Eclectic Letters #12 — James Marriott

A romantic restaurant under the National Portrait Gallery, a classic LRB essay, a genuinely hearty soup, the poetry of D. H. Lawrence, and The Ascension of Christ by Rembrandt.

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Larry’s

Larry’s is the restaurant in the basement underneath the National Portrait Gallery. And look, I don't want to oversell it. It is indisputable that it has something of the atmosphere of an overpriced hotel bar. Outside of the club sandwich, the food is of uncertain quality. I am told the cocktails are too sweet. The service is disorganised in a well-meaning way. The last time I went I was seated at a table with a half-chewed olive on it. But in spite of all this, I have an unkillable fondness for it. This could simply be due to my poor taste in restaurants. Or it really could be that the tiled romantically-lit labyrinthine space, covered in pictures from the gallery upstairs, is as atmospheric as I always feel it is. The crucial thing is that amidst the open-air insane asylum that is central London, Larry’s is always quiet and always bookable at the last minute. This might be because of the prices and the chewed olives or it might be because the entrance (a poorly signposted staircase diagonally over from St Martin in the Fields) is extremely easy to miss.

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My Favourite LRB Essay

In my view Seamus Perry is one of the (or possibly the) best literary critics currently writing. He is a lovely understated prose stylist and a doggedly acute thinker. You can tell that he really feels about books as well as just thinking about them. I read his piece on the Victorian novelist George Meredith ten years ago just after I had graduated from university and I still remember the way it struck me like lightning out of a clear blue sky. I hadn’t known that literary criticism could be so wise about life as well as about books. Perry’s review of John Carey’s last book, A Little History of Poetry is my all-time favourite LRB essay. Carey is an Oxford English professor famous for his anti-intellectualism (exemplified in his superbly provocative book The Intellectuals and the Masses). Perry tackles the paradoxes and virtues of Carey’s much-trumpeted “ordinariness” with sympathy and scepticism, leading him to a lovely acute comment on Philip Larkin’s poem “Born Yesterday”:

“Still, as Frank Kermode observed … ‘plain men cannot write plain prose in the manner of Orwell or Carey: to do it you must be over-educated.’ It is not difficult to twig that Orwell’s anti-intellectualism has a paradoxical relationship with the real Eric Blair, who was nothing if not a serious intellectual, though it would be wrong to see that paradox merely as a matter of faking it: the mistrust of lefty eggheads was a vital ingredient in what made ‘George Orwell’. Carey’s philistine gestures, too, are at once heartfelt and gestural, like Larkin’s, and in both, ordinariness is more ‘interesting and complicated’ than it may appear. When Larkin wrote a poem for Kingsley Amis’s newborn daughter he expressed the wish that she should be ‘ordinary’ (no Yeatsian posturing here, thank you very much), but then he ended with the lines:

If that is what a skilled,
Vigilant, flexible,
Unemphasised, enthralled
Catching at happiness is called.

Well, it’s an ‘if’ all right: the poem makes an extraordinary shift (as Larkin’s poems often do) into a kind of experience that feels rare rather than humdrum, isolate, precious, exquisite even, and certainly resistant to articulation.”

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Zuppe Chicken & Country Vegetables with Butterbeans Soup

I don’t have many views on food but I strongly believe this is far and away the best commercially available ready-made soup. I happened to stumble upon it on the shelf of a posh organic food shop in Hackney last year and I have eaten little else since. It’s one of those odd products that isn’t just a bit better than its competitors but head and shoulders above them. It’s hard to use enticing or original adjectives to describe soup but it is actually as “hearty” and as “wholesome” as lesser brands of soup are always boasting about being. It genuinely tastes homemade. My girlfriend and I order several packets a week on their website and we are considering taking out a subscription.

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The Poetry of D. H. Lawrence

D. H. Lawrence is obviously more famous as a novelist (albeit one who is shockingly little read nowadays). But he is also an exceptionally good poet. Every time I go back to his poems I revise my opinion upwards to the point that I sometimes find myself thinking there is a case to be made that he is one of the best English language poets of the twentieth century. The poems have an informal dashed-off style that makes them easy to underrate and a certain hectic exclamatory quality that may strike some readers as naive. In fact, I think the effect is calculated. Lawrence is un-embarrassed about being on the side of life and experience and feeling in a way I find incredibly appealing. One of the most likeable Lawrentian moments comes at the end of his poem “Snake” in which he chucks a log at a snake that has appeared in his garden in order to scare it off and immediately regrets the “pettiness” of the action:

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed
in an undignified haste,
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross,
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

If you haven’t read Lawrence’s poems before try “Snake” and also “Spring Morning” (probably my favourite of his poems), “Bare Fig-Trees”, “Bavarian Gentians”, “The Ship of Death” and “The Best of School”.

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The Ascension of Christ by Rembrandt

I’ve always thought that the ascension of Christ into heaven is a fundamentally absurd subject for a painting. It is hard to depict a grown man zooming up into the sky with much dignity. The most famous depiction of the scene by Raphael — the Messiah hovering mid-canvas with a bland half-smile on his face and doing jazz hands — has always struck me as intolerably kitsch. In some other versions such as in Durer’s Little Passion, all you see of Jesus is his feet sticking out from the top of the picture as their divine owner flies upwards and off screen. In spite (or perhaps because) of this I have an immense fondness for Rembrandt’s poignant version which I came across in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich last year. There is a little bit of a whiff of am-dram theatre about it. A solid and rather earthbound-looking Jesus stands on a small tuft of cloud which tiny cherubs with gaudy prop-cupboard wings are visibly straining to shove upwards. You can’t imagine it’s moving very quickly. Jesus is doing the standard jazz-hands ascension pose, but the hopeful uncertain expression on his face gives him the look of a conjurer who is not wholly certain his trick is going to come off. So much religious painting repels modern secular viewers with its confidence and certainty about doctrines that now strike us as baffling. What strikes me as so sympathetic about Rembrandt's painting is its quality of doubt. Everyone in it — Jesus, the struggling cherubs, the spectators — is making an effort to believe in the face of the apparently impossible. Much more likeable than High Renaissance bombast.

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James Marriott is a columnist for The Times. He also has a weekly Substack on ideas, literature and the arts, Culture Capital.