I have not done much in this relatively new formant which I like to think of as the equivalent of the short poems Lawrence wrote when he was too ill and tired to do anything else ('Pansies' he called them because that English word is derived from Pensées). Not that standard he set would be easy to reach! Some of these blogs have been posted on the website of Wordsworth Classics and others were written with members of the D. H. Lawrence Society in mind. But mainly they are for anyone who has happened to wander in my direction. They are not all about literature. One that is relatively recent, for example, deals with the problem of money in sport and is called 'Local heroes' (see under 'Musings') . In 'Texts for our Times' there is a blog with the self-explanatory title 'Boris, Byron and the 2019 general election' and another that considers the relevance of Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to our condition today (in 2020).

And Did You Once See Shelley plain...?

`And did you once see Shelley plain …?’: David Ellis recalls two light brushes with fame.

One important staging post on the long road to what is known as maturity must be full awareness of our own insignificance in the general scheme of things.  It is hard to tell whether this is helped or hindered by those occasional brief connections, sometimes recorded in The Oldie, with those who do seem to have succeeded in making a lasting impression on their times.  There is of course a difficulty here in knowing what will qualify as lasting.  In the 1960s, I was fortunate enough to have been taught English Literature by F. R. Leavis and yet, familiar as his name was in that period — who with even the slightest interest in the cultural scene had not then heard of `Leavisites’? — it is scarcely now more recognizable than that of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, George Saintsbury and any other of the dinosaurs he sought to replace.

         Before I went to university, I did however have encounters or connections with two more names whose fame might be described as a little more durable.  In one of the songs of the incomparable Chas and Dave there is a couplet which runs: `If I give in to my emotions then I might get hurt / if one day you run away with my uncle Bert’.  It has always seemed to me that everyone has, or should have, an uncle Bert.  My own was in fact a great uncle, the husband of one of my grandmother’s sisters, and he retired with her to Eastbourne after a lifetime in the Lancashire cotton industry.  When I was around ten I was sometimes invited to join the two of them down there, in the expectation (I suppose) that a little Southern sea air would put some colour into my pallid Northern cheeks.  What I remember most is that uncle Bert, whose second name was Parker, liked his meals on time and that twenty or so minutes before midday he would begin playing popular tunes on his piano as an indication to his wife that he was all set to go.  He was the first person I had then met who could not read music but nevertheless play almost any tune `by ear’, as they say.  My great aunt was his second wife and he appears to have passed on his musical gifts to a son from his first marriage who was called Ross.  If I did not know it at the time, I must have discovered a little later that this Ross Parker was in show business and responsible, with a Frenchman called Robert Dhéry, for a musical comedy that ran for a long time in the West End under the title of La Plume de ma Tante.  This was admittedly a tenuous connection with only minor celebrity but recently I was listening to the tributes paid to Dame Vera Lyn and discovered that perhaps the most familiar of her offerings, `We’ll meet again’, was co-authored by Ross Parker.  Even at the height of Leavis’s fame, it can be only thousands who understood what revaluation or the great tradition meant, but there must be millions upon millions who to this day can break into at least the first verse of that song.

         I never met Ross Parker, only his father, but my other brush with real fame was more direct and came a little later.  I must have been around fifteen and sufficiently advanced at the grammar school to be specialising in History, French and English Literature.  In our neighbourhood there was a woman, the discontented wife of a plumber, who seems to have set out to do on her social level what numerous society hostesses, and the grandes dames of the salons, had done on theirs, and encourage the flowering of the arts wherever she could detect a few green shoots.  It may be that she was looking for the next D. H. Lawrence, in which case she must have been severely disappointed.  I was somehow drawn into her orbit and more willingly in that she had two daughters, one about my age and the other old enough to be beginning her career as a nurse.  I remember it was this older one who once, in the kitchen of her house, was describing a particular operation in such painful detail that I passed out and collapsed to the floor.  This display of unusual sensibility may well have earned me brownie points from her mother, even though I have since learnt that the association between aesthetic appreciation and squeamishness is practically nil.  It was likely to have been this older sister who one day introduced me to a boy three years older than I was, but who came from the same town.  He had just left school and was studying, I gathered, to be an actor, and he made a strong impression on me with dress, mannerisms and a way of talking I had never come across before.  Although at that point I had no vocabulary to describe these I think the appropriate word nowadays might well have been camp, although at this distance in time it is of course difficult to tell.  He was described to me as Tony but I can’t recall, or did not at the time know, whether, at this early stage in his career, he had already settled on the pen name of Warren to go after it.

Robert Browning was not a poet I ever heard Leavis talk much about but for some reason that first line from one of his poems — `And did you once see Shelley plain?’ — has always stuck in my mind.  I went to school with the Booker prize winner Howard Jacobson, knew the poet D. J. Enright well and was once (or was it twice?) in a social gathering where Harold Pinter was present; but there is nothing in my experience which corresponds to seeing Shelley plain.  I did however once meet and talk with Tony Warren only a few years before he wrote the first six episodes of Coronation Street, in celebration, if that’s the right word, of a Manchester suburb whose only other distinguished resident was L. S. Lowry.  They launched a television programme which survives to this day, has just celebrated its sixtieth birthday and must have been seen by even more millions that can sing `We’ll meet again’.  Fame is of course not only a numbers game yet, philosophically speaking, there is no such thing as a masterpiece which nobody has ever read.  If we were to take Tony Warren as a standard, then most of us who have tried to communicate with our fellow human beings are abject failures.  A pity, then, that I can’t now remember a single word he said.

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