When I mentioned that Rapallo would be one of the destinations of Elaine's and my rail trip to Italy, more than one of my poet friends mentioned Ezra Pound. "Poundland!" remarked one. Rapallo, on the Ligurian coast, was of course the abode of the American poet from 1925 until 1945, when he was repatriated to the US and arraigned for treason because of his collaboration with the Italian Fascist government during the Second World War. He returned to Rapallo following his lengthy incarceration in a mental institution in Washington DC, and again lived there until his death in 1972. In the years before the war, Pound in Rapallo was the centre of a distinguished group of writers, composers and artists who came and went, including his wife the painter Dorothy Shakespear, WB Yeats, TS Eliot, Georges Antheil, Richard Aldington, Louis Zukofsky, Basil Bunting and many others. He started composing The Cantos there. He gave regular talks to visitors. The Italian poet Eugenio Montale...
The gorillas were the main attraction of course. Elaine and I had long been obsessed with these wonderful animals. Near where we live, at the related wildlife parks Howletts (near Canterbury) and Port Lympne (between Rye and Folkestone) several gorilla families are kept in captivity, in good conditions. We visit them regularly. They are Western Lowland Gorillas, as are the vast majority of captive gorillas. Between 100,000-300,000 remain in the wild, mostly in Congo and surrounding countries. The shaggier Mountain Gorilla is much rarer, and classified as endangered. It is estimated there are about 1,000 – up from a nadir of around 250 when poaching was taking its toll in the 1960s and 70s. You will never see them in captivity – they don’t thrive there. They inhabit two upland sites: one at the border of Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, below the five extinct volcanoes of the Virunga Massif (the Rwanda side is now the Volcanoes National Park); and the other i...
[CONTAINS SPOILERS!] The novel that came to be called Secret Orbit had a long gestation which would be too tedious to detail. For years I’d had a perhaps not very original perhaps pretentious notion of writing my own Divine (secular) Comedy: Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. All three parts were to be set in different versions of London. Secret Orbit was once the title of another associated project, but eventually came to be allocated (initially as a working title) to the part of the trilogy that represented Hell. Of course, Hell is always the most fun to write. The title stuck, and the novel got written. Like the other half-written novels in the sequence, it is structured in 33 chapters, mirroring the cantos of Dante’s original (there are actually coded references to the mirrored canto in each chapter, though I’ve forgotten what some of them are). The framing device is a description of the stages of decomposition of the unnamed protagonist’s body as he lies in his London...
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