It was the beginning of June. The harbingers of summer had already zig-zagged their insouciant way through the bright transparent air. Which harbingers? Why, those large determined big-eyed flies – the bluebottles! Something reassures me when I hear the buzz of the bluebottle: it’s the sound of dazzling skies and long-grass meadows, of the deep green shade of chestnuts, swallows on the wing, picnics and riverbanks – and days that begin dawn-pink in the east and die slowly in the glowing farewell of orange or bronze at sunset. It’s the memory of my parents disturbed during their afternoon reading – and swishing their rolled-up newspapers again and again as they tried to dispatch the wilfully wretched importunate beasts.
The sound of the bluebottle reminds me of 1969 – of those transistor radio days . It was in this year that the still avant-garde and underground band ‘Pink Floyd’ released their album ‘Ummagumma’ and which included Roger Waters’ beautiful composition, ‘Grantchester Meadows’. ‘Grantchester Meadows’ begins with the chirp and tinkle of birds singing – and then, every once in a while, we hear the drone of a fly. Thereafter the song begins in earnest: it is charming; there are dog-foxes and kingfishers and ducks taking to flight from the surface of water. Overall, a lovely dreamy version of England emerges through the Floyd’s plangent hypnotic sound. (It’s an England that is worth preserving.) BUT after six minutes or so the fly re-appears. Its drone rises and falls in random volumes until we hear footsteps and the swish swish swish of a fly-swot. Then there is one final swot … and silence.
In 1969 I also first read Mervyn Peake’s trilogy of novels, beginning with ‘Titus Groan’, then ‘Gormenghast’ and lastly ‘Titus alone’. The novels describe the life of Titus – the seventy-seventh Earl of the ‘umbrageous’ brooding crumbling kingdom of Gormenghast. In the second novel Peake tells us about Titus’ schooling; like mine it was an ink-stained kind of schooling that no longer exists; the young Titus, like his classmates is sleepy; while the classroom swims ‘in a honey-coloured milky-way’ of sunbeams, Titus begins, for the first time in his life to attend, at length, to the effortless flow of his thoughts and the fruits of his imagination. As he does a fly starts to buzz around in the classroom. And Peake tells us about this fly:
“Every time it passed certain desks, small inky hands would grab at it, or rulers would smack out through the tired air. Sometimes it would perch, for a moment on an ink-pot or on the back of a boy’s collar and scythe its front legs together, and then its back legs, rubbing them scything them, honing them, or, as though it were a lady dressing for a ball, drawing on a pair of long invisible gloves.”
Peake then considers the ultimate meaning of the fly:
“Oh bluebottle, you would fare ill at a ball! There would be none who could dance better than you; but you would be shunned: you would be too original: you would be before your time. They would not know your steps, the other ladies. None would throw out that indigo light from brow or flank – but, bluebottle, they wouldn’t want to. There lies the agony. Their buzz of conversation is not yours, bluebottle. You know no scandal, no small talk, no flattery, no jargon: you would be hopeless, for all that you can pull your long gloves on. After all your splendour is a kind of horror-splendour. Keep to your inkpots and the hot glass panes of schoolrooms and buzz your way through the long summer terms.”
And so, through his parable of the bluebottle, Peake identifies the eternal problem confronting that which is truly original: it is before its time. But, there is something else: it’s not too far-fetched to find in Peake an anticipation of the anti-aesthetic – the ‘horror-splendour’ that came to characterise so much of contemporary modern art.
Go Ask Alice 