Music
Guardian man
Peter Phillips
The reissue, in paperback, of Sir Neville Cardus's Autobiography this year (Hamish Hamilton £4.95) will give many people the opportunity to consider it for the first time. It was written between 1942 and 1946 in Australia, and published in 1947: the description of an eclectic, who felt so in sympathy with music he said that, when listening to it, he almost entered into the creative processes of the composer's mind.
Of course, Cardus was not a practising musician, but a critic, and one who wanted to write well. I mentioned in this column a year ago that music had never attracted good prose-writers, even in English where the tradition of art criticism, for instance, is so well founded. Cardus has this to say: 'Where in all the output of English music critics would I find a large-minded way of writing a prose which would be worth preserving [my italics] for any reader of culture and imagination and lover of humane letters?' He determined to find it, or 'perish in the attempt'. Furthermore he regarded himself 'as equipped almost second to none amongst my contempor-
aries in music criticism, culturally and from experience and by grace of an ability to write more flexibly than any of them'. One may ask now, as one could not when this book first appeared, since he lived and wrote until 1975, whether he reached this elusive goal, which succeeding generations seem so eager to attain.
He may have found a serviceable style — that is a subjective matter; but it has not so far helped to 'preserve' his perceptions about music until the present in any signifi- cant way. He writes wonderfully well about himself and people in general, about the circumstances of life, about life — all these things; but he fails, as is perhaps inevit- able, to rationalise in concrete terms, in prose, what a composer is trying to ex- press. There are good reasons for this; and not all the usual ones, since Cardus, to judge from this book alone, was indeed a very capable writer and a widely cultured man. Anyone who can write: 'I don't believe in the contemporary idea of taking the arts to the people; let them seek and work for them' has obviously thought about things. The first reason is that most of his writing on the subject was concerned with reviewing particular performances of works, in a newspaper. Both these details make his remarks transitory in a way that Berenson, for instance, would not be when writing a book about North Italian Painters of the Renaissance. Berenson may seem old-fashioned but the paintings are still as he described them at the turn of the century, if a little dirtier (or very much cleaner), and we can see what he means. Sir Hamilton Harty's performance of Beethoven's Ninth means nothing now, especially not if, as Cardus reports, he added several minutes to the record, 'held by Hans Richter for 30 years against all comers', for the slowest rendering of the Adagio. If Cardus, in this article, was not pursuing the same end as Berenson in his book, one has the feeling that in the end he wanted to be. As for being confined to a newspaper. Cardus states that even if he had written the best book in the language, he would wish to have his epitaph read: 'In spite of all temptations, he remained a Manchester Guardian man. This was simp- ly a mistake: newspaper articles never have the same impact or powers of 'preserva- tion' as books. True, his columns could have been rounded up and published as an anthology, which they haven't yet been; and of the few books he did write on music, not one was recommended to me to consult or discussed in my hearing, despite his reputation, in my time as a music student and as a don at university. What proof that? Well, an indication maybe.
His prose-style itself is intriguing. Just as a writer today might be glad to turn a phrase in the manner of a recent stylist, so Cardus, writing in the Twenties and Thir- ties, instinctively turned back to Thomas Carlyle: 'The influence of Carlyle was still on us.' The problem with 'fine writing', as it came to be called, in journalism is that it seems to us now put on and false: the Autobiography is not in this mode. In a way descriptions of music should benefit from an extravagant style, since a wide vocabulary might hope to encompass some of the meanings in it; but one would be better off listening to the sounds them- selves. Mention of Carlyle brings me to this further observation: that Cardus's musical spectrum was limited significantly to Romantic German music. It was not his fault — this was the repertoire which was performed in those days, and thought worthy of performance. But compared with Berenson, who may make reference to painting from the 13th century onwards, it is indeed a narrow base from which to extract general principles about human sensibilities — ultimately what one hopes for from a great critic of an art-form.
Yet the Autobiography is full of such extractions. All his stories about Sir Tho- mas Beecham are true, for once; he is discursive about J. M. Barrie, Ernest Newman, Cyril Alington, A. C. Maclaren, C. P. Scott. His writings on and apprecia- tion of cricket cannot unhappily be dwelt on here, though he would have seen no reason why cricket and music should not be considered together: a deeply sympathetic combination to him and to me, though not always perceived: 'Everybody who has ever written to attack me in print on a musical point has been unable to resist pointing out that I am interested in cricket; to imply, of course, that I cannot possibly know anything about music.' His definition
of autobiography might stand for all time: 'Interest in autobiography should begin at home . . . my chief interest is to delight and engross myself. A modest or inhibited autobiography is written without entertain- ment to the writer and read with distrust by the reader.' This one avoids all these pitfalls.
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