I Awoke One Morning And Found Myself Famous

I Awoke One Morning And Found Myself Famous

Everywhere there was talk 

After the headline read: 

Does a wampyr walk 
Where others fear to tread?

I sighed:

"There would be no going back. 

The die has been cast."

Alas!

One cannot stop
The vox pop.

Like the dawn, I awoke
That sunny morn,
Before anyone spoke.
Before my first yawn ...

Famous! 

Lord Byron

"If thou regrett'st thy youth, why live?"

~ Byron

For much of their lives together, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont (1789–1879). In 1816, Claire had a brief affair with Lord Byron, the most celebrated poet of the day. At the time, Byron was suffering from the recent failure of his marriage and was about to leave England for good. Later that year, Claire introduced Shelley to Byron in Geneva, and the two poets struck up an immediate friendship. Byron’s fame contrasted with that of Shelley, whose reputation grew only after his death. Indeed, in many ways the two were opposites: Byron was famous, Shelley little known; Shelley was an idealist, Byron a pessimist; Shelley’s puritan temperament disapproved of Byron’s dissolute ways, while Byron looked askance at Shelley’s unconventional household. But they recognised each other’s genius, delighted in their conversations, and were drawn together as fellow exiles and outsiders. Two years after Shelley's untimely demise Byron himself would be dead. He was laid to rest in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard, Nottinghamshire, having been refused a place at Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Karl Marx who (according to his daughter) said: "The true difference between Byron and Shelley consists in this, that those who understand and love them consider it fortunate that Byron died in his thirty-sixth year, for he would have become a reactionary bourgeois had he lived longer; conversely, they regret Shelley’s death at the age of twenty-nine, because he was a revolutionary through and through and would consistently have stood with the vanguard of socialism.”

Marx, of course, understood nothing of the nature of either poet. Byron had deeply conservative tendencies leavened by a kind heart – he had no real political beliefs, only attitudes, as he himself admitted. The prim and proper Shelley was a head-in-the-clouds radical who understood nothing of real politics, and would have become lost in a world about to greet the Great Reform Bill of 1832 (had he lived to see it), so memorably brought about by the real reformer, friend Hobhouse. The true distinction between the poets is that while Shelley's life mirrored his thought, Byron's thought was a mirror of his life.

The most biased work on Byron has been produced by those who view him through the prism of an -ism – such as feminism etc. Our concern should be with the truth – seeing Byron clearly and whole.

Table Talk

Twelfth Night

Another Year

Goodbye Dickie, Debo and all the Rest

Many now gone

Beyond the veil.

Far too many

To allow.

But there are one

Or two

Hidden from view

I shall regale

You with now.

~~~~~~~~~~

The guns have fallen silent on a career
That I recall for one film with awe;
And it's not that grandee Ghandi,
Beko or Oh! What A Lovely War

Or should that be bore?

You only need one bright star
In the firmament to see
Brilliance from afar —
And that's Guns at Batasi.

It's better than all the others,
Including Brighton Rock.
And for all those liberal brothers
It came as quite a shock

To hear RSM Lauderdale bellow
At the black fellow

And shout at all the rest:
"I have seen Calcutta.

"I have eaten camel dung.
My knees are brown,
My navel is central,
My conscience is clear,
And my will is with my solicitors,
Short and Curly."

It was the best.

You can keep Jurassic Park
And the rest of the sticky
Computer generated lark.
For me it will always be ...

Batasi.

Thank you, Dickie.

~~~~~~~~~~

So Farewell Debo;
You were the last
From that past
Which brought O

M and his wife
(Both whom I knew)
Like the Dodo
To an end

Of that line
Called Mitford
(And Mosley!)
You were fine

When the sword
Was held high;
But now we
Wave goodbye

(As you  sail
Toward Avalon)

Like the Dodo
You go
And glow,
Debo.

Elizabeth Hill R.I.P.

Elizabeth Hill 

(February 1948 - October 2014)

Elizabeth was the first wife of Anthony Hill. He worked part-time at my London studio darkroom from 1963 to 1968. She was called "Zibby" by all who knew her. When I came to paint her portrait years later from memory I placed the subject in the Elizabethan era. She was traditionally old-fashioned in outlook and mirrored Elizabethan Englishness despite her mother being Scottish born and bred. Her father was every bit a Londoner. They represented a type of person who will soon no longer exist, which is perhaps another reason I was drawn to placing her in the distant past. Her views today would be regarded as extreme and indubitably politically incorrect. But not so much back then. What I liked about Zibby was her sense of humour, plus the fact that she spoke her mind without fear or favour. She had wit and showed immense generosity to those whom she liked. Her tongue could sometimes be acerbic, as well as soft; yet she was always true to herself and that is at the heart of what really counts. I appreciated her honesty, and continued to know her until her divorce from Anthony at the turn of the 1980s. This was followed by an accidental encounter with her and her daughter, Jacqueline, a few years later along a busy Kentish Town thoroughfare. I never saw this unique lady again after that meeting. Zibby belonged to a breed now virtually extinct.

Zibby at my portrait studio in the 1960s.