Not some staged Mike Leigh or Harold Pinter weirdness, though I did briefly consider writing about an imaginary birthday party (given that it was my own birthday this week), to which I would invite famous people who have shared the same 4th February arrival date as myself.
Before I knocked that idea on the head, potentially interesting invitees included one Joshua Abraham Norton (born in 1819 in London and later self-proclaimed Emperor Norton I of the United States of America - I kid you not, check it out); also Constance Markiewicz (born Constance Gore-Booth in 1868 in London, revolutionary, suffragist, Irish nationalist and the first woman elected to the UK parliament); Rosa Parks (born in 1913 in Alabama, a leading civil rights activist); Norman Wisdom (born in 1915 in London, a fine comedy actor and unofficial King of Albania); Alice Cooper (born Vincent Furnier in 1948 in Detroit, a rock musician and golfer); and Siobhan Dowd (born in 1960 in London, a brilliant children's author and winner of the Carnegie medal who died way too young in 2007).
Kathleen Laetitia (please call me Kitty), dressed in sensible tweeds with a pair of gardening gloves tucked into the jacket pocket just in case, is the first to arrive, puts me at my ease (it should be the other way) by inviting me to take a turn around the garden with her while we wait for the other guests to arrive. She says it seems a long time since she became the first woman to graduate with a degree in horticulture from Reading university. I observe that so it is, nearly a hundred years. But what a trail she blazed for women as the first professional horticulturist of her sex between the wars and what a legacy she has left us all at Upton House Gardens. She's pleased to note the steps made towards equality in recent decades but plays down her own role in that journey and avers that plants are more important than people anyway.
In the end I settled for an intimate al fresco fantasy supper party with three guests; supper rather than dinner because it's less formal and - let's be honest - the conversation is more important than the food, right?
The lucky invitees would comprise these notables: Kitty Lloyd-Jones, Russell Hoban (who actually was born on 4th February) and Grace Slick. I would host, of course. Kitty jumped at the chance to return to Earth and it was for her benefit, principally, that I opted for supper under the stars. Russell at first declined on the grounds that he died in 2011, but I told him that Kitty had been dead way longer and he should come anyway so we could discuss his novels, which I have always rated and most of which are due to be republished as Penguin Modern Classics in the UK this year. No fantasy supper party of mine could not include Grace Slick, the voice that launched a thousand trips, so here we will soon be gathered in a secret garden belonging to Maxfield Parrish, your Saturday blogger plus cultural, counter-cultural and horticultural heroes. The evening is balmy, the spread is delectable - soup, osso buco, baked apples - the wine is of good vintage and there will be brandy and cigars all round later.
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| outdoor setting for a supper party (not in February, obviously) |
Russell, by rights, is next on the scene, a journal and fountain pen in his pockets. He says he used a computer in his later years but there's nowhere to plug them in where he lives now. I tell him how much I loved reading all his books, especially that purple run of Kleinzeit, Turtle Diary, Riddley Walker, Pilgermann and The Medusa Frequency in the 1970s and 1980s. He points out that he wrote another ten after that and I make amends by saying how pleased I am that they're all getting republished and that I shall buy and re-read every one. When I tell him that we share our birth date he doesn't seem surprised. He already knew, and that we have it in common with my friends Vassiliki and Sue. I'm impressed.
Grace is the last to arrive, dressed for 1968 in kaftan and boots, bedecked with strings of beads, reeking of patchouli and already well-lit. It's the nerves, she laughs, acid eyes sparkling. She tells Russell she loved his 'Frances' books as a child, and she has always liked beautiful gardens. Soon everyone is under her spell, listening to tales of psychedelic San Francisco, of playing morning maniac music to half a million people at Woodstock, of her campaigns to save endangered wildlife.
We've taken our places at the table under the trees, illuminated by a string of golden globes. The wine and the conversation flow. I sit slightly in shadow, happy to listen for hours enthralled, having merely to keep refilling their glasses as they rap about the trials and joys of creativity, about ecology, about favourite books and records, the peculiarities of the afterlife, how the next thing is the best thing although the here-and-now is everything. Their happy faces glow with alcohol and lamplight. They are having such a good time they hardly notice me, the perfect host. It's almost as though I'm not even there...
I offer you two poems again this week, the first by W.B. Yeats, the second my own. Yeats wrote his elegiac poem in memory of sisters (one of whom was the self-same Constance Markiewicz mentioned above), and the couplet "The innocent and the beautiful/ Have no enemy but time" has always struck me (since studying Yeats for A-level English) as particularly fine.
In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz
The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams -
Some vague Utopia - and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion, mix
Pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.
W. B. Yeats, October 1927
My latest strange invention is an inversion of sorts of a more famous final meal, a commentary on megalomania and its just deserts. It may eventually acquire an additional verse (which I'm working on) to be inserted between the current first and second, but for now it's a three stanza poem.
The Last Supper
No one touched the electric soup for we were not
soup-drinking men, he the General, we his loyal
particulars; anyway the sight of lightning bolts
fizzing round in bowls behind our reflected eyes
unsettled. We knew where we were with great
plates of ox-meat and potatoes, the last and best
the island had to offer. And wine, plenty of that.
We gorged and drank like there was no tomorrow.
After pudding (honeyed baked apples and cream)
the mood changed at our table set out on the lawn.
Defiant celebration of blood brotherhood faltered
when the head turned on the body as it often does,
a common flaw in a powerful cast, whose reveal
under duress is shattering. Belching, glaring, our
General rose unsteady to berate us, his disciples,
a bunch of inebriates, lacking spine for the fight!
I think he meant invertebrates, but as we had been
drinking for hours, I wasn't going to put him right.
Instead, I stared tired-eyed into apocalyptic skies,
while my diminished comrades finished the mints.
They wouldn't have kept anyway. As I swallowed
a last cup of coffee both hot and bitter, defeat rode
twinkling in the bay, a cock crowed, the first wave
of paratroops dropped quietly through the dawn.
Thanks for reading. There's washing-up to be done! S ;-)
15/02/21 Addendum: my friend Jim has kindly sent me a picture of Grace Slick from 1968. I attach it here as he was unable to add it to his comment...
