Diary
The other day I joined the milling thousands who are queuing to see the Pre-Raphaelite Exhibition at the Tate. An average of 3,000 people a day (with 5,000 on Saturdays and Sundays) have been flocking to enjoy the excruciatingly horrible Pinks and browns of Holman Hunt and the ludicrous sex-fantasies of Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It is 35 years since so many Pre-Raphaelite pictures have been assembled under one roof: an embarras de richesse, in fact, but the whole thing is wonderfully well set-out and a superb catalogue is provided. I suppose Millais emerges as easily the best painter in the bunch. For one thing, he was so varied. H. e Was capable of painting ridiculous slush like
i
Pot Pourri', and then splashing out in a grand and quite different manner in such huge canvases as 'Chill October' or 'The Vale of Rest' where he abandons the bright Colours and pernickety detail which we associate with the PRB and paints trees as they really are, and a wild sky which looks as though it is actually out of doors. I had never before seen his famous portrait o f i Ruskin, painted at the falls of Glenfinlas in the disastrous summer of 1862 (which end- ed to Millais' elopement with Mrs Ruskin). The face of the great sage is as brilliantly done as the reproductions would suggest, but the rocks and water are vividly, almost vi.olently, unreal. A minor star of the ex- h. ibition is Ford Madox Brown, whose tiny landscapes of Hampstead and elsewhere also convey a feeling for sunlight. For the !Ii°st Part, the Pre-Raphaelites had no feel- ing at all for light, and their scenes whether ?utdo °A- N (like Hunt's curious purplish ScaPegoat') or a bit of both (like his almost Obscene 'Shadow of the Cross') seem ar- t2eially lit, as though about to be recorded for TV. Perhaps it is their similarity to TV .fhis respect which explains their pro- , lo us popularity with the public, for all (Ina.
listorting and changing reality. It is certain- .
il easy enough to imagine some of the urne-
Jones p maidens as 'resenters' on breakfast television.
Ihave a hideous tendency to get things wrong, and in the course of the last four tLee weeks, I have written a number of things in column which people have taken amiss. Apologies to all, but one more so than to the 'A'ell-known reviewer and man of letters. 'II could have sworn that I had not only Obituary. of his death, but that I had read his nntuary. Readers can imagine my embar- "aassrnent when I opened last week's Spec- ito,- to read a letter from Mr Fitton, very vAch alive and living in Herefordshire. can I say? One can't really say one is sor at N ri7 for falsely describing a man as dead. oo are are sufficient. I can at least try to make amends by apologising for my remarks on Mr Fitton's personal ap- pearance. He does not, he informs me, resemble a red mullet.
The correspondence column of the Times Literary Supplement is a traditional place for pedants, publishers, pedagogues and others to let off various sorts of vapour which in others would be called steam. I now turn to it each week with a renewed sense of wonder at the kind of things which make people angry. There has been a voluminous and vitriolic correspondence on the subject of T. S. Eliot and this lamentable-sounding - play by Michael Hastings called Tom and Viv. Then, on another page, column after column has been devoted to discussing the question of whether a poem by Peter Reading (a dramatic monologue put into the mouth of a cub reporter in the Lebanon) is, or is not, anti-semitic. Tucked away, far from the noise of battle, but on the same page, a character called R. E. Alton has been writing intemperately hostile letters about my wife. This does not exactly endear him to me, but the subject of their quarrel is so obscure that I do not understand it. My wife apparently wrote a review in which she expressed some opinion about one of the manuscripts of Sir Philip Sidney's Arcadia. Alton, who seems like one of the dons in- vented by Belloc, wrote an impassioned and long letter to the TLS in reply in which he accused my poor wife of sneering, and creating a 'travesty' of the truth. I regard all this sort of public banter as good clean fun, but my wife, who is milder and not in the least vulgar, was rather upset. She wrote back a letter to the TLS of such staggering erudition that I could not understand a
word, but assuring Alton and the world that she had not intended to sneer. He now replies: 'There seems to be no limit to the capacity within some students of Sidney for false statement and false suggestion'. It all seems like a storm in an academic tea-cup, I know. In so far as I was aware of Alton before this I thought he was rather an amiable old buffer. But I am now less sure. Perhaps he has gone a bit nuts: as dons do. I feel tempted to challenge him to a duel or to horsewhip him on the steps of the British Museum.
T know that one is in danger of sounding I the Great Bores of Today if one starts complaining about the late delivery of post, but my daughters have just been ex- posed to a conspicuous example of it. Mr Alastair Forbes, whosedistinguished Boston- ian ancestry is to be sniffed out in the distinctively Jamesian flavour of his occa- sional eauseries in the review-columns of the Spectator, was kind enough to post my girls a Christmas present in the middle of December from Chateau-d'Oex in Switzerland. To judge from the date stamp, it passed through the customs on 3 January and it was delivered to my house in Oxford on 11 April. It was a small parcel, contain- ing a book and some torches, both much appreciated, but when, only a week away from Easter, we read the enclosed card which said 'Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year', we assumed that this was a characteristically oblique Forbesian cir- cumlocution. Investigation proved that the cadeau had in fact taken nearly four months to arrive.
The campaign is beginning in Oxford to elect a new Professor of Poetry. I believe it is the oldest literary chair in the university and previous occupants of it have included John Keble, Matthew Arnold, Robert Graves, W. H. Auden and other distinguished poets. It does not have to be a poet, merely someone who can speak in- terestingly about poetry. Unlike most of the professorships, it is filled by ballot; every MA of the University can vote. The two strongest contenders this time are as it hap- pens both poets of distinction, James Fen- ton and Peter Levi. Moreover, they would both 'be very good at saying interesting, amusing and doubtless, sometimes, annoy- ing things about literature from the podium. The appointment lasts five years. Both poets will still, God willing, be hale and hearty in five years' time, but I shall vote for Levi on the grounds that he is older; also, he stood last time and I think there should be a 'pecking order' about these things. In a just world, Peter Levi would in any case be a Professor of Greek, but it so happens that he is not. Another reason for giving him my vote. I urge all Specta'or readers who are also Oxford MAs to vote Levi this time round and Fenton in five years' time.
A. N. Wilson
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