Remembered for A While

I reserved this slab of a book from the library, not realizing its heft or format. Remembered For a While takes the form of a chunky coffee table book packed with essays and personal notes, but also scans of family albums, drawings, clippings, and photos. While this isn’t a straight biography with a single author, the collection of essays, family letters, discovered personal effects and artifacts all help – obliquely, indirectly – to provide a living portrait of Nick Drake as he was: son, brother, friend, artist, legend.

The essays take us to leafy Warwickshire in Tanworth-in-Arden for Drake’s childhood. He learns to play piano and composes early songs on a reel-to-reel recorder his mother kept in the family drawing room. He discovers her album collection and provides hilarious, dismissive one-liner reviews in a little notebook: “Silly,” “Good for toddlers,” “Sorry & utterly wet,” “Can’t remember it,” etc. He then goes to public school, followed by an incomplete study at Cambridge.

Between college and university, Drake takes six months in Aix, busking about town, smoking, and taking hazy trips to Morocco with friends. Incredibly, he and his friends encounter the Rolling Stones while in Morocco, not once, but twice. The first time they tracked the Stones down at their hotel, El Mingah, and after boldly suggesting that Drake play for them, are politely turned down. The next time, they’ve found themselves all drawn together at a medina, watching as a line of cross-legged snake charmers play for a pile of very sleepy snakes. This time they agree to hear Drake play. (This is a passing exchange, rather than a catalyst.)

The years at Cambridge are fraught, and Nick is ready to dedicate himself full time to music. At this point in the book, after hearing from old childhood friends, other buskers from days in Aix, and family, the analysis of his songs begins, with hand-written lyrics and observations about his evolution as a musician, beginning with Family Tree (his oldest recordings) and Five Leaves Left in 1969.

I enjoyed slowly reading these sections and listening back through every album, poring through the riddle-like imagery of Nick Drake’s lyrics, and reading Chris Healey’s running commentary song-by-song on Drake’s tuning, note drops, meter, and melody. Healey has a nice way of bridging and interpreting riverine phrasing, his music’s technical difficulty, and the effect of tone layering through diverging melody and vocal tuning. Healey argues that too much is made of Nick’s lyrics, when much more in conveyed through sound. For example, the vocals in ‘Time of No Reply’ seem to imply that things are not actually as good as they appear when Drake employs the minor in the B section of his melody, in contrast with chord tuning. Similarly, the re-tuning just one string does a lot of work in conveying tone by adding a nagging, double tonic note or a sense of being doomed in many other songs.

When Island Records release Five Leaves Left, Nick dropped out of Cambridge with less than a year to finish. The album is considered a commercial failure with very little recognition, mostly because Nick Drake hates performing live and has virtually no stage presence.

A year later, Bryter Layter, in all its ornamentation is released… again barely noticed.

And then finally, Pink Moon, in 1971. The full album, just twenty-eight minutes, was recorded over just two nights in October 1971. Drake dropped the master off at Island Records reception without saying a word, and the stark album was released as it was, stripped right back.

‘Pink Moon’ has two popular meanings: in folklore, a pink moon appears around April when the snow first melts and the first flowers of spring appear. The other reference is a blood moon which appears during a total lunar eclipse. The latter is traditionally seen as an evil omen, therefore more apt for the dark years that followed Pink Moon’s release.

The last section, as you can imagine, is incredibly sad and difficult reading. Over the course of three very heavy years, Gabrielle (Nick’s sister) gathers together snippets from his father Rodney’s daily diary where he notes the progression and changes in Nick’s mental illness and the difficulties they faced in trying to communicate with or understand him when he was living back home with them. These short entries fill more than thirty large, crowded pages and make it clear how much agonizing and tenderness his parents put into watching out for him and wanting only his happiness.

A line from one of the final essays by Ian Macdonald, originally published in Mojo, summarizes what so many of the contributors to this collection seem acutely sensitive of:

“We are, in the end, what we leave behind, but we too spoil in the memories of others, augmented or diminished as they try to trap and pin us.”

Ian Macdonald

The form that this vast and varied biography has taken responds to that menace of misinterpretation or miscalculation in spectacular form, and while it doesn’t dispel the notion of Drake as a very troubled and ill man towards the end of his very short life, it honors the memory of Nick Drake as everything he was and should be recognized as.

Landmarks

Landmarks is a book full of word-hoardings, history, aesthetic and play with language. Each chapter opens with a glossary of obscure or lost words used around England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe the landscape, natural world, and weather locally. Macfarlane was originally inspired by a glossary he came across on the Isle of Lewis entitled ‘Some Lewis Moorland Terms: A Peat Glossary’ containing endless specific, comprehensive, and finely discriminating terms used in describing the lexis of peat, of all things. He then went on a mission to create similar glossaries of obscure words from around the British Isles, asking for suggestions and receiving more than 4,000 terms. Each chapter of the book opens with a new, thematic glossary that seem to wonder at the obscure and precise.

There are words included like “griggles” (small apples left on the tree), “spronky” (having many roots), or “smoot-hole” (gap in a drystone wall deliberately left open to allow small animals to pass through). Words almost onomatopoeic, only if you could have a word visually evocative of what you were trying to describe (is there… a word for that?). Like “aquabobs” (icicles), “wonty-tumps” (molehills), or even “roarie-bummlers” (storm clouds).

Beyond the idiosyncratic, Landmarks also reveals a complex, swarming world of landscape – thwarting the impression of, for example, a brindled moor as a vast, dead space, and instead presenting it as a world teeming with aspect and intricacy.

Every humble landscape is byzantine in its immensity and variety.

This was a pleasure to read, but underlying the project was the awareness that children now don’t know the natural world like they once did. Comparing the roaming radius of British children in 1970 to 2010, Macfarlane discovered that they’d lost 90% of their range. The Oxford Junior Dictionary has replaced words like ‘acorn’, ‘buttercup’ and ‘willow’ with terms like ‘blog’, ‘broadband’ and ‘cut and paste.’

We listened to Landmarks on audiobook as we covered about a thousand miles driving up to and around Scotland. Chosen primarily for its subject matter, and some of the specific chapters (for example, we spent some time in the Cairngorms: the focus of the first chapter), we thought listening to this would be the perfect accompaniment to our stunning roadside views, which it was. There are some advantages to the audiobook version of this, in particular pronunciations through the glossary sections, and some of the sound effects. The narrator attempted a few too many accents for my liking (often where it was completely unnecessary), but so many of the Gaelic words to describe various landmarks are easier to find commonality through in pronunciation as the way these are written would not be directly phonetic to an American or British English pronunciation.

Above: a photo of the Cairngorms, the landscape we were travelling through when listening to Landscapes. Full Scotland trip here if of interest.

All That Man Is

This is a novel in the form of nine shorter stories, each focusing on a new male protagonist – the first, seventeen, is then followed by progressively older men as each new story starts until the final character, who is in his late 70s. The stories are set in Berlin, London, Prague, Cyprus, Italy, and Croatia – all in suburban or peripheral areas of the countries or cities where they’re set, and all dominated by an atmosphere of misery.

Listening to Szalay speak to the BBC on ‘Bookclub’ about this novel, I’m struck by how earnestly he seems to want to appeal to a sense of universality and shared experience through this collection. Each character is very much a cisgender, European male (also, seemingly all white), and they’re clearly situated in the contemporary world in an almost hyper-real, often sleazy setting. They all go from one place in Europe to another within their stories, so there’s a sense of movement and he wanted to ‘capture the world as it [was]’ in its fluidity (he says ‘is’, but this was notably published prior to the Brexit referendum, and definitely pre-Covid-19). A reader asked him during Bookclub whether – since these nine stories seem to be so clearly grouped into three categories: stories about men obsessed with sex, then with money, and finally with loneliness – this ‘novel’ of stories is intended to represent the three Ages of Man? I think this is a pretty apt question, which the author deflected somewhat, but I now can’t overlook.

I think at the start of the collection, I was more absorbed by the familiarity of the specific places described which I’d also visited, and the stark realism of the stories. I did enjoy sections of this collection, but it’s bleak. I think it aspires to be more than it was for me.