The Squinancy Tree

South by William Sansom and Adam and Eve and Pinch Me by A.E. Coppard. Vintage Penguins, 870 and 595. William Sansom went to Uppingham School and thence to Bonn to learn German. Later he travelled and lived a little in various parts of Europe including Spain and Hungary. 

If in doubt, go South, young man.

William Sansom is doing the Grand Tour. Putting up at hotels and gazing out from terraces with all his Graeco-Roman education. The leisured traveller with time for style. I don't entirely like him, but I can sense him, compile him in my mind's eye. His slicked-back hair in the manner of Heurtebise in Cocteau's Orphée. Apologetic. Faux-modeste. He pays homage, he describes. 

There lay the fine wide Place Masséna. On one side a garden of palms led to the milk-blue sea. But elsewhere rose a warm geometry of classic, arcaded buildings washed in pinks from pale rose to dark terra-cotta; hundreds of rectangular shutters were picked out in greens, olive to lizardly yellow.

A.E. Coppard was the son of a tailor and a housemaid. Left school at the age of nine to work as errand boy for a Jewish trousers maker in Whitechapel during the period of the Jack-the-ripper murders. He's on a journey.

In the great days that are gone I was walking the Journey upon its easy smiling roads and came one morning of windy spring to the side of a wood. I had just rested to eat my crusts and suck a drink from the pool when a fat woman appeared and sat down before me. I gave her the grace of the morning.

He overwrites nature as a natural must. As faery/ploughman, with a wicked sprint. Take the squinancy tree.  The squinancy tree drops red petals into the princess's bower in  'Princess of Kingdom Gone', princess of a tiny kingdom, she slips from its bower into dark velvet water.

I know squinancywort from the flower book of my childhood. Relative of woodruff. Squinancy tree is new. Googling the squinancy tree brings me to several non-functioning Armenian websites, plus a reference back to A.E. Coppard and the princess of a tiny kingdom.

At the back of my copy of Penguin 595 there is a phone number, Epping 2491, in my father's decided script. Maybe he was ringing about the squinancy tree. 

I went on alone and in the course of the days I fell in with many persons: stupid persons, great persons, jaunty ones. An ass passes me by, its cart burdened with a few dead sprays of larch and a log for the firing.  An old man toils at the side urging the ass onwards. They give me no direction and I wonder whether I am at all like the ass, or the man, or the cart, or the log for the firing. I cannot say.

Cocteau' Orphée, Rilke, Café des Poètes,

Yesterday afternoon I watched Cocteau's Orphée. It was the right level of artifice for the middle of winter, where people in our world skirt each other under watery sun, and nothing useful to say on a christmas card is coming to mind. 

Give me the Café des Poètes in vivid black and white 1950s, Orphée the national poet idol in his pleated chinos, his well-lit bone structure and upward stance, Eurydice in her shirt-waister and full skirt, the foreign princess Death in her strict high heels, her black and white style, imperious and eventually human, and her smooth endearing chauffeur Heurtebise (would that be Hotchkiss, in English?) who ripple through mirrors between this world and the underworld, where Cocteau's voiceover in soothing, precise words carries them onward in some of the most flowing and expressive filming seen from that day to this.

Later the same day I read the first three poems of the second part of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus, which are about mirrors. I smiled. Following Rilke (by bike, as it were), bringing Cocteau to Rilke and vice versa, interweaving our cultures with each other is like lining the brain with overlapping layers and seeing each anew. 

Mirrors: no one has ever known how/ to describe what you are in your inmost realm./ As if filled with nothing but sieve-holes, you/ fathomless in-between spaces of time./ You prodigals of the empty chamber—/vast as forests, at the close of day ...  /And the chandelier strides like a sixteen-pointer /through your unenterability.

None better than Cocteau to show how to enter a mirror. Death, and Heurtebise, Orphée and Eurydice enter the underworld through mirrors. They wear rubber gloves because they were filmed dipping their hands into mercury, this practicality offset by the unearthly sounds of Les Structures Sonores, the glass and metal instruments of Lasry/Baschet. The underworld was filmed in the ruins of the St Cyr military academy outside Paris, lit to accommodate Death, in her final robes, white then black then full and flowing, going off, I suppose, into an under-underworld, as punishment for having fallen in love with Orphée and having released him and Eurydice back into their lives.