at Eric Bentley's

In Manhattan, around 6 pm in July 2004, on a day like these days, I was on my way to Eric Bentley's residence in Riverside Drive, not far from Columbia University, Bentley's academic den until some forty years ago. I rang the door bell and he was standing there with his arm streched welcoming me. I entered his suite and sat down with him in the living room. It was supposed to be a quick introductory visit and we agreed that I call for lunch on Saturday. I stayed with him for over three hours, both of us oblivious of time passing swiftly amidst a warm and intimate conversation about things theatrical, Brechtian, Shavian (the man being Brechtian and Shavian) and Beckettian (I being Beckettian and Shavian). He said he was going to tell me things exclusively to me which he had not put in print--which he did about the memorable 1949 staging in East Berlin of Brecht's Mutter Courage und ihre Kinder, directed by Brecht himself with Frau Brecht in the title role. Bentley, however, like Jesus cautioning his disciples against false prophets coming after him, cautioned me that a lot of materials written about Beckett after his death could be untrue

Ezra Pound

There's a place of trees gray with lichen,


I have walked there thinking of old days



Above are from Ezra Pound, and the scene reminds me of my walk to Eric Bentley's suites in July 2004 by the Hudson through St Joan Park, Riverside Drive. Pound didn't like NYC but loved living in Italy instead, till his death in 1973, outliving all his contemporaries. During his stay at St Elizabeth clinic, he was visited by ee cummings, TS Eliot and Hugh Kenner."Get to know the greats of your generation," Pound once advised a protegee. After all, what's behind the Pound Fascist syndrome? But let's not forget that Shaw, a nice gentle meek man who wouldn't raise a hand to kill a mouse, had a Stalinist syndrome!

Omar Pound is Ezra's only son by his wife Dorothy. Gossip had it that Dorothy came back home pregnant after a one-year holiday on her own in Egypt. Dad called new-born babe Omar, after Omar Khayyam. Omar Pound studied Arabic poetry in Cambridge in early 1950s, and my friend Hussam Al-Katib, currently a Palestinian Professor of Comaparative Literature over here in Qatar, told me once that he and Omar attended classes together in Cambridge, and one of their professors was the Commie Raymond Williams. Omar would go to Hussam asking him to explain certain words and phrases in verses he was working on to translate from Arabic into English. In 1987, Omar came to Baghdad, Iraq to attend a contemporary Arabic poetry festival. Until recently, Omar Pound was Professor of Islamic Studies in Oxford
Since the 15th century to mid-19th century, Arabic poetry became sterile because poets didn't break out of the mould. The same thing happened in English literature at the end of the 18th century. After Dryden and Pope the writing of poetry became so formalised that poetry at the end of the Augustan Age was very atrocious. It only came back to life when Wordsworth replaced old moulds by new ones

my tubby torso

During my Summer-2005 stay in Reading, I went in a Saturday noon to have lunch in Whitley, a Wiltshire village, in a place called the Pear Tree Inn. Being a Beckettian-heavy-boozer-turned-a-Shavian-teetotaller, I ordered a bottle of Barbican alcohol-free beer, christening its name, Islamic beer, to the bar-maid who served with a smile. There are certain things which seldom fail to send a shiver of excitement rippling thru my tubby torso, and that bar-maid's smile is one of them and entering a restaurant is another

THE OXFORD COMPANION TO FOOD, Alan Davidson says that the Italians claim that their culinary secrets were packed up and transported over the Alps by Caterina de'Medici when, in 1533, she married the man who became Henry the Second of France. Antonio Latini's LO SCALCO ALLA MODERNA, published in late seventeenth century, contains the--correct me if I am wrong--first account of roasting ortolan in the days when eating songbirds was not yet banned in Europe

poetry on a plate

The Pear Tree Inn in the sprawling Wiltshire village of Whitley is unobstrusive from the outside but inside it buzzes with good humoured babble and the sound of someone invisible kneading and slapping the dough making steak and kidney pies. An eyepatch-wearing Harley-Davidson motorcycle rider informed me--like the proprietor of THE WORLD periodical informed Dr Johnson that Lord Chesterfield claimed he had aided Johnson in compiling THE DICTIONARY--that the site of the present Inn was originally a farmhouse going back to over 3 hundred years ago, and this was evidenced by the bits of slightly hackneyed farming memrobilia such as cartwheels, penny farthing pitchforks and old rust-stricken scythes scattered here and there in the spacious garden. I decamped to that outrageously pretty garden with its chunky wooden benches, I--literally not fuguratively--touched the timber of the bench, closed my eyes and with--one cannot help resorting to quote Hamlet--my mind's eyes and imagined--it was a sort of literary masturbation--as does Gray in CHURCHYARD ELEGY imagines Cromwell to be buried in the cemetry--that Fielding, Goldsmith, Sterne, Coleridge might have sat on that bench. I liked the lofty barn-like restaurant for its pulling in punters from the outer reaches of the railway which Dickens abhorred and the motorway that Dylan Thomas loathed. I loved the food which was hearty, and the meal I ordered consisted of pan fried fish on a bed of rice with thick rich juicy dash of gravy. In both sight and taste, that lunch was poetry on a plate

Caedmon Spoken Word Records

I have a special, cynics would consider it peculiar or even odd, liking of listening to plays on LPs or cassettes or cds. My favourite ones were the Caedmon spoken word records. In listening, you feel and enjoy the words which you miss while watching actors moving on the stage or the screen. I discovered these records in 1971 when they were still on LPs. I was then doing my MA degree in English literature the University of Leeds, England. The first 3-LP set I bought was "Death of a Salesman", then I bought many Shakespears plays LPs. The best I have heard on the entire Caedmon is Lee J Cobb playing Willey Loman in Miller's "Death of a Salesman" and Patrick Magee reading the Marquis de Sade in Peter Weiss' "MaratlSade". Charlie Onion, a fellow-Caedmon-Records admirer mentions that the entire cast of the original "Death of a Salesman" was called to do the recording of the play. Not exactly, as Arthur Kennedy and Cameron Mitchel who played Biff and Happy in the orignal were in the recording replaced. It should be mentioned that Arthur Miller attended the sessions of the recording and he himself recorded a preface. I salute Marrianne Roney and Barbara Cohen for their project, especially they hired first class actors to do the recordings, actors like Paul Scofield to do King Lear, Montgomery Clift to do Tom in "Glass Menagerie", Hugh Griffith to do Prospero, and others. Dylan Thomas' recording with a cast "Under Milk Wood" was not up to my expectations. It is a joy to bring back the memory of those Caedmon spoken word LPs which I left back home in 1995

Paddy Beckett

The Irish are the English's victims in joking. One reason which made Beckett don't like London and decide to settle down in Paris is that because Londoners, recognising his Irish brogue, would address him as Paddy which is derived from Patrick, patron saint of Ireland. Beckett felt offended being addressed as Paddy