Magdalene Matters: Issue 52

A Day of Unusual Measure

by Mr James Woodall (2017)

Last year a book of writings by a brilliant alumnus appeared posthumously, organised by his friends. Our former Royal Literary Fund Fellow, Mr James Woodall reports.

The death of James Malpas (1977), at age 56, was an uncommon shock to all who knew, loved and admired him: he was an uncommon man.

A cerebral haemorrhage in 2015 deprived the world of an enormously versatile and energetic lecturer and art historian. His topics included, as The Guardian wrote seven years ago, “19th-century German romanticism, Hogarth, late 19thcentury Scandinavian artists, Japanese art, camouflage, alchemy and William Blake”. He rode motorbikes, joined the Territorial Army and kept amphibians in his various London homes. He had multitudinous friends.

He arrived at Magdalene in 1977 to read English, switching two years later to Art History. After an MPhil at the Warburg Institute, he worked for Sotheby’s, Christie’s and the Tate. He wrote prolifically throughout his adult life, poems not least of all, and was published in the Times Literary Supplement and the London Review of Books. Some five years after his death a Cambridge contemporary and great friend, Stephen Romer, the prominent poet and critic, went painstakingly through James’s papers. The result in 2021 was A Day of Unusual Measure: Selected Poems – Extracts from the Diary and Letters.

The poem here, from the book (a copy is in the New Library), was addressed to the sister of another rising Cambridge poet – also at Magdalene – of that era, Mr Michael Hofmann (1976).

Writing to Franzi

You were photographed in a white interior I know nothing about, the amateur camera at a slight, disconcerting angle. Dark brown hair asserts against the gentlemanly white of someone’s studio. Trees embrace beyond the leaning window and a large fly or small smudge has come to rest on the ceiling. No matter, I’m sold on this celluloid with your tremor of a smile at being caught by surprise – I almost forgot to breathe. Southern Europe now holds you within a more radiant light than the trees filter here; I vow to write post-haste an invitation (and think of bringing it myself) as you’re only boat, train and a thousand miles away.

Reprinted with permission