Tag: Montmorillon

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Requested poems from Poetry Please number 7

Seventh most requested poem on Radio 4’s Poetry Please is Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to the Marriage of True Minds by William Shakespeare – or perhaps, as James Joyce would have it, William Rutlandbaconsouthamptonshakespeare (or some other poet by the same name). You can, of course, buy the sonnets, or the complete works of Shakespeare at The Glass Key in Montmorillon.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove.
O no! It is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

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Requested poems from Poetry Please number 8

I would like to take this opportunity to make mention of the website of the Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org) where you can find not only the text of all ten of the chosen poems, but a splendidly wide range of poems all available to you on-line. You can, of course, find a great selection of poetry books at The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon.

Eighth in the series of most requested poems for the Poetry Please programme on Radio 4 is The Listeners by Walter de la Mare:

‘Is there anybody there?’ said the Traveller,
  Knocking on the moonlit door;
And his horse in the silence champed the grasses
  Of the forest’s ferny floor:
And a bird flew up out of the turret,
  Above the Traveller’s head:
And he smote upon the door again a second time;
  ‘Is there anybody there?’ he said.
But no one descended to the Traveller;
  No head from the leaf-fringed sill
Leaned over and looked into his grey eyes,
  Where he stood perplexed and still.
But only a host of phantom listeners
  That dwelt in the lone house then
Stood listening in the quiet of the moonlight
  To that voice from the world of men:
Stood thronging the faint moonbeams on the dark stair,
  That goes down to the empty hall,
Hearkening in an air stirred and shaken
  By the lonely Traveller’s call.
And he felt in his heart their strangeness,
  Their stillness answering his cry,
While his horse moved, cropping the dark turf,
  ‘Neath the starred and leafy sky;
For he suddenly smote on the door, even
  Louder, and lifted his head: –
‘Tell them I came, and no one answered,
  That I kept my word,’ he said.
Never the least stir made the listeners,
  Though every word he spake
Fell echoing through the shadowiness of the still house
  From the one man left awake:
Ay, they heard his foot upon the stirrup,
  And the sound of iron on stone,
And how the silence surged softly backward,
  When the plunging hoofs were gone.

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Died on this day – 5 October 1918

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It is 95 years to the day since the aviator and fighter pilot Roland Garros was shot down from the skies above Montmorillon in France. Garros was born in Réunion in 1888 and started his aviation career in 1909. By 1911 he had graduated to flying Blériot monoplanes and entered a number of European air races with this type of machine, including the 1911 Paris to Madrid air race and the Circuit of Europe (Paris-London-Paris), in which he came second. In September he established a new world altitude record of 5,610 m (18,410 ft). In 1913 he gained fame for making the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean from Fréjus in the south of France to Bizerte in Tunisia. The following year, Garros joined the French army at the outbreak of World War I.

Garros distinguished himself by achieving the first ever shooting-down of an aircraft by a fighter firing through a tractor propeller. In 1915 Garros crash landed behind the German lines and he became a prisoner of war. He finally managed to escape from a POW camp in Germany in February 1918, after several attempts, and rejoined the French army. In late September 1918 he visited Montmorillon whilst on leave and purchased a book on real tennis from The Glass Key bookshop. On 5 October 1918 he was shot down and killed a month before the end of the war and one day before his 30th birthday.

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Died on this day – 25 September 1933

Ring_LardnerRinggold Wilmer Lardner better known simply as Ring Lardner was born in Niles, Michigan on 6 March 1885. Lardner became a sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the world of sports. Lardner never liked his given name and shortened it, naming one of his sons Ring Jr.  It was Ring Jr who became the journalist and screenwriter blacklisted through the offices of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC).

Lardner started his writing career as a sports columnist and in 1907, he moved to Chicago. Two years later, Lardner was in St Louis, writing the humorous baseball column “Pullman Pastimes”. In 1913, Lardner returned to the Chicago Tribune, which became the home paper for his syndicated column “In the Wake of the News”. It appeared in more than 100 newspapers, and still runs in the Tribune.

In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, You Know Me Al, an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made heavy use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular. Like most of Lardner’s stories, You Know Me Al employs satire, in this case to show the stupidity and avarice of a certain type of athlete. The journalist Andrew jackson wrote that “Ring Lardner thought of himself as primarily a sports columnist whose stuff wasn’t destined to last, and he held to that absurd belief even after his first masterpiece, You Know Me Al, was published in 1916 and earned the awed appreciation of Virginia Woolf, among other very serious, unfunny people.”

Lardner was a close friend of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other writers of the Jazz Age. His books were published by Maxwell Perkins, who also served as Fitzgerald’s editor. Lardner influenced Ernest Hemingway, who sometimes wrote articles for his high school newspaper under the pseudonym Ring Lardner, Jr. The two met in December 1928, thanks to Max Perkins, but did not become friends.

In 1933 despite his ill-health Lardner visited France and called at The Glass Key bookshop in Montmorillon to sign copies of his novel You Know Me Al. It was here that Lardner died on 25 September 25 at the age of 48 of complications from tuberculosis.

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Died on this day – 14 September 1927

ImageIt was eighty-six years ago today that Angela Isadora Duncan met her death in Montmorillon, France. Through her dancing Duncan restored dance to a high place among the arts. Breaking with convention, she traced the art of dance back to its roots as a sacred art. She developed within this idea, free and natural movements inspired by the classical Greek arts, folk dances, social dances, nature and natural forces.

Duncan was born in San Francisco in 1877 and began her dancing career by teaching lessons in her home from the time she was six through her teenage years. A desire to travel brought Duncan to Chicago where she auditioned for many theatre companies, finally finding a place in Augustin Daly’s company. This job took her to New York City. Feeling unhappy and limited with her work in Daly’s company and with American audiences, Duncan decided to move to London in 1898. There she found work performing in the drawing rooms of the wealthy and inspiration from the Greek vases and bas-reliefs in the British Museum. From London, Duncan traveled to Paris, where she drew inspiration from the Louvre. She spent most of the rest of her life in this manner, touring in Europe as well as North and South America.

In 1914, Duncan moved back to the United States and transferred her school there. In 1921, her leftist sympathies took her to the Soviet Union where she founded a school in Moscow. However, the Soviet government’s failure to follow through on promises to support her work caused her to move back to the West.

Both in her professional and private lives, Duncan flouted traditional mores and morality. She was bisexual and alluded to her Communism during her last United States tour, in 1922–23; Duncan waved a red scarf and bared her breast on stage in Boston, proclaiming, “This is red! So am I!”

Duncan bore two children, both out of wedlock – the first by theatre designer Gordon Craig and the second by Paris Singer, one of the many sons of sewing machine magnate Isaac Singer. Both children died in an accident on the river Seine in 1913.

In 1922 she married the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin who was 18 years her junior. Yesenin accompanied her on a tour of Europe and the United States. The following year he left Duncan and returned to Moscow. Duncan had an affair with poet and playwright Mercedes de Acosta which is documented in numerous revealing letters they wrote to each other.

By the end of her life Duncan’s performing career had dwindled and she became as notorious for her financial woes, scandalous love life and all-too-frequent public drunkenness as for her contributions to the arts.

Duncan’s fondness for flowing scarves was a contributing factor to her death in an automobile accident in Montmorillon, France, at the age of 50. After a visit to The Glass Key bookshop Duncan climbed into a friend’s Amilcar automobile and the shawl, having become tangled in the open spokes of one of the wheels, tightened and broke her neck.

Isadora Duncan was cremated, and her ashes were interred at Père Lachaise Cemetary in Paris.

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Died on this day – 3 September

Woodcut of Green suited in deaths livery
Woodcut of Greene suited in deaths livery

Robert Greene (baptized 11 July 1558, died 3 September 1592) was an English author popular in his day, and now best known for a posthumous pamphlet attributed to him, Greenes, Groats-worth of Witte, bought with a million of Repentance. The pamphlet is most famous for a passage which appears to allude to William Shakespeare, who was then starting out on his career as an actor and playwright.

Greene is said to have been born in Norwich. He attended Cambridge, receiving a B.A. in 1580, and an M.A. in 1583 before moving to London, where he arguably became the first professional author in England.

Greene published in many genres including romances, plays and autobiography. In 1592 he visited Montmorillon in France where he is known to have called at the Glass Key bookshop. He died in Montmorillon ‘of a surfeit of pickle herring and Rhenish wine’ according to Gabriel Harvey who announced his death in a letter to Christopher Bird dated 5 September.

Greene’s colourful and irresponsible character has led some to speculate that he may have served as the model for Shakespeare’s Falstaff.

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Died on this day – 11 August 1937

Edith_Newbold_Jones_WhartonEdith Wharton, born Edith Newbold Jones on 24 January 1862. Aged 23 she married Edward Robbins Wharton who was 12 years her senior and suffered from depression. In 1913 she divorced him as his mental state had seriously deteriorated. She moved to France and lived in Paris.

Helped by her influential connections to the French government she was one of the few foreigners in France allowed to travel to the front lines during the First World War. Wharton described those trips in the series of articles Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort.

Throughout the war she worked tirelessly in charitable efforts for refugees and, in 1916 was named a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in recognition of her commitment to the displaced. The scope of her relief work included setting up workrooms for unemployed Frenchwomen, organizing concerts to provide work for musicians, opening tuberculosis hospitals and founding the American Hostels for Belgian refugees. In 1916 Wharton edited The Book of the Homeless, composed of writings, art, erotica and musical scores by almost every major contemporary European artist. When World War I ended in 1918 she abandoned her fashionable urban address for the delights of the country at the Pavillon Colombe in nearby Saint-Brice-sous-Foret.

Wharton was a committed supporter of French imperialism, describing herself as a “rabid imperialist”, and the war solidified her political conservatism. After the war she divided her time between Paris and Hyères in Provence, where she finished The Age of Innocence in 1920. The novel won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Literature making Wharton the first woman to win the award. She returned to the U.S. only once after the war, to receive an honorary doctorate degree from Yale University in 1923.

Wharton was friend and confidante to many gifted intellectuals of her time: Henry James, Sinclair Lewis, Jean Cocteau and André Gide were all guests of hers at one time or another. But her meeting with F. ScottFitzgerald is described by the editors of her letters as “one of the better known failed encounters in the American literary annals.” She spoke fluent French (as well as several other languages), and many of her books were published in both French and English.

In 1934 Wharton’s autobiography A Backward Glance was published.

In 1937 whilst visiting friends in Montmorillon Edith Wharton suffered a stroke and died. She is buried in the American Cemetery in Versailles.

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Died on this day – 9 July 1797

NPG 655,Edmund Burke,studio of Sir Joshua ReynoldsEdmund Burke the Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher was born on 12 January 1729.  After moving to England he served for many years in the House of Commons as a member of the Whig party.

Burke is mainly remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries and for his later opposition to the French Revolution. He was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the 19th century. Since the 20th century, he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of modern conservatism as well as a representative of classical liberalism.

Initially, Burke did not condemn the French Revolution. In a letter of 9 August 1789, Burke wrote: “England gazing with astonishment at a French struggle for Liberty and not knowing whether to blame or to applaud!”. The events of 5–6 October 1789, in which a crowd of Parisian women marched on Versailles to compel King Louis XVI to return to Paris, turned Burke against it. In a letter to his son Richard on 10 October he said: “This day I heard from Laurence who has sent me papers confirming the portentous state of France—where the Elements which compose Human Society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of Monsters to be produced in the place of it—where Mirabeau presides as the Grand Anarch; and the late Grand Monarch makes a figure as ridiculous as pitiable”. In the same month he described France as “a country undone”. Burke’s first public condemnation of the Revolution occurred on the debate in Parliament on the Army Estimates on 9 February 1790, provoked by praise of the Revolution by Pitt and Fox:

Since the House had been prorogued in the summer much work was done in France. The French had shewn themselves the ablest architects of ruin that had hitherto existed in the world. In that very short space of time they had completely pulled down to the ground, their monarchy; their church; their nobility; their law; their revenue; their army; their navy; their commerce; their arts; and their manufactures.”

Immediately after reading a sermon by Dr Richard Price called A Discourse On the Love of our Country, Burke wrote a draft of what eventually became the Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke put forward that “We fear God, we look up with awe to kings; with affection to parliaments; with duty to magistrates; with reverence to priests; and with respect to nobility. Why? Because when such ideas are brought before our minds, it is natural to be so affected”

The most famous passage in Burke’s Reflections was his description of the events of 5–6 October 1789 and Marie Antoinette’s part in them. Price had rejoiced that the French king had been “led in triumph” during the October Days but to Burke this symbolised the opposing revolutionary sentiment of the Jacobins and the natural sentiments of those like himself who regarded the ungallant assault on Marie Antoinette with horror, as a cowardly attack on a defenceless woman.

Burke’s Reflections sparked a pamphlet war.  Thomas Paine penned the Rights of Man in 1791 as a response to Burke; Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Men and James Mackintosh wrote Vindiciae Gallicae. Mackintosh was the first to see the Reflections as “the manifesto of a Counter Revolution”.

Burke’s last publications were the Letters on a Regicide Peace (October 1796), called forth by the Pitt government’s negotiations for peace with France. Burke regarded this as appeasement, injurious to national dignity and honour.  In the Second Letter, Burke wrote of the revolutionary French government: “Individuality is left out of their scheme of government. The state is all in all. Everything is referred to the production of force; afterwards, everything is trusted to the use of it. It is military in its principle, in its maxims, in its spirit, and in all its movements. The state has dominion and conquest for its sole objects—dominion over minds by proselytism, over bodies by arms”.

In 1797 Burke travelled incognito through France undertaking further research into the origins and effects of the French Revolution.  During a visit to Montmorillon his identity was uncovered and he was forced to flee an angry crowd that had assembled in the Place Marechal Leclerc.  Burke took refuge in La Terrasse tearoom where he died on 9 July 1797.

on 9 July 1797.

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Died on this day – 19 June 1857

Alexander Lucius Twilight
Alexander Lucius Twilight

Alexander Lucius Twilight, born free in Vermont on 26 September 1795, was the first African American person to have earned a bachelor’s degree from an American college or university.  He achieved this by graduating from Middlebury College in 1823.  An educator, minister and politician, he was licensed as a Congregational preacher, and worked in ministry and education all his career.  In 1829 Twilight became principal of the Orleans County Grammar School.  There he designed and built Athenian Hall, the first granite public building in the state. In 1836 he was the first African American elected to public office as a state legislator, serving in the Vermont General Assembly.  In 1857 Twilight visited Europe and died whilst lecturing in the Théâtre de la Cité in Montmorillon.  He was 62 years old.

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Died on this day – 8 June 1809

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Thomas Paine was born on 29 January 1737 in Thetford, Norfolk.  Paine emigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 with the help of Benjamin Franklin and he arrived in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense published in 1776, the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America’s independence from Great Britain, and The American Crisis, a pro-revolutionary series of pamphlets published between 1776 and 1783. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, “Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”

Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s and became deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), in part a defence of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to Paine being tried and convicted in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. In 1792, despite not being able to speak French, he was elected to the French National Convention.

In December 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because his book The Age of Reason, published in three parts between 1794 and 1807, advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, and argues against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introducing the concept of a guaranteed minimum income. In June 1809 he visited Montmorillon and died there on 8 June.