Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp's deathday - New Zealand's other Germaine Greer, though you probably know her without her surname.
She once wrote, and it is a very dangerous thing for a writer to hold out such open invitations to posterity:
"I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all."
Before he fell out with her, D.H.Lawrence admired her, even adored her, and that is recommendation enough for me. They shared the T.B. too of course. Her last words would last forever, if they were inscribed on her gravestone:
"I love the rain. I want the feeling of it on my face."
She also went further, much further; through the rain to the illusion of sunshine:
The Storm
I ran to the forest for shelter,
Breathless, half sobbing;
I put my arms around a tree,
[‘round’ in the original: the added syllable is my correction]
Pillowed my head against the rough bark.
"Protect me," I said. "I am a lost child."
But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.
A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth;
It lashed the forest together.
A huge green wave thundered and burst over my head.
[sloppy, that line]
I prayed, implored, "Please take care of me!"
But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon me.
Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.
A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was drowning
[better without ‘that’]
In a bubbling cavern of space. I alone -
Smaller than the smallest fly - was alive and terrified.
Then for what reason I know not, I became triumphant.
"Well, kill me!" I cried and ran out into the open.
But the storm ceased: the sun spread his wings
And floated serene in the silver pool of the sky.
[dreadful cliché - the poem maimed
I put my hands over my face: I was blushing.
[but then redeemed]
And the trees swung together and delicately laughed.
[by ‘delicately laughed’]
I put my arms around a tree,
[‘round’ in the original: the added syllable is my correction]
Pillowed my head against the rough bark.
"Protect me," I said. "I am a lost child."
But the tree showered silver drops on my face and hair.
A wind sprang up from the ends of the earth;
It lashed the forest together.
A huge green wave thundered and burst over my head.
[sloppy, that line]
I prayed, implored, "Please take care of me!"
But the wind pulled at my cloak and the rain beat upon me.
Little rivers tore up the ground and swamped the bushes.
A frenzy possessed the earth: I felt that the earth was drowning
[better without ‘that’]
In a bubbling cavern of space. I alone -
Smaller than the smallest fly - was alive and terrified.
Then for what reason I know not, I became triumphant.
"Well, kill me!" I cried and ran out into the open.
But the storm ceased: the sun spread his wings
And floated serene in the silver pool of the sky.
[dreadful cliché - the poem maimed
I put my hands over my face: I was blushing.
[but then redeemed]
And the trees swung together and delicately laughed.
[by ‘delicately laughed’]
Amber pages
China Daily has an interesting article (click here) about the publication of his will, apparently "proving" what scholars have long questioned (click here), that he ever went to China in his life ... but Marco Polo is to travel literature what Shakespeare is to English drama - the man who couldn't possibly have done what he is said to have done, even though it's right there before our eyes, unneeding of proof. The Everyman Library edition of Marco Polo's travels - click here - for example, contains extensive footnotes, longer than the book itself, which could win an international award for the most insulting, patronising, condescending and defamatory footnotes ever written, a continuous argument against absolutely everything Polo claims to have seen, based on the editor's certainty that anything written in anybody else's book on the subject can be taken as veracious, even if it was written centuries after Polo had been and seen.
Simone Lucie
Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir, born today in 1908. Apparently "The Second Sex" was suggested by her next-door neighbour Jean-Paul Sartre (for whom see April 15), and she thought it might be a good idea for a short article for a newspaper; until she started researching it, and it grew, not just into 2-volumes and over a thousand pages, but into the most important work in the feminist catalogue.*
Joan Chandos Baez, born today in 1941.
1969: The Concorde jetliner made its first test flight (Bristol). Or maybe not. The BBC History page insists it was March 2; elsewhere I have found January 19... clearly this needs more research...
* From my diary for March 2024, many years after I posted her birth-date:
you can read the full tale of the family's continued ownership here, and the rest of my visit will be in Prashker's London when I finally get around to publishing it; oh, and I leave you to work out how many of her book-titles and key concepts I managed to squeeze like the juice of mandarins into that diary-paragraph in order to capture at least an overall image of her.Coming out of Moorfields eye hospital after my check-up had gone much better than I feared it might - all men are mortal, even if I am no longer in the prime of life - the drops they put in my eye for their scans had rendered any more reading or writing existentially impossible, but going for a long walk along the left bank of the canal absolutely essential. Force of circumstance - a fracas on a houseboat on the Angel side had caused one man a very easy death and spilled the blood of several others - sent me eastwards, towards Dalston and Hackney, along the north side of Shoreditch Park, and no it wasn't going to prove a huit clos, because this was not Sartre territory, though the two were inseparables. De Beauvoir town - I have no idea if she ever came to stay here - named for Simone's ancestor Richard de Beauvoir of Guernsey, who acquired Balmes House in the 1680s...
And of course, according to the rules I set for this blog, there should have been a cartoon of a traffic light to indicate the follow-up to the asterisk at the end of her first entry. But "De Beauvoir Town is a low-traffic neighbourhood (LTN) and is characterised by an almost complete lack of traffic lights within the residential grid. Traffic is primarily managed through traffic calming measures like bollards and modal filters, rather than traffic lights." And conservation green for this paragraph as well. I think Simone would have applauded it unhesitantly.
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