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Tag Archives: James Fenton

The Occasional Pleasure of Advancing Years: Christopher Hitchens on the Passage of Time

15 Sunday Dec 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

A Moveable Feast, Age, Aging, Angela Gorgas, Capitalism, Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22, James Fenton, Martin Amis, Marxism, memoir

NPG x133006; Christopher Hitchens; James Martin Fenton; Martin Amis by Angela Gorgas

“In some ways, the photograph of me with Martin and James is of ‘the late Christopher Hitchens.’ At any rate, it is of someone else, or someone who doesn’t really exist in the same corporeal form. The cells and molecules of my body and brain have replaced themselves and diminished (respectively). The relatively slender young man with an eye to the future has metamorphosed into a rather stout person who is ruefully but resignedly aware that every day represents more and more subtracted from less and less.

As I write these words, I am exactly twice the age of the boy in the frame. The occasional pleasure of advancing years — that of looking back and reflecting upon how far one has come — is swiftly modified by the immediately succeeding thought of how relatively little time there is left to run. I always knew I was born into a losing struggle but I now ‘know’ this in a more objective and more subjective way than I did then. When that shutter clicked in Paris I was working and hoping for the overthrow of capitalism. As I sat down to set this down, having done somewhat better out of capitalism than I had ever expected to do, the financial markets had just crashed on almost the precise day on which I became fifty-nine and one-half years of age, and thus eligible to make use of my Wall Street-managed ‘retirement fund.’ My old Marxism came back to me as I contemplated the ‘dead labor’ that had been hoarded in that account, saw it being squandered in a victory for finance capital over industrial capital, noticed the ancient dichotomy between use value and exchange value, and saw again the victory of those monopolists who ‘make’ money over those who only have the power to earn it…

Christopher Hitchens and Angela Gorgas

I now possess another photograph from that same visit to Paris, and it proves to be even more of a Proustian prompter. Taken by Martin Amis, it shows me standing with the ravissant Angela [Gorgas], outside a patisserie that seems to be quite close to the Rue Mouffetard, praise for which appears on the first page of A Moveable Feast. (Or could it be that that box of confections in my hand contains a madeleine?) Again, the person shown is no longer myself. And until a short while ago I would not have been able to notice this, but I now see very clearly what my wife discerns as soon as I show it to her. ‘You look,’ she exclaims, ‘just like your daughter.’ And so I do, or rather, to be fair, so now does she look like me, at least as I was then. The very next observation is again more evident to the observer than it is to me. ‘What you really look,’ she says, after a pause, ‘is Jewish.’ And so in some ways I am — even though the concept of a Jewish ‘look’ makes me bridle a bit — as I shall be explaining. (I shall also be explaining why it was that the boy in the frame did not know of his Jewish provenance.) All this, too, is an intimation of mortality, because nothing reminds one of impending extinction more than the growth of one’s children, for whom room must be made, and who are in fact one’s only hint of even a tincture of a hope of immortality.”

__________

From the memoir Hitch-22 by Christopher Hitchens.

More from the memoir:

Christopher Hitchens

Friendship, Love, Irony, Humor, Parenthood, Literature, and Music

Hitchens at Home

The Grape and the Grain

Christopher Hitchens by Angela Gorgas

A Map of the World that Did Not Show Utopia

Christopher Hitchens Cancer

These Contradictions

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“For Andrew Wood” by James Fenton

25 Thursday Apr 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

For Andrew Wood, friendship, James Fenton, Poem, poetry

Daniel in Ireland

What would the dead want from us
Watching from their cave?
Would they have us forever howling?
Would they have us rave
Or disfigure ourselves, or be strangled
Like some ancient emperor’s slave?

None of my dead friends were emperors
With such exorbitant tastes
And none of them were so vengeful
As to have all their friends waste
Waste quiet away in sorrow
Disfigured and defaced.

I think the dead would want us
To weep for what they have lost.
I think that our luck in continuing
Is what would affect them most.
But time would find them generous
And less self-engrossed.

And time would find them generous
As they used to be
And what else would they want from us
But an honored place in our memory,
A favorite room, a hallowed chair,
Privilege and celebrity?
And so the dead might cease to grieve
And we might make amends
And there might be a pact between
Dead friends and living friends.
What our dead friends would want from us
Would be such living friends.

__________

For Andrew Wood by James Fenton. Find it in Children in Exile: Poems 1968-1984.

The photo is of my old friend Daniel and was taken in Muckross House in Ireland.

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“Jerusalem” by James Fenton

06 Wednesday Feb 2013

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Arabs, Christians, Israel, James Fenton, Jerusalem, Jews, Muslims, Poem, poetry, religion

Jerusalem

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee –
There is no covenant between your God and me.

It is superb in the air.
Suffering is everywhere
And each man wears his suffering like a skin.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin,
The laughter from the armoured car.
This is the man who won’t believe you’re what you are.

Israel 2006 1228

This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh, I am not afraid of you,
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.

This is not Golgotha.
This is the Holy Sepulchre,
The Emperor Hadrian’s temple to a love
Which he did not much share.
Golgotha could be anywhere.
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
And as it makes its way it also makes its will.

Israel 2006 1296

The city was sacked.
Jordan was driven back.
The pious Christians burned the Jews alive.
This is a minaret.
I’m not finished yet.
We’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
What was your mother’s real name?
Would it be safe today to go to Bethlehem?

This is the Garden Tomb.
No, this is the Garden Tomb.
I’m an Armenian. I am a Copt.
This is Utopia.
I came here from Ethiopia.
This hole is where the flying carpet dropped
The Prophet off to pray one night
And from here one hour later he resumed his flight.

Israel 2006 3987

Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes, I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.

I am your enemy.
This is Gethsemane.
The broken graves look to the Temple Mount.
Tell me now, tell me when
When shall we all rise again?
Shall I be first in that great body count?
When shall the tribes be gathered in?
When, tell me, when shall the Last Things begin?

Israel 2006 4034

You are in error.
This is terror.
This is your banishment. This land is mine.
This is what you earn.
This is the Law of No Return.
This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine.
This is my history, this my race
And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home.  You have destroyed my home.

Israel 2006 3729

__________

“Jerusalem” by James Fenton, as printed in his Selected Poems.

The photographs were taken in and around Jerusalem in the winter of 2005.

The picture below is of yours truly at the Western Wall of Solomon’s Temple. It’s out of focus because of the day and time in which it was taken: evening on the Sabbath, so the sun was getting low and the photo had to be snapped in a hurry, before the Rabbinate would see us and have a chance to tell us to put our cameras away.

Jerusalem

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“In Paris with You” by James Fenton

10 Monday Dec 2012

Posted by jrbenjamin in Poetry

≈ 13 Comments

Tags

Ian McEwan, In Paris with You, James Fenton, Love, Paris, Poem, poetry

Eiffel Tower

Don’t talk to me of love. I’ve had an earful
And I get tearful when I’ve downed a drink or two.
I’m one of your talking wounded.
I’m a hostage. I’m maroonded.
But I’m in Paris with you.

Yes I’m angry at the way I’ve been bamboozled
And resentful at the mess I’ve been through.
I admit I’m on the rebound
And I don’t care where are we bound.
I’m in Paris with you.

Do you mind if we do not go to the Louvre
If we say sod off to sodding Notre Dame,
If we skip the Champs Elysées
And remain here in this sleazy
Old hotel room
Doing this and that
To what and whom
Learning who you are,
Learning what I am.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris,
The little bit of Paris in our view.
There’s that crack across the ceiling
And the hotel walls are peeling
And I’m in Paris with you.

Don’t talk to me of love. Let’s talk of Paris.
I’m in Paris with the slightest thing you do.
I’m in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,
I’m in Paris with… all points south.
Am I embarrassing you?
I’m in Paris with you.

__________

“In Paris with You” by James Fenton, which you can find in his Selected Poems.

Also worth reading: Ian McEwan, a longtime friend of Fenton’s, discussing life, literature, and reading (with a nod to “In Paris with You”) in yesterday’s New York Times Sunday Book Review:

Do you read poetry?

We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you — and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of self-annihilation. To be so engrossed that you barely know you exist. I last felt that in relation to a poem while in the sitting room of Elizabeth Bishop’s old home in rural Brazil. I stood in a corner, apart from the general conversation, and read “Under the Window: Ouro Preto.” The street outside was once an obscure thoroughfare for donkeys and peasants. Bishop reports overheard lines as people pass by her window, including the beautifully noted “When my mother combs my hair it hurts.” That same street now is filled with thunderous traffic — it fairly shakes the house. When I finished the poem I found that my friends and our hosts had left the room. What is it precisely, that feeling of “returning” from a poem? Something is lighter, softer, larger — then it fades, but never completely.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be? 

I wouldn’t trouble the president with advice, or with one more transient treatise on America’s supposed terminal decline. For the sake of the general good, I’d have him absorbed in poetry. What would suit him well, I believe, is the work of James Fenton. His “Selected” would be fine. The range of subject matter and tone is immense. The long, wise reflections on conflict (“Those whom geography condemns to war”) would be instructive to a commander in chief, and the imaginative frenzy of “The Ballad of the Shrieking Man” would give him the best available measure of the irrational human heart. There are poems of mischief and wild misrule. A lovely consolatory poem about death is there, “For Andrew Wood.” (“And there might be a pact between/ Dead friends and living friends.”) And there are the love poems — love songs really, filled with a sweet, teasing, wistful lyricism… “Am I embarrassing you?” one such poem asks in its penultimate line.

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