Categories: uncategorized
Date: 02 August 2010 13:02:17
Well, not quite finest. That has to be David Jones. But a little bird tells me - by which I mean a link I got from Wikipedia - that there is a ceremony at Ernest Dowson's grave in Brockley going on more or less right now: Link to Ernest Dowson campaign
And today is his 133rd birthday.
Dowson was born in Belmont Hill just off Lee High Road, smoked hash all through Oxford, and tried and failed to be a successful poet. and drank himself to death in Catford when he wasn't much over thirty. His father had died of a possibly accidental overdose, his mother had hung herself, his girlfriend had left him for another man, and the whole lot of them were consumptive. He only published one collection in his lifetime apparently, though friends got another one together after he died. One of the unluckier poets. We are talking absinthe, laudanum and faded violets here.
But it seems that he wrote at least one poem that everyone has heard of (if not heard) - Days of Wine and Roses - and another few dozen they ought to have had. And, weirdly, is claimed as the oldest citation for the word "soccer" (though he spelled it "socca") As well as the phrase "Gone with the Wind" - originally in a poem that Cole Porter sort-of-borrowed for a song in Kiss Me Kate. And that wonderful line: "absinthe makes the tart grow fonder".
Travelling around London is always time-travel. Partly because the buildings themselves are from different parts of the past, partly because the street plans and boundaries and placenames are usually far older than the buildings, mainly because many districts are associated in my mind with the time I first got to know them - so Shoreditch is the late 1970s and early 1980s when my Dad was in the print there, the areas between West Croydon and Thornton Heath is as well, but Knightsbridge and the Legoland end of Rotherhithe are mid to late 1980s, the Isle of Dogs (in its Canary Wharf instantiation) is 1990s, and for me there will always be something of late summer or autumn 2003 about Walthamstow and Tottenham marshes.
BUT towns and suburbs and neighbourhoods also carry about with them a feeling of the time or times when they were in tune with history. And for some reason Lewisham is full of the late 19th and early 20th century. That's when it produced, or housed, its small crop of famous writers - Edith Nesbit, Henry Williamson, David Jones, and Ernest Dowson. There's an indelible tinge of late Victorian and Edwardian about the place. Though maybe not so much literary decadence these days.
Links to some more about Dowson and early modernism, and to Dowson's page on the website of the friends of Brockley and Ladywell cemeteries