coined by Coleridge as a criticism of Wordsworth, and, while in theory Wordsworth would repudiate worshipping nature if doing so excluded God, in the practice of his poetry, it doesn’t. He discovers, and uncovers for us, no deadly emptiness at the heart of things, but ‘a bright and breathing World’ (III. 242) in which ‘the Virgilian magic of insects humming’22 is not a distraction from God but a sign of his benignity:

What other spirit can it be, that prompts
The gilded summer Flies to mix and weave
Their sports together in the solar beam,
Or in the gloom of twilight hum their joy? (IV. 447–50)

Nature worship goes with those other P-words of Dorothy’s – ‘pantheism’, ‘paganism’ – but there is an open, ecumenical compatibilism in Wordsworth that means such accusations can sit untroubled next to stoicism (which The Excursion also contains), what we would call Romantic humanism, as well as the soundest Anglicanism. This latter is embodied in the figure of the Pastor.

While Dorothy’s excursion takes her away from her father, an extraordinarily bad rector, the Solitary’s takes him to Grasmere Church, home of ‘a country clergyman of more than ordinary talents’.23 As the Wanderer introduces the Pastor,

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                                              No feudal pomp […]
Nor feudal power is there; but there abides,
In his allotted Home, a genuine Priest,
The Shepherd of his Flock; or, as a King
Is stiled, when most affectionately praised,
The Father of his People. (V. 98–105)

A genuine priest, yet here is the Pastor a few hundred lines later, in full nature worship mode, describing the melting of April snow:

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                                     Go forward, and look back;
On the same circuit of this church-yard ground
Look, from the quarter whence the Lord of light,
Of life, of love, and gladness, doth dispense
His beams[.] (V. 540–44)

Unlike poor Dorothy, when the reader of Wordsworth sees that the lord of light is both God and the sun, she does not need to prick or even check herself.

The Solitary and Dorothy Hare are both semi-autobiographical figures who suffer life-crises and lose their Christian faith, but only the latter’s is presented as being irrecoverable. In the same year as A Clergyman’s Daughter was published Orwell wrote a little poem that begins,

A happy vicar I might have been
Two hundred years ago
To preach upon eternal doom
And watch my walnuts grow;

But born, alas, in an evil time,
I missed that pleasant haven,
For the hair has grown on my upper lip
And the clergy are all clean-shaven.24

He might have been the Pastor, in a sense, exactly as he says of the Reverend Charles Hare: ‘A couple of centuries earlier, a happy pluralist writing poems or collecting fossils while curates at £40 a year administered his parishes, he would have been perfectly at home.’25 Orwell would not even have had to be a rector to be happy, but merely a vicar! Either way, he seems sure that happy vicars and rectors are ‘anachronism[s]’, and there is no ‘genuine Priest’ in A Clergyman’s Daughter. ‘The novel insists’, says Michael Levenson, ‘on the obsolescence of both the Anglican faith and its social / institutional practice.’26 Specifically, Dorothy’s friend Warburton insists on this, and the first part of Chapter 5 is worth reading in full as a very entertaining tour de force from the point of view we would now identify as New Atheist. The wit is more Hitchens than Dawkins:

‘Surely I don’t take you to mean,’ said Mr Warburton, ‘that you actually regret losing your faith, as you call it? One might as well regret losing a goitre. Mind you, I’m speaking, as it were, without the book—as a man who never had very much faith to lose. The little I had passed away quite painlessly at the age of nine. But it’s hardly the kind of thing I should have thought anyone would regret losing. Used you not, if I remember rightly, to do horrible things like getting up at five in the morning to go to Holy Communion on an empty belly? Surely you’re not homesick for that kind of thing?’27

Perhaps, as Valerie Meyers writes, ‘Orwell was more interested in the social effects of dwindling Christian faith than the individual’s sense of loss’, whereas The Excursion is about exactly that.28 It concludes much more open-ended, with the Solitary taking his solitary way back towards Blea Tarn Valley, but not before signalling his willingness to continue his dialogue with the Wanderer:

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                                                     “Another sun,”
Said he, “shall shine upon us, ere we part,—
Another sun, and peradventure more;
If time, with free consent, be yours to give,—
And season favours.” (IX. 778–82)

In A Clergyman’s Daughter and The Excursion we find two responses to the problems posed to – I won’t say Western civilisation, but Anglican civilisation, broadly understood – by the withdrawing of the sea of faith, and they map on to Meyers’s distinction between the individual and ‘social effects’. Warburton is intelligent and selfish, and his atheism comes naturally and works quite well for him, but it can be viewed as a ‘luxury belief’ if one considers the widespread anomie about which we now hear so much, under headings such as ‘the meaning crisis’. Hence Dorothy’s instinct that church retains ‘something of decency, of spiritual comeliness’.

The work of Wordsworth and Orwell continues to do what it does nationally – in Ruskin’s phrase – because it speaks to what still bedevils us. At its least attractive, the choice is between the insufficiencies of scientism – ‘Viewing all objects unremittingly / In disconnection dead and spiritless’ (IV. 957–58), as the Wanderer puts it – and a C of E-themed fudge. It is actually the compatibilist Wordsworth who feels more of the moment, with talk of a ‘quiet revival’ of Christianity, as well as related phenomena such as John Vervaeke’s Awakening From the Meaning Crisis, Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary, and Ted Gioia’s New Romanticism. Wordsworth is as good a guide as these, with, as Paul Fry says of the Wanderer, a ‘sense of his peripatetic vocation as an always-successful quest for significance.’29

But we have been too long ‘inside the whale’. The third of Dorothy’s P-words – after ‘pantheism’ and ‘paganism’ – was ‘progress’. When Wordsworth wrote The Excursion his revolutionary days were behind him, but Orwell wrote A Clergyman’s Daughter before his had even begun. As he explains in ‘Why I Write’, his experiences up to that point had

increased my natural hatred of authority and made me for the first time fully aware of the existence of the working classes […] but […] were not enough to give me an accurate political orientation. […] By the end of 1935 I had still failed to reach a firm decision.

Hence the ‘happy vicar’ poem, which he inserts at this point of the essay. But then, enter political purpose:

The Spanish war and other events in 1936–37 turned the scale and thereafter I knew where I stood. Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it.30

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2. Outside the Whale

Bliss Was It in That Dawn

A lot has been written about Wordsworth’s involvement in the French Revolution, so I will quote only my favourite prose account, the poet’s own and a short one: ‘I went over to Paris […] at the time of the revolution in 1792 or 1793, and so was pretty hot in it’.31 He was on ‘the left side’ – le côté gauche – in the original sense, supporting the revolution against the ancien régime. (Louis XVI was not affectionately praised or styled the father of his people at this time!) Wordsworth’s famous poetic description of this period comes not from The Excursion but The Prelude, and was also published under the title ‘The French Revolution, As it appeared to Enthusiasts at its Commencement’:

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Because of the fact that Lord Byron
Synonymised ‘female’ and ‘siren’,
Thoughts of craftswomen, draughtswomen,
Scotswomen, yachtswomen
Did his each waking minute environ.

People asked of the poet John Dryden,
‘To the lyric, your range, won’t you widen?’
Said the poet, enraged,
‘Can’t you see I’m engaged
In translating the myth of Poseidon!’

The poet named Sam Taylor Coleridge
Had marital woes. I’ll the whole abridge:
He explained, ‘On my life,
Making love to my wife
Is like trying to coax and cajole a fridge.’

The scholar and poet named Gray
Guessed at Peterhouse, Cambridge he’d stay,
But to Pembroke upped sticks
In 1756
When rowdy undergrads drove him away.

A poet by name Robert Herrick
Went to Dartmoor to work as a cleric.
Every poem he wrote
Went in one book of note,
So don’t you dare call it generic.

There once was a poet called Marlowe
From Canterbury, nowhere near Harlow.
He was quite the big noise,
Loved tobacco and boys,
Like the Robbie to Shakespeare’s Gaz Barlow.

The poet-historian Milton
Described battles in Wiltshire, near Wilton.
He may as well have not written
His History of Britain,
But his poetry’s aged like fine Stilton.

A four-foot-six Catholic named Pope
In town couldn’t not interlope.
So he left to make grottos
And countless bon mottos
On what springs eternal, viz. hope.

Volume Two of The Poems of Shelley
Features cover art by Botticelli.
Bysshe’s corpora encased
By Italia, birthplace
Of Venus and tagliatelle.

There once was a poet called Spenser
Who’d have no doubt got into Mensa.
Dedications umpteen
He inscribed to the Queen,
And so never ran foul of the censor.

The poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
A notable Twickenham denizen,
Wrote of stag, hind and roe,
And the ‘lily-white doe’,
But never the subject of venison.

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Upon the whole, though many other circumstances daily occur in the streets of the metropolis that might serve to distinguish the four parts of the day, yet these which Hogarth has selected appear to be the most striking, and evince him not only to be a proficient in his art, but also to possess a consummate knowledge of the town.
    — Thomas Clerk, The Works of William Hogarth (1810)

Below are photographic re-creations of The Four Times of the Day, taken between 2017 and 2025.

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How can I know what I think till I see what I say?
    — Graham Wallas, The Art of Thought

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A Question is the best beacon towards a little Speculation.
    — Keats, to Benjamin Bailey, 1 November 1817

Model for your student how to use discussion and writing to develop ideas.

In maths, you’re meant to ‘show your workings’. In an essay that a student has the opportunity to edit – coursework, for example – they don’t need to show all of their workings. Writing the essay is a way for them to figure out what they think, and they can then go back to put that thesis in the introduction and to trim any fat.

Two

Help your student to

• Speak about complex ideas,

• Read high-quality material, and

• Write essays on which they will receive detailed feedback.

These are three ways of thinking.

For obvious reasons, weight lessons towards speaking, and homework to reading and writing.

Three

In his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde says that ‘Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.’ This is an invitation as well as a warning.

Four

When reading a play with one student, you can’t dish out multiple parts. So, for every scene, know who the main speaker is, get your student to read that part, and fill in the others yourself. That way, your student can concentrate on the most important things being said.

For example, in the first scene of Othello, your student can read Iago, focussing on the way he describes Othello behind his back; and in the second scene, your student can read Othello, focussing on how he presents himself and comes across.

Five

If you’re teaching texts which you don’t know the whole of well, make a virtue of necessity and specify by comparing analogous passages. For example, the censure of Eve by Adam in Paradise Lost (X. 867–908) and the censure of the Duchess by her brothers in The Duchess of Malfi (II. v. 22–82).

Six

We value our annotations. Sometimes we value them as one would a life raft in a sea tempest. But a huge number of old annotations can actually make it harder to engage with and teach a text; to see the wood through the trees. Try re-reading a clean copy. What’s important today, for this student?

Seven

Do the texts in Michaelmas mode first time round, i.e. properly, in detail, on their own literary terms, because when you come back to them in the summer term you’ll be doing them from the exam’s point of view.

Eight

Most students’ essays take most of their details from the first half of the text. Your student’s can stand out by exploring the end – the second generation in Wuthering Heights, for example, or Othello’s final speech.

Nine

When comparing texts, pair analogous characters, almost in a Joseph Campbell-like way. For example, in A Streetcar Named Desire and The Handmaid’s Tale, Blanche and Offred both experience guilt, have illicit sex, try to stay sane, and end by being forcibly removed from where they have been living. The Doctor and Matron can be compared to the Eyes, Allan to Luke, Stanley to the Commander, Stella to Moira, etc.

Ten

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There may be even in flattery an honest kind of teaching, if princes, by being told that they are already endued with all virtues necessary for their functions, be thereby taught what those virtues are, and by a facile exhortation excited to endeavour to gain them.
    — Donne, Ignatius His Conclave

The best thing I learnt at the Institute of Education is to treat your student’s written work with the utmost seriousness. Read and comment on it as if it is a book that you’re editing. Even do this if they’ve dashed it off – it might shame them into greater effort next time.

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* ᴬⁿᵈ ᴾᵉᵗᵉʳʰᵒᵘˢᵉ
† ᴼᶠᶠᵉʳᵉᵈ
‡ ᶜᶦʳᶜᵃ

It is worth saying something about a more recent predecessor, namely Pope. Gray was somewhat influenced by him – they did meet, though it is not known when – and ‘In 1752 he began a systematic study of the history of English poetry […] encouraged by a copy of Pope’s outline for such a history’.2 However, Gray notably contrasts Pope’s professionalism, for, while the latter lived by his pen, Gray’s ‘desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement.’3 He spent a lot of time in post-Popean Twickenham, at Strawberry Hill, the house built by his friend Horace Walpole a third of a mile from Pope’s villa.

Gray could have been a Parkleys Poet Laureate alongside Dryden and Tennyson, but refused the Lord Chamberlain’s offer. Like Brooke, Gray wrote one outstandingly beloved poem, and it was for this that the laureateship was offered: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church‐Yard’. Bloom calls it ‘perhaps [the] most allusive of all poems in the language’, in which ‘Gray compounds Milton with Spenser’. The DNB says it is ‘one of the great poems of the English language; to many readers, learned and otherwise, it has stood almost for the idea of poetry itself.’ In closing this series on the Parkleys Poets, I’ll quote the opening and let it stand without comment.

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The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (1–4)