Verbal music in London's most magical drawing-room
An experience I would on no account have missed took place the other evening in Albemarle Street, the London home for over two centuries of the great publishing house of John Murray. The setting was the splendid 18th-century drawing-room, full of portraits and memorabilia of Byron and other Murray authors. This was the room where the then head of the firm, John Murray II, read aloud to friends the letters Byron sent him from Italy, recounting his amorous adventures (1 have fallen in love with a very pretty Venetian of two-and-twenty with great black eyes') in the poet's hope that word of his successes would get back to his furious estranged wife. It is also the room in whose fire-grate the sole copy of Byron's supposedly scandalous Memoirs was solemnly burned in front of witnesses. The occasion was the purchase and presentation of a number of precious manuscripts of poems by Keats, Shelley, Byron and others to the Wordsworth Centre in Grasmere, and the substance of the entertainment was the reading of a selection of these verses by Sir Ian McKellen.
Now the reading of poetry aloud to an audience is a considerable art, and it is a curious fact that some of the most accomplished actors are not the masters of it. It requires intelligence and sensitivity, a thorough grasp of the text, and deep sympathy with what the poet is trying to say. I have been present, on different occasions, when those great actors John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson have been found deficient in one or other of these qualities, and the verse did not resonate. Can it be that women take more readily to this art? A year or two ago I heard a memorable reading by Fiona Shaw at the Irish Embassy, and this autumn, at the memorial service for Bernard Levin, Maggie Smith read poetry with luminous clarity. However, in the Murrays' drawing-room, Ian McKellen gave a reading which held me spellbound, as though Prospero himself was reciting from his magic book. He got to the very essence of these majestic and varied writers, and it was as though they themselves were present in the room alongside him. Sometimes his voice was vibrant with power; sometimes it fell, quite literally, to a whisper just above the threshold of audibility, but the room was so still that all of us heard it with ease. I found myself wondering at his sheer vocal range, at the skill of his breath control, and at the cunning with which he conveyed the meaning of the words while never losing the underlying rhythm of the prosociy or the faint rhyming echoes. This was great art and we felt privileged to be present. I particularly enjoyed the extract he read from 'Don Juan in which Byron seems to speak in proptia persona — it was as though the reckless and disdainful lord were lounging in front of us, pale face just slightly flushed at the cheekbones, open-necked silk shirt, uncut but carefully combed hair beginning to go grey, club-foot elegantly concealed, and a small riding whip in his hand to flick the air in emphasis of his words as he told us about himself with devastating candour.
McKellen also read, with the delicious intimacy the blissful connubial setting of it demands, the dozen lines of Shelley's evening vignette in the Euganean hills, which I am tempted to quote in full:
'Do you not hear thc Aziola cry?
Methinks she must he nigh,' Said Mary, as we sate In dusk, ere stars were lit, or candles brought; And I. who thought This Aziola was some tedious woman, Asked, 'Who is Aziola?' How elate I felt to know that it was nothing human.
No mockery of myself to fear or hate: And Mary saw my soul, And laughed, and said. 'Disquiet yourself not: 'Tis nothing but a little downy owl.'
There was a penetrating reading of Shelley's `Ozymandias'. one of the most pregnant sonnets ever written. so hideously relevant to our own tragic times. This occasioned McKellen's one mistake in reading, and I particularly admired the way he dealt with it. In the line 'Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despairr, he said 'words'. Instead of hurrying on, hoping no one would notice, or apologising, which would have been excessive, he simply paused, waited for us to collect our attention again, and then calmly went back to the beginning of the passage. That was the touch of the master. I am attached to this fierce little poem, not least because I once read it myself on TV. It was a literary programme presided over by Melvyn Bragg, and I was reviewing a selection of Shelley's poems. I said, Instead of hearing my empty words of praise perhaps the viewers would prefer to hear Shelley's own. So I will read "Ozymandias".' Bragg tried to stop me but I brushed him aside (the programme was live), and the viewers liked it, to judge by the letters they wrote.
At my school the reading of verse, and of prose for that matter, was taken seriously. The Jesuits were a Counter-Reformation order, and the central aspect of that powerful cultural and theological movement was presentation — the displaying of the Catholic faith in the most colourful, flamboyant and dramatic way possible. Hence the cultivation of painters like Tintoretto. Veronese and, above all, Caravaggio and his followers. Every square inch of the interiors of Jesuit churches was covered in scenes of sanctity and martyrdom, rendered with intense realism, high masses were celebrated with gorgeous ritual, and sung by massed choirs thundering out the sumptuous sounds of the new baroque music, and the drama too was added to press home the message. All this was reflected in my time at Stonyhurst. The very names of the classes, in ascending order, were a transfiguration of the old Latin syllabus: Rudiments, Figures, Grammar, Syntax, Poetry and Rhetoric. This last, being the art of persuasion, was accompanied by many plays and public performances of all kinds. We had a wonderfully well-equipped green room, a fine stage, and costumes were supplied by Motley in London, regardless of expense. I always had admirable elocution coaches, an art in which the Jesuits had special skills — they were the only order (with the exception of the Dominicans) who actually taught their young postulants how to compose hut above all how to preach a sermon. I won the elocution prize with a rendering (by heart of course; no reading) of G.K. Chesterton's 'Lepanto', a perfect piece tor an elocution competition.
I was also coached in the specialist skills of reading the verses of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who had taught at the school and conceived some of his best poetry (and prose) amid the rich and sombre Pennine foothills on which it was perched. Hopkins is more difficult to read successfully than any other poet I know because of the sprung rhythm in which it is written. In trying to recite him, I had the assistance of that fine old actor Robert Speaight, a master of verse delivery, who created the role of Thomas Becket in Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral. Hopkins's instructions on what exactly sprung rhythm was and how to present it, contained in his letters to Robert Bridges, still mystify me. Eventually I just read the poems according to the best of my understanding, and forgot all about the springing. That is my advice to others who may wish to bring out the sonorities and cadency of this master of verbal music.
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