W.B. Yeats & Van Morrison.

I cannot think of anything new to tell you today because I haven't done anything even remotely interesting, due to this lockdown and the crappy weather. I noticed that it is the anniversary of W.B. Yeats  who died 82 years ago today on January 28th 1939, so I thought I would dust off this old story I wrote a few years ago........

When I moved to Westbury in 1987 I got to know this man called Sean who came from County Sligo. He was a real character and told me lots of interesting and funny stories. He had been in the Irish army in his early days. One night in the pub he told me that in 1948 because of being in the army he had been present at the re-burial of W.B. Yeats. I looked it up and found out that sure enough Yeats had died in France in 1939, but in 1948 he was exhumed and returned to Ireland and according to his wishes buried in Drumcliffe Churchyard in Sligo. The words that are on his headstone appear in Vans song Here Comes The Knight on the No Guru album. 'Cast a cold eye on life, on death'. Van has been influenced very much by W.B. Yeats and his work has been littered with Yeats references, so this might be a good place to look at Yeats's influence on Van. Crazy Jane On God was a Yeats poem that Van set to music and was meant to appear on the A Sense Of Wonder album but the trustees of Yeats estate refused permission. It eventually appeared on The Philosophers Stone album and is quite superb. Before The World Was Made is one of the best tracks on Too Long In Exile and is adapted from Yeats poem ‘A Woman Young And Old’ originally published in 1933.

If I make the lashes dark, And the eyes more bright, And the lips more scarlet, Or ask if all be right, From mirror after mirror, No vanity's displayed, I'm looking for the face I had, Before the world was made.

Van donated this song to an album called Now And In Time to Be which I heartily recommend in which various artists such as the Waterboys,Christy Moore,Shane McGowan,The Cranberries,Richard Harris and many others recite or sing Yeats poems. In Summertime In England  Van mentions Yeats and Lady Gregory corresponding, corresponding. I have heard it suggested that Rough God Goes Riding was inspired by Yeats poem The Second Coming, but I’m not sure about that. He may have got the idea from Robin Williamson's song For Mr Thomas which Van also covered. When I first got the Avalon Sunset album the cover reminded me of Yeats poem The Wild Swans At Coole. Van’s song When The Leaves Come Falling Down made me think of Yeat's poem The Falling Of The Leaves. In Rave On John Donne there is,

Rave on let a man come out of Ireland, Rave on Mr Yeats, Rave on down through the Holy Rosey Cross, Rave on down through theosophy, and the Golden Dawn, Rave on through the writing of ‘A Vision’.

There are a lot of similarities between Van and William Butler Yeats. Both were very interested in the occult and mysticism, theosophy etc and influenced by Blake and Swedenborg.  Van has  mentioned the mystic church of Swedenborg in Notting Hill in his live concerts. The thing that really, I find interesting is the reference to the writing of 'A Vision'.

‘A Vision’ was privately published in 1925, a book-length study of various philosophical, historical, astrological, and poetic topics by Yeats who wrote these works while experimenting with automatic writing with his wife. On the 20th October 1917, three days after her twenty-fifth birthday, George Hyde Lees married the fifty-two-year-old poet. The partnership of Yeats and George Hyde Lees is one of the most creative in the literary world.  Nothing that had happened to him before was more dramatically exciting than the automatic writing of his wife. Georgie died in 1968 the year Astral Weeks was recorded. Was Georgie Hyde-Lees the inspiration for Madame George? I don’t think so because Van left school at age 15 and probably not even aware of Yeats. It was only later when he educated himself with reading that William Butler influenced his work. I think that the identity of Madame George will be an enigma forever shrouded in a mystery.

The Joan Anderson Letter.

I have just finished reading The Joan Anderson Letter by Neal Cassady. It did not take long to read it because it is only a short hardback book of 188 pages. This is the second edition published 2021 in London by Eyewear Publishing. The first 46 pages are taken up with an extensive introduction by A. Robert Lee who is an expert on Beat Generation literature and has published several books on the subject previously. This letter written by Neal Cassady to Jack Kerouac in December 1950 has been described as the Holy Grail of the Beat Generation. It is a type written 16,000-word letter that Kerouac said was the greatest piece of writing he ever saw and would make Melville, Twain, Dreiser and Wolfe spin in their graves. Now I have read it, I do not think it is all quite what Jack cracked up to be, but I can see that it is an especially important document. I do not think it is actually a letter at all, it is a story told by Neal. He had his own literary ambitions which is why he sought out and befriended the likes of Kerouac, Ginsberg and Burroughs. He wanted to learn from them to further his own writing career. I am sure when he wrote it, he was hoping that Jack would help him to get this ‘letter’ published. The story recounts Neal meeting and falling in love with this beautiful Jennifer Jones lookalike called Joan Anderson. She was already pregnant when they met. After a while Neal’s ardour cools and he suggests that they should go their separate ways. Things descend into chaos; Joan attempts suicide by drinking hydrogen peroxide and ammonia and tries to jump out of a hotel window. When hospitalised she loses the baby. There are other sub-plots and diversions, involving other women, an hilarious escape through a bathroom window, brushes with the law, jail time, and other adventures.

Neal by Carolyn Cassady.

The letter was only 18 typed pages, but it is action packed. The content is not what makes the letter important though. It is the style. When Jack read the letter, he was already a published author. His first novel The Town And The City came out a few months earlier in March 1950. It was a very traditional type of novel and was not a big success. Jack was searching for something more real. The Joan Anderson letter was a frantic, manic, torrent of words, with the typewriter barely keeping up with the flow of thoughts. This is what Jack Kerouac was looking for. A stream of consciousness style that he would later describe as Spontaneous Bop Prosedy. He got to work, and On The Road, became a classic novel with Neal Cassady the hero as Dean Moriarty.

Jack sent the Joan Anderson letter to Allen Ginsberg who in turn sent it to a publisher called Gerd Stern, and it disappeared. Stern lived on a houseboat and it was thought it might have gone overboard. Nothing was heard of the letter until it was discovered in 2012 by Jean Spinoza whose father had been given the papers of a defunct publisher called The Golden Goose Press. There was a dispute about ownership of the letter, which was finally resolved, and the letter was sold at auction to Emory University, Georgia and it was put on view in an exhibition in 2018. In the back of the book are photos of the eighteen pages of the letter. The original letter is almost as important a document as the original scroll of On The Road. The Cassady family cooperated in the publication of the letter and contributed some nice photos and drawings by Carolyn Cassady who I had the pleasure of meeting over 30 years ago. I am glad that this legendary letter has finally seen the light of day because it was an important catalyst in the development of modern writing.

Me & Carolyn Cassady.

Good Oak.

Pigeon in my yard.

 When I got up this morning, I found that about four inches of snow had fallen overnight. The first real snowfall of this winter. The sun came out eventually, so I got well wrapped up and went for a brisk walk around Westbury. The area around the churchyard mainly. I took a few pics. I was only out for about half an hour, but it was good to get some fresh air. Yesterday I watched Cheltenham from League 2 take on Manchester City in the F.A. Cup. Man C are one of the biggest teams in the world, but Cheltenham took the lead and were still winning with about 15 minutes to go, but City scored three times to win the game. That is the magic of the F.A. Cup where lowly teams get the chance to play the best. My team Peterborough United are up to 3^rd place in League 1 after another win, so it was a good afternoon of football.

Westbury Church.

I read another chapter of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold last night. I’m enjoying reading it now. The chapter I read was called Good Oak and was about sawing down an oak tree which had been destroyed by lightning. They were sawing it up for firewood. As you know, you can age a tree by the rings that are created in the trunk each year. He could tell that this tree was about 80 years old. As he sawed through the years of the tree, he recounted what had happened during those years. It was mainly concerned with the depletion of the wildlife in Wisconsin, such as the disappearance of passenger pigeons, lynx, and cougar. It shows that even in the 1940s people were becoming concerned about mans negative effect on the environment.

 I started watching a film called Pawn Sacrifice which was about the chess player Bobby Fischer. He didn’t seem to be a very likeable character, portrayed as a paranoid, racist, control freak. I expect it wasn’t all his fault. I think he was probably on the Asperger’s spectrum where people can be brilliant at one subject but can’t cope with anything else. I’m not a psychologist, so I don’t really know. I am afraid I fell asleep before the end of the film. That will do for today because Manchester United are playing Liverpool shortly. I’ll tell you who wins tomorrow.

Addendum: Manchester United won 3-2, a really good game.