A busy week
A busy week. The percipient among you (if any - I jest!) will have noticed that, come August, the columnists and opinion-formers in one's newspapers take a well-earned holiday. My old friend and quiffing partner Lord Rees-Mogg takes to his wind-surfer, for instance, whilst that most estimable scrivener, Bernard Levin, dons his orange-and-black all-in-one Lycra bodysuit, leaps on his trusty cycle and, head down, goes hell-for-leather in the world-famous Tour de France, stopping on the way only for a selection of gorgeously ripe cheeses from the Perigord washed down with a fine Bourgogne. But no rest for the wicked! Whilst these distinguished doodlers are relaxing from their inky toil, it is Wallace Arnold who is invariably hired as their stand-in. But the work they leave behind is the only kind of permanence worth having. As for the rest, the marble busts, the blue plaques and the postage stamps, it's as insubstantial as a firework or Chinese lantern.Neal Ascherson is on holiday.
It hadn't suffused his work.All writers and artists want permanence - a second life, or afterlife, to vindicate them. Some, in their eagerness for recognition, accept honours in their lifetime (Benjamin Britten did, becoming a life peer six months before he died), and most would be flattered by the idea of a memorial once they're dead. There was no extra frisson, no spurious claims on either side This was only the place he'd happened to grow up in. And not all writers feel sentimental towards their birthplace. I gave a reading recently with a gifted and celebrated poet who was performing for the first time in the city where he'd been born.
It should have been a real occasion, a homecoming: special for his hosts, special for him But it passed off like any other event. Against the reality of increased mobility, we set these fixed monuments. Against the reality of increased homogeneity - everywhere looking like Milton Keynes - we evoke the spirit of place. But there has never been a straightforward, symbiotic relationship between the heart and the hearth. Is the place that inspired David Hockney's paintings Bradford or Los Angeles? Shakespeare's official residence is Elizabethan Stratford-upon-Avon; his real home is all times and all places.Perhaps it's a panicky sense that fewer and fewer of us have real roots that's creating our heritage culture, with its requirement that every artist be given a single grid reference on the map. But some artists merely inhabit places, passing through them or living out of them like suitcases - their real roots lie wider or elsewhere. The Scottish poet and novelist George Mackay Brown thought the Orkneys gave him all he needed to know of the world.
Benjamin Britten was when he wrote Peter Grimes, Albert Herring and Noye's Fludde - the Lake Poets were, and Thomas Hardy, and Ted Hughes, and Seamus Heaney, and even the St Ives school. The casual visitor to the Tate at St Ives, expecting scenic harbours or fishing boats, in the manner of Alfred Wallis, will be disappointed.This isn't to deny that artists are shaped by the places where they are born or live. What we enjoy about music is its power to transcend: it lifts us beyond the places where we hear it or where it happens to have been composed. Much modern painting, too, strives to be universal, abstract, un-pindownable.
Even the St Ives school of artists, who were given a name which ropes them in together by the Cornish sea, have a complex relationship to the landscape - a matter of grain and texture, not simple topography. But just as marble and concrete miss the essence of what flesh feels like, so the statue of an artist (unless perhaps it's Rodin's Balzac) can tell us nothing about art Art may begin in a place, but it doesn't end there. The fact they do might be an argument for a guided tour or lecture, pointing out how a particular street here or incident there might have inspired Burke's opposition to slavery or Blyton's creation of Noddy or Big Ears But it's doubtful how useful this exercise would be. Blyton country - the land where the Famous Five have their adventures, away from their homes and parents - is a sort of Cornwall of the imagination, not a bit Home Counties.To put up a statue is to imply a solid link between the man (or, less often, woman) and the place he is standing. Burke was born in Dublin, and his mind fed on events in America and France.