SAY SO

put it down to jetlag, some of it, idleness, mail to catch up on, flat to be cleaned, a review to write and an outline for a long essay to compose, then there was also an unaccountable disinclination.

I've posted a short piece about Richard Killeen's latest show [at Ivan Anthony's] with a brilliant photo on http://www.Tony_Green.typepad.com , because it's easier to post photos on there.

Books have occupied me. Imposing piece of work: Hilary Spurling's extraordinary mining of resources for her biography of Matisse, The Unknown Matisse -- volume one, the early years.That becomes a vivid portrait of a time and place, with so many of the friends and colleagues given almost much attention as Matisse himself. There was so much I didn't know about Matisse. How he was hated and derided! And the whole of the Humbert scandal, that made life even more difficult for Matisse was quite new to me. At the centre of the book is the struggle against the Beaux-Arts sysytem, the need make room for independence of mind, or rightly, the desire to actually make feelings and perceptions known rather than have them repressed by routines that had lost touch with almost all kinds of feling and perception.

Last weekend there was a Monster Book Sale at Alexandra Park raceway. I arrived on the afternoon of the third day. Half the books were already sold. Just as well, I got an aching neck and shoulders from trailing past rows of tables with boxes of books in them. The most interesting of the books I bought [$2 for the good ones, 50c for the not so good] was an autobiographical book by Geoffrey Grigson, critic, poet, editor of 'New Verse', journalist and broadcaster, 'the Crest on the Silver', 1950.
The centenary of his birth [March 2nd 1905] is being celebrated this year. He has much to say about the virtues of village life in England, gives a vivid portrait of his life as a child of an elderly parson and his third not very amiable wife in a poor parsonage in Cornwall. This, strangely, is the happiest part of the book. Then follow the horrors of school, idle Oxford University years, a term teaching in a school for morally and physically degenerate and nasty children of the vey rich; depression amid journalism in London; the seriously unpleasant years working in WW II at Evesham, intercepting enemy broadcasts. In short, he gives an account of his generally rather grumpy dissatisfied aimless sometimes depressed and rather grumpy life.
Remote and vague in the background are his three wives and children. He doesn't even name the first two. Other biographical sources say that the first, a woman from Ohio, died of tuberculosis After several years of determinedly staying single, he hesitated too long over marrying an Austrian woman. So she returned to Salzburg. He writes a detailed description of an anxious train journey across Europe to Salzburg late in 1938 to find her and bring her back to England as his second [?] wife. He describes the young woman he talked to on the train; he describes the family of his wife-to-be, but says nothing about her herself, or what they did on meeting, other than buying a gold ring with garnets. That, I suppose, was the marriage that ended in divorce.