Looking Back with Francis Poulenc

Grove Koger

Today’s post is based on a review I wrote for the November/December 1992 issue of the Record Exchange’s late lamented Disc Respect.

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Francis Poulenc first became known as a member of Les Six, a loose confederation of French composers who rose to prominence a little more than a century ago. The six were Georges Auric, Louis Durey, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, and Germaine Tailleferre. They rejected what they viewed as the stultifying influence of Wagner, and celebrated the everyday world of vin ordinaire and boeuf bourguignon. Against Teutonic solemnity, they set Gallic wit. Their arena was Paris in the 1920s, to my way of thinking the artistic and musical version of paradise on earth.

Sadly enough, Les Six were not a long-lived confederation, and they soon went their separate ways, with Milhaud and Poulenc eventually becoming the most famous.

Poulenc (whom you see at the top left in the photo above) wrote his Sinfonietta decades later, on a commission from the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). The occasion was a celebration of the first anniversary of the corporation’s Third Programme, which was responsible for broadcasting a heady mix of classical music, talks, and documentaries. Accordingly, the work was first heard over the air in a performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra under the baton of Roger Désormière on October 24, 1948—a date far removed from the halcyon days of Les Six.

The Sinfonietta’s four movements add up to less than half an hour, and manage to mix insouciance, gravity and lyricism. The orchestration itself is nimble, as befits a work for small orchestra consisting of two clarinets, two flutes, two oboes, two bassoons, two French horns, two trumpets, timpani, harp, and strings. According to critic Benjamin Ivry, Poulenc based the Sinfonietta on what he remembered of a string quartet in-progress that he had grown dissatisfied with, torn up, and thrown into a sewer. As Poulenc himself admitted, the piece is a belated farewell to youth, but while he may have been looking back to the morning of his world, his eyes were dry. You can hear the piece in a modern performance by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Nathalie Stutzmann here.

The Sinfonietta’s four movements add up to less than half an hour, and manage to mix insouciance, gravity and lyricism. The orchestration itself is nimble, as befits a work for small orchestra. According to critic Benjamin Ivry, Poulenc based the Sinfonietta on what he remembered of a string quartet in-progress that he had grown dissatisfied with, torn up, and thrown into a sewer. As Poulenc himself admitted, the piece is a belated farewell to youth, but while he may have been looking back to the morning of his world, his eyes were dry. You can watch and hear the piece in a modern performance by the Swedish Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Nathalie Stutzmann here.

If you’d like to know more about this intriguing figure, there’s no better source than Ivry’s study Francis Poulenc in Phaidon’s “20th Century Composers” series. Ivry doesn’t agree with my high opinion of the Sinfonietta, but then, contrary to what you may have heard, great minds don’t always think alike.

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Sybille Bedford & the Iron Rule of Time

Grove Koger

Born in Prussia in 1911, Sybille Bedford settled for a time with her Jewish mother and her mother’s lover in Italy before the trio moved on to the little Provencal port of Sanary-sur-Mer. There Bedford met Aldous Huxley, whose writings were to be a great influence on her, and Huxley’s wife, Maria. It was thanks to the Huxleys that she was able escape France before the Nazi invasion.

Bedford’s first novel, A Legacy, which dealt in fictionalized terms with the tangled lives of her parents and their families, was published in 1956 to wide acclaim, and her last novel, Jigsaw (1989), which described her childhood and youth in similarly fictionalized terms, was short-listed for the prestigious Booker Prize. However, her second and third novels, A Favourite of the Gods (1963) and its sequel, A Compass Error (1968), have attracted less attention.  

In A Favourite, Anna, the daughter of a wealthy New England family, marries Rico, a member of the minor Italian nobility, in the late years of the nineteenth century or the early years of the twentieth, and is shocked to discover, much later, that he has long had a mistress. Anna’s family believe in “absolute domestic respectability,” but her refusal to accept the fact of her husband’s infidelity shocks her Italian relatives, and, in time, her own daughter, Constanza, the beautiful “favourite” of the title.  

Constanza herself marries Simon, a little unwisely, and divorces him just as unwisely. Simon is more calculating in his actions, cultivating Anna before courting Constanza. But his strategies do him no good in the end. “In her youth,” Constanza realizes, “she had looked at fate as the bolt from the clear sky, now she recognized it in the iron rule of time on all human affairs. Today is not like yesterday; the second chance is not the first. Whatever turning points are taken or are missed, it is the length of the passage, the length of the road that counts.”

And, for the most part, Constanza’s road is a long and easy one. “Life was still good to her,” Bedford writes. “Exceptionally good. She had what all mortals pray for and unfortunately few are given.”

A Compass Error takes up the story of Constanza and Simon’s daughter, Flavia, who’s as intelligent and attractive as her mother, but so hungry for the world that she inadvertently betrays her mother. In Bedford’s estimation, it seems, naïveté is a sin, perhaps a mortal one. Flavia can nearly absolve herself, can nearly conclude that she has acted in innocence. But can she? Has she? “She goes over those days again hour by hour, word by word,” but Bedford refuses to give her (or us) a definitive answer.

Bedford called A Favourite of the Gods her “one attempt at fiction with almost no autobiographical sources or associations,” as she wrote in the introduction to the 2001 Counterpoint reprint. The comment isn’t quite true, as it surely applies to A Compass Error as well. And while the autobiographical details may be few, the locales Bedford evokes—Rome, London, Sanary sur Mer (thinly disguised as “St.-Jean-le-Saveur”)—are ones she knew intimately.

Upon publication, A Favorite was criticized in a kind of reverse snobbery, as if the lives of the rich and cultured are of less interest or importance, from a literary point of view, than those of the poor and uneducated. And yet they offer far more opportunities for the novelist experienced enough and perceptive enough to do them justice.

A minor character in A Favorite is named “Mr. James,” which might lead us to think that the famous Henry James has stepped from real life into the novel. But no, he isn’t Henry, and in her foreword to the 2001 Counterpoint edition of A Favourite, Bedford explains that naming him thus was a mistake. Nevertheless, the milieu Bedford deals with is one that Henry James would have understood perfectly well, although Bedford’s nimble, impressionistic style is a far cry from James’ greyer one.

I had the pleasure of reviewing Selena Hastings biography of Bedford in the 2022 edition of The Limberlost Review, edited by Rick and Rosemary Ardinger. The edition is a substantial one, running to nearly 400 pages, and, like Bedford’s novels, would be a fine addition to your library; you can order a copy here.

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Thinking about Atlantis

Grove Koger

I don’t know of any myth in the Western World that has attracted so much ink as that of Atlantis, the great island that supposedly sank into the ocean sometime in the distant past.

However, the word myth can have several different meanings, and it’s important to understand what kind we’re talking about in discussing Atlantis. (That’s it at the top of today’s post in a map by Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher, who’s oriented his map with north at the bottom).

Plato’s retelling of the story appears in two of his dialogues, Timaeus and Critias, the latter of which lacks a conclusion. Plato provides the story with a pedigree, claiming to base his information on the works of Athenian statesman Solon, who is said to have visited Egypt in the 5th century BCE. However, we have only Plato’s word for what his source might have learned.

The truth is that Atlantis seems to have sprung full-blown from the head of Plato (seen above in a Roman copy of a bust by Silanion) in much the same manner that Athena was thought to have sprung from the head of her father, Zeus. Plato’s dialogues constitute the very first mentions of the island, which he described as lying “in front of … the Pillars of Hercules.” These pillars are usually understood to be promontories at the western end of the Mediterranean Sea, but—and this is only one of the many, many buts in the story of Atlantis—ancient authorities placed the pillars in any number of places, and even, on occasion, considered them to be metaphors. (For details, I encourage you to consult the entry in the invaluable online Atlantipedia.)

In any case, it’s important to keep in mind that the story of Atlantis has no precursors. It seems fairly obvious that Plato was teaching a lesson about the ideal state and about what happens when the citizens of that state turn away from the ideals that have sustained it. However, his story has been seized upon by subsequent philosophers, novelists, archaeologists (many of them amateurs), and crackpots, with the result that a small library could be filled to overflowing with their works.

The most popular location for Atlantis has proven to be the eastern North Atlantic Ocean, largely due to the modern identification of the Pillars of Hercules with Gibraltar in the north and Monte Hacho (or possibly Jebel Musa) in the south. As a result, prime candidates for the remains of the lost island have included three of the archipelagoes of Macaronesia—the Canary Islands, Madeira, and the Azores. A. Samler Brown, for instance, dealt a little too carelessly with the subject in early editions of his guidebooks. More recently, some archaeologists have seized upon the catastrophic eruption of the volcano at the Greek island of Santorini, or Thera, which occurred some 3,600 years ago. However, they overlook the central point that Atlantis didn’t erupt, it sank.  

Among novelists, Jules Verne described how his travelers visited the ruins of Atlantis in Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea (1869-70), and Pierre Benoit placed his character Antinea, a descendant of the rulers of Atlantis, rather ingeniously in a cave in the Sahara Desert in his 1919 novel Atlantida. More recently, Lawrence Durrell suggested in his 1953 travel memoir Reflections on a Marine Venus that “islomanes”—those “who find islands somehow irresistible”—are “direct descendants of the Atlanteans, and it is towards the lost Atlantis that their subconscious yearns throughout their island life.” And on and on …

Several years ago, realizing that few writers of any stripe have dealt Plato’s inner life, I wrote a modest story I called “An Incident from the Childhood of Plato.” But when I submitted it to a market I thought I had a good working relationship with, I received a remarkably obtuse response. The editor suggested that I was trivializing Plato’s use of the myth, and that the physical actions I describe were simply unrealistic. It hadn’t occurred to me that I was trivializing anything at all, since, quite the contrary, I had connected the myth with what I thought could have been a profoundly important childhood experience. In addition, the physical events I describe in the story were perfectly consistent with reality, as I proved to the editor when I provided him with links to several news reports of similar events. In any case, I went on to submit the story to the publication Altered Reality, whose perceptive editor accepted it within a couple of days. You can read it here.

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Jack London Rounds the Horn

Grove Koger

January 12 is the birthday of American novelist and short story writer Jack London, who was born on this day in 1876. In today’s entry in the series I’m calling “Sea Fever,” I talk about his final novel of the sea.

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The Mutiny of the Elsinore. Macmillan, 1914

On March 2, 1912, Jack London, his wife Charmian, their servant Nakata, and their fox terrier puppy Possum took passage on the four-masted bark Dirigo in Baltimore, bound for Seattle. London planned to spend his time working on a new novel, to be called The Valley of the Moon, but the voyage would provide material for yet another novel, The Mutiny of the Elsinore.

One of the last working “windjammers,” the Dirigo (above) was not rated to carry passengers, and although London paid for their passage, he and Charmian and Nakata were required to sign on as crew members, London as first mate, Charmian as stewardess, and Nakata as cabin boy. Aside from the savage gales that the Dirigo encountered as it rounded the notoriously stormy Cape Horn, the voyage was memorable for the many bedbugs that Charmian found in her bunk. Despite his ostensible rank of first mate, London himself spent many of the daylight hours perched on the mizzen-top, the platform built on top of the lowest section of the ship’s third, or mizzen, mast. (He also took a number of photographs of the ship, one of which you see a few paragraphs below.)

By the time the Dirigo reached Seattle on July 26, nearly five months after it had set sail, London had completed The Valley of the Moon with ten days to spare. But for our purposes, the most important result of the voyage was The Mutiny of the Elsinore, the ominously titled novel which was published two years later.

London’s narrator in Mutiny, the world-weary Pathurst, is taking his voyage around the Horn out of boredom, as his life has “lost its savour” and there is nothing he is “keen on.” Not only is he tired of his fellow-men, he has also tired of women. “I had endured them, but I had been too analytic of the faults of their primitiveness, of their almost ferocious devotion to the destiny of sex, to be enchanted with them.” Pathurst is dismayed, then, to learn that the Elsinore is to have a female passenger—the captain’s daughter.

Despite Pathurst’s misgivings, Captain West himself strikes Pathurst as reassuringly competent, “as poised as a king or emperor.” Pike, the first mate and a “splendid figure of a man,” is a veteran of the legendary clipper ships that once loaded their precious cargo of tea at Hong Kong. However, Mellaire, the second mate, is a puzzle. Pathurst is “aware of the feeling that comes to one in the forest or jungle when he knows unseen wild eyes of hunting animals are spying upon him.”

And the crew? “[A] more wretched, miserable, disgusting group of men I had never seen in any slum,” observes Pathurst. “Their clothes were rags. Their faces were bloated, bloody, and dirty. I won’t say they were villainous. They were merely filthy and vile. They were vile of appearance, of speech, and action.” The Elsinore may be a sailing ship, but the glory days of sail, it seems clear, have passed.

We eventually learn more about Mellaire and exactly what kind of hunting animal he is, but only after Captain West makes a terrible miscalculation as the ship struggles—and struggles—to round the Cape. It is only later that the “ridiculous and grotesque” mutiny of the book’s title takes shape.

Biographers and critics have not been kind to The Mutiny of the Elsinore. In Wolf: The Lives of Jack London (Basic Books, 2010), James L. Haley mentions it in two sentences, while Earle Labor devotes only an end note to it in Jack London: An American Life (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), although he includes an appreciative comment by Bert Bender. And it’s only Bender, in Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, with a fine cover illustration by Tony Angell), who seems to appreciate the book’s qualities.

For Bender, the novel is notable for its picture of the “degenerated state” of sailing ships and their crews, and for London’s realization that mutiny is a natural feature of human evolution. For most readers, the novel’s qualities include London’s first-hand description of life at sea and particularly his treatment of the Elsinore’s desperate travails at Cape Horn. The novel’s major weakness is the presence of Captain West’s daughter, Margaret. Just as the presence of a female castaway weakens the final section of London’s most famous novel, The Sea Wolf (1904), so, too, Margaret and her evolving relationship with Pathurst are the novel’s most conventional elements. We may fault London for being too eager to give the reading public what it wanted, but it’s important to remember that he depended on that same public for his income.   

I’ll conclude with a word about the fate of the Dirigo, for which I’m indebted to WreckSite. On the morning of May 31, 1917, near Eddystone Lighthouse, the Dirigo was torpedoed by a German submarine. A contingent of German sailors boarded the ship, seized her papers, and proceeded to sink her. The crew of the Dirigo were allowed to escape in a small boat, with the submarine captain advising them to “steer by the wind,” adding that the land was “not far off.” The sailors were subsequently rescued by a fishing boat and taken to the English port of Plymouth.

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On the Iron Road to Sóller

Grove Koger

I’m basing today’s post on an article I wrote for the Summer 2004 issue of Boise Journal.

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If you travel much, you learn that your transportation can be either a simple means to an end—a way to get where you’re going—or a rewarding part of the experience itself. In the case of Mallorca’s Ferrocarril de Sóller, it’s both.

After ferrying from Barcelona, Maggie and I have routinely spent a few lazy days in Palma, admiring its magnificent cathedral and several of its other sights, including its sphinxes and the elegant building that was once its Gran Hotel. Then we’ve headed out on a ferrocarril, or train, from the city’s station across the dusky plains of southwest Mallorca and into the rugged Serra de Tramuntana.

Built in 1912, the 16-mile narrow-gauge railway originally transported citrus from Mallorca’s lush northern coast. Today it carries tourists and Mallorcans between Palma and the old market town of Sóller. The train itself is venerable; many of its wooden carriages date back decades, and it clicks and sways along its narrow track as if muttering to itself. As the ground rises, the landscape grows greener and more angular, more vertical, and before long, the peaks of the Tramuntana tower overhead, and its valleys fall away far below. The track doubles back, plunges in and out of tunnels, doubles back again, and emerges in the heights above the Valle de los Naranjos (the Valley of the Oranges), only to begin its dizzying descent.

Sóller is built around a central square lined with cafés and bars and shaded by ancient plane trees—a fine base from which to plan the rest of your visit … or the rest of your life. One morning we wandered among the extravagant subtropical plants of the town’s jardin botanique and watched wasps the size of our thumbs darting impatiently through the flowers. Another morning we hiked through overgrown terraces of olive and carob to Fornalutx, a mountain village whose stillness lay heavily against our ears.

In the past, Mallorcans contended with pirates, and so built many of their towns inland, linking them to simple ports by road. But Sóller and Port de Sóller are unique in being linked by tram as well. Opened a year after the Sóller railway itself, the Tranvía de Sóller provides convenient access to the small, circular bay whose beauty so impressed the Moors that they called it Sulltar, or “Golden Shell.” (The photograph at the top of today’s post is the entrance to the bay.)

Today, the shell is encrusted with hotels and villas, but the swimming is still good and the vistas breathtaking. One day we took a sweaty hike up the steep road for an eagle’s-eye view of the bay far below, lingering in the Faro Restaurant in our shorts and boots for an embarrassingly elegant lunch served with crisp linen and gleaming crystal.

A precipitous road leads from Port de Sóller to Port de Pollença on Mallorca’s northeast coast—but that’s another destination for another day.

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