#michael spring

[The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery (Which He Never Meant to Publish on Any Account), by Charles Dickens. With Illustrations by HK Browne. First Edition Published by Bradbury & Evans, London, 1850. 624 pp]

'Well, well!' said my aunt, 'the child is right to stand by those who have stood by him – Janet! Donkeys!'

Just opposite the pond where a pioneering Francis Bacon tried to stuff a chicken with snow (an early experiment in refrigeration, as a result of which he died) is where Coleridge stayed when he was trying to get off Laudanum. The chemist he used to supply his needs (just around the corner) apparently had a secret door so that he could pick up supplies discreetly.

This was all a bit earlier than Charles Dickens’s semi-autobiographical novel David Copperfield, in which the hero stays with the Steerforth family, in the same street, in their imposing house on Highgate Hill, where he revels in the view across London. It does, though, set a tone.

Go to Highgate today and you can still take in the views, across Hampstead Heath and to the landmark hungry city beyond. You’ll see interesting looking delicatessens and bakeries and estate agents in whose windows are advertised average-looking properties with eye-watering prices. Cyclists and runners come here for the challenge. (That climb up West Hill must be traumatic, and so must the one past Highgate Cemetery where Karl Marx lies quiescent). What you won’t see is any trace (apart from a blue plaque) of that Dickensian hero who was to all intents and purposes, Dickens himself.

When I first went to Grammar School (some time before the flood), our teacher of English, a redoubtable Scots lady, set us to work reading Robbie Burns, most of which I still find unreadable to this day: (“First he ate the black puddens, and then he ate the white” if memory serves. What was all that stuff about?). But then, having, I suppose given up on us ever adopting Scotland as a second nation, started us reading David Copperfield.

There was a lot of early humour. She had us read passages from the book, and one of my classmates had the misfortune to take on a section in which, according to him, “workmen were warming their hands round a brassiere.” (Brazier was the word he was searching for, but an unpleasant nickname pursued him for years afterwards). We couldn’t get why Brooks of Sheffield would be listening in to awkward conversations about David’s destiny, let alone why David should be the someone who was “sharp”, or why Barkis, the carrier, should be ‘willin’.

Steerforth of course is both David’s boyhood hero and nemesis, eventually betraying in the most callous manner David’s adolescent friend Little Emily, so it is ironic that his family home sits high on a hill where you might have thought all manner of approaching disasters might be foreseen. You look at that house and contemplate how Mrs Steerforth lived there, alone and destroyed by the revelation that her son had been the least moral of individuals, with an inherent streak of cruelty.

What no one likes about David Copperfield in particular and Dickens in general is how good all the children (a lot of the adult characters too) actually are. You know, and I know, that children and adults too, just aren’t like that. His characters are noble, responsible, uniquely loving and should they ever commit a single irresponsible act, they suffer for it (usually in silent prayer) over a good number of pages. This is a feeling you can’t get over, but perhaps as the pages go on you learn to ignore a little in the face of mounting eccentricity.

The mentally troubled Mr Dick and his fixation with kites and Charles I helps you do this, so too does Mr Wilkins Micawber who continually totters on the brink of the debtors’ prison (like Dickens’s own father) while continually fathering children and remaining optimistic that ‘something will turn up’.

But while the good do seem impossibly good, the bad are really bad too, though believably so. David’s own mother perhaps doesn’t mean to be bad. (She just falls in love with the wrong man). But David’s schoolmasters are disconcertingly sadistic. Steerforth, the schoolboy role model shapes up to be a hero, but is gradually revealed to be a snob without decency or morals. And then there’s Uriah Heep, the character for whom the word ‘oily’ was created, the beast who corrupts all about him and whose desires – for both heiress and position in society – are so grotesque, yet so nearly come true.

David Copperfield is not a fairy tale. Instead it is a whole collection of them, in which every variety of fairy tale outcome from cruel disaster to shining achievement takes its place within its pages. Most varieties of mythical beast are there too, together with a few, often vulnerable, often understated, heroes. The best novels always answer ‘what if?’ questions. So many what ifs arise in David Copperfield that it is virtually a philosophy course. There’s a muted plea for social justice too, which is no bad thing, even now.

There are a lot of reasons not to read it. (Too long, too sentimental, too much else to do). But ever since my dour Scots teacher encouraged us to open its pages, it has become one of those books I go back to, time after time.

Top/Middle: Two photographs thanks to Quintessential Rare Books, LLC, Laguna Hills, CA, USA & to Abe Books. Bottom: Sketch of Dickens in 1842 during American Tour; thanks to Bonhams.

Michael Spring

wordsacrosstime

Jazmine and I with cobra lilies

near a serpentine rock ledge wet from a seeping slope the greens of the cobra lily’s veiny body feathers light a wasp, caught in the drowse of sunlight, inspects and enters an opening into the cobra-like head this carnivorous pitcher plant begins to twitch and sway the wasp bangs against the plant’s inner walls looking at numerous translucent false exits as the wasp tires and slips down – the…

no, I didn’t see the bear today near the ancient apple tree nor did I unfold my beach chair to fish the pond I couldn’t stop writing in my journal I didn’t leave the house I’m sorry I haven’t yet returned your call the sun has set, the moon is bright and I’m still in my pajamas I haven’t harvested the boletes fruiting near the woodpile although they are inside my head, sizzling in a skillet, so…

after we climbed through the fence

freight cars blasted by with a rush of wind and screaming metal box cars, hopper cars, empty livestock cars graffiti slipping past us what we really wanted to see was a livestock car with an elephant or a giraffe or a flatcar full of slumbering contortionists we hoped to see someone thrown from the train who’d tell us the octopus woman thought he was the best acrobat she ever saw and perhaps he’d…

it seems impossible your jaguar slipped in unnoticed before the stone doors were sealed I will pry the door open for you but you must promise your jaguar won’t attack mine my jaguar simply wants to run free with yours Michael Spring is the author of five poetry books and one children’s book. His most recent book is dentro do som/ inside the sound – a bilingual book (poems translated into…

with her red skirt and sequins

she flames on the wick of the Celtic bodhran’s rhythm as the hurdy-gurdy with flutes and guitars build a ladder I now climb                         leading into the wing bones                         of the house – yes, our                         house can fly Michael Spring is the author of five poetry books and one children’s book. His most recent book is dentro do som/ inside the sound – a…

how I see things

my eye is a mouth holding an egg if I stand still long enough I’ll have the guts to swallow my future Michael Spring is the author of five poetry books and one children’s book. His most recent book is dentro do som/ inside the sound – a bilingual book (poems translated into Portuguese by Maria Joao Marques) published by Companhia das Ilhas, Portugal, 2021. His poetry awards include the Robert…

by Michael Spring

This is a brief and true story of heartache and injustice, a tragedy that stretched over generations. It is one of those stories that prods at your sleep, etches itself into views and places, and finally leaves you shouting at the moon.

My part in the story is simply that of an observer. I have traced down some of the links, read some of the poetry, wept silently at the rank injustice that surrounded these few connected individuals. The only good thing to come out of it was the poetry – a few desperate quanta of light, somehow not gathered into the black hole - but let me begin the story where I started.

The Only Blonde in the World is a painting by an artist called Pauline Boty. It’s part of the collection of works held by Tate Britain, and its subject is Marilyn Monroe. I’d walked by it a few times, liked its confident presence and its understated enthusiasm for a woman who in her own lifetime became more legend than reality.

I was reminded of it when I – by accident – wandered around the small exhibit dedicated to Marilyn Monroe at the National Portrait Gallery in 2012. There was a photo there of Pauline Boty with her painting. I decided to try to find out some more.

Pauline Boty was beautiful, like the subject of her painting (Michael Seymour and Lewis Morley’s photos of her are in the National Portrait Gallery). Her friends called her the Wimbledon Bardot for her resemblance to the legendary Brigitte. She was talented too, and followed up her time at Wimbledon Art College by moving to the Royal College of Art. And there she started painting and drawing her contemporary heroes – Monroe, Jean-Paul Belmondo, the Rolling Stones – as well as assembling collage and other multi-media works that emerged from her course, nominally concerned with stained glass.

In London, she took wing. Her work featured in an exhibition, Young Contemporaries, with Robyn Denny, Richard Smith and Bridget Riley. With her fellow artist Derek Bolshier, she was accepted, after auditioning, to appear as a dancer on the TV Show of the moment – Top of the Pops. She got to know Peter Blake, later to design the cover of the Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper LP, Bob Dylan, Kenneth Tynan, David Frost. She was one of the few women amongst the pop art movement, and she was also an actress, good enough and photogenic enough to get a cameo role in Alfie as one of Michael Caine’s girlfriends.

And then she fell in love.

After 10 days of knowing Clive Goodwin, they decided to get married and in 1965, unexpectedly and at the age of 28, she found she was pregnant. She also found that she had cancer.

She refused all treatment, and instead determined to have her baby, a girl, who became known as Boty Goodwin. Pauline Boty died five weeks after the birth.

Boty was brought up by Clive and her grandparents, often staying with the family of the left-wing poet, Adrian Mitchell, whose daughters became firm friends.

12 years after her mother’s death, her father (the publisher of Black Dwarf and a successful TV and film producer) was in Hollywood, meeting with Warren Beatty in a big hotel there to discuss the forthcoming film Reds. Clive Goodwin felt unwell and in the lobby was sick and collapsed. Hotel staff and police who were called thought he was drunk – he’d actually had just one glass of wine – and threw him into a cell where he died alone, of a brain haemorrhage.

Boty grew up and emerged as a talented woman like her mother. She completed a first degree at the University of California in Los Angeles. (The eventual settlement from her father’s death had made her financially independent). And when she came back to the UK, she stayed with Adrian Mitchell and his family. She was offered post-graduate scholarships at UCLA in two subjects, literature and fine art.

Returning to California, she was given heroin at a party, and died of an overdose in her sleep.

In response, Adrian Mitchell wrote some heart-wrenching poetry, the best of which is Especially when it snows, which should be read in full, but contains these lines of heartbreak:-

especially when it snows and down the purple pathways of the sky the planet staggers like King Lear with his dead darling in his arms

It would be hard to make up such a tale of injustice and suffering, a tale in which so many bright lights are extinguished with a callousness that makes me think that if there is a god, I want nothing to do with him.

The Only Blonde in the World is part of the collection at Tate Britain. The poetry of the late Adrian Mitchell is published by Bloodaxe in the UK. You can search on YouTube to see and hear Adrian Mitchell reading his anti-war poem, Tell me lies, at the Albert Hall in 1965.

Image (c) Estate of Michael Seymour 1962, from National Portrait Gallery Collection NPG x88193. Extract from Especially When It Snows (c) Estate of Adrian Mitchell / Bloodaxe.

Michael Spring

wordsacrosstime