Aubrey Beardsley at Tate Britain

 

Good news about the Aubrey Beardsley exhibition at Tate Britain.

According to the gallery's website they will be reopening on 27 July.

The Beardsley exhibition has been extended to 20 September. It's a great show and I can thoroughly recommend it. The gallery should also be selling copies of Decadent London in the shop.

Sussex Sects (Sussects?)

On recent walks in the countryside around the pretty village of Robertsbridge, a few miles north of Hastings, we encountered small groups of distinctively dressed people that I had noticed off and on over recent years whenever in the area. Turns out they are part of a rural religious community called The Bruderhof. In the present social and economic circumstances their existence is of more relevance and they are worth checking out. See for example here and here. They occasionally get into the mainstream media (see here).

Coincidentally I was also reading John Burke's book on Sussex (pub 1974, in the 1970s Batsford series) in which I learned about another group called The Society of Dependants, a Christian sect founded by John Sirgood in the nineteenth century in the Sussex village of Loxwood. I had never heard of them previously - unlike the Bruderhof/Darvell Community they no longer appear to exist. Also known as The Cokelers more information can be found here  here and here.

11/08/20 A documentary on the Bruderhof will be broadcast on 13 August on BBC1 see here

Esalen

A lockdown second viewing of the entire 7 seasons of Mad Men inspired me to find out some more about Esalen, the utopian 'human potential' New Age community precipitously perched on California's Pacific Coast in Big Sur. It is clearly the inspiration for the therapeutic outpost that Don Draper ends up at in the culmination of that excellent 60s-set series.

I got hold of a book called Esalen, America and the Religion of Non Religion by Jeffrey J Kripal (University of Chicago Press, 2007). Once past the academic and theoretical introduction it's scholarly but readable and includes a varied and fascinating cast of characters who have appeared in posts on this blog (Wilhelm Reich, Fritz Perls) or in my books (Stanislav Grof in Gary Lachman's essay in Secret Tunnels of England: Folklore & Fact.

The gamut of New Age therapies is covered (although they disliked the term New Age at Esalen): encounter groups, massage, meditation, gestalt therapy, Rolfing etc together with such esoteric interests as remote viewing and telepathy. Hallucinogenic drugs played their part and there is a section on Terence McKenna and other experimenters with such mind-blowers as DMT.  The author is very keen on Tantra and makes his case for it being one of the principal influences on Esalen's healing strategy. There is also quite a lot about Esalen's visits behind the Iron Curtain and contribution towards cooling East/West tensions in the Cold War.

Kripal emphasises the importance of texts in the transmission of ideas and describes founder Michael Murphy's reading of Sri Aurobindo's The Life Divine as 'deeply hermeneutical':

'a model that recognises a truly profound engagement with a text can alter both the received meaning of the text and one's own meaning and being ... That is, we need to recognise that the act of reading, far from being a mechanical, disembodied exercise of vocabulary and grammar, is in fact an immeasurably complex psychophysical event in which two horizons of meaning and being (the reader and the read) are "fused" and transfigured in a mysterious process that we do not, and perhaps cannot ever, fully understand. Elsewhere I have referred to a hermeneutical mysticism in the life and work of twentieth century scholars of mysticism - a disciplined practise of reading, writing and interpreting, through which intellectuals actually come to experience the religious dimensions of the texts they study, dimensions that somehow crystallise or linguistically embody the forms of consciousness of their original authors. In effect, a kind of initiator transmission sometimes occurs between the subject and object of study to the point where terms like "subject" and "object" and "reader" and "read" cease to have much meaning. And this of course is a classically mystical structure - a twoness becoming one, or perhaps better, a not-two. Reading has become an altered state of consciousness.' (p.61)

Something else to bear in mind: ''The literary critic David Noel once observed that whether or not Carlos Castaneda's stories faithfully reflect his peyote rituals, whether or not his teacher Don Juan even existed, what we have, in the end, are not sacred plants or Indian sorcerers, but Castaneda's texts, which are themselves a kind of mind-altering substance. "Words," Noel observes, "are the only psychotropic agents Castaneda gives us."

It was, however, disconcerting to find that the author, 'Professor and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies at Rice University', thinks that the Feast of Epiphany occurs on 6 February!

More on Esalen here and here

That final episode of Mad Men

I also intend to read Henry Miller's Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch (1957) see here

Also of relevance is a film I watched last week Altered States directed by Ken Russell. See here

Bibliophilic Pleasures

I like books. I like looking at a well-designed and produced book, feeling the texture of the cloth cover, turning the pages, resting it in my hands. It's just not the same with an e-book.

I don't consider myself a serious book collector, but there are also the bibliophilic pleasures to be enjoyed by owning second-hand books, especially if they are inscribed or display bookplates or other signs of ownership.

Yesterday I took a book from the shelves to re-read a section for some research: British Antiquity by T D Kendrick (London: Methuen & Co, 1950); it has a very tactile cloth cover with a debossed golden image of the cross found by the coffin alleged to contain the remains of King Arthur and Queen Guinevere uncovered at Glastonbury in 1190 (the book is a critique of Geoffrey of Monmouth's massive influence on early medieval British historiography). I bought it online a few years ago, but for the first time I noticed that there was a bookplate on the front pastedown and the owner's name written carefully on the flyleaf. There was also a small sticker on the pastedown for a bookshop in Oxford (Parker & Son) where the book was presumably purchased. Parker and Son was a famous Oxford bookshop, no longer in existence - see here.

The bookplate was a certificate like I used to get at school when you won the school prize for a particular subject - this one was from Somerville College, Oxford for the Coombs Prize in History awarded to Antonia Morland.

A quick check online reveals that the Edith Coombs Prize for History was won by amongst others the writer and feminist Vera Brittain author of the popular autobiography Testament of Youth; there don't appear to be any recent references to the prize. Somerville College is of course a famous Oxford college established for women students founded in 1879; alumni include Dorothy L Sayers, Iris Murdoch and er, Margaret Thatcher.

Antonia Morland took the married name Antonia Gransden (written on the flyleaf), a name that rang no bells with me but, on checking, I discovered that she was an eminent scholar in medieval history and that, sadly, she had died in January this year at the age of 91. She specialised in historiography, her most notable work being the two-volume Historical Writing in England (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974 and 1982) and merited obituaries in amongst other publications The Times (which mentions that she was a friend of EM Forster) and The Guardian here. She also produced a study of Legends, Tradition and History in Medieval England (here) that it would probably be worthwhile for me to read. She gained a first class degree in History in 1951, so the book was probably presented to her that year. She later went on to study for a PhD, unusual for a woman at that time.

Another intriguing item is a book I bought online by John Russell Taylor: The Art Nouveau Book in Britain (London: Methuen, 1966) with a beautifully spare gilded cover. The flyleaf bears the inscription: 'For Roman, Who has made all too good use of it already - I've never found a JMK drawing! John Russell Taylor 1967'. JMK is presumably Jessie M King, who features in the book, see here. John Russell Taylor, who is still with us, went on to become an eminent critic and writer on film with major biographies of Hitchcock, Alec Guinness, Orson Welles, Vivien Leigh amongst others. Could Roman by any chance be Roman Polanski? I'd like to think so - The Tenant is one of my favourite films.

For films of serious book collectors see for example this film on Mark Valentine or R B Russell's film on collecting weird fiction master Robert Aickman.

A Virtual Whistler Talk

I shall be putting a tentative toe into the waters of virtual talks next month. I was originally supposed to be delivering a talk on Whistler at Chelsea Town Hall (a handsome historic venue in the heart of the area where he lived for most of his life) a few weeks ago, but coronavirus put a spanner in the works and it never happened.

Now I've agreed to deliver it instead through Teams on 14 July. The advantage is that anyone anywhere (with internet access) can tune in, the disadvantage that you lose the atmosphere of the venue and the opportunity to sell and sign books afterwards (the latter quite a big disadvantage as many of my book sales are at talks, where I sell them for less than you pay online).

It's not something I want to pursue in a big way, but I'm willing to see how it goes this once. I was also planning to do a guided walk around Chelsea to supplement the walk in the summer, but it looks unlikely that that will happen this year.

Register for FREE through Eventbrite here.

The Ludham Dragon

While I ponder whether to republish Secret Tunnels of England, here's an extract about an unusual event in Norfolk (pp.68-69).


The Norfolk village of Ludham was said at one time to have been terrified by a fearsome winged dragon, twelve to fifteen feet in length, which appeared every night, forcing the residents to stay indoors between the hours of sunset and sunrise. For its lair, the dragon excavated a series of tunnels beneath the heart of the village: from the corner of St Catherine's churchyard they passed under the high street and local inn. At dawn, after the monster retired to its subterranean home, the villagers desperately tried to fill the entrance with rocks and rubble, only to see the creature burst forth once more each evening.

On a particularly sunny day the dragon unexpectedly emerged from the tunnels to bask in the warm sunshine in the centre of the village. Seizing the opportunity, one brave man laboriously rolled a huge boulder into the entrance to the dragon's tunnels, sealing them shut. Returning to its lair, the dragon found the obstruction impossible to dislodge. Furiously lashing its tail, the enraged beast flew towards the Bishop's Palace (now the site of Ludham Hall) and along the causeway to the ruined Abbey of St Benet, where it passed under the great archway and vanished in the vaults beneath, never to be seen again. The dragon's tunnels were later filled in.

This legend, recounted in a manuscript in the Norfolk Record Office, is undated, but may have been based on an actual event. The Norfolk Chronicle for 28 September 1782 contains the following brief report:

'On Monday the 16th inst. a snake of an enormous size was destroyed at Ludham, in this county, by Jasper Andrews, of that place. It measured five feet eight inches long and was almost three feet in circumference, and had a very long snout; what is remarkable, there were two excrescences on the fore part of the head which very much resembled horns. This creature seldom made its appearance in the daytime, but kept concealed in subterranean retreats several of which have been discovered in the town ... The skin of the above surprising reptile is now in the possession of Mr J Garrett, a wealthy farmer in the neighbourhood.'

A few years ago I was passing through the village and took some photographs see above. The King's Arms pub, St Catherine's church and a local information panel with the story of the dragon.