Dates and Dorothy

By Richard Lung

Dates and Dorothy

Since coming of age I wanted to change the world, when, in middle age, the world returned the compliment by changing me. That is when I met my guide and mentor Dorothy Cowlin.

The first half of this book explores the life of the poet and novelist. (Most of this review of Dorothy Cowlin remains freely available online for an uncertain time.)

The second half of this book, classed as life and love poetry, continues my collected verse, begun in book one of nature poetry, The Valesman.
Here is the story of my out-going friendship with Dorothy for over twenty years.
The Dates, historical and romantic, make up two of the other sections, covering the post-war years. There is a final section on "the romance of religion."

• Language: English
• Publisher: Richard Lung
• Release date: Sep 6, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310994869

Richard Lung

My later years acknowledge the decisive benefit of the internet and the web in allowing me the possibility of publication, therefore giving the incentive to learn subjects to write about them.While, from my youth, I acknowledge the intellectual debt that I owed a social science degree, while coming to radically disagree, even as a student, with its out-look and aims.Whereas from middle age, I acknowledge how much I owed to the friendship of Dorothy Cowlin, largely the subject of my e-book, Dates and Dorothy. This is the second in a series of five books of my collected verse. Her letters to me, and my comments came out, in: Echoes of a Friend.....Authors have played a big part in my life.Years ago, two women independently asked me: Richard, don't you ever read anything but serious books?But Dorothy was an author who influenced me personally, as well as from the written page. And that makes all the difference.I was the author of the Democracy Science website since 1999. This combined scientific research with democratic reform. It is now mainly used as an archive. Since 2014, I have written e-books.I have only become a book author myself, on retiring age, starting at stopping time!2014, slightly modified 2022.

Book preview

Prelude review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Collected verse volume 2: life & love poetry.

Richard Lung (of website: Democracy Science)

Copyright 2014 by Richard Lung.

Copyright 2014 the estate of Dorothy Cowlin, her poems and prose, as here quoted in review.

First edition.

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Publishing note.

I welcome this chance to publish this review of Dorothy Cowlin, as a Prelude to volume two of my own Collected Verse, part of which is about my friendship with Dorothy.

There is a historical fitness about this arrangement, because much of Dorothys story, partly in unpublished written accounts, to which she gave me free access, takes place in the inter-war years. Whereas, my story begins after the second world war. This starts as a forty-year chronicle or series of dates. The next two decades (the nineties and noughties) are a blur of my friendship with Dorothy.

Thus, book two is a fairly coherent story, up to the last two sections, which are collections of romantic and religious verse. Book one, The Valesman, and book two, Dates and Dorothy, are my best organised collections.

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Table of Contents

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:

Part 1: dates from 1949 to 1988.

Part 2: the Dorothy poems (1987 - 2010).

Part 3: loves loneliness loves company.

Part 4: the romance of religion.

Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin

Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin: the novels.

Interlude. The angry young men and The Movement

Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin: verse.

Comments on verse from the 1990s.

Record of Cowlin poem publications, prizes, etc.

Dorothy Cowlin biographical novels.

Dorothys school days: The House By The River.

A young poets sketches.

Lost novels and a subsequent unpublished novel.

Dates, historical and romantic, and Dorothy:

part 1: dates from '49 to '88

49 bless you

50 kaaa!

51 trailer

52 on the star-light trail

53 is your journey really necessary?

54 by the fountains and the flowers

55 partners

56 april first

see you later

57 long division

Miss Marney

58 the good guys always win

he looked at his shoes

59 Mission Impossible

Brief Encounter

this means war!

60 the giggler

61 Champ

62 the first casualty

no dice

63 a slip of the pen

64 The Beatles stopped at our house

65 the test pests

King Kongs engagement ring

on his toes

a disagreeable bout of time travel today

66 war is wrong.

67 turned away

bad career move

68 less the stranger

1968

1968 again

the anxiety dreams

69 PR

70 one-track mind

The Naked Ape

ded leters

71 inside-out

the lone star state

Ill always think of you

72 the pillar of fire

73 3e lerning

74 you can keep it

bible communism

75 death of a nation

76 the drout

77 an immature student

78 the routine deception

79 the unsafe

ring of service

80 Lennon

81 his last visit

82 on the shelf

83 Bill

84 speaking too soon.

fysics as metafor

85 the diamond thieves

86 fall-out warning

87 paying guests

88 on the rebound

part 2: the Dorothy poems

I wouldn’t lower myself

the wrong door

Abigail

attention!

don’t read my poems

ahead

the lost novels

ghost writer

without honors

thought corgi

old posts

her new bird poem

Dolly Dingbat

that elfin look

Dandelion Dorothy

I do not think I am alone

the rambler

the gown

Dorothy and the swans

the charmer

lafiti

sudden parting

ninety three

uncanny reminder

jujment day

Sutton Bank

leaving party

death gets one down

wake me

the life she lent left with her

looking for acorns

cherry apples

the lamp of poetry

part 3: loves loneliness loves company

and some have bratness thrust upon them

sullen

that bird

the prisoner

dizzy mod

surrender

bewitched

girls threw themselves at him

lightning romance

on a technicality

farewell

falling star

erosion

her loveliness

star-crossed

plea

loves company

natures child

a compass wavers

near miss

toeing the line

swanning around

making up

sensible

cardiac Bel

cover

found sculpture

storm of passion

double star

male and female

a strapping lass

a rarity

the German lovers

the introduced

unconscious concentration

marriage guidance

a sherrickin'

an allegory of love

double act

when the goodbyes were said

the bewildered wife

divorce

not a natural right

freed as a bird

the wife that never was

the girls

part 4: the romance of religion

walking into the morning sun

re-vision

the Buddha attains enlightenment

the Dalai Lama election

Kung Fu-tse

Pythagoras on science

code-named Q

go'spel

pain

tears

priestess

born again

Santa Fey

Timisoara Christmas

the stars began to spill out in flocks

Jesuses Sisters

Christs just method

Martha and Mary

the Christian mystery

after the Passion

resurrection

Ellerburn church

the farewell stone

dragon maiden

in Coventry cathedral

the cup cast aside

authority

a forgotten find

in the midst of life

now a major motion picture

essays:

a genius for love

learning to love

Found poem by John Donne: For whom the bell tolls

notes

acknowledgments

after-word

guide to five volume collected verse by Richard Lung

guide to two more book series by the author.

return to contents

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Dates and Dorothy

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Prelude: review of Dorothy Cowlin

Dorothy looking out over dalby forest

Dorothy looking out over Dalby Forest

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Poetic art of Dorothy Cowlin

A survey of the eight novels:

About Dorothy Cowlin, novelist and poet.

Penny to Spend.

Winter Solstice.

The Holly and the Ivy.

The Slow Train Home.

Rowanberry Wine.

An End and a Beginning.

Draw the Well Dry.

The Pair of Them.

About Dorothy Cowlin, novelist and poet.

The reason for this appreciation is a belief in Dorothy Cowlins poetic talent, which may be discerned in her novels and journalism as well as the poems.

Dorothy had eight novels published by Jonathan Cape, the distinguished English House, from 1941 to 1956. They are set in the counties of her origins and settlement, Lincolnshire to Lancashire to Yorkshire.

Of these Winter Solstice (not to be confused with later novels of the same title) was re-published almost half a centrury later, but in unfortunate circumstances.

I checked with Dorothy that the unlikely events, surrounding the re-issue, were correct. She confirmed it. And added, perhaps wistfully: I suppose we should forgive them.

Despite the off-putting and inaccurate promotion of its re-issue, Winter Solstice nevertheless rates as Dorothys most substantial addition to the classics, black as a winter night, this great industrial city prose poem.

There are also the four biographical novels. A sample of her journalism was re-published in book form. Like Dorothy herself, these are well-informed and good company.

The same could be said for the unpublished autobiografical writings on her early life.

Dorothy destroyed her unpublished novels and her many volumes of diaries, I regret to say.

Then there are the poems, mostly written later in life. Her travels, in retirement, from the Orkneys to the Scillies, and abroad, inspired her. Cowlin is a British but more a Keltic poet, as well as a northern English novelist and journalist.

All of her poems are short. (Winter Solstice is really her epic.) Poetry may be short but anyone who writes it may just leave a few lines that will live on in the collective memory of a great people.

Dorothy Cowlin is not a lyricist, who beats out lines of indoctrinating force or over-powering majesty, but mainly a free-verser of quiet moods in far-off solitudes. The consolation for the reader is in her own equable character. She is inner-directed rather than other-directed, to use the terms of David Riesman, in The Lonely Crowd. But there are precious few crowds in Cowlins poems. Indeed precious few individuals. She is in communion with nature.

Her novels show acute understanding of human motivation and character. Perhaps, she couldnt really develop that in short verse, apart from the odd wonderful glimpse, like in Orkney.

The subtantial body of poems of the remotenesses of the British Isles and a good selection of others could become standards. Regretably, her collected poems were not published in her lifetime. Practical e-book self-publishing came too late for her.

But Dorothy didnt believe in immortality, and being out-lived by her works didnt matter to her. She was the child who doesnt need a night-light.

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A survey of Dorothy Cowlins eight novels.

Penny To Spend.

To survey contents.

A girl can never make up her mind what sweets to spend her penny on. When she grows up, she can't decide which man to marry. But fiction allows her the luxury of having her life twice. Of her two suitors, the one she marries, in part one of the novel, becomes her failed suitor and friend, in part two. And vice versa for the other suitor.

The novel was also published in Swedish, under a different title that conveyed the heroine was The Two-ways Woman. Alternate histories are a conception that modern theories of physics have to confront in their quest for the true nature of reality. However, Dorothy Cowlin was partly influenced by J B Priestley time plays.

John Braine biography of Priestley quotes his play that declaims on the sadness of the unrehearsed theatre of life. Or, as Richard Feynman says, about time, that is what life is like: you make your mistakes and then you die.

Pascal and J B Bury claimed the course of history would have been changed with the length of Cleopatras nose. And in Cowlin novel an insignificant incident changes her life history. When the heroine is being courted in the park, a swan drifts by. This breaks the spell of courtship with one suitor. But in the alternative scenario, it makes the spell that decides her choice of suitor.

The poetic quality of the novels background reminded me of Mendelssohn music to A Midsummer Nights Dream. Fairyland is conjured by the dancing on ice-rinks in misty parks, the melting snow and swan drifts.

The young womans second suitor appears, in that setting, as a monstrous spider, as he stands under the black drape over his box camera on tripod.

The poetic touch is light to the point of unreality, like old fotos bordered by halos. But, whatever choice the maiden bargains for, she cannot escape the dullness and drudgery of her fate.

Her choice of partner, in part one, the more showy man grossly declines in marriage. In part two, as the failed suitor, he is cleverly transformed into some semblance of an idealistic admirer. But, the fotographer, who wins the heroines hand, this time, has the bad luck (for himself and his wife) to be punished and broken in prison.

As a not very satisfying foot-note, Dorothy Cowlin first novel draws on the small Lincolnshire town of Grantham, home also to Isaac Newton and Margaret Thatcher. She was slightly older than the Roberts girl and went to the same grammar school.

Dorothy was top of her class but broke her right arm before the exams came up. This would have been an honorable excuse for not taking them. Dorothy, tho, was not going to let anyone forget that she was top. So, she started writing with her left hand. Anyone who has seen Dorothys scrawl with her right hand can imagine how readable were her left-handed efforts. But she made her point.

And no, she never knew Margaret Roberts at school. Nor did she know the Roberts grocers shop. Her first female character, with a penny to spend, was not served by girls.

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Winter Solstice.

To survey contents.

Dorothy Cowlin got the idea for her second novel from her mother. She told Dorothy about a young Grantham womans spontaneous recovery from a psychosomatic illness. During the first world war, a bed-ridden girl heard the soldiers marching by. She wanted to see them and got up to look.

Such germs of truth, more than once, grew into the plants of her fiction. The heroine is bed-ridden, tho there is nothing physically wrong with her. It is all in her mind why she cannot rise up and walk.

The author has assimilated the ideas of depth psychology admirably. You feel that common sense is being used to arrive at an intelligent understanding of the invalid. For that reason alone, the book would be worth reading.

The novel starts from the severely limited world view of the sick bed. This does not suit the modern craving for action. As mankind gets more crowded and domesticated, entertainment becomes more escapist. Adventure stories become more sensational and, as movies, crammed with impossible special effects, which are no longer special.

But Winter Solstice confronts, in aggravated form, rather than distracts from the freedom-starved condition of urban settlement. Cowlin novel structure compares to breaking the conventional order of symphonic movements, by starting with the adagio instead of the allegro con brio.

As a young excitement addict, I wouldnt have appreciated this novel. It finds Arnold Bennett interest in the ordinary. (Bennett was one of Dorothys favorites.) The invalid has no choice but to follow the changes in her fire-lit room, the starry skylight, and the morning stirrings thru a partial window view on an industrial district. With this unpromising material, the author exercises our imagination to some poetic effect. She makes a lot out of a little.

Show business gets ever closer to replacing imagination with virtual reality. The fans perhaps become so fanatical because their imaginations have been taken over by some commercial fantasy. To be our individual selves, with independent imaginations, we need to learn from the poets ability to recover the magical from the routine. She makes the common-place wonderful, in a world which is making the wonderful common-place.

The invalid is looked-after by her twin brothers, the quirks of one compared to the other, being among her most successful characterisations. (The author drew on a visit to two master tailors.)

The idea of having the bed-ridden girl noticed by a customer, who is a pioneer woman pilot, is inspired. One need think only of flying bedsteads to make the contrast perfect.

Not surprisingly, the girl falls in love with this role model, who is everything, freedom-wise she would like to be. The aviator is literally a woman of the world. And of course she had her real life counter-parts. Amy, wonderful Amy, the musical title sums up the public regard for such women as Amy Johnson.

That didnt mean you could take liberties, tho. When the English-woman finally made it, somehow, to land in Australia, the man, who ran up to kiss her, got slapped.

The patient breaks into her forbidding memories of the slums.

She recovers to confront squalid scenes of her former life. Bridges take on symbolic meanings. The brutal grandeur of the railway viaduct dominates the skyline and pours smoke on the hovels clustered about its feet.

A bridge, over the brown wash of filth and chemicals, is frequented by rats. This is going to be covered. Yes, replies the patient, on her first walks, but it will still be there. The covered pollution compares to her own ugly memories, which she covered-up, as if that would make them go away, when it only allowed them to run riot, for not being attended to.

The painter, Lowry was possessed by the old industrial landscape of the north. As an experiment, he was placed, with a canvas, in the middle of the country-side.

More smoking brick-work was the result.

But Winter Solstice is Dorothy Cowlins only sustained prose poem of the black lands.

This masterpiece is an unrecognised pioneer of the urban poetry that has superseded traditional nature poetry - if only because most of us are now townies. The unnamed town, that the story drew on, was Stockport.

Valerie Grove wrote a little masterpiece of a comic poem in Jamaican English, about a working woman shopping in Longsight Market. This is in a sort of no-mans land between Stockport and Manchester.

Dorothy Cowlins second novel has two foot-notes.

Shortly after writing her novel of an invalid, the authors mother actually became bed-ridden. She had to look after her and a child, while her husband was away on service. It is just another instance of the disadvantages professional women have faced. She was not able to publish another novel for eight years.

The second foot-note to Winter Solstice: a friend of the author told her the book had been re-published. This was 49 years after its first appearance in 1942. The cover said She died in 1962. No source was given for this falsehood, not repeated by the re-prints Introduction, a forbidding ax-grind of feminist doctrine, with a lesbian slant.

Eventually, the local and national press got wind of this occasion to repeat Mark Twain disclaimer: News of my death has been greatly exaggerated.

The introduction writer had been a student of a college teacher of social history. He had found the book, out of print, admired it, and used its vividness for his lectures. The student had told a new re-print publishers of forgotten classics of radical literature.

It turned out that the publisher was an ill man. He had a financial backer, who was taking on much of the book production. But he had no experience of that business. At any rate, an American run had to be pulped because the pages were collated wrongly.

Or so I understand.

The original edition of Winter Solstice