Handsome is as handsome does
Favourites from Guy Newbury
Guy Newbury, a Lecturer in Music at Pembroke College Oxford, died in January this year. I have good memories of Guy (as I know several readers do) as a tutor and pianist, and for the notes he posted on Facebook: flash fictions about Fran, Babs and Rupert; episodes lifted from dreams; pitches for inventions; conversations overheard.
His posts have low word counts and, like preludes, feel like they are fragments of bigger edifices that we see only a part of. Fran and Babs are not real people, but avatars like Schumann’s Florestan and Eusebius who mediate GN’s experiences in the M&S aisles of daily life. Mostly, we meet them in the middle of something, and their escapades end (like dreams do) just as something is about to happen. These posts are hard to understand, but give the feeling that, in a world as complex as strange as this one, being misunderstood is hardly the biggest risk for a little piece of writing.
Guy’s professional and creative qualities made him so roundly liked because he was also kind and well-mannered. He ran tutorials at the far end of Pembroke’s dark-green and wooded chapel. Whether he was busy teaching or just eating a sandwich, he would not turn around to see who had arrived: either it was the tutee he expected or, if it were not, he preferred to keep it as a surprise. He would recall stories students shared the week before, then he would play through their music like it was a worthy, difficult poem. His advice was gently corrective, often bypassing music: ‘Apologies remind me of bananas,’ he told me. ‘I am not fond of bananas.’ More than once he wrote on Facebook that ‘Handsome is as handsome does,’ meaning (I think) there is little point in seeming handsome if you do not also act handsomely.
Here are some of my favourite sketches:
Trinity Term 2015: the verdict
Guy: Fran?
[Fran opens one eye, watches beadily, but says nothing.]
So – what's the verdict?
Fran: A dangerous end to the term. Mosquitos dancing ... the wrong sort of laughter ... That rainstorm was salutary.
TODAY'S INVENTION
I awoke with a neat idea: TRAM-SHOES. They have grooves in the soles which fit the tram lines so that you can power along, as far as needed.
WALES
I am in a strange little house with rooms that don't add up together and have conflicting views. In the bathroom, a vulgar daub of the sea, impossibly coloured and hung at the wrong height.
TIARA
We were in the Oxford Music Faculty, in the Denis Arnold Hall. Across the business end of the room, dark purple velvet curtains...
THE CURTAINS PARTED
and there stood Professor Wollenberg, splendid in a tiara.
OVERHEARD IN REGENTS PARK
He'll drive to the restaurant, but she'll walk. She walks everywhere. She'll walk ten kilometres. She walked all the way to Juan-les-Pins.
WIGMORE BIRTHDAY
Thank you all for the birthday wishes.
Note to self: it's a risk to book a major concert or recital to mark a birthday. It places the performers under such great pressure!
BOULEZ'S FAMILY
I was perched on a large rocky outcrop in the sea - a stone elephant. Nearby, but inaccessible, was a much larger rock with a city upon it, a city you could never see because of the perpetual storms and rain that blinded the view. Suddenly my bags were in the water - the one with the champagne and my message laboriously composed in French, and the Joseph bag with my newly-bought Boulez score (70 euros). Slowly as a Fauré progression, they make their way out into the channel.
J.S. BACCHIC
'Bacchic' refers to Bacchus, not to J.S. Bach. Yet he has his wild moments too, even if they are in invertible counterpoint at the tenth
BROAD BEANS
I have been meaning to ask: when one steams broad beans, the water in the pan underneath turns a fascinating coppery red-brown. It's a beautiful shade... The beans, smiling away as they do, remain moonily pallid. Expliquez-moi...
BRIAN O’LINN
Brian O'Linn, his wife and wife's mother,
Were all going home o'er the bridge together,
The bridge it broke down, and they all tumbled in,
'We'll go home by water,' says Brian O'Linn.
BOOKMARK
I was re-reading Don't Tell Alfred for the hundred and fiftieth time when (on page 208) I came upon a ticket for a Joan Miró sculpture exhibition in 1992. I can't remember the exhibition, nor can I say why I haven't noticed the ticket on interim re-readings. It cleaves to page 208; not 209.
My copy of Portrait of a Lady has a photograph of a camellia in bloom tucked between pages 644 and 645 (the last of the text). I remember the camellia in question, in a friend's garden; it thrived for years before dying in a Cambridge frost in 1996/7 (they had moved). I haven't re-read the novel since then. Books, like opera and picnics, lie outside time.
RUPERT IN LONDON
'Your Oyster card,' says Mummy Bear,
'Will take you simply anywhere!'
Aboard a Tube (the Northern Line)
She jumps, and Rupert's left behind.
'Oh my,' he says, 'this station's drear.
Where next? South Bank? It's fairly near.'
A rough and ragged throng draws nigh.
They snarl, 'On us you've come to spy'.
Poor Rupert's jostled, grabbed and bound
Front paws and hind! 'Now, not a sound.
'You'll come with us! And say your prayers:
Embalmed or stuffed, the TATE needs bears!'
Through splendid forecourts Rupert's led.
He gasps: 'The Turbine Hall! I'm dead!'
Into a dungeon stern and proud
He's flung by that nefarious crowd.
***
A squeaking choir assails the air!
'Why, friendly mice!' cries Rupert Bear.
'We'll help you out', the rodents boast.
'Naïves are what we like the most.'
A secret staircase stands revealed.
'Don't ever tell!' the rodents plead.
Up craggy stairs they deftly climb.
'Phew! Here's the Queen: we're just in time!'
Atop the stairs, a glorious throne,
Bejewelled and dazzling, stands alone.
In cloth of gold, the Queen sits there.
'It's Mummy!' gaps the little Bear.
'Oh yes, 'tis I,' his Mummy beams.
'I'm wilder than your wildest dreams.
'Clutch tight your Oyster: and, my son,
Ne'er underestimate your Mum.'