Billy Strayhorn

At 4:45 a.m. on today's date in 1967, Billy Strayhorn died of cancer at the age of 51. The New York Timesobituary described him as "a jazz composer, arranger, lyricist and pianist, who was often called Duke Ellington's alter ego." Ellington himself would call Strayhorn simply "my favorite human being."

Shortly after he had joined Duke Ellington's band in 1939 as a lyricist and arranger, Strayhorn wrote a tune he called "Take the 'A' Train," which quickly became the group's signature theme -- and one that many assumed had been written by Ellington himself.

For the next three decades, Strayhorn would composed original pieces for the Ellington band and, in a kind of musical symbiosis, would work out musical ideas or even moods suggested by Ellington. Strayhorn explained: "What it comes down to is this: Duke can call me and say 'I've got these notes here and I haven't got the time. I write it out from there . . . We really understand what each of us wants in a composition."

During his lifetime, musicians in the know, starting with Elllington himself, realized the extent of his talent, but only recently, after the publication of David Hajdu's 1996 biography "Lush Life" has the full extent of Strayhorn's work as a composer in his own right been clearly outlined.

"Young Romantics": Bohemians behaving badly

From idealism to incest in the tangled, magnificent lives of Shelley, Byron and Keats

People were intrigued by the lives of writers before the early 1800s, but the modern fascination with "the writer's life," and specifically with the idea of a coterie of unconventional young talents hanging out together in some appealing setting, began then. If you're smitten with Bloomsbury or Paris in the 1920s or the Beats, you have -- by extension, at least -- fallen for the group of poets, essayists, musicians and artists Daisy Hay writes about in her new book, "Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation." They set the pattern; those who came after were variations on their theme.

"Young Romantics" focuses on two complicated households, one lastingly notorious, the other now nearly forgotten. The first is the family group surrounding the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, which included his wife, Mary Shelley (author of "Frankenstein"), and her stepsister, Claire Clairmont. The second belonged to a journalist, critic and poet named Leigh Hunt, whose two-year incarceration in the Surrey County Jail for the crime of criticizing the Prince Regent kicks off Hay's narrative. The two other major poets of this circle, Lord Byron and John Keats, come into the story as well, of course, though Byron played a larger part than Keats -- who had the sense to stay out of most of the bigger messes his cohorts got into.

This second generation of Romantic poets (after the group led by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1790s) shaped our contemporary conceptions of creativity and morality so profoundly that it's safe to say we've never really gotten over them. It's become a cliché to call them the first hippies, rock stars and celebrities; above all, these men and women defined what it means to be an artist in the modern age -- a heroic, if lonely figure who insists on remaining true to his genius in a harsh and venal world. Hay explains that she hopes, with "Young Romantics," to look "beyond the image of the isolated poet in order to restore relationships to the center of the Romantic story." In this, she's attempting a bold revision of how the Romantics portrayed themselves and at the same time tapping into our long-standing infatuation with the idea of a community of brilliant free spirits, inspiring and infuriating each other via a web of friendships, love affairs and feuds.

Hay works in a shadow; Richard Holmes, arguably our greatest living biographer, specializes in the Romantics. (His "The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science"was among the most celebrated works of nonfiction published last year.) Hay doesn't write as captivatingly as Holmes does -- but then, neither does anyone else. The strength of "Young Romantics" lies in its perspective, not so much on her subjects' works (the critical passages in the book are perfunctory) as on the delights and agonies of la vie boheme as it was lived in its early days.

Hunt and Shelley both longed to create countercultural communities, and made several creditable stabs at it. Perversely, getting tossed in the clink turned out to be a blessing for the impractical Hunt, who was co-owner, editor and chief contributor at a liberal newspaper, the Examiner. In those days, with enough money and the right friends, a jail cell could be comfortably outfitted; Hunt had a charming room with flowered wallpaper and a private garden in the midst of an otherwise dank prison. His confinement, and his principled conduct in the face of it, made him a hero to the reform-minded left, and as he penned a series of influential columns about European politics, his parlor received a steady stream of notable visitors and patrons.

As a result, Hunt became the center of a group whose "emergent identity" was based on the ideal of "sociability," described by Hay as "an experiment in living which elevated the rituals of friendship -- communal dining, music-making, letter writing , shared reading -- so that these rituals ... took on a cooperative, oppositional significance." How people, especially creative people, conducted their personal lives became not just a political statement, but a kind of political activity at a time when the British government was trying to tamp down rising popular discontent with a raft of oppressive new laws.

No one could have endorsed this vision more fervently than Shelley, an aristocratic proponent of radicalism and free love who'd been expelled from Oxford for his atheistic views. His mentor in these beliefs was the political philosopher William Godwin, who turned dishearteningly unsympathetic when Shelley eloped with his 16-year-old daughter, Mary, in 1814. (Shelley already had a wife, and a pregnant one at that.) The "immorality" of their relationship made living in England, or in any other settled situation, difficult for the young couple, but eventually (after the suicide of his first wife) Shelley and Mary did get married, and the second half of "Young Romantics" describes the poet's efforts to forge assemblies of like-minded friends, including Byron, in various Italian cities.

Money and sex usually conspired to foil these plans, or to cut them short. The impecunious Hunt was always hitting up his exasperated friends for loans; Dickens based the sponging Harold Skimpole, in "Bleak House," on him. And for all their lofty ideals, Shelley and Hunt could be stunningly insensitive to the women in their lives, the ones who had to suffer most of the consequences of all that free love. Claire Clairmont, whose relationship with Shelley was ambiguous at best, bore Byron's illegitimate child, a daughter she adored but who was taken away from her and died in a convent at the age of 4. By the time "Young Romantics" gets to the year 1822, when Shelley drowned in a boating accident, it comes as a jolt to learn that Mary Shelley had run away to Europe with a great poet, written a seminal English novel, buried three children (only her fourth survived to adulthood) and lost her soul mate -- all by the age of 25.

Whether or not they were formidable thinkers (like Mary Shelley) or intrepid adventurers (like Claire), the women in these artsy enclaves had the unenviable task of running the households where revolutionary sociability was cultivated. Most of these establishments included extra women of uncertain status, usually sisters. Hunt, Shelley and Byron all wrote poems featuring brother-sister incest and were rumored to have such propensities, which didn't make being part of their domestic entourages any easier. (Only Byron actually appears to have slept with a blood relation, his half-sister, Augusta, but a dalliance with a sister-in-law was considered quasi-incestuous at the time.) Claire eventually fled to Russia -- viewed by the English as a barbarous outpost -- to seek work as a governess, hoping to escape the taint of her association with Shelley and Byron. One of Hay's research discoveries is an autobiographical fragment by Claire, in which she indicts both Shelley and Byron as "monsters of lying, meanness, cruelty and treachery," primarily for their championing of free love.

But the two poets could also be kind and magnanimous, and they were certainly correct in thinking that Claire was more wronged by the sexual mores of her time than by either of them. Hay -- a stolid rather than a lyrical writer -- is better at pruning back the moral thickets of these relationships than she is at invoking why so many people got swept up in Byron's charisma, Percy Shelley's radiant idealism, Keats' meltingly lovely verse or Mary Shelley's ethical intelligence in the first place. No matter; their lives were also a kind of art, and one that never fails to cast its spell.

Memorial Day

"BRAVE." IT'S BECOME an almost mandatory adjective in speechifying whenever some officeholder or candidate makes reference to the people who fight the country's wars: the "brave" men and women, soldiers, Marines, sailors, pilots and so on. It must amuse many of those serving, since they know firsthand that not all of them are brave and a few are not particularly admirable. What they are -- those who risk their lives, bodies and futures in war -- is part of a community that extends over generations, whose members living and dead have learned the deepest meaning of trust in one's fellows and who often have discovered that, when put to the test, they can draw from themselves and those around them a measure of courage and selflessness they had never known was there. It's not a band of heroes that Harry the King addresses in Shakespeare's play but a band of brothers.
This is why the popular and long-serving attorney general of Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal (D), found himself in so much trouble for untruths, briefly uttered in past speeches and statements, about having served in Vietnam. Politicians are generally granted quite a bit of leeway in praising themselves and their accomplishments, even to a degree that in others might be considered insufferable. But Mr. Blumenthal discovered, as other candidates have before him, that a claim of the sort he made is regarded not just as political exaggeration but as an attempt to claim something merited by only a small, and dwindling, number of people in our country -- for want of a better word, call it "glory." Or, to use a dictionary definition: "praise, honor, or distinction extended by common consent." Mr. Blumenthal was treading, however unwittingly, on sacred ground.
There are many wealthy, accomplished and successful people in this city and around the country who would give a lot for a share of that kind of glory (but probably not what's really required). They don't necessarily "hold their manhoods cheap," in Shakespeare's phrase, but they do look on those who have served, who have put themselves in danger, with an often unexpressed mixture of admiration and envy.
This high regard for service isn't a new thing. The Greek playwright Aeschylus -- renowned in his time and ours as a literary giant -- had an epitaph of but a few lines on his stone; they relate not that he wrote many great plays but that he fought well against the Persians at Marathon. This is our national day not only of memory but of praise, honor and distinction -- of true, unembellished glory achieved in many American wars and still being won today.

Andrea Palladio

By ADA LOUISE HUXTABLE

New York
The most universally admired, widely emulated, eternally influential and consistently bowdlerized and degraded of all architects is Andrea Palladio, born Andrea di Pietro in Vicenza in 1508, whose rise from simple stonecutter to master of the principles of classical antiquity made him the most celebrated builder of his time and forever thereafter. His work and reputation have continued to resonate throughout the centuries and the world.

Andrea Palladio's Buildings

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A present-day shot of the iconic Villa Almerico Capra Valmarana, known as La Rotonda, in Vicenza.

A fortuitous confluence of circumstances guaranteed his fame. He was, of course, sublimely talented. This was the moment when the buildings and artifacts of ancient Greece and Rome were being rediscovered as a source of artistic inspiration, initiating what we know as the Renaissance, which also changed everything forever.
The only surviving Roman text on architecture was the treatise written by Vitruvius in the first century B.C., and although it contained abundant rules and instructions, its illustrations had been lost. Through careful, and often conjectural reconstruction of Vitruvius's descriptions, Palladio established the standard for the way Renaissance architects saw and used the buildings of the ancient world. But he took his own admiration for classical precedents beyond their literal imitation to a new level and an elegant new style.
All that Palladio learned from Vitruvius and from two later trips to Rome in the 1540s became the basis of the most influential books on architecture ever written, his Quattro Libri dell'Architettura, published in Venice in 1570. Translated into French in 1650 and retranslated into English in 1663, with expanded English versions in 1715 and 1720, Palladio's "Four Books of Architecture" became an essential part of every distinguished library, including that of Thomas Jefferson, who helped himself liberally to their examples. They remain text and model to the present day.
For Palladio, the Quattro Libri served both a polemical and a promotional purpose. While they were meant to spread the gospel of the new classicism, they were illustrated with examples of his own work, which served as presentation drawings for potential clients. (Some things don't change—the profusely illustrated two-ton coffee-table tomes put out by today's architects have the same purpose but lack the redeeming larger theme.)
The fact that Palladio's drawings still exist may well be due to the English passion for collecting all things Greek and Roman or of later, classical inspiration and carting them back home (the contested Elgin marbles, for one conspicuous example). Many of Palladio's drawings were brought to England by Inigo Jones in 1614, with more retrieved by Lord Burlington in 1719; all are now in the collection of the Royal Institute of British Architects in London.
Thirty-one of these rare drawings, on loan from the RIBA, are on display in this country for the first time at New York's Morgan Library & Museum in "Palladio and His Legacy: A Transatlantic Journey." The exhibition traces the course of the Anglo-Palladianism inspired by the books and drawings that swept Britain in the 18th century and quickly crossed the ocean to the U.S., to be adopted immediately by a young country seeking an appropriate national identity.
Sponsored by the RIBA Trust and the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, the show also features handsome new models and some of the earliest publications of Palladio's work from the RIBA's and the Morgan's collections, including Lord Burlington's own copy of the Quattro Libri. A number of the drawings are supplemented by exquisite, small, bas-relief facades mounted on the wall beside them.
Seeing the original ink-and-wash drawings made almost 500 years ago, with Palladio's handwritten notes, often done on the site, erases the centuries; they create a miraculous fusion of the distant past and immediate present, a kind of aesthetic time warp that brings the man and his moment wonderfully alive. The hand of the artist and the ink on the page connect instantly with the eye, mind and heart of the viewer. There is an intimacy, a sense of the architect's presence that no reproduction can achieve.
As important archives go online and the original works of art remain in zealously protective conditions, the tradeoff for universal accessibility is the loss of this direct contact with the authentic work for the deeply personal and moving experience that is what looking at art will always be about. A glossy image on a computer screen is a poor substitute for the real thing.
Another reason to see this show is the exemplary scholarship and comprehensible labels that offer generous information for both the specialist and the layman, to the extent of the visitor's desire or energy to absorb it. But the best reason of all is the way these seductively beautiful drawings reveal the real Palladio, as opposed to all the pallid imitations that have followed.

Palladio & His Legacy

The Morgan Library & Museum
Through Aug. 1

The exhibition starts with Palladio's investigations of Vitruvius's incomplete texts and proceeds to his own interpretations, from ideas or freehand sketches; to the use of instruments for precise measurements and proportions; and, finally, to presentation drawings that indicate light, shade, depth and detailed ornamentation.
There are drawings and models of iconic buildings like the Villa Rotonda in Vicenza, a pilgrimage point for architects from Inigo Jones to Le Corbusier, and the formal villas in the working farmland of the Veneto region, linked to the outbuildings that serve as storage barns in stunning, symmetrical, classical compositions—a serenely beautiful arrangement, as the Morgan label diplomatically notes, "more often informed by architectural criteria than by functional logic." (Have I mentioned that some things never change?)
What happened to American Palladianism after that transatlantic journey is a fascinating story. It began impressively, with Jefferson's first version of Monticello and his proposal for the Virginia State Capitol, James Hoban's competition-winning design for the White House, and aristocratic plantations like Drayton Hall, just outside of Charleston, S.C.—all early, ambitious versions of the popular Palladian style.
This early efflorescence was followed by 19th-century builders who used pattern books derived from the original publications and spread columns, domes and porticos across the land in more modest bids for dignity and fashion. Classicism endured in state capitols, courthouses and financial institutions, with a final, extravagant burst in the Beaux Arts elaborations of the "White City" of Chicago's 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. It continued in a more chastened form well into the 20th century, from the imposing colonnaded facade of George P. Post's 1903 New York Stock Exchange to Cass Gilbert's Supreme Court and John Russell Pope's National Gallery of Art in Washington of the late 1930s.
But somewhere along the way, as American government and business bureaucracies grew, classicism was reduced to empty formulas and public and institutional buildings established a denatured, clichéd correctness with a horrible life of its own. Huge structures employed numbingly endless columns and redundant motifs in a debased version of the Palladian ideal that reduced a glorious tradition to embalmed monotony.
And it got worse. Increasingly remote from its origins, devoid of Palladio's superb understanding of scale, mass and detail and their subtle and delicate balance, the style was eviscerated and dumbed down to caricature in hack commercial versions. Shopping malls pasted on meaningless pediments and pilasters; advertisements for McMansions featured "palladium" windows. What was not dead on arrival was Disneyland.
Rejections and revivals of the classical tradition are an enduring part of architectural history, and architects will keep finding new ways to interpret its timeless appeal. Even Jefferson revised his design of Monticello after he had seen the latest neo-classicism in France. Tastes change; and taste and talent are not mutually exclusive. There will always be good buildings and bad buildings, and style is irrelevant to those critical relationships of proportion, plan and detail and to the mastery of the elusive elements that define our ideas of beauty and how we experience a building in its time and place. Whether it is "traditional" or "modern" is a specious argument at best.
But architectural golden ages are few and far between. The unique combination of historical, social, cultural and economic factors that brings an unprecedented time and talent together cannot be replicated; there is no way to recapture the magic moment that changes the course of art. Although Palladio's monuments will continue to influence and inspire, the golden age of Palladianism is past. Only those drawings bring it back to life.
Ms. Huxtable is the Journal's architecture critic.

Once More, With Feeling

By MAUREEN DOWD

WASHINGTON
President Spock’s behavior is illogical.
Once more, he has willfully and inexplicably resisted fulfilling a signal part of his job: being a prism in moments of fear and pride, reflecting what Americans feel so they know he gets it.
“This president needs to tell BP, ’I’m your daddy,’ “ scolded James Carville, a New Orleans resident, as he called Barack Obama’s response to Louisiana’s new watery heartbreak “lackadaisical.”
At a press conference, Obama said Malia had asked him, as he shaved, “Did you plug the hole yet, Daddy?” (That hole should be plugged with a junk-shot of Glenn Beck, who crudely mocked the adorable Malia.) Oddly, the good father who wrote so poignantly about growing up without a daddy scorns the paternal aspect of the presidency.
In the campaign, Obama’s fight flagged to the point that his donors openly upbraided him. In the Oval, he waited too long to express outrage and offer leadership on A.I.G., the banks, the bonuses, the job loss and mortgage fears, the Christmas underwear bomber, the death panel scare tactics, the ugly name-calling of Tea Party protesters.
Too often it feels as though Barry is watching from a balcony, reluctant to enter the fray until the clamor of the crowd forces him to come down. The pattern is perverse. The man whose presidency is rooted in his ability to inspire withholds that inspiration when it is most needed.
Oblivious to warnings about Osama hitting the U.S. and Katrina hitting New Orleans, W. often seemed more absorbed in workouts than work. Obama, by contrast, does his homework; he conveys a rare and impressive grasp of difficult subjects when he at last deigns to talk to the news media and reassure those whose lives are overturned by disaster.
The wound-tight, travel-light Obama has a distaste for the adversarial and the random. But if you stick too rigidly to a No Drama rule in the White House, you risk keeping reality at bay. Presidencies are always about crisis management.
Obama invented himself against all odds and repeated parental abandonment, and he worked hard to regiment his emotions. But now that can come across as imperviousness and inflexibility. He wants to run the agenda; he doesn’t want the agenda to run him. Once you become president, though, there’s no way to predict what your crises will be.
F.D.R. achieved greatness not by means of imposing his temperament and intellect on the world but by reacting to what the world threw at him.
For five weeks, it looked as though Obama considered the gushing that became the worst oil spill in U.S. history a distraction, like a fire alarm going off in the middle of a law seminar he was teaching. He’ll deal with it, but he’s annoyed because it’s not on his syllabus.
Even if Obama doesn’t watch “Treme” on HBO, it’s strange that he would not have a more spontaneous emotional response to another horrendous hit for Louisiana, with residents and lawmakers crying on the news and dead pelicans washing up on shore. But then, he didn’t make his first-ever visit to New Orleans until nearly a year after Katrina hit. “I never had occasion to be here,” he told The Times’s Jeff Zeleny, then at The Chicago Tribune.
Just as President Clinton once protested to reporters that he was still “relevant,” President Obama had to protest to reporters last week that he has feelings.
He seemed to tune out a bit after the exhausting battle over health care, with the air of someone who says to himself: “Oh, man, that was a heavy lift. I’m taking a break.”
He’s spending the holiday weekend in Chicago when he should be commemorating Memorial Day here with the families of troops killed in battle and with veterans at Arlington Cemetery.
Republican senators who had a contentious lunch with the president last week described him as whiny, thin-skinned and in over his head, and there was extreme Democratic angst at the White House’s dilatory and deferential attitude on the spill.
Even more than with the greedy financiers and arrogant carmakers, it was important to offend and slap back the deceptive malefactors at BP.
Obama and top aides who believe in his divinity make a mistake to dismiss complaints of his aloofness as Washington white noise. He treats the press as a nuisance rather than examining his own inability to encapsulate Americans’ feelings.
“The media may get tired of the story, but we will not,” he told Gulf Coast residents when he visited on Friday. Actually, if it weren’t for the media, the president would probably never have woken up from his torpor and flown down there.
Instead of getting Bill Clinton to offer Joe Sestak a job, Obama should be offering Clinton one. Bill would certainly know how to gush at a gusher gone haywire. Let him resume a cameo role as Feeler in Chief. The post is open.

We had fun here..........

Point Clear Alabama

Lunch with the FT: Antony Gormley

By Jackie Wullschlager

On a warm spring day, a giant in a fluorescent yellow jacket and woolly hat strides into the Lord Stanley, a wood-panelled gastro-pub in Camden, north London. A head and shoulders taller than everyone else, Antony Gormley gazes effortlessly over the throng of drinkers at his local and hastens to our table. He has a long mobile face and darting eyes behind square silver glasses. He gives me a peck on each cheek and places a solicitous hand on my arm. “Hello, how has your day been so far?” he opens. “Can I get you a drink?”
It is a vicarish approach, anxious to appear easy-going, one of the crowd. I tell him the FT pays for lunch. He requests a lemonade and peels off his cyclist’s gear, revealing dark hair flecked with grey and couldn’t-care-less clothes – brown turtle-neck jumper, beige trousers. Without further ado, he produces a catalogue for a recent show from his rucksack and shows me a diagram of a triangle within a triangle. “You see, this is so beautiful! I said to Roger Penrose [professor of mathematics at Oxford], ‘I’ve been dealing with this bubble geometry and I’m not making much sense of it, can you help?’ He was an absolute joy, so open-minded, he spent hours taking me through this jungle of possibilities.”
I try to interest Gormley in the blackboard menu but he lingers on the trisector theorem illustration, summarising rapidly: “If you trisect a triangle’s angles internally, the intersections provide the vertices of a smaller triangle. Whatever the original shape, the smaller triangle will be equilateral. It shows the relationship of the random to the absolute.”
Is Gormley a philosopher? He is aware that “either my work can be seen as really bad figurative sculpture, or as a provocation to a state of reflection”. Few artists divide audiences in more complex ways. He is seen by some as a traditional sculptor of the human form, and by others as a cutting-edge conceptualist – and he’s admired or loathed on both counts. He is popular with the public but has equally attracted opprobrium from the critical establishment for the very accessibility of works such as “Angel of the North”, his massive motorway landmark, or “Field”, an installation of 40,000 clay-sized figurines made with a community in St Helen’s, Merseyside, for which he won the Turner Prize in 1994. Last year’s “One and Other” for Trafalgar Square’s Fourth Plinth, won widespread acclaim. So has “Event Horizon”, the recent installation of fibreglass and iron sculptures of a naked man across New York’s skyline, a reprise of the event in London in 2007.
Test Sites, opening at London’s White Cube next week, brings Gormley’s conversations between architecture, geometry and the human body into the gallery. It includes massive blocks of rusted iron, which aim “to make the condition of architecture absolutely apparent as a way of describing the body”, and a space frame: “a drawing but also an object – virtual but also real. It’s a forest of verticality, a 3D hologram but somehow you’re part of it.” The viewer edges his way through the frame in total darkness until, on a timed cycle, blinding light floods the room, recalling the installation “Blind Light” at London’s Hayward Gallery in 2007. “It’s intensely uncomfortable – what was illusory becomes visual, and you find yourself up against your fellow men. It’s very experiential – very scary. When I showed a version in New York, people became totally freaked out.” He imitates an east coast twang: “Turn those lights off!”
Why put people through it like this? “[The philosopher Edmund] Burke said there’s no beauty without terror. I want people to react by saying, ‘What the hell is this?’, then become the object and ask the same question.” This insistence on putting the spotlight on the viewer makes Gormley a modern-day grand inquisitor, an interrogator of souls.
Certainly his uncompromising conceptual focus is matched by asceticism at lunch. With barely a glance at the Mediterranean-leaning menu of meat and fish, he selects the cheapest thing on it – a vegetable risotto. Neither starter nor desert are contenders. The waiter suggests an accompanying green salad; I order an onion tart.
Gormley, 60, is lean and fit and puts himself through extreme physical trial in the bedrock of his art: casting moulds from his own body. “The idea of making a surrogate body or getting someone else to do what I can legitimately use myself to do – I couldn’t do that,” he says. “It’s my moment of truth. If there’s a truth claim in the work, it’s not an interpretation of life but that it comes from a lived moment in time. I may be applying logical and conceptual principles of the mind/body problem, but this is not expressive. I’m trying to tell things as they are – as evidence of something actual. It’s the thing people kill me for.”
He means, I think, the underlay of human figuration as a basis for conceptual art. Why has this provoked such vehement responses? “I’ve been battling this all my life. There’s a sense that somehow the work is unaccepted within the canon because it’s still going on about the body. There are people who characterise my project as a one-shout idea. But you don’t criticise a dancer for using his body. People seem to make a connection with the work. The body is capable of transcending creed, race, language, to tell of human experience including thought, feeling, indeed the fact of human existence. We need images of the body now as much as we have ever needed them and no one knows how to make them make sense.”
It is not too hard to read this offering of his body – and a certain petulance that the meaning of the sacrifice is not universally acknowledged – in terms of Gormley’s rigorously Roman Catholic upbringing. “Oh, yes, there was lots of kneeling in dark places praying to non-existent gods,” he says, but most seminal – though nothing to do with religion – are memories as a child of seven or eight of “the experience of the enforced sleep – being made to go to sleep when I wasn’t tired between two and three in broad daylight. That’s when I got to know the body as a place, not a thing. It was a feeling of incredible claustrophobia. I remember the metal-balconied room in the middle of our house in Hampstead Garden Suburb, facing south. It was incredibly hot, bright, pink, the size of a matchbox, completely suffocating. I felt almost sick with nausea from its confinement. The slow release from that into a space that was dark, cool and infinite – I got used to having that experience. The tiny room opened out, turned into something without dimensions. I can’t think of anything that I have made that doesn’t refer to that or hasn’t come out of it.”
The food arrives. My tart, served with potato and walnut salad, is rich and robustly flavoured with rosemary. Gormley takes forkfuls of risotto, a fresh, creamy-looking concoction of morels, peas, broad beans and basil, without interest. Was his childhood happy? “Not really – but it wasn’t sad either,” he answers, as if the question were irrelevant. Antony Mark David Gormley – the initials AMDG are, not coincidentally, those you encounter in churches across Europe, where they stand for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, to the greater glory of God – was born in 1950, seventh child in an affluent family. His father was manager of a pharmaceutical company and a “captain of industry” who “had a passion for 15th-century paintings”. He was also, says Gormley, “a maniac. He was hopeless – he believed in discipline but I’m not sure that he was particularly disciplined. Motivation is very difficult to pin down. With my father, although he took my scribbled poems to his secretary and brought them back typed out, there was always a sense that nothing was quite good enough. The whole family suffered from the feeling that in his view the potential of one’s offerings was not quite adequate.”
At Ampleforth, a Catholic boarding school in north Yorkshire, Gormley “made a radio, a boat, a sandyacht”; monks “listened to my poems and helped me find the right paints – I have a lot to be thankful for in my education.” He read architecture and anthropology at Cambridge, then travelled in India, where he developed an interest in Buddhism that has remained a constant. He did not set out to be an artist: “I wouldn’t have had that presumption or assumption. It was only when I realised it was the only conclusion to who I was. I was three months off 30 when I came out of art college. I kept my options open a long time. And I have been very wilful.” After art school – Central St Martin’s, Goldsmiths and the Slade – he worked and lived in Peckham, south London, for years with painter Vicken Parsons. “Such an amazing wife and mother,” he says, “and still my best critic, merciless and very good.” The couple have three children: filmmaker Ivo; Guy, who studied sculpture at Goldsmiths; and architect Paloma. “They are so brilliant and interesting. I say that with no sense of self-congratulation. It’s been none of my business but I’m intensely proud of them.”
Our main courses finished, Gormley eats his way dutifully through the salad. The pub is heaving but nothing distracts him; he speaks warmly of younger generations of artists. His own cohort includes Tony Cragg, Peter Randall-Page, Bill Woodrow and his great rival Anish Kapoor. Though the two no longer talk to each other, Gormley says Kapoor “still makes extraordinary, challenging things”. But, he says, “That generation has been eclipsed, quite rightly, by the very lively Thatcher’s children [the Young British Artists]. They were able to do what we couldn’t dream of – we were happy to wait for galleries and institutions to take an interest while we showed our work shyly to each other. They said, ‘We are going to take control of our destinies’ and I take my hat off to them.”
Although he considers that “Damien [Hirst] is a natural philosopher”, he distinguishes his generation from the rest of the YBAs because “there is a really deep thing for us – of thinking about the issue of where sculpture fits with the world of made things and perhaps a bit wider – an expectation that you would set the terms of your own project and articulate it as well. You had to chart your journey but also the reason for the voyage in the first place.”
Although his admirations tend to the abstract – Malevich, Pollock and Serra – a crucial point in Gormley’s journey was the “revelation” of encountering Jacob Epstein. “After seeing Epstein, I felt I didn’t have a choice. He dealt with sex, procreation, death. Epstein made a pregnant woman, Moore made a Madonna. Moore had holes but not many vaginas and giant schlongs wapping around.” Gormley waves his arms suggestively. “You don’t see many tumescent penises in Moore. Epstein was filled with American vigour and a call for this primary language of direct carving. He infected the world. While English painting was dealing with formal issues, Epstein was dealing with the question, ‘Is the human project going to last?’”
This, updated to an environmentally threatened and technology-led age, is the question posed by Gormley’s art, too – most recently in the 390ft sculpture of a naked man, engineered as a minimalist pylon, which he proposed for the Olympic commission. We are meeting soon after this was rejected in favour of Kapoor’s “ArcelorMittal Orbit”, and days after the Sunday Times published an illustration based on its own artist’s impression rather than on Gormley’s actual proposal – and he invites me to see the “true Olympic model”. I apologise on behalf of my profession, and try to prolong lunch. His lemonade never arrived, so I reorder and he downs it hastily. I pay the bill and we walk five minutes to his warehouse-studio.
Did he expect to win the Olympic commission? “I didn’t think they could possibly fail to appreciate that this is what the Olympics needs,” he answers wryly, showing me how viewers would have been invited to climb the man-pylon. “It would have been approachable but also an experience – the framing of a situation in which the viewer becomes the viewed. It’s a collective approach, where participation is essential to make a new moving body. It’s the industrial sublime, a mountain you climb in the city.”
Gormley is a paradox: a minimalist and also a romantic; an abstract thinker whose work turns on the human figure; a giant ego who denies individual expression but instals casts of his own body worldwide as Everyman. “The work is driving me, evolving and I’m keeping up with it – it makes enormous demands not just on me but on everyone who helps.” Again the absolutism, inclusiveness, recall the Catholic ideal, yet I wonder if Gormley is an optimist?
“Well, no. I probably suffer from melancholy, but we have to believe if the sun has got 6bn years of energy left, we have a part to play. I make contemporary megalithic markers in time and space. Leaving a record of human experience beyond the time when we’re talking to ourselves is a primary urge. We’re insignificant. I’m attracted to sculpture that recognises that. Most culture is a reaction to amnesia – not just human memory but the way whole galaxies disappear into black holes – cosmic amnesia. Sculpture is a railing against that.”
Antony Gormley, ‘Test Sites’, White Cube Mason’s Yard, London SW1, June 4-July 10. ‘Event Horizon’, New York, to August 15. ‘Critical Mass’, De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill-on-Sea, until August
.................................
The Lord Stanley, London NW1
1 x risotto with morels, peas, broad beans, basil and Parmesan £9.50
1 x Onion and rosemary tart with new potato and walnut salad £9.50
1 x green salad £2.50
1 x lemonade £2.70
Tap water
Total (inc. service) £28
.................................
Antony Gormley vs Anish Kapoor
Leonardo vs Michelangelo, Ingres vs Delacroix, Matisse vs Picasso – artists through history have thrived on creative rivalry. As the two leading British sculptors of their generation, Gormley and Kapoor have always seen in one another both their greatest competition and a benchmark for achievement.
In the 21st century, the ambitions of both have become increasingly monumental and their latest projects blur differences between art and architecture.
1950 Antony Gormley born in London to Irish father and German mother.
1954 Anish Kapoor born in Bombay to Indian father and Iraqi Jewish mother.
1973-79 Gormley attends Central St Martins, Goldsmiths and Slade School of Art. Kapoor attends Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea School of Art.
1990 Kapoor represents Britain at the Venice Biennale and wins Premio Duemila, the prize for youngest artist.
1991 Kapoor wins the Turner Prize with “Untitled”, a pigment and sandstone urn.

Gormley’s ‘Testing a World View’

1994 Gormley wins the Turner Prize with “Testing A World View”, five identical iron body forms described by the artist as “the polymorphousness of the self”.
1995-98 Construction of Gormley’s “Angel of the North” in Gateshead.
2002 Kapoor wins Unilever Commission to fill the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Produces “Marsyas” – three connected steel rings, the largest of which weighs 10 tonnes.
2004 Kapoor wins commission for a memorial to the British victims of 9/11, New York.
2009 Gormley’s “One and Other” wins commission for Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square. Kapoor’s “Sky Plinth” is an unsuccessful contender.
2009 Kapoor retrospective at the Royal Academy of Arts includes ”Svayambh”, a 40-tonne block of red wax, paint and vaseline that travelled slowly on a train track through five galleries, depositing crimson goo on walls, cornices and floors.
2010 Kapoor wins Olympic commission to design a public attraction at the Olympic Park in Stratford. The “ArcelorMittal Orbit” a 115m-high looping lattice of tubular red steel is chosen ahead of Gormley’s 118m sculpture of a naked man.
2010 Gormley’s “Habitat”, created from 57 stainless steel boxes, and situated in Anchorage, Alaska, is his first permanent installation in the US.

Memorial Day

Britten's "War Requiem"

On today's date in 1962, Benjamin Britten's "War Requiem" for solo soprano, tenor, baritone, chorus and orchestra, had its premiere performance at Conventry Cathedral in England. The Cathedral had been virtually destroyed in war-time bombing, and Britten's big choral work was commissioned to celebrate its restoration and reconsecration.

Britten was a committed pacifist, and his "War Requiem" text combines poems by Wilfred Owen, who had been killed in World War I, with the traditional Latin text of the Mass for the Dead. Despite using poems written during the First World War, Britten's choice of soloists reflected nations who participated in the Second.

With Britten's life-time partner, tenor Peter Pears, representing England, the plan was to have a German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and a Russian soprano, Galina Vishnevskaya, for the 1962 premiere. As a young man, Fischer-Dieskau had been drafted into the German army, and had been a prisoner of war, but was eager to participate. Unfortunately, the Soviet authorities wouldn't issue a visa for soprano Vishnevskaya to sing in the new Britten piece: "How can you, a Soviet woman, stand next to a German and an Englishman and perform such a political work," they told her. The British soprano Heather Harper substituted for her.

For many, Britten's "War Requiem" is his masterpiece, and shortly after its premiere, Britten wrote to his sister: "The idea did come off, I think . . . aren't those poems wonderful, and how one thinks of that bloody 1914-18 war especially. I hope it will make people think a bit."

OP-ART

Shorting Reform

By MICHAEL LEWIS

Published: May 28, 2010

MultimediaTo: Wall Street chief executives

Op-Art

Related

• Times Topic: Financial Regulatory Reform

From: Your man in Washington

Re: Embracing the status quo

Our earnings are robust, our compensation has returned to its naturally high levels and, as a result, we have very nearly regained our grip on the imaginations of the most ambitious students at the finest universities — and from that single fact many desirable outcomes follow.

Thus, we have almost fully recovered from what we have agreed to call The Great Misfortune. In the next few weeks, however, ill-informed senators will meet with ill-paid representatives to reconcile their ill-conceived financial reform bills. This process cannot and should not be stopped. The American people require at least the illusion of change. But it can be rendered harmless to our interests.

To this point, we have succeeded in keeping the public focused on the single issue that will have very little effect on how we do business: the quest to prevent taxpayer money from ever again being used to (as they put it) “bail out Wall Street.”

As we know, we never needed their money in the first place, and by the time we need it again, we’ll be long gone. If we can keep the public, and its putative representatives, fixated on the question of whether their bill does, or does not, ensure there will be no more bailouts, we may entirely avoid a discussion of our relationship to the broader society.

Working together as a team we have already suppressed debate on many dangerous ideas: that those of us deemed too big to fail are too big and should be broken up, for instance, or that credit default swaps and collateralized debt obligations and other financial inventions should simply be banned. We are now at leisure to address the few remaining threats to our way of life. To wit:

1. Washington will attempt to limit our ability to exploit the idiocy of institutional investors a k a our “customers.” The Senate appears intent on forcing our most lucrative derivatives business onto open exchanges, where investors can, for the first time, observe the prices we give them. This measure — which I’ve come to call the “Making the World Safe for Germans With Money Act” — will prove difficult to defeat. Our public strategy here, as elsewhere, must be to complicate the issue.

To the mere mention of open, public exchanges for derivatives, you should always respond, “That will destroy liquidity in these fragile and complex markets.” Most people don’t even know what “liquidity” means, or what causes it or why they actually need to have more rather than less of it — or what, even, the point is of a market that requires privacy to operate. They will assume that you must understand it better than they do. For that reason alone it is useful.

The other point you should make to our elected officials (privately, please) is that our profits function as a fixed point in an uncertain universe. If they curtail our ability to shaft German investors in one way, we will simply find some other way to do it.

Shockingly, the Senate version of the bill more or less would require us to cease to trade derivatives entirely. This unpleasant idea was introduced by Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas, and it leads me to a point that is worth underscoring: We do not have a problem with the American people, we have a problem with American women. Elizabeth Warren, our TARP supervisor, continues to ask questions about what we did with our government money; Mary Schapiro has used her authority at the S.E.C. to sue Goldman Sachs. Of the four Republican senators who crossed over to vote with the Democrats, two were women — and one of the guys posed naked for Cosmopolitan magazine.

Going forward, we should discourage women from seeking higher office — or indeed, any position in which they might exert influence over our activities. More immediately, in your private conversations with Larry Summers, Tim Geithner and male Republican senators, you should simply refer to Blanche Lincoln as “unhinged.” They’ll get it.

2. Our slow cousins at Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s are likely to suffer a blow to their already lowly status. They are virtually certain to be stripped of their designation as Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organizations. Whatever that means, it presents no threat to our way of life. Just the reverse: the more miserable it is to work at Moody’s, the less capable (and more manipulable) Moody’s employees will be.

The lone remaining risk to the status quo is the Franken amendment — introduced by Senator Al Franken of Minnesota — which would prevent us from personally selecting the ratings agencies that offer opinions on our offerings. It creates a board inside the Securities and Exchange Commission to assign ratings agencies, thereby removing the direct incentive the raters have to please us. (Of course, it preserves their indirect incentive: that is, that we might one day offer them jobs.)

The Franken amendment thus gums up what has been heretofore a very cleanly rigged system. In addition to encouraging public references to Stuart Smalley and Mr. Franken’s other theatrical embarrassments, we should remind our friends on Capitol Hill and in the press that “the Franken amendment will give the federal government the same control over finance it has seized in health care.”

3. There is a slight, but real, risk that public opinion will yank us in some unexpected direction. Over the past few months, a curious pattern has emerged: the more open the debate, the more radical the outcome.

In private, reasonable discussions we were able to persuade our friends in the Senate to prevent votes on amendments hostile to our interests — the worst of which, I might add, was dreamed up by yet another female senator. But the minute a vote was held, and senators sensed the cameras watching, even our friends abandoned us to the mob. All of these people are continually engaged in the same mental calculation: are the votes I might gain with this remark or this idea or this position greater than the votes I can buy with the money given to me by Wall Street firms? With each uptick in the level of public scrutiny — with every minute of televised debate — our money means less.

In the short term, we must do whatever we can to dissuade Representative Barney Frank from allowing any part of these discussions between senators and representatives to be televised. In the longer term we must return to the shadows. Do your work in private; allow your money to speak for you; and remember, the only way we’ll get the financial reform we need is if we pay for it. No one else can afford it.

Michael Lewis, a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, is the author, most recently, of “The Big Short.”

A

It's the birthday of the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, born in Brookline, Massachusetts (1917), who said in one of his last major public speeches, "When power leads man toward arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations."

Bill Bryson

On a walk through the countryside, Bill Bryson tells Kate Weinberg why he was glad to leave Iowa and how his traveller’s quest has ended in Britain

Bill Bryson is an adopted national treasure after his travel book Notes from a Small IslandPhoto: ANDREW CROWLEY

Bill Bryson is waiting under the departure screens at Paddington, looking very much like a big garden gnome on a day out. With his gingery-white beard, thick glasses, round tummy and a baseball cap, he has kitted himself out for the walk in the countryside near Henley-on-Thames with a backpack and a long walking stick. When I introduce myself, a wide smile swallows up most of his face, including his eyes which disappear into small half moons and a road-map of laughter lines. I tell him that I have brought coffees, but struggled with whether to get him an Americano or a cappuccino.

His smile widens even more as he tells me — I sense, untruthfully — that the cappuccino was a great choice. This is not so much because the Anglophile from Iowa is devoutly Old World rather than New World, even in his choice of coffee. It’s just that: “You get to see me with a foam moustache and beard.”

Bryson is possibly the nicest person in the world to spend a day with getting lost around the Chiltern Hills. The best-selling author of numerous travel, science and language books became an adopted national treasure after the publication of Notes from a Small Island in which he pottered around Britain, observing the country and its characteristics with far more fondness and hilarity than the way in which we Brits view ourselves.

Now he is president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, Chancellor of Durham University (a fact advertised by his “Durham University” baseball cap) and still rolling out best-selling books, for which he has received an honorary OBE. In his backpack, he has the American proofs for his latest, At Home, which was recently launched in Britain — a history of domestic life told via a walk around the rooms in Bryson’s house.

But the anecdotal narrator of many of his books’ affectionately savage ripostes bears little resemblance to the polite, mild-mannered, middle-aged man who accompanies me on the train to Reading, a rural ramble, and then lunch in a country pub.

“I often feel I’m a disappointment to people because they expect me to be the guy in the books. When I sit next to someone at a dinner party I can see they expect me to be quick and witty and I’m not at all. I think it’s true of a lot of comic writers. They tend to be solitary and if they are funny it’s in a slow-motion, reflective way.” Or, as Bryson likes to put it, “I’m not funny in person”. Which is well-observed and, of course, rather funny.

Our taxi drops us outside the village shop in Stoke Row. As a man known for spending much of his time discovering countries on foot, I ask if he is any good at reading maps. “Not as good as I should be,” he says, leaving me, rather unwisely, to be the navigator.

We strike out at a reasonably fast pace, Bryson determined if a little wheezy with his walking stick, and remarking regularly on the beauty of the bluebell woods or the open fields. “Look at this, it’s just gorgeous,” he says as we emerge over a stile into a large grassy field. “And this isn’t even famous, it’s just another magical corner of Britain. Because you’ve had this for a very long time, there’s a tendency to regard it as permanent and fixed, but it’s not. You don’t want it to get diminished in any way.”

Having grown up in Middle America, Bryson is an unlikely standard-bearer for the British countryside. On the other hand, he seems more alive to Britain and Britishness than most people here, and has lived in England for most of his adult life. He once went back to the States with his family for eight years but describes the experience as “like moving back in with your parents when you are middle-aged. America is a very seductive place in terms of lifestyle and comfort, but it wasn’t for me.”

Bryson says he is a foreigner in both countries, a fact he relishes. With the World Cup coming up, for Bryson it’s a great position to be in: if England triumphs, he will revel in the celebrations; if England loses, he will stand back and think “these people, they can’t play football”. As he says, it also suits him from a professional perspective, “because it’s always better as a writer to be something of an outsider”.

He is, therefore, ambivalent about applying for British citizenship. At some point he will: he has no doubt that he wants to live and die here. And yet, he has turned being a foreigner into a career. You get the sense he is in no hurry to give that up. And, anyway, he is a little queasy about the possibility of failing the citizenship test. “Apparently it’s really hard. Questions like: 'To the closest five, how many members of Parliament are there?’ It would be much better if they asked: 'Who are Morecambe and Wise?’

Walking across a village green, Bryson stops, mutters something and picks up a small piece of wrapping from where it has been discarded a few feet from a bin. His appointment as CPRE president came about when he suggested an anti-litter campaign to them, and it is evident that this is something he is passionate about.

“It’s not just about not trashing the countryside. I see litter as part of a long continuum of anti-social behaviour,” he explains. “One end of it is this minor thing like litter and small bits of graffiti, and the other end is kicking somebody’s head in.

“But it’s not just yobbos in white vans,” he says, recounting a story of a woman in a smart Barbour coat walking her dog near the flat he keeps in London. She had chucked her dog’s droppings, in a tissue, under a car on the street. “I sidled up to her and said, 'Where is your dog poo, ma’am?’” I ask if his country concerns extend to other matters, like fox-hunting. He approaches his answer with his usual delicacy. “If you were going to present to me a type of human being that I wouldn’t particularly instantly warm to, probably one of the best things you could do is put him in a snug red coat and on top of a horse.”

Bryson’s appreciation of natural beauty seems to have stemmed from growing up in countryside that he deems ugly. Iowa is famous for its long low hills, fields the size of small English counties growing industrial quantities of wheat, corn and sorghum and dotted with towering grain silos. If you’re driving across America, it’s the state that you sleep through.

“I never thought of landscape as anything other than having an economic purpose. Then I came to this place — not just Britain but the whole of Europe — where you think, 'Ha, this is so beautiful.’ I wouldn’t be the way I am about the countryside if I didn’t grow up in Iowa.” Bryson was born in 1951. “I come from Des Moines. Someone had to,” as he puts it in the first line of The Lost Continent. He talks about his upbringing with both nostalgia and claustrophobia. In The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid he recounts an idyllic scene of provincial naivety and slow-motion living, where everyone’s car is always newly washed, and people gather around a dead cow because it’s something to do. But although his memoir provides a vivid almanac of the “consumer paradise” of 1950s America and bursts with funny anecdotes about his childhood and the community, it is strikingly absent of internal feelings. “That’s absolutely right. In all of my books I’m basically telling you the truth, but only a portion of the truth. You don’t really get to know me.”

The two-dimensional portraits of his parents (his mother, forgetful; his father, stingy) are written for effect but also betray the lack of closeness he felt to them and his two older siblings. “We had a fairly amicable relationship but essentially lived separately in the same house.”

His relationship with his mother was “not close”, a woman he describes as “never having a bad word to say about anyone, who was 100 per cent devoted to my father”. Mrs Bryson senior is now 97 and living in a care home in Des Moines where she is “happy all the time, with almost no memory left”.

His late father, who was a sports journalist for the Des Moines Register, evidently had the opposite temperament. “My dad was a kind of difficult person in that he was very self-absorbed and rather stiff and formal — he would always shake hands rather than embrace me. Although he ate meals with us, he always went back to his room to read.”

Later, Bryson goes a little further, admitting his father was a “selfish man, and a depressive — the reason he was in his room a lot was because he was normally in some kind of funk. I feel a lot of what I am is a reaction to him. But there are big parts of me I can also see are like him. I am very much like my father except for my moods, in which I am more like my mother.”

I wonder what is similar about Bryson and this unappealing-sounding man? “Compassion is not my strongest quality,” he replies, surprisingly. “But then I tell myself that if I was more understanding and sympathetic I wouldn’t have made fun of all these people and written the books that have made me successful.”

It’s as if Bryson’s oddly detached home life has resulted in him being a little removed from the world. Certainly his mother and father’s hazy idea of parenting led to the young “Billy” becoming a fantasist. “I lived in an imaginary world. I loved playing roles. I would construct quite elaborate parallel lives for myself. When I joked in the book about using X-ray vision to eradicate people, I still do it.”

When not consigning people to oblivion, the young Bryson’s first love was movies, a medium that he could lose himself in and which also provoked his wanderlust.

“I grew up as a voracious watcher of movies, all of those Hollywood movies from the Fifties and Forties, like Jimmy Stewart’s It’s a Wonderful Life, where the towns were always so attractive and the community so perfect. I had this conviction that if I looked into the wider world I would find that place. I think a big part of me has always been looking for that. I guess when I go travelling, that’s what I’m looking for.”

Back in the woodlands, it’s becoming increasingly less clear what we are looking for. For a while now, I have been struggling with the difference between the map and the landmarks we have come up against. Bryson has been relaxed and reassuring, but as we reach a signed footpath for Stoke Row that we have clearly passed about half an hour earlier, he has to admit that we have gone in a circle. As we retrace our footsteps, I ask about his routine at home, an old rectory in Norfolk where he lives with his wife, Cynthia. “We get up really early, sometimes ridiculously early, like 4.15am, which usually means by 10am I’ve already done a full day’s work.” Most of the rest of the day he spends gardening with his wife. “We have a big garden of four acres which we do ourselves. It’s very fulfilling but it’s a sort of overwhelming obligation.”

Bryson has been married to Cynthia for 35 years and they have two sons and two daughters. His youngest son is now at university. He met his wife on his first visit to England, when he took up work in a psychiatric hospital in Virginia Water. Cynthia was a nurse, and they met “making beds”. Bryson talks about his desire to slow down and spend as much time with his wife as possible. He feels he has spent the past 20 years going to exciting places while his wife stayed at home, being a full-time mother.

Last year, they rented a cottage on the north Norfolk coast, no more than 25 miles from their house and spent the day walking, reading and talking. Bryson’s burning desire to search for the flawless small town in 1940s Technicolor seems to have died out. “The idea of just wanting to be alone with my wife is something that you don’t expect to happen after 35 years of marriage.”

In this context, the subject of his latest book makes sense — Bryson has come to discover quite how much he likes being “at home”. But there is a strong sense of wanting to slow down time. “I’ve got a year and a half before I’m 60. In the last year or so I’ve begun to realise that this really is finite. In the sense that there are only so many more books I can write before I die. And also, how many more years can we keep doing the gardening?… Oh look, there’s the pub.” We have reached our destination.

On the train back he talks about the people from Norfolk who are “very nice, very considerate, very old fashioned”. Then he sits back in his seat, the wandering garden gnome who has found his way home. I remark tentatively that his description of the community and the flatness of the landscape make it sound a little bit like where he came from. “Yes,” agrees Bryson with cheerful resignation. “It’s exactly like Iowa.”

CV

Name: William McGuire “Bill” Bryson

Age: 58

Job: Author of 15 books. President of the Campaign to Protect Rural England. Chancellor of Durham University.

Education: Read “International Relations” at Drake University, Iowa.

Career: 10 years of journalism, including sub-editor on The Times, and a deputy national news editor on the Independent until 1987 when he became a full-time author.

Interesting fact: If he had been a British citizen, he would have voted Conservative in the election.

Is he British? Analysing the Anglophile from Iowa

Baseball or cricket? Baseball. Cricket I respect, but I still have never really connected with it. Baseball is one of the only things I really miss about America. It’s in my blood.

Marmite or peanut butter?

That’s not fair. Marmite isn’t edible. So . . . peanut butter.

Village fête or State Fair?

Village fête, though I do have a residual fondness for the Iowa state fair.

Favourite biscuit?

Obviously, McVitie’s chocolate digestive.

Edward Elgar or Aaron Copeland?

Elgar. Although I’m not musical at all.

Lake District or Grand Canyon?

Lake District.

Ha-ha or picket fence?

Ha-ha. As long as I know it’s there.

Written constitution or unwritten constitution?

Unwritten. There’s something adorable about having one that doesn’t actually exist.

Abbott and Costello or Morecambe and Wise?

Morecambe and Wise.

Duke Ellington or Duke of Westminster?

I’d have to say neither.