Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“CLOSING TIMES” by Dan Davin (published in 1975)

Call me a completist if you will, but sometimes, when I have read most of the works of a particular writer, I feel I have to finish the job and read the lot. On this blog I have dealt with all the short stories of the New Zealand expatriate Dan Davin (1913-1990) as presented in the scholarly edition of Janet Wilson under the titles The Gorse Blooms Pale –Dan Davin’s Southland Stories and The General and the Nightingale – Dan Davin’s War Stories. And I have dealt with all of his novels under my confronting and arrogant, but nevertheless accurate, headings Everything You Need to KnowAbout the Novels of Dan Davin – Part One and  EverythingYou Need to Know About the Novels of Dan Davin – Part Two. Admittedly I have not read (and will probably never read) Dan Davin’s official war history of the Battle of Crete, but I thought I had covered nearly all of the man’s literary output. Which left only his book of reminiscences Closing Times.

So here I am noticing it.

When it was first published, Closing Times was well-accepted by critics, who perhaps enjoyed these essays as at least respectable literary pieces after Davin’s limp final novels Not Here, Not Now and Brides of Price.  Closing Times consists of seven portraits of literary or cultural friends of Dan Davin. Most of these portraits had originally appeared as profiles in small magazines. The title immediately tells us that Davin knew some of the figures he profiled in the convivial context of the pub, though the title also suggests the chimes at midnight. There is a regrettably pompous and verbose eleven-page introduction which attempts to explain the nature of these profiles, how they are memoirs and not biographies and how the art of memoir is the art of selective anecdote… all of which is quite unnecessary as it is evident in what follows.

            Four of the seven profiles seem to me of less interest to the modern reader, even if one of them is about an important literary figure. Perhaps these were the four who did not engage Davin’s sympathies as highly as the other three did.

First  comes Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), the dandyish behemian writer, social snob and boozer, who was always on the brink of writing something great but who never quite achieved it. Davin finally says that Maclaren-Ross was a “major talent of minor accomplishment”, which seems just. Maclaren-Ross’s life reminds Davin of Sam Johnson’s memoir of the lively, promising, but distinctly minor poet Richard Savage. Perhaps Maclaren-Ross simply lacked the talent to write the novel he was always promising to write. After some much-admired short stories and one admired novella in the 1940s, he gradually sank into formulaic junk. Yet of course Davin recalls him as a convivial bar-friend, conversationalist, wit… and sponger, relying always on other people’s charity.

Even more minor is W.R. Rodgers (1909-69), a former Prebyterian minister and Northen Irish poet, who was another good drinking pal, if more abstemious and less garrulous than most such. Though told with good humour, most of Davin’s account of him concerns Rodgers’ failure to deliver an article for a book on Ireland which Davin, as Oxford publisher, had commissioned. As a result the book was never published.

Surprisingly, Davin’s next profile is on a major literary figure but it is neither very enlightening nor very entertaining. Louis MacNeice (1907-63) was one quarter of the “MacSpauday” poets, and probably the most significant quarter of that group after Auden. Davin speaks at some length of MacNeice’s discursive cycle of poems Autumn Journal that interested him in the 1930s and of MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel written in the 1950s, which referenced people whom Davin knew. Davin presents MacNeice as a taciturn man who was stand-offish and had to be coaxed into friendship, but who  eventually became another good pub pal. There is much talk of MacNeice’s love-hate relationship with the (Northern) Ireland where he was born. Regrettably, much of this profile is taken up once again with the story of the never-published book on Ireland, to which MacNeice was to be a contributor – the tale that is already told in Davin’s profile of W.R.Rodgers. As a profile it is surprisingly dull.

Enid Starkie (1897-1970), the subject of Davin’s next profile, is a figure now largely
forgotten. She was a scholar of French literature who wrote works on Baudelaire, Flaubert and perhaps most famously Rimbaud. But now her works have been superseded, as, eventually, most works of literary history and criticism are (for dissension from her views on Rimbaud, see on this blog the posting about Charles Nicholl’s Rimbaud book SomebodyElse). In Davin’s telling, Enid Starkie was a punctilious and diligent worker who always honoured deadlines and who was, in a way, heroic in keeping working and planning new projects even when ill and near death. She was definitely not an habituee of pubs, living a seemly and scholarly life. But she was apparently domineering in conversations and, Davin implies, she always had to be humoured as her fragile ego meant she was easily offended. Like Davin she was a lapsed Catholic, but from upper-class Irish stock (“Castle Catholics”) quite unlike Davin’s working-class background. Davin sees her as the archetypal “spinster” who still had an Edwardian outlook on life.

Thus for the four less interesting profiles, even if one of them (on MacNeice) deals with a major literary figure.

The most interesting profiles, and the ones with which Davin seems to have been most engaged, are the remaining three. Two are on well-known figures and one on somebody who will be totally unknown to most readers.

Itzik Manger (1901-1969) had been well-known in his own world, but that world had vanished even before Davin wrote about him. Itzik Manger was an East-European Jew, who had been famous as a Yiddish-language playwright and poet. But most of his world (and his relatives) had been destroyed by the Holocaust, and the Yiddish language was increasingly seen as inferior to the Hebrew that was now the dominant language in Israel. Here, then, was a man of great literary skill, but with a diminished, and dying, audience. Davin met him by chance at a literary conference, and the two of them struck up a friendship when they both escaped from the tiresome introductory sessions that go with such conferences. They headed for a pub and whisky; and they remained good friends thereafter. Davin tells many anecdotes of Itzik Manger’s happy interaction with Davin’s family and his children. Manger’s stories were often fantastical fables, and it is clear that part of the bond between the two men came as Davin saw a resemblance between Yiddish fantastical fables and the Irish fantastical fables that were part of his own ancestry. Minor and unknown figure or not, the profile of Itzik Manger is one of the best in this book.

            The remaining two profiles are of writers who were very well-known in their lifetime, but only one of whom now seems much read.

This is of course Dylan Thomas (1914-1953). Most of what Davin says about Thomas reinforces what we already knew – Thomas worked hard at his poetry but earned little and was easily distracted by booze. Were the distractions and the pub convivialty substitutes for writing when Thomas’s inspiration ran out? Or were they necessary relief when he had been too absorbed in his muse? Of course Davin notes Thomas’s unreliablility, failure to meet apppointments or deadlines, and his constant sponging off others. Thomas would readily steal things from people who had given him a bed for the night, including Davin. Thomas would especially steal clothes when his own shabby, unwashed clothes were no longer wearable. Davin sees in Thomas a touch of the little boy who never grew up. He also records the deep resentment that Thomas’s wife Caitlin had at the sight of Dylan’s pub cronies (including Davin). These were people who had regular jobs and better incomes than the Thomases, as the Thomases lived hand-to-mouth. But at the same time Caitlin saw them as people who were distracting Dylan from his real work as an inspired bard. In spite of all the obstacles, Davin sees Dylan Thomas as a great poet, and often tries to reconstruct Thomas’s ability to light up and enliven any pub conversation once he had a mug in his hand. To me, this is in a way like saying “You had to be there” when you try to explain how funny or uplifting somebody was. It is interesting that, to express the essence of Dylan Thomas’s effect upon others, Davin quotes at length from sections of Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Sequel that clearly reference Thomas without specifically naming him. (For other ideas on Thomas, see the posting Dylan Thomas A Tribute.)

            The other important figure is the novelist Joyce Cary (1888-1957). I cannot help feeling that this is the most admiring of all Davin’s pen portraits. The Ulsterman Cary had chosen England as his lifelong domicile and regarded himself as English. He was a prolific novelist but did not find fame until we has in his fifties, when he wrote the trilogy Herself Surprised, To Be a Pilgrim and (still his best-known novel) The Horse’s Mouth. Davin depicts him as methodical, carefully planning and editing everything he wrote; stoical in the face of adversity (the death of his wife ); convivial but not a gossip. In many respects he was a reserved, orderly man, honouring family traditions (one always went to the pantomime at Christmas) and – delightfully – never reading reviews of his own work and declaring that he never read new novels because he chose to read “only masterpieces”. He had a family of offspring who were all – as he was – well-trained in music; but he himself believed that all the other art forms (music, sculpture, painting, dance) were essentially sensuous and had no real moral content, whereas the novel was, and should be, essentially moral. This is how he conceived of his own novels. Cary was definitely not one of Davin’s pub mates. Davin knew him in the context of family gatherings and parties; and Cary was apparently adored by Davin’s three young daughters, to whom Cary told long tales. I add only that while Cary was seen as a major literary figure in his lifetime, he now appears to have faded out of the canon. I remember that The Horse’s Mouth was one of the set-texts for first-year undergraduates when I began studying Eng. Lit. at the University of Auckland in 1970. But I doubt that Joyce Cary would appear on many ‘varsity reading lists now.

            As it says goodbye and goodnight to so many people, Closing Times is a fitting end to Davin’s writing career. Davin writes epitaphs on old friendships. Parts of it do entertain, and it is now obviously one source books for various literary biographies.