As you began
You'll end the year with me.
We'll hug each other while we can.
Work or stray while we must.
Nothing is, or will ever be,
Mine, I suppose. No one can hold a heart,
But what we hold in trust
We do hold, even apart.

I wake up cold, I who
Prospered through dreams of heat
Wake to their residue,
Sweat, and a clinging sheet.

My flesh was its own shield:
Where it was gashed, it healed.

I grew as I explored
The body I could trust
Even while I adored
The risk that made robust,

A world of wonders in
Each challenge to the skin.

I cannot but be sorry
The given shield was cracked,
My mind reduced to hurry,
My flesh reduced and wrecked.

I have to change the bed,
But catch myself instead

Stopped upright where I am
Hugging my body to me
As if to shield it from
The pains that will go through me,

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off.

There was a special quality that had to do with the underside of life," said poet Philip Levine. "The characters who walked through Thom's poems -- they were everybody. He had such an affinity for the odd man out, the non- belonger, the despised, the downtrodden. He had this sympathy and insight, and he really humanized these people and made them loveable in his poems."

While this exchange of pleasantries took place between the two
Ralph Touchett wandered away a little, with his usual slouching
gait, his hands in his pockets and his little rowdyish terrier at
his heels. His face was turned toward the house, but his eyes
were bent musingly on the lawn; so that he had been an object of
observation to a person who had just made her appearance in the
ample doorway for some moments before he perceived her. His
attention was called to her by the conduct of his dog, who had
suddenly darted forward with a little volley of shrill barks, in
which the note of welcome, however, was more sensible than that
of defiance. The person in question was a young lady, who seemed
immediately to interpret the greeting of the small beast. He
advanced with great rapidity and stood at her feet, looking up
and barking hard; whereupon, without hesitation, she stooped and
caught him in her hands, holding him face to face while he
continued his quick chatter. His master now had had time to
follow and to see that Bunchie's new friend was a tall girl in a
black dress, who at first sight looked pretty. She was
bareheaded, as if she were staying in the house--a fact which
conveyed perplexity to the son of its master, conscious of that
immunity from visitors which had for some time been rendered
necessary by the latter's ill-health. Meantime the two other
gentlemen had also taken note of the new-comer.

"Dear me, who's that strange woman?" Mr. Touchett had asked.

"Perhaps it's Mrs. Touchett's niece--the independent young lady,"
Lord Warburton suggested. "I think she must be, from the way she
handles the dog."

(I have  never read this novel before...it has been a GAP in my reading for years! So am taking opportunity granted by it being James's birthday month to actually read it for the very first time! And I did notice that Salley Vickers loved it too! )

So...the beginning...I love the leisurely unfolding of this narrative. It seems to unwrap itself naturally; slowly opening up the vista of observation so that we see Isabel Archer for the first time through as though we have been in the garden too and have just looked up and drifted towards the door where she makes her entrance. Only this is no dramatically realised entrance. We have  just looked  up and there she is playing with a dog. Isabel is thus rendered both fresh and unselfconscious and I don't think I have enjoyed an opening of James so much before. It feels airy and hopeful somehow. And the attentiveness of the eye which alights on her bareheadedness conveys both puzzlement and erotic curiosity!

The qualification that at first she seemed 'pretty' maintains our interest; we are awaiting confirmation and greater detail. This reads as a genuine encounter with a new person. We sense potential and we hope for greater intimacy. The slight tension between her openness with dogs and yet her uncle's question about her possible strangeness is perfectly done. She literally walks towards us and into the novel; all spontaneity and easeful intelligence. 

It feels wonderful to have a new 'great' novel to enjoy for the first time!  

"Daniel"

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

They say Spain is pretty though I've never been
Well Daniel says it's the best place that he's ever seen
Oh and he should know, he's been there enough
Lord I miss Daniel, oh I miss him so much

Daniel my brother you are older than me
Do you still feel the pain of the scars that won't heal
Your eyes have died but you see more than I
Daniel you're a star in the face of the sky

Daniel is travelling tonight on a plane
I can see the red tail lights heading for Spain
Oh and I can see Daniel waving goodbye
God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes
Oh God it looks like Daniel, must be the clouds in my eyes

If you hear this under the duvet on  a perfect spring morning like today it feels like heaven! Every line seems to haunt the one before and the words seem to come out fully formed! Never dates for me and think the sense of acknowledgement, love and care reminds listeners of what matters.

Been rereading Alice Walker's Color Purple  this week and in a completely oblique way that line of Shug's where she describes the spiritual wondruousness of walking through a field of the color purple reminded me of Elton's Elegy for Daniel here.

Perhaps  Elton like Alice Walker is a pantheist too..or is it just the me and the  sunshine?

Perhaps !

Poor Winterbourne was amused, perplexed, and decidedly charmed. He had never yet heard a young girl express herself in just this fashion; never, at least, save in cases where to say such things seemed a kind of demonstrative evidence of a certain laxity of deportment. And yet was he to accuse Miss Daisy Miller of actual or potential inconduite, as they said at Geneva? He felt that he had lived at Geneva so long that he had lost a good deal; he had become dishabituated to the American tone. Never, indeed, since he had grown old enough to appreciate things, had he encountered a young American girl of so pronounced a type as this. Certainly she was very charming; but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State- were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen's society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt- a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category. He had known, here in Europe, two or three women- persons older than Miss Daisy Miller, and provided, for respectability's sake, with husbands- who were great coquettes- dangerous, terrible women, with whom one's relations were liable to take a serious turn. But this young girl was not a coquette in that sense; she was very unsophisticated; she was only a pretty American flirt. Winterbourne was almost grateful for having found the formula that applied to Miss Daisy Miller. He leaned back in his seat; he remarked to himself that she had the most charming nose he had ever seen; he wondered what were the regular conditions and limitations of one's intercourse with a pretty American flirt. It presently became apparent that he was on the way to learn.

'Have you been to that old castle?' asked the young girl, pointing with her parasol to the far-gleaming walls of the Chateau de Chillon.

I have always had an awkward relationship with Henry James. A tutor once told me to read his last novel The Golden Bowl as it would change my life. I managed a third of its tortuously convoluted prose and decided my life would have to stay as it was. I wanted narrative passion and energy: James  seemed to be offering  high aestheticsm as a prolonged substitute for existence Whilst I would never claim to be a Jamesian, nowadays I do find I enjoy the stately progression  of his sentences rather more than I used to...though there remains an unease about his overly subtle differentiations  between one moral choice  and another that lingers!

Just do it I think at times. Take a risk.  Try that what if...we may only live once!

If I had a visual image of a Jamesian novel it would be of a drawing room with people gazing at each other curiously across the linen napkins but never daring to meet each other in any authentic way at all.

The story of Daisy Miller  is one of my favourite of James's tales and like so many Nineteenth Century novels depends for its narratorial life-blood on a male voice who is almost superfluous to his own existence. ( Think of  of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Lermontov's A Hero Of Our Time, the whole of Chekhov  and even Hardy's Jude )   This narrative investment in a largely impotent figure serves to reveal the deep seated stasis in much social interaction and is psychologically acute and uncomfortable.

Winterbourne is the protagonist and 'filters' through his impressions of the heroine Daisy Miller  so that we never see Daisy except through the qualifying prose of Winterbourne himself. Thus by the end of the tale, we feel we have not met Daisy at all. We have only caught glimpses of this transient 'flower' almost in spite of the suffocating prevarications of Winterbourne's 'frozen' eye! We feel thwarted by the elusiveness of this heroine!

If we look at this extract from Daisy Miller we see Winterbourne trying to make up his mind about this new acquaintance, this new 'word' in his highly bounded existence. He clearly feels unsettled by ambiguity and the we notice James's protagonist processing and reprocesssing a 'list' of judgements and values. These shards of possible values inhibit the possibility( and probability) of action and place a keen emphasis upon the moral 'inscape' of the character under scrutiny. And this scrutiny ironically seems to focus rather more explicitly upon Winterbourne than Daisy herself. whose  freshness is acknowledged but then denigrated.

When Winterbourne signficantly leans back in his seat to observe Daisy then we know he is never going to allow himself to fall in love. She is a specimen to him and the displaced American society he represents. Daisy by contast is ensnared within the net of his second hand  moral judgements and he has not the will or the courage to allow her her own voice and presence.

The register we use when we describe others ( and ourselves) is of course highly revealing. No one understood this better than James to whom displacement was  life.  In this extract we sense a male in retreat. He longs to be led  'astray' yet spends his time ascertaining again and again just how near the right path he actually is. Winterbourne's gaze uncovers  his sexual interest whilst also acting as a substitue ( through spectatorship) for the real thing.

Little wonder that James's prose induces a sense of somnolent claustrophobia at times!

When poor Daisy defies all conventions in Rome and visits the Colosseuem at night, she is enveloped in a 'villainous miasma' and contracts malaria and dies. The scene in the Colosseum is one of the best in James and plays upon Rome's association with 'chiaroscuro' ( light and dark) as Winterbourne tries to negotiate the ambivalent shades of Daisy's final meaning in Rome.

  Her death ironically  brings out the absolute confirmation of her much debated innocence and I can't help feeling that Henry James's tragic heroine dies as much as the outcome of her author's sexual anxiety (and ambivalence) , as from malaria itself. Not an unusual fate of course for a spirited female  in Nineteenth Century Fiction! ( Comprehension usually signfies death in James: think of The Turn of the Screw and The Beast in the Jungle for example..)

'What sort of space is that which separates a man from his fellows and makes him solitary ?' ( Thoreau)

Henry James  knew this space only too well!

I'm Still Standing
Elton John

You could never know what it's like
Your blood like winter freezes just like ice
And there's a cold lonely light that shines from you
You'll wind up like the wreck you hide behind that mask you use

And did you think this fool could never win
Well look at me, I'm coming back again
I got a taste of love in a simple way
And if you need to know while I'm still standing you just fade away

Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid
I'm still standing after all this time
Picking up the pieces of my life without you on my mind

I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah
I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah

Once I never could hope to win
You starting down the road leaving me again
The threats you made were meant to cut me down
And if our love was just a circus you'd be a clown by now

How anthemic! Not quite 'I will survive' but it has its own pulse and potential. 

1983 was a deeply sad year personally and this song felt very sustaining and still does. 

Elton is a trooper! 

It's a human sign
When things go wrong
When the scent of her lingers
And temptation's strong

Into the boundary
Of each married man
Sweet deceit comes calling
And negativity lands

Cold cold heart
Hard done by you
Some things look better baby
Just passing through

And it's no sacrifice
Just a simple word
It's two hearts living
In two separate worlds
But it's no sacrifice
No sacrifice
It's no sacrifice at all

Mutual misunderstanding
After the fact
Sensitivity builds a prison
In the final act

We lose direction
No stone unturned
No tears to damn you
When jealousy burns

Has all the poignancy of tragic inevitability.  Each line seems to create the next and carry forward the emotional momentum.  I always think this reveals a human being who has come through: loved, lost and loved again.

Elton John has a big heart!