A bright day - at last!

But only meteorologically, as more bad publishing news hit the fan today – don't worry, I won't bore you with any of that today.

Elisabetta and I took a half day off this afternoon, and went to the Chelsea Flower Show. It was the first time we visited it, and we loved it. My only criticism: too many people – it was almost impossible to walk around and look at things properly. But the plants and the flowers were extraordinary. And the show, unlike some other trade exhibitions – including our gloomy book fairs – is far from depressing. The exhibitors are nice, relaxed people – which reminded me that there's another reality out there that is not so desperately cutthroat and deadline-driven as our idiotic world of media.

I will leave you with the first twenty-four lines of Keats's Endymion. I am planning to pay a visit to his tomb in Rome very soon.

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever –
Its loveliness increases: it will never
Pass into nothingness, but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the inhuman dearth
Of noble natures, of the gloomy days,
Of all the unhealthy and o'er-darkened ways
Made for our searching – yes, in spite of all,
Some shape of beauty moves away the pall
From our dark spirits. Such the sun, the moon,
Trees old and young, sprouting a shady boon
For simple sheep – and such are daffodils
With the green world they live in, and clear rills
That for themselves a cooling covert make
'Gainst the hot season – the mid-forest brake,
Rich with a sprinkling of fair musk-rose blooms.
And such too is the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead;
All lovely tales that we have heard or read:
An endless fountain of immortal drink,
Pouring unto us from the heaven's brink.

AG

Sales, a very British obsession

I will always remember the ecstatic face of a young British publisher who was trying to enthuse me with the story of one of her books which had sold – so she said – more than 50,000 copies. I am also amused when I read, in the trade press, publishers bragging about their sales, trying to hype each other out and perhaps infect the market with obviously false claims.

All right, Harry Potter has sold millions of copies worldwide, making the fortune of some Scottish ex teacher and transforming her into a lady and a celebrity. Fine. Has it got any literature value? Is the world a better place with it? What is the impact, at any time, of the UK Top 50 bestselling titles on our culture?

Atalantis has been forgotten, but not the Rape of the Lock. I am sure there are books that are now read by very few people which may change the world as we know it – or even people’s lives.

(Still, when I confessed, during a talk, that Keats’s Letters was one of my favourite works of all time, and a book that you couldn’t find in Waterstone’s or Borders – and certainly not in Smith’s – I was called a snob by a member of the audience.

I must here point out – to pre-empt the inevitable censure of the anti-intellectual brigade – that I am proud to come from a working-class background and to have paid for my own education to the last penny.)

Jane Austen’s books sold poorly during her lifetime, and she had to finance the printing of most of her books. Joyce had Ulysses printed by a French bookseller, and – well – didn’t become rich with the proceedings, unlike his grandson. Leopardi sold a handful of copies of his Canti. Dante sold no copies at all of his Divine Comedy. I could give a hundred more examples.

So why is every publisher so obsessed with finding the next Richard & Judy or Oprah pick – the next Bestseller? And why do readers buy what most other readers buy?

But I am rambling and ranting. Let’s all go to sleep.

AG

Benjamin Robert Haydon

It would have been quite natural for an ordinary mind to think blindness a sufficient obstacle to the practice of an art, the essence of which seems to consist in perfect sight…

Benjamin Robert Haydon (1786-1846), known throughout his life as a historical painter of some merit, has had little enduring success in the art world. It is rather through his autobiography, letters and memoirs that Haydon lives on today, and it is through these that his character lives on: a man with all the traits of genius with little of the requisite artistic talent.

Haydon’s life was marked by a combination of chronic eye disease, burgeoning debt and a feverish desire to assert himself as the greatest painter of his day. His determination was relentless, his passion untiring, and his character so infectious (or ‘contagious’ as Aldous Huxley puts it in his introduction to the out-of-print 1926 edition) that he seems to have genuinely convinced some of the great poets and critics of his time – including Keats, Hazlitt and Wordsworth – that he really was a genius of the first order. Keats’s On Seeing the Elgin Marbles was addressed to Haydon, who played a foremost role in persuading the British government to buy the frieze from Lord Elgin. Haydon responded to Keats characteristically:

“I know not a finer image than the comparison of a Poet unable to express his high feelings to a sick eagle looking at the Sky!—when he must have remembered his former towerings amid the blaze of dazzling Sun beams, in the pure expanse of glittering clouds!—now & then passing Angels on heavenly errands, lying at the will of the wind, with moveless wings; or pitching downward with a fiery rush, eager & intent on the objects of their seeking—You filled me with fury for an hour, and with admiration for ever.”

Clearly this of Keats’s resonated with Haydon – what else was the partially-sighted historical painter but a sick eagle, forced to correct the errors of perspective in his colossal canvases by peering at one part of a painting close-to, inspecting it in a mirror, and viewing it through several pairs of strong convex spectacles stacked in front of one another from a distance? Yet Haydon’s belief in his own powers was unshakable: “My Picture today struck me […] as the most enchanting of all sights. […] It came over [me] like a lovely dream. I sat & dwelt on it like a young girl on a lover (when she is unobserved). I adored the Art that could give such sensation”.

Although Haydon’s writing is peppered with vanity and often downright vulgar, his memoirs and autobiography are nonetheless a touching and well-written insight into a man who was a forceful and inspirational member of the Keats circle. The impression we get from Haydon’s memoirs of his life – and death – is tragicomic in the extreme: in 1846, at the age of sixty, he paid a large sum to hire a portion of the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly to exhibit two new paintings, The Banishment of Aristides and The Burning of Rome. Just next door, the American dwarf Tom Thumb was performing in a circus show to which thousands flocked, ignoring Haydon’s exhibition entirely. His diary reads: “Tom Thumb had 12,000 people last week; B. R. Haydon, 133½ (the ½ a little girl). Exquisite taste of the English people!” After months of desperate prayers, humiliation and an accumulation of debts that amounted to around £3,000, Haydon locked himself in his studio, his wife and daughter next door, and shot himself in front of the enormous painting he was working on. Not killed by the shot, he then cut his throat twice with a razor, his strength of character unfailing to the end. His adoration of Shakespeare marked the last words in his journal, “Stretch me no longer on this rough world”.