Tuesday. Quite a fun meeting on xxxx - certainly a lot more relaxing than the previous morning in xxxx when I struggled single-handedly to defend our lines against the advancing Austrian hordes ! By clambering over the bodies of their own dead piled in heaps on the parapet, some adjectival phrases succeeded in breaking into our trench and were only subdued after desperate hand-to-hand fighting involving much close-quarter use of the bayonet.
As the meeting drifted quietly on, life in the booth was a veritable hive of creative activity. Andy Upton had brought with him his drawing pad and 2B pencils and was busy drawing his own hand. I hadn't realized what he was doing and wondered why his hand was posed in such a peculiar way - the consequence of a lifetime devoted to self-handling possibly? Andy is actually very good, approaching his task with the focused attention and conscientious application which is typical of everything he does. Talking about it, he explained how he was seeking to attain a sufficient level of technique to be able to capture the inner life underneath the surface appearance. Well, I don't suppose you can ever have too much technique, but I can't help thinking that ultimately what is really required is a certain sensibility on the part of the artist which is more than just technique. It's probably one of those left-brain, right-brain things. I remember years ago an art teacher on TV recommending drawing with both hands simultaneously for that very reason. Dufy, although right-handed for everything else, painted exclusively with his left hand.
When he wasn't drawing or (when pushed to it) interpreting, Andy devoted himself to reading some whopping great novel in Finnish. A "Great Work of Modern Finnish Literature" - about a thousand pages of recherché descriptive prose, recommended, of course, by Jari! Jari rang me up from Finland to tell me that he could order a translation into Swedish if I wanted. I told him I'd get back to him once I'd got through the the lengthening list of other "books I must read", so I'm safe for a month or two!
Anyway, while all this was going on, I was enthusiastically recommending passages from the sermons of Meister Eckhart to Karl Telfer. I'd been dipping into one of those little yellow Reclam editions I'd picked up while on mission in Austria (see earlier posting). He, however, affected to be utterly absorbed in the sports pages of the Independent!
During some lull in the proceedings, our conversation drifted, quite naturally I thought, onto the subject of Ibsen. My innocent reference to the Father of Modern Drama was, however, greeted with hoots of anti-intellectual derision. One does, on occasion, have the impression of casting pearls before the proverbial swine! What this illustrates, it seems to me, is the relativity of culture. In a Scandinavian context there is nothing remotely abstruse about a reference to Ibsen. In fact he enjoyed a huge Europe-wide reputation. Joyce learned Norwegian specifically in order to be able to read him in the original. His plays are still regularly staged. Just last autumn, in fact, we saw Hedda Gabler in London. I've got a biography somewhere. I must dig it out. Another one to add to the list!