Katherine Rundell's anatomy of wonders

PLUS: crypto poetry and Remembrance Day

Writing Elsewhere
I followed in John Betjeman’s footsteps around some of the City churches and wrote about it for The Critic.

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Katherine Rundell's anatomy of wonders

What a rare and splendid writer is Katherine Rundell. She can compound like Manley-Hopkins, describing swifts as “sky-suited”, and knows as Kingsley Amis did how to use commas instead of conjunctions, writing of hermit crabs, “They have been found in tin cans, in coconut halves.” She routinely uses colons as Fowler taught us: to deliver the goods that were invoiced in the previous words. Such technical elegances are not everything we should want in a writer, but they count, and they are a large part of what makes her new collection of animal essays, The Golden Mole, so enticing and readable.

Rundell has a great skill for condensation, not just in her syntax. She takes only the most interesting, bizarre, and informative facts and carefully arranges them, so that sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, you begin to see animals in ways you could not have anticipated. Here’s a typically arresting sentence: “The shattered skulls of foxes have been found in wombat burrows.” Such rhythm! Such cadences! Rundell is perhaps the only writer I have read whose nature writing verges on prose poetry successfully.¹ That is because she uses writing techniques to help her arrange facts, whereas most of the literary nature writers are so light on information their fancy prose is wordy and insubstantial. Rundell is the spun gold to their faux taffeta.

And such facts. Did you know that Amelia Earhart was likely killed by hermit crabs, whose clutch strength is more than twice that of a tiger’s jaw? Or that giraffes only drink every few days because bending their neck down restricts blood flow to the brain? How about that bear fat was sold as a cure for baldness in Elizabethan London, bears being kept in cages outside shops to reassure prospective customers they would not be purchasing dyed pig grease? You will find within these essays, originally written for the London Review of Books, diversions into the history of aphrodisiacs, plagues, seventeenth-century death registers, social history, egregious practices in the modern sale of exotic creatures as pets, and much more besides. Rundell is an anthological essayist. She gets more into three pages than some people get into whole chapters.

That precise, eclectic eye for detail was on display in Rundell’s recent biography of John Donne (my review here), with such snippets as roast chickens dressed as jockeys riding a roast pig. There is a new series of children’s books by Rundell coming out soon, which as Susie Goldsbrough said could be as good as Philip Pullman. I, too, am keen to read that series. But it is in the sort of cataloguing-rising-to-cheerful-polemic techniques that she uses in The Golden Mole where Rundell really excels. When her lively imagination works on facts she is able to produce juxtapositions and illuminations other writers cannot. The book I really want her to write would be An Anatomy of Wonders.

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Walt Whitman’s crypto poetry

I don’t blog much about poetry any more (if you want to know what I think try this or this or this or this—I used to make lists of poems I enjoyed, also). It struck me as I was reading Whitman this week that a lot of what seems to have gone wrong with SBF and FTX comes back to basic human instincts.

(I and mine do not convince by arguments, similes, rhymes,
We convince by our presence.)

We convince by our presence! Yes, papa Walt knew his business and the evocative, religious style he writes in, with those full long lines and buoyant biblical parallelism, brings out the timeless morality that always gets forgotten when sex cults commit fraud in the quest of utopia.

Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is call’d riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve,
You but arrive at the city to which you were destin’d, you hardly settle yourself to satisfaction before you are call’d by an irresistible call to depart,
You shall be treated to the ironical smiles and mockings of those who remain behind you,
What beckonings of love you receive you shall only answer with passionate kisses of parting,
You shall not allow the hold of those who spread their reach’d hands toward you.

One day I shall teach a humanities class at business school. As well as reading Mansfield Park (How To Behave In Meetings) we shall chant Walt Whitman and the Psalms together. We will study the Memos of David Selznick, the anthology Leadership, Froude’s Life of Carlyle, Tolstoy, and other such things. There would, of course, be a good amount of biography.

If you liked the Whitman you can read the whole poem, called Song of the Open Road, here. If you didn’t like the Whitman, there is very little I can do to help you, other than to wish you the best of luck with whatever sort of life it is that you are trying to live.

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Poetry of Remembrance

We went to the Remembrance Day parade with the children on Sunday. They were attending as part of their Scout troop. Some 886,000 Londoners died in service in the First and Second World Wars, and a further 70,000 civilians died, many of them in the Blitz. For us to be free, young men have choked in the mud and mothers have been blown up in their homes. You can see the remnants of a bombed-out church at Christ Church Greyfriars and also a few streets away in St Mary Aldermanbury, now reconstructed in Fulton Missouri as a memorial to Churchill. Stand on the top floor of Samuel Johnson’s house and look out across the square (all destroyed, only the house remains) down to Fleet Street. Fire watchers were positioned there; you can see a lovely painting of them in the attic. Walk north to the area around the Barbican and notice through the absence of anything old just how badly London was affected by the Blitz. For half a mile north of Gresham street, very few structures remained. (Britain is so restrictive about new building that the net effect of the Blitz for London’s GDP was positive.)

I thought of this but also of my grandfather, a nineteen-year-old who served in the North African desert in 1942, the point at which it was not clear how the Allies would win. “Before El Alamein we never had a victory,” wrote Churchill, “afterwards we never had a loss.” My grandfather didn’t fight with Montgomery, but he was there in the desert where the world hung in the balance. My uncle died, younger than I am now, flying Tornadoes over Germany in 1988, leaving behind two small children and a young wife. One of those children is an RAF officer today. She gave this very moving address on Remembrance Day two years ago. These people served—and serve—so I don’t have to. A lot of great poetry was written about the wars, novels and memoirs too. Some of it was read at the Remembrance Day service. (I recommend Ivor Gurney.) The words I found most moving this Sunday though were from a hymn, O God Our Help in Ages Past. It was written by Isaac Watts, a dissenting minister and poet, and is a reworking of Psalm 90. How’s this for the poetry of loss:

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone,
Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;
They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

He could have been writing about the Blitz, the young of the Somme, the Normandy dead, the soldiers known and unknown, the factory girls, the ambulance drivers—all of them gone, quite, quite gone. It is good for us to remember, but it won’t change much. The dead are dead and the living must work to make their memory worthwhile. We must remember them and we must be worthy of their memory. Watts was writing about you too. Life is short, even when you are not killed in war. Make good use of your time! Perhaps some other words Watts wrote will be sufficient inducement to help us keep their memory alive until next year. It was written for children but it can serve for us as well.

In works of labour or of skill
I would be busy too:
For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.

In books, or work, or healthful play
Let my first years be past,
That I may give for every day
Some good account at last.

Watts sets a good example in his own work. Here’s an extract from the Dictionary of Biography.

Despite his recurrent ill health, the previously declining Mark Lane Church flourished under Watts… ‘Though his Stature was low, and his bodily Presence but weak, yet his Preaching was Weighty and Powerful’.

Let us remember, and for their sake let us be busy with good works. As the Psalmist says, “So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.”

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Writing Elsewhere
I followed in John Betjeman’s footsteps around some of the City churches and wrote about it for The Critic.

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1. Virginia Woolf was right, again: nature writing is the disease of English prose.