(from issue 18)
Still Time for Surprises
John Ashbery: Your Name Here. Manchester: Carcanet, £7.95.
David Herd: John Ashbery and American Poetry. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, £45.
For the past decade, John Ashbery has been producing a new book of poems almost every year -- a situation that, for just about any other poet, would signify excess. Can the lyric poet, one wonders, continue to produce at this rate? Has Ashbery's vision changed dramatically, his experience taken a new turn? Has there been a noticeable stylistic shift? Have the poet's advancing years (Ashbery is now seventy-four) brought the wisdom Yeats claimed as the compensation for "bodily decrepitude"?
It is probably too soon to assess the overall trajectory of Ashbery's poetic career. In the meantime, his ability to produce memorable poems uniquely his own remains undiminished. True, one could argue that Ashbery always writes the same poem: he usually begins with an observation -- "Disturbing news emanates from the wind tunnel" or "Out on the terrace the projector had begun/ making a shuttling sound like that of land crabs" -- an observation that involves seemingly absurd detail or non-functional simile. An Ashbery poem characteristically collages childhood memories, present conversations, and interweaving narratives -- almost always non sequiturs that nevertheless add up to the sensation of being alive, here and now, in the bizarre, media-filled culture of the late twentieth century. The bemused and beleaguered Ashbery voice is immediately recognisable in such locutions as "I know I shall one day come to the reason/ for manners and intercourse with persons./ Therefore I launch my hat on this peg", or "I am wondering where to stand -- could that group of three/ or four others be the beginning of the line?" Ashbery's demonstrative pronouns remain largely indeterminate, so that when we read a line like "We doctored it all up" ('A Suit'), we cannot know what "it" refers to. The preferred verse form continues to be a stanza of irregular length made up of long, loose free-verse lines, most of them enjambed. As for wisdom, the 'I' of these poems is just as uncertain, hesitant, self-deprecating, and receptive to new possibilities as was his younger self. He never pronounces, never generalises, never claims to have the truth or even to experience the privileged moment when the poet sees into the life of things. If anything, these poems end, as does the brilliant 'Sonatine Mélancolique' with the memory of
A time when we too were out of step
and the whole sentient world offered to bathe us --
pale bluster, flubbing today again and again.
Despite such marked continuities, the new poems are recognisably different as well. For one thing, they are more relaxed, more humorous, more willing to let it all hang out than were those in, say, The Double Dream of Spring or Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Memory has become increasingly obsessive, playfulness and camp more acceptable, and dialogue with a 'you' who is a close friend or lover becomes the normal lyric mode as does the telling of tales that invokes a shared past. Bowdlerised citation used for burlesque effect -- from pop song, poetry, newspaper headline, opera libretto, French novel, advertising jingle -- has become a stock-in-trade: every line points to something we have heard before -- but where? In this free-wheeling landscape, the anxiety of such poems as 'These Lacustrine Cities' and '"They Dream Only of America"' has given way to a measure of serenity. "Yes", we read at the conclusion of 'A Suit', "I could have told you that some time ago". But since we have no idea what "that" is, the ending is not exactly reassuring either.
Take 'Redeemed Area', whose suggestive title encompasses all sorts of possibilities, from actual "redemption" to its antithesis -- an area "redeemed" for the sinister uses of others. The poem opens with an absurd bit of dialogue, or is it monologue?
Do you know where you live? Probably.How can one not know where one lives? Never mind: the narrator goes on to tell a more or less realistic story about one Abner (Li'l Abner of the comic strip?) who "is getting too old to drive but won't admit it" and who goes out in search of "cough drops/ of a kind they don't make anymore". But the "drugstore has been incorporated into a mall" and "All the houses/ are owned by the same guy, who's been renting/ them out to college students for years, so they are virtually uninhabited". It all makes good sense: students are known to wreck rental units and urban blight has brought decay to the 'old' neighbourhood.
But just when we think that the poet is giving us a 'normal' account of suburban sprawl, a surreal note is introduced:
A smell of vitriol and socks pervades the areaIf this sounds like mere clowning around, the drawing of absurd comparisons and making of foolish similes, think again. The smell really may be a mix of sulphuric acid and sweat (from dirty socks), thus reminding the poet -- in a moment of comic alliteration, of an "open sewer in a souk" -- a souk or Oriental bazaar. Cough drops do taste medicinal and hence perhaps like extract from the catnip plant, and as for that orange slice -- how, one wonders, would lying on a girl's behind affect its taste? Here, as so often in Ashbery's lyric, 'nonsense' turns out to be oddly apropos. For, as in Joyce's 'Araby', exoticism soon mutates into the merely tawdry. Consider the next stanza:
like an open sewer in a souk. Anyway the cough drops
(a new brand) tasted pretty good -- like catnip
or an orange slice that has lain on a girl's behind.
That's the electrician calling now --This is at once hilarious and poignant. By the time one comes to the last line, one realises that the speaker has been fooling around so as to ease the pain that parting from a lover is about to bring. The absurd suggestion about the Christmas tree lights suggests that the loss of electricity has marked the end of a holiday season, a season of love and pleasure. The inconsequential shift from the Christmas lights to the dictionary stand and then to the toaster, turns the "redeemed area" of the title into a space of chaos and impending trouble. But the poet refuses to mourn: "Gradually", he declares, "everything will return to normal". Indeed, "I have adjusted the lamp,/ morning's at seven".
nobody else would call before 7 A.M. Now we'll have some
electricity in the place. I'll start by plugging in
the Christmas tree lights. They were what made the whole thing
go up in sparks the last time. Next, the light
by the dictionary stand, so I can look some words up.
Then probably the toaster. A nice slice
of toast would really hit the spot now. I'm afraid it's all over
between us, though.
This last line illustrates the thickness of Ashbery's poetic texture. "Morning's at seven" comes, of course, from Robert Browning's Pippa Passes: "The year's at the spring,/ And day's at the morn;/ Morning's at seven... God's in His Heaven -- / All's right with the world!" But Ashbery isn't drawing a simple contrast between Pippa's cheeriness and his own chaotic life. For 'Morning's at Seven' is also the title of Paul Osborn's 1939 Depression drama -- a Midwestern family tale where things get a bit more complicated. Perhaps, the poet suggests ruefully, a bit of distance will give him the perspective he needs:
the tarnish has fallen from the metallic embroidery, the walls have fallen,Again, the absurd quickly yields to pathos and back again. Tarnish is what is left when the metal flakes off, not vice-versa. The ominous and generic news -- "the walls have fallen... parents are weeping/ the schools have closed" -- is never explained; indeed, these are no more than generic signs of doom. And yet "all the fuss has put me in a good mood": if the world is indeed in such a sorry state, how sorry can the poet feel for himself? And so, in a wry allusion to Apollinaire's 'Soleil cou coupé' (in Zone), we have, finally, the invocation "O great sun".
the country's pulse is racing. Parents are weeping,
the schools have closed.
All the fuss has put me in a good mood,
O great sun.
Ashbery has many imitators both in the U.S. and the U.K. but not one who can match these tonal shifts and thick allusions. Indeed, it is the density of reference and vocal range that also makes Ashbery's poems -- early and late -- so hard to talk about. David Herd's new full-length study makes a valiant effort to chart the poet's entire career to date, to determine "What are the continuities? What are the differences? [...] How does one volume lead to, or away from, another?" He proposes to do this by examining the relations of the poems to their period and rehearses, with great skill and thorough scholarship, what Ashbery was doing when, whom he spent time with, what he was reading, and what was happening on the political and cultural front. The anomalous Tennis Court Oath (1962), for example, is read in the context of the poet's alienation in his early Paris years -- an alienation heightened by Cold War culture in the U.S., as defined by critics like David Riesman, Vance Packard, C. Wright Mills, and Philip Rahv.
But compelling as is the attempt to link Ashbery's poems to The Lonely Crowd or The Hidden Persuaders, the poems don't quite come alive as a result. Why, after all, is The Tennis Court Oath so different from the work of Ashbery's Paris friend Harry Matthews on the one hand, his Harvard/New York friend Frank O'Hara on the other? Why is his response to Philip Rahv so different from Robert Lowell's? Nor does it help to posit generalisations like "How and whether to risk the sublime in a cultural climate in which poetry is failing to communicate are problems which persist throughout Ashbery's poetry of the 1970s". To what poet would this diagnosis not apply? In his first chapter, Herd notes that Ashbery himself has repeatedly expressed the desire to be more fully understood. But understanding can only come from reading the poems themselves, word for word, and line by line, with as much knowledge of genres, conventions, and poetic topoi as possible. Indeed, Herd's comparisons of Ashbery to Pasternak or Pascal are finally no more satisfying than earlier links drawn between Ashbery and Keats, Ashbery and Emerson. No labels seem to stick to this mercurial poet, who has, in his own words,
wriggled farther into an indeterminate space
that was actually a mood, or many moods, one overlaying another
like gift wrap.
Acts of Judgement
Donald Davie: Two Ways out of Whitman: American Essays, ed. Doreen Davie. Manchester: Carcanet, £14.95.
Are there ways out of Whitman, once one is inside him -- as Americans are so often told we are? If there is some route out of, or through, Whitman, could Donald Davie (1922-95) show us the way? An 18th-century scholar, and later a Pound expert; a Movement poet in the 1950s; an acerbic, discursive, unpredictable poet for decades afterwards; and a prolific practical critic; Davie (who taught at Cambridge and Essex, then Stanford and Vanderbilt) was long a compelling model for people alert to poetry on both sides of the Atlantic. He was, too, a model of sorts for people ambitious both as poets and as critics. Shortly after his move to the United States, Davie complained in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1972) that American and British poetics "haven't been on hearing terms". If that's the right way to put the problem, it is a problem Davie set out to fix: this record of his engagement with American poetry demonstrates his attempts to hear for himself what American poets were doing, and his sometimes appalled, sometimes fascinated reactions to what he heard.
Especially after Ezra Pound: Poet as Sculptor (1964), much of Davie's literary criticism took the form of poems, or book reviews, or stand-alone essays. Sometimes Davie arranged them into books; sometimes he didn't. Sometimes (as with Thomas Hardy) the book cohered around one argument; sometimes the collection was just a collection. Carcanet (a firm he helped create) now plans a "uniform edition" of all Davie's works: some of its volumes are those he assembled himself, while others, like this one, are posthumous repackagings. Here are substantial essays -- some new to print, some from journals, some from The Poet in the Imaginary Museum (1977) and Trying to Explain (1980). Here too are poems about US (and Irish) poets, one-column reviews, explications of single poems, and rejoinders to objections to explications: in other words, a book for the converted.
From Articulate Energy (1955) forward Davie was expert at describing syntax -- its varieties, its uses, its conjecturable moral and social meanings. The ideal, and non-existent, book on American poetry by Davie would examine poetic syntax in its American masters -- Robert Frost, say, and Marianne Moore. Here instead is a book that shows how American poetry looked, to one thoughtful poet-critic, from about 1960 to 1980. Davie favours, by and large, two camps -- the "ways out of Whitman" the title implies. (The "Two Ways" of the eponymous book review are, misleadingly, William Carlos Williams and Roethke.) First are careful, formally conservative, metrically accomplished "classicists", allies or students of Yvor Winters; these poets value, as Davie did, discursive logic and argument -- Allen Tate, Turner Cassity, Robert Pinsky. Second are the Objectivist and Black Mountain writers Davie himself discovered later on, who took their bearings from the more readable Cantos, and (though Davie regrets admitting it) from Williams.
Davie's two roads out of Whitman, in other words (and according to him), were built by Winters and by Ezra Pound. "What Pound and Winters have in common" (he explains in 1957) "is an unremitting moral concern, driving through their poems to acts of judgment". What Pound and Winters share, put less abstractly, are interests in craft, in conscious thought and artifice, and in subjects other than the self: history, geography, geology, anything but autobiography. Either mode (they cannot be combined) seemed to Davie a workable alternative to two other, more "Romantic", modes which dominated American verse from the mid-Sixties to the mid-1980s: an autobiographical poetics distilled from Lowell's Life Studies, and a quasi-surrealist striving after (in Davie's acid phrase) "yeasty heavings from a Jungian unconscious".
As American literary history, Davie's map seems idiosyncratic, sometimes conjectural, rather West Coast -- but not wrong. As directions (how to read like Davie) it's provocative and rewarding. Davie stood throughout his career for several positions: the clearest, here, pervade his introduction to Winters' Carcanet Collected Poems (1978). This version of Davie stood, with Winters, for logic and syntax, for dryness and hardness, for attention (if not deference) to the structure and conventions of society. A good poem was and had to be "considered utterance"; yet since the subconscious of the poet, and the resources of the language, play roles in every poem, "the attempt to make [poems] considered utterances… must always to some degree fail". What Davie sought was not the absolute sovereignty of reason which Winters sometimes wanted, but "the tension that comes of the artificer bending his will against the medium, going against the grain of it". Poems should not just be, but also mean. "It is possible to ask", Davie explains, of John Hollander's poem 'Movie-Going', "'Is he right about the significance of the movies, or is he wrong?' And that, from my point of view, is abundantly to his credit."
Even more than he stood for such so-called prose virtues, Davie stood for a position about positions, a stance about aesthetic and intellectual stances: see if you really believe this, his work insists, test it in action, imagine the alternatives, read it again and see for yourself. Davie's constant, almost compulsive expansions of his own taste, his refinements and reversals of previous stances, show how well he followed his own advice. "So long as [Whitman] is seen as any kind of moralist", Davie says in 1968, consciously (perhaps homophobically) echoing Winters, "he has to be declared profoundly and dangerously irresponsible." Yet "reading Song of Myself", Davie continues, "I found myself reading a great poem, invigorating and liberating. The experience was undeniable and at whatever cost my ideas about poetry and morality will have to be changed to allow for it."
Alas, "Whitman" elsewhere continued to name, for Davie, not a Romantic elegist nor a structural innovator, but an anarchic, confessional, hippieish impulse, one carried (like an illness) into the present by Williams. "The pathos and the distinction of Berryman's career reside first in his having a haughtiness which Whitmanesque democracy was permitted to chastise… and second, in his having a natural shamefastness which Whitmanesque openness was permitted, with the help of alcohol, to outrage." This sentence amounts to a wonderful reading of Berryman -- and a failure to read Whitman. As for WCW, what if Davie had given his major poems ('The Yachts', 'To Elsie', book one of Paterson) the laudable patience he gave to, say, George Oppen's? Grant that Williams's late theories don't always make sense; does it follow that Williams "was, or pretended to be, mindless"? That intellectuals' admiration for Williams showed, as Davie pronounced in 1987, "the condescending love of powerful minds for a weak one"? Davie's contempt for Williams seems forgivable -- payback, perhaps, for Williams' contempt for England -- but it's also depressing in a critic otherwise so willing to test his own tastes.
Readers accustomed to calling Davie "conservative" (a label he liked to court) may be surprised by his insistence that history matters -- that poets are or should be influenced, or had better realise they have been influenced, by their society, its past, and their positions with regard to both. (Davie's interest in religious history, apparent in his poems and prose about Britain, barely turns up in this book.) Attacking the Romantic inclination to segregate literature from reportage and rhetoric, Davie reminds Americanists in 1979 to read speeches, "travel narratives", and "historiography as… genre[s] of literature". Elsewhere he complains that "American criticism today still takes account of [literary and intellectual] history to the virtual exclusion of… social and economic and political history." (O world, what changes thou hast seen!) Yet Davie also reminds us of the gulf between his historicism and the New kind: "I do not at all represent", he writes, "contextualizing as a requirement, but only as an instructive exercise, and ultimately as a demonstration that the poem, returned to a historical context… passes that test and survives as a poem."
Doreen Davie and Carcanet chose to arrange this collection chronologically by subject: we begin with early American letters, move swiftly to Winters, then to Lowell, Berryman, Tate, and thence to the pupils of Winters and the heirs of Pound and Zukofsky. This structure has the advantage of miming an American-poetry syllabus, and the disadvantage of making it harder to see when and where Davie changed his mind. But any arrangement would carry some disadvantage. More mysterious are the principles of selection. Why use two short essays about a single poem by Lorine Niedecker, but not Davie's cogent essay from a 1987 Parnassus, which considers Niedecker's work as a whole? Why use three short pieces about Robert Lowell (from 1959, '65 and '73) but not Davie's final, judicious verdict on Lowell's 1976 Selected? Given the book's comparative brevity (202 pages, with index), why not include Davie's wonderful blast against Galway Kinnell, "Slogging for the Absolute"?
If such omissions surprise and distress, some unpublished writings surprise and delight: who knew that in 1954 Davie completed -- apparently for his own private benefit -- a searching if unsatisfactory analysis of Wallace Stevens' The Auroras of Autumn? Who knew that as late as the 1980s he was still writing memorials to Winters? Also notable are the poems about poets (several not in Davie's Collected Poems). None stand among Davie's best, but several boast well-turned stanzas, and all are provocative criticism -- one from 1980 admonishes Heaney, "Too much Lowell in your latest./ All of us suffered that contagion/ While he lived."
Davie's best verse yields a sense of sustained attention, a startling formal variety, and a feeling for the whole, astringent, self-chastising man, harsher on himself than on anyone else, and stranger and sadder than his prose could show. That Davie could say of himself, "Not Englishness/ Nor anything else about me ever ripened"; he could, too, ask, adapting the 39th Psalm,
Hear my prayer, O Lord,We come away from Davie's best critical works -- the Hardy book, say, or Articulate Energy -- with a strong sense of Davie's arguments, and of the ways in which he can teach us to read. This less substantial volume leaves us not so much with a new feeling for Davie's tastes as with a sense of the admirably demanding spirit that formed and re-formed those tastes. Helen Vendler called Davie a votary neither of Truth nor of Beauty, but of Justice. The moral weight he gave poetic action and reflection has come to seem more credible than the moral weights assigned by more recent (and farther-left) critics, mostly because we cannot know, from Davie's general views about people and words, what his judgment on a particular work will be. Davie writes in 1981, reviewing several books of book reviews (which means you are now reading, and I am now writing, a review of reviews of reviews):
and please to consider my calling:
it commits me to squawking
and running off at the mouth.
[T]his, surely is the noblest spectacle that the critical activity affords us: the struggle between love and justice; the determination to do justice to a man or woman whom we unreflectingly dislike; and, conversely, the determination not to weigh the scales in favour of the poet we are in love with. This drama, it is evident, is possible only when the critic does not refuse the judicial function.It is a function Davie -- as poet, reviewer, scholar and critic -- often exemplified, and one he never refused.
(from issue 17)
Loves to Fight a Battle
Peter Reading: Marfan. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £6.95.
Isabel Martin: Reading Peter Reading . Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £10.95.
Asked in a recent interview whether he had ever felt part of a community, Peter Reading replied:
It is no virtue to be a part of a community, but it’s inevitable
that one is ... I feel part of the community wherever I am -- you
can’t avoid it unfortunately, as Robert Frost remarks: He
fought a loving battle with the world’.
Marfan is primarily concerned with community and communities, and with conflicting feelings of inclusion and alienation. This tension is crudely realised in the narrator’s insatiable desire to castigate the "Big-Time Art and small-town politics" of the community to which he belongs. In the opening pages the poet affords himself the epithet "Lannan’s Secret Weapon", and later devotes much time and energy to making scurrilous attacks upon Marfa’s cultural figures and political practices:
It’s Xenophobia, but pretends to be
outraged concern that hundreds of tons of drugs
are flooding across the Mexico/US line
each year -- the hatred’s in the stupid faces,
the stupid quasi-military duds,
the stupid guns of off-duty Patrolmen
in Carmen’s stuffing their porcine guts with shite.
Elsewhere the poem’s anti-American prejudice discards the cloak of socio-political injustice and exposes itself at the drop of a hat. This poet does not fight a loving battle, but simply loves to fight a battle. An advertisement for the forthcoming Marfa Lights Festival leads him to conjecture that the entertainment will consist of "some banjo-pluckin’ strumpet from Big Bend --/ all in all, a load of fucking chancers". One of the many collages interspersed throughout the text includes a letter to the editor of the Big Bend Sentinel in which Reading upbraids Jeff Hubbard, the local candidate for County Judge, for the solecisms in the latter’s election poster. The poet’s sensitivity increases as the piece progresses, and this results in trivial incidents provoking passionate outbursts. Lannan’s Secret Weapon clearly has as delicate a trigger as any border patrolman’s gun.
Marfan is more successful when it turns its attention away from public life. The opening pages in particular constitute a quieter and more complex exploration of a visitor’s place in this Texan community. The poet is shown as a "solitary, voluntary exile" reading Dante in the "southwestern public library". Passages from the Commedia describing the "maledicts" whose "desperate shrieks/ and supplicant imprecations are ignored", contrast with the poet’s own despair and his preoccupation with "a labial lump;/ pain in the kidneys and the abdomen". Reading’s sense of alienation is further questioned and transformed by references to a mysterious "malfortunate" who is woken by the "raucous ain in the "arid scrubland basin" beyond the library walls. The poet is continually drawn to characters who exist on the margins of a community, such as the "Burro Lady" who travels everywhere on her mule, and a pickup truck driver who has spent time in a rehabilitation centre and now believes the CIA is beaming signals to him. The intermittent reappearance of these characters brings not only a necessary unity to this fragmented poem, but also moments of comedy. The locals constantly assail Reading with bizarre and often pointless tales; one Lone Star drinker tells of how he "holed up with a bunch of Peccaries" in a barn:
Wall, ah wus thar for bout two hours, an than
thay high-tailed, doin Peccary stuff, ah guess.
In this place idlers throng;
discarded stones, wood crosses, painted plaster,
and plastic roses faded to pinkish grey
garbage the quiet, death-sustaining slope.
Morales, Marquez, Garcia, Martinez,
Flores, Rivera, Hinojos-Hernandez ...
Spiked on a Yucca sprouting from the dirt
of Maria Bartolo Villanueva,
a straw-stuffed rag doll, smiling, rosy cheeked.
The words ... are placed more economically than before, the syntax is completely different for all its linear straightness, and the stylistic level is lowered, using demotic speech and pastiche. Reading starts consciously planning the structure of poems and co-ordinates them in a new metrical arrangement: one will look in vain for dactyls in this volume; instead one encounters metres not commonly used in English. In Nocturne’ and Trio’ Reading realises his first original formal ideas.Where she allows herself sufficient space and time for a sustained consideration of individual poems Martin proves a lively reader, and does much to illuminate Reading’s use of form and meter. Martin draws on a wide range of unpublished material including interviews and conversations with the poet. Her extensive knowledge of Reading’s work allows for an interesting analysis of the "fastidious intratextuality" of the more recent volumes, and a strong case is made for reading Reading in chronological instalments rather than "single doses".
Although Martin rightly observes that the poet’s readers "either fall for or recoil from his work", she is reluctant to engage with the criticisms of commentators or reviewers. This is all the more surprising given Reading’s fondness for using his verse for just such a purpose. Martin prefers to dismiss negative reviews as "misinformed" and impatiently sweeps aside any objections to Reading’s work:
One reviewer implied that Reading’s dramatic talent had chosen the wrong medium, as if poetry could not contain dramatic elements [...] O’Brien and Kerriga exhibits xenophobia’ -- as if Reading had never parodied British accents, or never written his harsh anti-xenophobic poems.Martin makes large claims for her subject’s verse, rating it among "the most important and moving poetry of the late 20th century". If Reading is to prove worthy of such praise then the charges levelled against his poetry need to be fully acknowledged and answered.
(from Issue 17)
Affinities
Anne Stevenson: Granny Scarecrow. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £7.95.
I’ve never met Anne Stevenson, but having read this book I’d like to, which is not always the case when you admire someone’s poems. Endearing characteristics shine through this collection, like the joy in Skills’ at the ingenuity in a complex piece of machinery ("this clever Matchbox toy") and the adroitness of its driver. Or the loving insight of A Parable for Norman’ (MacCaig); I only met that delightful man once but the voice she gives him is so right, I thought I could hear him speaking. I don’t doubt that the voice of Ted Hughes in Invocation and Interruption’ is equally right; if I didn’t react so positively to that it was because, for once, I didn’t share her affection for the subject. This was rare; I kept discovering affinities and I don’t know if that was because I just happen to share a lot of interests with her, or because she is tapping into concerns which many other readers would share. I am certain very many women, for starters, would react as I and my daughter did to Clydie is dead!’ -- not the best title for a beautifully tender, wry elegy for a pet cat:
you will never again rule us by vocative law,
or pull back the bedclothes at six with a firm paw,
or bemoan the indignities of travelling by car,
or flourish an upright tail on crepuscular walks,
no, nor compile statistics on the field mice of Wales.
Men would like it too of course, assuming they weren’t like the stupidly snooty male editor who told a friend of mine, "Women write far too many cat poems". (Well, if men were half as nice as cats ...) Knowing some people react scornfully to the idea of cherishing or mourning an animal, I have tended lately to disguise my own cat poems so that readers could suppose they concerned friends or children. I admire Stevenson’s braver refusal to care what the hell anyone of honest emotion. She is always brave about that, and about technique. She uses child-voices and ballad metres, both of which can go horribly wrong and sound faux-naif. I worried for a while that this was going to happen to the dream-poem Innocence and Experience’, but in the end the half-recalled snatches of playground rhyme are brilliantly sinister:
Singing sticks and stones
may break my bones
(but names hurt more).
Singing step upon a crack
break your mother’s back
(her platinum-ringed finger).
Singing who got up ur mother
When your daddy wasn’t there
Singing allee allee in free! You’re
Dead, you’re dead, wherever you are!
The back-cover blurb says she approaches ideas "by looking intently at small things and seemingly insignificant events". That is certainly a better way to approach them than via windy abstractions, as one can see when it comes off. It is how /i>’ conveys a changing way of life. The use of the dead woman’s dress for a scarecrow is practical rather than irreverent; you might call it recycling. And her granddaughters’ unease at the sight of it in winter, "starved in its field of snowcorn", is seen to have wider implications, as is their choice of another route to the bus stop. They "avoid the country way" through the scarecrow’s cornfield, preferring the road which will take them away from the farm altogether one day. "They caught the bus. And it caught them".
No technique succeeds always. In a few poems, as hard as I look, the events so carefully observed remain, for me, not just seemingly insignificant but genuinely so. I can’t see what Incident’ is getting at, and I’m not sure the epigrammatic Old Wife’s Tale’ and On Going Deaf’ earn their place. The ballad metre, successfully used elsewhere, doesn’t feel quite right in All There Was’; there’s an uncharacteristically sentimental feel to the last verse. And though generally I like the humour and wryness in her voice, I’m not altogether certain about "Mr unresting redstart" (Phoenicurus phoenicurus’) and "Mrs Blackbird" (Pity the Birds’).
But these are awfully trivial gripes. As must be apparent, I like this collection a lot, and I don’t think it’s purely because of personally shared interests and affinities, although I am sure that plays a part. It is always fascinating to find a writer who draws inspirandle your own interest. Two weeks before I read this book, I had been in the Italian Chapel built from a Nissen hut by prisoners of war on Orkney. Indeed I had written a poem about it, so when I read on Stevenson’s contents page the title The Miracle of Camp 60’ (which is also the title of the chapel’s tourist booklet), my first thought was "Bugger!". Thankfully, when I read the poem, it turned out we had seen the place quite differently. Her POW narrator sees the chapel as an oasis of joy, beauty and peace not only in war but in life ("happier than ever again"), and feels guilt, when he goes home, for having been happy there while his family were suffering the deprivations and violence of war. By extension, this guilt is that of all (reader included) who find pleasure and solace in art while, in real life, people suffer. Chiocchetti, the POW painter who was the chapel’s main creator, shares this guilt but refuses to consider it valid; art, he says, is a necessary earnest of eternal joy, a promise that suffering doesn’t last forever. Chiocchetti, both in real life and in this poem, religious, but you don’t need to be a believer, in that sense, to hear something valid in that message. The one reservation I have about the poem is the narrator’s voice. If you use the voice of a foreigner speaking English, you can either write normal English and assume it stands for his own language, or imitate a non-native speaker. She opts for the latter, and mostly the blend of slightly fractured, over-formal English and a lot of Italian words works all right. But there are moments, when he says "how do you say", or "regard" for "look", when it worries me. I think it’s an inherently perilous technique, because it can look unintentionally patronising, Johnny Foreigner mangling English. Again this may be personal, to do with ancestry and being forced to read the appallingly unfunny portrayal of Fluellen at school. Stevenson’s Italian voice never descends to anything like the level of Shakespeare’s patronising racist ineptitude but years of hearing stage Welshmen say "look you" can make one instinctively react against this technique even when it is clear (as it is here) that the reverse of disrespect is intended.
(from issue 12)
Michael Longley: Selected Poems. London: Jonathan Cape, £8.
Michael Longley: Broken Dishes. Belfast: Abbey Press, £5.
Michael Longley's Selected Poems is more than welcome. His previous Selected Poems 1963-1980 was designed primarily to introduce the poet to American readers, and the absence of a Selected Poems readily available in Britain and Ireland at the same time was always to be regretted. But the nature of Longley's poetic career has more recently made the need for such a volume an imperative. The unusually long gap between the 1979 The Echo Gate, and the fifth collection in 1991, Gorse Fires, may have made it difficult to appreciate fully the sustained coherence of Longley's poetic career. And the enthusiasm with which Gorse Fires was, rightly, received, has tended to obscure both his achievement in the 1970s, and appreciation of the thematic and stylistic links between the earlier and later collections. The obvious virtue of the new Selected Poems is that it restores in one volume a full sense of that continuity. Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid were hailed as signalling a new energy and a new voice in Longley's writing. It is, as the Selected Poems makes apparent, a 'new' voice which draws its strength and themes from the 'old' one.
Longley's is a poetic voice which treads carefully, and which found itself slowly and unobtrusively in the early years of the Northern Ireland Troubles. He has been, on the whole, free from the 'revisionitis' which has attacked some of his contemporaries: a few poems were tinkered with when they made their way from the original collections into Poems 1963-1983, but no changes have been made in the new Selected Poems and, where possible, many of the original, careful 'pairings' of poems on pages have been retained. One might perhaps regret the absence of 'The Rope-makers', 'Kindertotenlieder', or 'No Man's Land', but this is a generous and balanced selection from all Longley's collections which makes apparent the extent to which his poetry works self-reflexively, building a confident voice from the foundations of the 1968 No Continuing City onwards. Many of the early poems feed into the later ones, set forth the themes and images with which Longley will be preoccupied throughout his career, and the Selected is selected to sustain those connections. Poems such as 'Freeze-up', where spring will 'dust from our sills snow and feather', or 'Persephone', where 'footsteps borrow silence from the snow', set the precedent for the dominating, highly complex feather and snow imagery of both Gorse Fires and The Ghost Orchid, and one of the strongest of his early poems, the elegy for his father, 'In Memoriam', establishes the father/son relationship destined to play such a prominent and wide-ranging role in all his subsequent collections:
In his second collection, An Exploded View, that pre-Troubles invocation finds its answer in what is probably Longley's best-known poem from the 1970s, and certainly one of the most powerful poems ever written about the Northern Ireland Troubles and the First World War, 'Wounds'. His father is interred imaginatively alongside victims of the Troubles:Before you died, Re-enlisting with all the broken soldiers
You bent beneath your rucksack, near collapse,
In anecdote rehearsed and summarised
These words I write in memory. Let yours
And other heartbreaks play into my hands.
Now, with military honours of a kind,Longley has always been able to touch on 'taboo' subjects, to break the silences caused by historical and cultural confusion, or by human atrocity. The personal relationship with his father is pushed outwards in 'Wounds' to encompass the world wars and the Troubles. It is a relationship that has also translated into mythological terms, in the Odysseus/Laertes, Priam/Hector encounters in the later poetry, where the Trojan War parallels events in contemporary Northern Ireland. 'Ceasefire' is a poem much quoted in connection with the Northern Irish ceasefires, and one which, in the context of the Trojan War (and, by extension, Northern Ireland) carries as much a message of warning as it does one of redemption. At the end of the poem, Priam makes the extraordinary gesture of submission and atonement:
With his badges, his medals like rainbows,
His spinning compass, I bury beside him
Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of
Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.
[...]
Also a bus-conductor's uniform -
He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers
Without a murmur, shot through the head
By a shivering boy who wandered in
Before they could turn the television down
Or tidy away the supper dishes.
To the children, to a bewildered wife,
I think 'Sorry Missus' was what he said.
'I get down on my knees and do what must be doneLongley has always been recognised as a love poet, and as a poet who takes inspiration from the natural world. He is also a war poet, and it is not too extravagant to claim that he has written as intelligently, movingly, and consistently about the Northern Irish Troubles as have any of his contemporaries, probably more so. 'The Ice-cream Man', from Gorse Fires, is amongst the most powerful of those poems which mediate between private and public tragedy, as is the sequence 'Wreaths', from the earlier The Echo Gate:
And kiss Achilles' hand, the killer of my son.'
When they massacred the ten linen workersIn the later poems, the concern with suffering explored in relation to the First World War and sectarian killing in Ireland extends to encompass the Holocaust, a subject many poets fear to treat. The success of these poems lies in the use of a compassionate yet unsentimental voice, and an attention to detail which restores specificity at a point in history when it is most in danger of being lost in abstraction - numbers, dates, death-tolls counted beyond comprehension:
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.
Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.
('The Linen Workers')
Because you will suffer soon and die, your choicesThe measure of Longley's success in perfecting his lyric voice may be that it has not provided critics with easy formulas for understanding or pigeonholing the poetry. Longley has always been less user-friendly for critics than either Heaney or Mahon. That may be, ironically enough, and despite the link Heaney senses between what he has described as 'the political glamour of [Ulster], the sex-appeal of violence, and the prominence accorded to the poets', because Longley's is the voice of a poet who stayed and worked in Northern Ireland through the 1970s and 1980s. His touch is sure, but it is delicate, as in one of the later poems, 'The Ghost Orchid':
Are neither right nor wrong: a spoon will feed you,
A flannel keep you clean, a toothbrush bring you back
To your bathroom's view of chimney-pots and gardens.
With so little time for inventory or leavetaking,
You are packing now for the rest of your life
Photographs, medicines, a change of underwear, a book,
A candlestick, a loaf, sardines, needle and thread.
('Ghetto')
Added to its few remaining sites will be the stanzaThat delicacy has much to do with his felt responsibility towards, and response to, a home ground that has also been a war-zone, a responsibility lived as well as written. It is also an element of a style that has sometimes led to misrepresentation of Longley's work: technique rather than temperament; style rather than subject. The extreme care with which these poems are written, a care not always exercised by others, is not so much indicative of formal restriction as of a cautious obliquity that finally resists reductive categorisation. Love poet, nature poet, or war poet? The question is unanswerable since Longley tends to work as all three simultaneously. Thus, 'The Ghost Orchid' hints obliquely at human as well as ecological disaster with its 'leaves like flakes of skin'; the touch at the end is as erotic as it is painful, the gentle probing of an open wound, awareness of the fragility of that which survives disaster. Throughout his poems, Longley's imaginative co-ordinates are plotted geographically north by north-west, from the war-torn city of Belfast to the redemptive rurality of Mayo, and historically from the Trojan War through the world wars to the Troubles. It is the gradual merging of all three categories - nature, love, war - into the individual poem, allied with a growing confidence in his lyric voice that makes Longley one of the foremost poets writing in Britain and Ireland today. This is a marvellous book, not to be missed.
I compose about leaves like flakes of skin, a colour
Dithering between pink and yellow, and then the root
That grows like a coral among shadows and leaf-litter.
Just touching the petals bruises them into darkness.
Broken Dishes is a collection of fifteen poems, most of which are elegies for friends, artists, writers, or victims of war. Its frontispiece shows a photograph of an Amish quilt, 'Broken Dishes', from c.1930. The quilt serves as metaphor for the collection: the broken dishes are, in these poems, broken lives, but from those broken lives is created a delicate pattern that binds the poems together. Longley weaves colours and images - snow, feathers, frost-flowers, poppies - in and out of the poems, not so much as overt consolations but as elements of continuity between past and future, presence and absence, life and death. The first poem in the collection, 'The Evening Star', is a syntactical winding back home which seeks to reunite imaginatively that which has been divided:
The day we buried your two years and two monthsLongley's poems tend to work with, and to find their strength in, an awareness of their own inadequacy; he is never complacent about the function of elegies, perhaps because in Northern Ireland there have been too many to write, each one progressively more difficult than the last. As elegist, he does not look for universal truths and consolations, but works for an understanding of individual grief, and for an evocation of the idiosyncratic manifestations of personal grief seldom seen by the outside world. If at times this can leave the reader feeling a little abandoned on the outskirts of a private conversation, it is precisely that feeling of isolation from the subject of the poem that these elegies are all about. In the title poem, the isolation is also, in the end, a recognition of the inadequacy of language, an elegy for elegy:
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,
The evening star, the star in Sappho's epigram
Which brings everything back that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.
Sydney our mutual friend is kneeling by your bedThe abrupt, poignant truths which change nothing, the bumpy staccato sentences at the heart of the poem, are smoothed over by linguistic absence: blankets and eiderdown and sheets. 'All I can think of', the gesture, is all that remains.
Hour after hour on the carpetless hospital floor.
He repeats the same kind words and they become
An invocation to you and you start to die.
You love your body. So does Sydney. So do I.
Communication is blankets and eiderdown and sheets.
All I can think of is a quilt called 'Broken Dishes'
And spreading it out on the floor beneath his knees.
Longley is the quintessential lyric poet, whose concerns are, and have always been, as he states himself, 'Eros and Thanatos'. His elegies work in the dividing line between love and death; they also work to blur that line, to see two sides to the same coin. 'Maureen Murphy's Window' looks back to MacNeice's 'Snow', with 'more than glass between the snow and the huge roses', and, more subtly, to Keith Douglas's 'On a Return from Egypt', where 'The next month ... is a window/ and with a crash I'll split the glass./ Behind it stands one I must kiss,/ person of love or death'. In 'Maureen Murphy's Window':
Because you've built shelves across the big window, keep-MacNeice's glass, and Douglas's window, are revisited here, as a line between life and death that is invisible, but is there to be crossed and recrossed imaginatively. Broken Dishes is, in many ways, even with its subtle intertextualities, an intensely private collection of poetry. It is also therefore the poet's own self-imposed task in these poems to tiptoe in and out without breaking a thing. The snow is falling all over Longley's poetry. And, like the subject of the poem, 'He is the snow poet and he keeps his snow shoes on'.
Sakes and ornaments become part of the snowy garden.
The footprints we and the animals leave in the snow
Borrow the blue from the blue glassware you collect.
I imagine your dead husband moving in and out
Through windows and shelves without breaking a thing.
(from issue 12>
Les Murray: Collected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet,
£12.95.
Les Murray: Fredy Neptune. Manchester: Carcanet, £18.95.
'But there's too much in life: you can't describe it', runs the last line of Les Murray's new verse novel Fredy Neptune. A reviewer faced with the elephantine bulk of his Collected Poems (literally: a massive pachyderm, rear on, adorns its cover) and Fredy Neptune can only wonder at what exactly Les Murray's idea of 'too much' would be, if all this falls short. The first of these books is a Collected rather than a Complete Murray, but still manages to run to five hundred pages of poetry, from The Ilex Tree (1965) to Subhuman Redneck Poems (1996). If everything in Murray is writ large, it also tends to be writ dense. Here he is on the lyrebird, in Translations from the Natural World:
Tailed mimic aeon-sent to intrigue the next recorder,This is instantly recognisable Murray. Lines like these proceed by a kind of metaphorised shorthand, typically in too much of a hurry to bother with definite articles, but undeniably powerful and compelling in their very strangeness. As we see from the poems on animals and on other obsessions like heraldry and military history, Murray does best with subjects he knows well, and that he feels passionate and enthusiastic about. The vocabulary is self-consciously technical and acquired: Translations from the Natural World could not be further from the relaxed, taken-for-granted intimacy with rural life we find in Death of a Naturalist.
I mew catbird, I saw crosscut, I howl she-dingo, I kink
forest hush distinct with bellbirds, warble magpie garble, link
cattlebell with kettle boil; I ran ducks' cranky presidium
or simulate a triller like a rill mirrored lyrical to a rim.
If only all of Collected Poems showed the same sure grasp. It doesn't, and in its absence Murray's Dr Hyde rises from his dark subconscious to wrest the pen from his hands. There's probably little point at this late stage in complaining about the hectoring right-wing Christian side to Murray, which can be relied on to put in an appearance whenever sex, war, liberalism or cities come up. But I'm going to anyway because the sort of garbled writing it inspires in him remains a serious obstacle to enjoying his work. The last poem in Collected Poems, for instance, 'The Head-Spider', is a fairly dire portent if this is how he intends to keep writing. 'Misrule was strict' in the swinging Sydney suburb of his student days, we learn, where resentment of the poet's chastity poisons his life: 'If you're raped you mostly know/ but I'd been cursed, and refused to notice or believe it'. In case this is too personal to be of interest, Murray dresses it up in theological pseudo-profundity: 'If love is cursed in us, then when God exists, we don't'. It's not an isolated case. There's not much Christian grace in evidence in the conclusion of 'The Last Hellos', an elegy for his father: 'Snobs mind us off religion/ nowadays, if they can./ Fuck thém. I wish you God.' R.S. Thomas and Geoffrey Hill both have a reputation for being more forbidding and frosty poets than Murray, but I can't imagine either writing a line as cheap and nasty as that in the name of religion. Other examples of more of the same include 'A Torturer's Apprenticeship', 'Where Humans Can't Leave and Mustn't Complain' and 'The Beneficiaries', a guaranteed inclusion in the Faber Book of Ignominious Verse that James Keery usefully suggested someone should compile.
Equally annoying is his addiction to daft political metaphors, as when he tells us in 'The Inverse Transports' that 'America and the Soviets/ and the First and Third Reich were poems' (what was the Second Reich - a Bildungsroman?), or, worse still in 'Rock Music' that 'Sex is a Nazi ... what is a Nazi but sex pitched for crowds?' (a pensée that comes up again in Fredy Neptune). Does that make the Spice Girls Nazis? When it comes to satire, Murray's onslaughts are remarkably underdeveloped and one-sided. As a distant observer of the last Australian general election I saw a few threats to the national fabric, and they weren't playing rock gigs. So where is the Les Murray satire on the odious Pauline Hanson, or is it bullyingly liberal to pick on an honest Redneck like her? If Murray can't reclaim the Redneck without the nasty right-wing baggage he trails with him in Subhuman Redneck Poems, and the clotted, hectoring poetry he inspires, perhaps we'd be better off letting the species die out.
Having got that out of the way it's safe to return to what I like so much about Murray: 'the endless detailed rehearsal of Australian peculiarities', to use his own phrase for what distinguishes Australian poetry. For me, Murray's early work remains his best, and there are large tracts of The Weatherboard Cathedral and Ethnic Radio that I would not want to be without. There is much in The People's Otherworld and The Daylight Moon too that ranks with his best work, but no Murray book is without at least a handful of exceptional poems. A list of these would include 'Spring Hail', 'Driving Through Sawmill Towns', 'The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever', 'The Idyll Wheel', 'Escaping Out There', the hilarious 'Hearing Impairment', 'Roman Cage-cups', 'The Conquest', 'Morse', 'Tympan Alley', 'Glaze', 'Suspended Vessels', 'Stacked Water', 'It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen' and 'The Warm Rain'. If Murray's sprawling Collected Poems could have tightened its belt sufficiently to include only poems as outstanding as these, 'it had been vain to blame, and useless to praise' him. One last niggle: Collected Poems lacks a title index, though its 1991 predecessor managed to stretch to one. In a book of this size, it's the least one expects.
Big as Collected Poems is, within a month of its publication Murray was back in print with a verse novel as long as many other writers' Collected Poems, Fredy Neptune (whose cover, again, looks like a comment on its own bulk; someone at Carcanet certainly has a sly sense of humour). Murray had already written a verse novel, The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, though there's no mention of it anywhere here. The hero of the book is Fred Boettcher, a pacifist German-Australian sailor caught up in World War One. After witnessing a group of women being burned to death he loses his sense of touch. Periodically his feeling begins to return, only to be driven away again by lapses into unworthy or violent conduct (it takes the completion of his éducation sentimentale at the end of the book to restore it fully). In the course of the novel Fredy moves from Turkey to Palestine, Egypt, Greece, Australia, America, Germany, and Australia again, as a sailor, a circus strongman, a Hollywood actor and Zeppelin manufacturer. He searches for his parents and becomes a husband and father. He works as an extra on All Quiet on the Western Front, has Rilke read to him by Marlene Dietrich, and rescues a mentally retarded boy from castration in a Nazi hospital.
Fredy Neptune is 10,000 lines long, but the cumulative effect of its enormous length is to overwhelm rather than beguile a reader's patience. Its dustjacket compares it to Byron, but so many of the qualities that make Don Juan a pleasure to read are utterly alien to the spirit of this book: Byron's flirtatious toying with the reader, his lightness of touch and epigrammatic wit, his ability to make sex sound comic rather than terrifying, and not least his skill in altering the narrative pace to avoid monotony and relentlessness. Fredy resembles Juan to the extent that things tend to happen to him more than he ever makes them happen himself, but the things that happen are almost uniformly awful. Fredy Neptune is a monumental epic of pain, violence, waste and futility. In addition to his inability to suffer pain, Fredy has remarkable physical strength and, a bit like the Incredible Hulk, unleashes it whenever bad guys get fresh with the weak and defenceless. When the occasion demands, though, he rises above comic-book heroics to genuine moral heroism. His saving of the mentally retarded boy in the chapter set in Nazi Germany (easily the novel's most impressive) is one such example. It is a relief to see how Murray's hectoring falls by the wayside when his moral outrage is given a genuine subject to work on and the real writer in him takes over; he even breaks out in rhyme to mark the occasion. If only the real Les Murray could emulate Fredy's emergence from sensory deprivation and learn to respond a little less defensively to the world beyond the Redneck in the bush.
I’m too old. I shy away from cults. She’s too extreme. She’s a bad influence.
The first poem of hers I fell for was 'Spinster', which I read in a magazine before I left New Zealand. (Or perhaps what I liked in it were the echoes of John Crowe Ransom?) On the strength of it, in 1960, I ordered The Colossus from the Dunedin University Bookshop. This is the only book of hers that may have influenced me - I can see that a poem I wrote in 1962 bears traces of her Roethke period. At that point, and in that country, Plath felt like my own private discovery. But when I came to England early in 1963 she had just died, and the cult began. Like everyone, I was fascinated - I bought the books as they appeared - but I refused to be taken over. After all, she was born only two years before me; I was damned if I was going to be influenced by a dead contemporary whose style was already proving too seductive to others.
Plath has had a damaging effect on two generations of younger women poets too spineless to resist her powerful voice, who without undergoing the intensely laborious apprenticeship to the craft that she served before attaining her later style have simply decided to imitate the poems of her final years. This makes for lazy writing, boring to read. And as for students and beginners, no Arvon Course is complete without some hopeful person offering a stream of violent, undigested imagery for the tutors’ approval. She can’t help it, poor dear: Plath is the only poet she’s read. Then there’s the personal influence, even more dangerous. Teenage girls are already sufficiently given to suicide without this alluring example (although I admit she’s not the only persuasive advocate of easeful death; a young woman of my acquaintance was reading Keats in the ambulance as she went to have her stomach pumped out).
Yes, of course Plath was brilliant - but not all that brilliant. (I’m writing this in the week of Diana-mania, an instructive parallel). There are now more woman poets writing and publishing than ever before, and many of them are admirable. It’s time to move on.
Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters. London: Faber, £14.99.
Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Birthday Letters is Ted Hughes's lack of distance. Here lack of distance amounts to lack of poetic tact. Given that he wrote these poems over a period of years, there is little sense of development, literary or otherwise. They all seem obsessively close to the obsession-driven experiences they recreate: 'Siamese-twinned, each of us festering/ A unique soul-sepsis for the other' ('9 Willow Street'). Ian Sansom has suggested, however, that Hughes seeks to 'distract' the curious (London Review of Books, 19 February 1998). On this reading, Birthday Letters lays false trails for the feminist hounds so bitterly abused in 'The Dogs Are Eating Your Mother' (one of the eight poems already published in New Selected Poems), except that Hughes would be more inclined to put down poisoned meat:
Yet the tone here, ugly and shrill whatever the provocation, does not support Sansom's 'distraction' thesis. Birthday Letters, like Anne Stevenson's biography, has a mission to explain - as much to Hughes himself as to the public. No doubt many things remain hidden, but the book at once reflects and constitutes an effort to get the past into a personal and imaginative focus which it continually resists. Yet Hughes's decision to publish seems just one more proof of bewilderment. Cui bono? The occasional sharp insights, for author and reader, are sucked back into obfuscating rather than clarifying myth. Because the literary relationship between Hughes and Plath never separated the psychic from the poetic, and because Hughes persists in regarding 'poetry' as a dark god, he tends to reject the kind of structures that would provide both analytical and formal perspective ('soul-sepsis' will not do). Plath has inspired nothing as objectively powerful as 'The Other', Hughes's cold parable of Assia Wevill's attitude to her rival (New Selected Poems). The languages of the poets were mutually entangled before her death, and Hughes does little to disentangle them. Thus Plath leads a macabre authorial afterlife in these rewritings, whether Hughes gives his side of a story, as in 'The Rabbit Catcher', or paraphrases her story: 'Your dreams were a sea clogged with corpses'. Sometimes Hughes desires to exorcise the past, sometimes to conjure it back; sometimes he makes a stain worse and worse by rubbing.a kind Of hyena came aching upwind.
They dug her out. Now they batten
On the cornucopia of her body. Even
Bite the face off her gravestone [...]
Let them Jerk their tail-stumps, bristle and vomit
Over their symposia.
All this may be human (whether it is poetry remains to be considered), but the recycling of reciprocal myth can become tiresome and aggrandising. Whereas you might think we had already heard enough of 'Daddy' from Plath herself, Hughes gets clumsily in on the Freudian act: 'Daddy had come back to hear/ All you had against him'; 'your real target/ Hid behind me. Your Daddy,/ The god with the smoking gun'; 'When you wanted bees I never dreamed/ It meant your Daddy had come up out of the well'. With amazing bad taste, he cites Wilfred Owen's 'Strange Meeting' in a poem about himself and Otto Plath. Other images from Plath's poems and journals - bolting horse, prowling panther, rapacious machine ('The dark ate at you') - reiterate, rather than illuminate, her problem. These animals also seem unsure whether they belong to the Hughes world of elemental energies or the Plath world of inner demons. Thus a tour of America almost comically produces 'Germany's eagle/ Bleeding up through your American eagle' and a marauding bear in search of double immortality. In 'The Badlands' omens pile up hectically: Hiroshima, a snake ('I said:/ Just like the coils on the Newgrange lintel'), Dante's hell, 'bone,/ coming through the crust', a manic mouse in a 'solar furnace/ Of oxides and fire dust'. 'You Hated Spain' is much more successful as psychic travelogue because it takes one step at a time, moving from observation ('the oiled anchovy faces') to intuition ('your panic/ Clutched back towards college America') to myth:
I see you, in moonlight,I have always thought it a pity that the poem does not end here, but continues: 'A new soul, still not understanding [...] with your whole life waiting/ [...] and all your poems still to be found.'
Walking the empty wharf at Alicante
Like a soul waiting for the ferry [...]
The gloss is banal, obvious. Hughes too often indulges in 'had you/ I but known' or 'did you but know now'. The first poem 'Fulbright Scholars' speculates about a remembered photograph: 'Maybe I noticed you [...] Noted your long hair, loose waves -/ Your Veronica Lake bang'. Even though the next poem reflects, 'In those days I coerced/ Oracular assurance/ In my favour out of every sign', oracular assurance overdetermines the script of Birthday Letters. Several reviewers have commented that the stress on fatality and inevitability, on signs and omens, on gypsies and ouija, seems to preclude human agency: 'The fate she carried/ Sniffed us out'. My point is not that such a stress dodges responsibility - let those who can easily diagnose and manage a friend's or partner's mental illness cast the first stone - but that it reduces complexity. The poems that do complicate matters are not those in which, as in 'The Badlands', everything appears extraordinary, but those which shatter the frame of ordinariness. 'The Minotaur' begins: 'The mahogany table-top you smashed/ Had been the broad plank top/ Of my mother's heirloom sideboard'. And 'Fever', although it goes on too long, invokes Plath's gastric ailment in Spain as a more persuasive - because behavioural - omen: 'Your cry jammed so hard/ Over into the red of catastrophe/ Left no space for worse'.
The most compelling sections of Birthday Letters are a form of verse autobiography which evoke Cambridge and London in the 1950s, the gauche beginnings of married and literary life. I could wish that Hughes had written a memoir in the cool prose that sometimes tries to get out of his hectic poetry; or, at least, in a mode as far removed as possible from the idioms that he and Plath made part of their relationship. Hughes's language renders her an elemental force and a material girl, while his own interiority also largely goes missing. It is disconcerting to find him putting familiar formulae, such as the shock ending, to use. 'Night-Ride on Ariel' actually ends: 'That Monday'. The repetition of favourite words as well as rhythms - jewel, glitter, sunstruck, homicidal, gutturals, entrails, prolongueur - makes it appear as if he were not taking enough linguistic care. There is crude, bad writing in Birthday Letters ('Those terrible, hypersensitive/ Fingers of your verse') as in the overpraised Tales from Ovid of which Michael Hofmann inexplicably said: 'Hughes is as broad as Ovid and as subtle'. Other poets and critics who should know better have raved about both books. Is Hughes's reputation being talked up in some mysteriously collective way, and to hell with critical judgement, to hell with poetry? ('The press was squared/ The feminists were quite prepared'). Hughes's language and forms could not be less metamorphic. They tend to make everything sound the same and therefore seem unready for the real challenges.
Francis Ponge: Selected Poems. Edited by Margaret Guiton. Parallel text, with translations by Margaret Guiton, John Montague and C.K. Williams. London: Faber & Faber, £9.99. First published by Wake Forest, 1994.
The originality of Francis Ponge (1899-1988) can be overstated. His early masterpiece, Le Parti pris des choses ('Siding with Things') is exhibited as concept art, the kind that wins the Turner Prize for its shocking choice of materials. Dialogue, narrative, event, landscape, classicism, romanticism and verse form are all gone, and the thirty-two prose poems about Things, from 'bread' to 'the pebble', instead present an assertively individual series-work, like Monet's early series of Rouen Cathedral. Ponge's concept was intellectually unimpeachable, beguiling the likes of Sartre and Camus to take it seriously as philosophy, and there is even a legendary provenance, the only copy of the text - lost for a while in 1941 - having to be proof-read by Jean Paulhan himself, the director of Gallimard, while Ponge was an active Resistant stranded across the border into the Unoccupied Zone. A sensation of a book, in fact.
Not, however, quite his debut, for a small-press book of 1926 had sold altogether thirteen copies, and Ponge was by now forty-three, having accumulated the work in a niggardly fashion for over a decade (he later claimed to have been avoiding it). His artistic values were not so much revolutionary as counter-revolutionary: he despaired of the prolix obscurity and cronyism of literary Paris and flirted with surrealism only in sympathy for its communist outlook. Working as a junior editor, 'I wanted all the time to throw my inkwell in M. Cocteau's face'. Le Parti pris des choses was unfashionably wry, accessible and readable, and it's interesting to compare its fate with that of Jacques Prévert's Paroles, another straight-talking classic of the time. Prévert is now (almost) dismissed as harmless fun for teaching school-children about verse; if Ponge escaped this fate partly through the lure of his concept, then it is worth noting that successive critics and editors have exaggerated its centrality to his work. It was, for instance, Jean Paulhan who excised verse poems and other diversions from the original manuscript.
The editor of this valuable Selected Poems, Margaret Guiton, is therefore in good company. She includes almost the entirety of Le Parti pris des choses, but all three non-Thing poems are out: political satires which may not be good but bear testimony to Ponge's pre-war trade unionism. That takes half of the book and the remainder is very sketchy, omitting verse and including little about people or Ponge's own life. Whole books go unrepresented, as do occasional pieces, such as the commissions for the Electricity Board and the Pompidou Centre; and the selection stops around 1960. Admittedly, most of Ponge's later works are not convenient to selection. He rejected the conventional definition of 'poem', and distinguished only between closed and open writing, the pieces of Le Parti pris des choses being mostly closed and the books of artistic methodology being mostly open. We know from Ponge's own selections that he would have represented his meta-poetry and art criticism - which is of some acumen, on Giacometti, Braque and other contemporaries. It seems a pity not to have met him half-way, but in the end it is the closed poems of chosisme that will always be linked with his name.
The chosiste mannerism is not unlike a dramatic monologue in the voice of a reviewer whose subject this week is, let us say, an orange:
In concluding this all too summary study, carried out as roundly as possible, we have to cope with the pip. This seed, shaped like a miniature lemon, is the color of the white wood of the lemon tree and, inside, of a pea or tender sprout. After the sensational explosion of that Chinese lantern of tastes, colors and scents - the fruity balloon itself -, we have to recognise the relative hardness and acidity (not entirely insipid) of the wood, the branch, the leaf: a very small sum total but unquestionably the raison d'être of the fruit.(Note 'color': American spellings, idiom and typography prevail inside the pukka Faber jacket of this book.) Umberto Eco once published a spoof review of a numbered, limited edition of etchings by the Bank of Italy called '10,000 lira', and at first Ponge can seem to be making the same send-up, especially since it is hard to see where solemnity ends and irony begins. Ponge's gentle comedy, a positive delight, comes from teasing the reader about how seriously the speaker is to be taken, with his initially wild enthusiasms (on doors: 'The happiness of seizing one of these tall barriers to a room by the porcelain knob of its belly'; on bread: 'The surface of bread is marvellous... as though you held the Alps in your hand') and his sly concluding retractions. On a wooden fruit-box: 'it is, all in all, a thoroughly likable object - on whose fate we shouldn't dwell too heavily or too long.'
Ponge's luxuriantly detailed descriptions might be compared to James Joyce's or for that matter Nicholson Baker's; but his minutiae are expressions not of richness but paucity and the defeat of language. 'It's not easy to define a pebble', he begins, and 2500 words later he can fairly be said to have proved his point. Defeats, then, but he also compared surges of language to orgasm, or to a joy which overcame his poverty and depression; and his work is a translator's minefield of punning allusions and conceits, Latin and French derivations having been a childhood passion. He later reconciled this with chosisme by hailing etymological curiosities as rich seams in the linguistic stone, implicitly construing language itself as chose, but it doesn't really wash. I think he simply loved words: and who would not share his pleasure that mûres means both 'ripe' and 'blackberries'? Even in translation, his deftness with prose is astonishing to watch. Here is a rain-cloud about to burst (and note the correct usages of 'weight' and 'mass'):
The ensemble has the intensity of a complex mechanism, as precise and unpredictable as a clock activated by the weight of a given mass of condensing vapor.The rainstorm is one of Ponge's more unlikely choses, but to Ponge, an object is whatever can be isolated in discussion and encapsulated as an indivisible self. A class of objects - say, 'Vegetation' or 'Fauna' - is equally treatable in this way, its self being the common nature of its examples. (One might compare this view to category theory, a mathematical analogue of semiotics which emerged in post-war French seminars, in which categories are themselves objects in the category of all categories; or with related ideas in object-oriented computer programming, where the interchangeability of describing classes and objects is a commonplace.)
Nothing better sums up the wholesomeness of Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music than that a few of her favourite things include whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and brown paper packages tied up with strings. Snails, molluscs, interiors, the elements, rain-soaked leaves - how about 'The Trees Decompose in a Sphere of Fog' as a title? - moist, fleshy fruit, a door, an oyster, a door to an oyster - above all, moistness combined with enclosure - suggest that Dr. Freud would have appreciated M. Ponge better. The desire to be enveloped, so much more affable in manner than the desire to penetrate, turns up for instance in 'Notes Toward a Shellfish', when Ponge laments the empty space in buildings:
Somehow I wish that man sculpted kennels, or shells, of one sort or another, things on his own scale, that he created objects differing greatly from his own mollusk shape but proportioned to it (I find African huts fairly satisfactory in this respect).Only fairly satisfactory? I was put in mind of another great French eccentric, Count Henry Russell (his father was Irish), whose obsession with Vignemale, a mountain in the Pyrenees, led to having himself buried alive for long periods in specially-dug grottoes near the summit. Still, chacun à son goût.
For whatever reason, encapsulations - which is to say shells, literal and metaphorical - recur in Ponge's early writing. Language is the shell around actuality; art is the shell built by the artist, which outlives him and can perhaps be reoccupied; the horizon of a poem's attention is a shell around its subject. But a shell masks an interior. What is within? If there is no access to it, does it exist? If it doesn't matter what is within, why are we dismayed to think of the shell as unoccupied? - as in Ponge's images of art decaying to powder in the millennia after human extinction. 'The anger of snails: is it perceptible? Are there instances of it?'
Sartre's definitive review of Le Parti pris des choses, in 1944, made Ponge one of the court poets of existentialism, a moral philosophy which rejected treatment of people as objects and insisted upon recognition of their worth and obligations. Sartre attempted to distinguish between Ponge's human choses ('the gymnast') and his inhuman ('the pebble') but it is not easy to see on what textual grounds. Ponge seldom ascribes personality and his use of human language dances carefully around anthropomorphising his choses, even the human ones. The fruit-box is 'a bit bewildered', but this is an image for rude construction, fresh paintwork, recent arrival; and similar human-sounding attributes are similarly excusable. Perhaps Ponge does sound like an existentialist when he asks if snails can be known to have anger. But then, when he was taken up by the Tel Quel group in the 1960s, it was miraculously found that his poems were in accord with post-structuralism, too: as also with Robbe-Grillet and the 'new novelists', whose novels are phenomenological in that they can tell you what their characters do but never what they feel. Ponge has himself mischievously advanced further philosophies within which to locate his writings, which like hermit-crabs move from shell to shell.
The second half of this Selected Poems amounts to a bestiary: here are longer, luxuriant descriptions of animals, though insects and lower forms still predominate. As Ponge ages, he grows in self-importance: he begins to date his poems, which are not poems but 'science par excellence'; he gives them headnotes showing that the prose form used is cleverer than you might think; he writes book-length treatises on his compositional technique; he publishes lavish drafts, so that he is now the darling of genetic critics: and his draft-books are exquisite. La Fabrique du Pré (1971) mixes in an aerial photograph, a map, Latin etymologies, numerous full-colour plates of paintings, Bach's autograph of a movement from the Brandenburg Concertos and botanical watercolours of grass; handwriting, typescripts, doodles, three colours of paper. Ponge has a serious point, that his poem (Le Pré, 'The Meadow') is uncontained in association - that it is 'open' - but the vanity will make you smile all the same.
J.S. Bach was a genuine ingredient of Ponge's later work. When Ponge felt a need to impose structure on his prose meditations - a need to string together different takes on the same idea - he drew it from Bach's cello suites, six-movement pieces of courante, sarabande, gigue and so forth, or else from his aria-and-variation form. Often the initial idea recurs at the climax, an aria da capo as in the Goldberg Variations; or there are fugal recapitulations, as in this crescendo from 'The Horse':
Did I say monk?...No, ferried on his excremental litter, a pontiff! a pope displaying to all comers a splendid courtesan's bottom, open heart shaped, on nervous legs tapering to elegant high-heeled shoes.It is not hard to reconstruct the preceding fifty lines from this summary, taking each image in turn. But whether or not these suites justify their size, as compared with the perfect blackberries of ink in Le Parti pris des choses, their language is too marvellous to begrudge reading; and even if it could be argued that he was a one-idea writer whose idea was then over-elaborated by too many intellectuals, the originality of Francis Ponge cannot be overlooked.
(from issue 13)
"Pardon?": Our Problem with Difficulty (and Geoffrey Hill)
Geoffrey Hill: The Triumph of Love. London: Penguin, £8.99.
The present writer understands little of Geoffrey Hill's recent The Triumph of Love, and he knows from past and continuing experience that growth in understanding will not only be slow and painstaking, but also worthwhile. Geoffrey Hill writes difficult poetry about difficult subjects in difficult times. Why should we have a problem with that? For many -- though it is significant that they are not saying so in print, critical ignoring being presently a more effective means of control than critical argument -- The Triumph of Love is a mistake: distorted by anger, it betrays a want of taste and a want of proportion. Its "humour" can only be described as such by resort to scare quotes. Hill, it is being said in the comparative privacy of the academy, has gone off; in the old-fashioned idiom, he isn't cricket. Even Hill's anticipatory parody, in The Triumph of Love, of this hostile reception is deemed to go too far and to be too easy -- although "easy" is a strange word to use in relation to Geoffrey Hill. A consensus is growing, and has notably strengthened since the publication of Canaan, to the effect that there is something wrong with Geoffrey Hill. There is something wrong with Hill's aesthetic, with his relation to language, with his politics, with his religion, with his erudition -- although what precisely all or any of these may be are more difficult questions which have yet to be answered in any adequate way. However, on one thing only we can all agree: Geoffrey Hill does not fit in.
Such reviews of The Triumph of Love as have appeared have been rather odd. They present the fact of Hill's major standing as a chilly concession rather than a celebration, and proceed to unearth or reveal or expose the "real" Geoffrey Hill beneath the implicitly unnecessary clutter of his difficulty. Two examples: writing in the Sunday Times (9 February, 1999 Books p. 12) on the way to identifying in Jo Shapcott "the future health of poetry", Sean O'Brien managed de haut en bas to discern in Hill "beneath the modernist encrustrations [...] an altogether freer, less encumbered imagination, according to which love of place and delicacy of detail have their own validating power." Thus Hill, albeit rather late in the day, is finally showing some promise as a simple landscape poet. In a much longer review in the TLS (29 January, 1999, pp. 7-8) Adam Kirsch began by presenting Hill's erudition as a wall behind which he hides -- a charge which The Triumph of Love's own "Charged with erudition" is charged to anticipate. There is thus a fallacy lurking here which is acquiring a general currency. In response, one must assert that in Hill, the poetry is in the difficulty; and Hill as poet is realised in, rather than concealed by, his erudition. It merely takes, and will go on taking, time and effort to appreciate that realisation.
The Triumph of Love is more overt than earlier Hill in making available to us its extraordinary effort of remembering, the array of art and writings, names, events and places with which it is in dialogue: Shakespeare, Kenelm, Emerson, Daniel, Rouault, laus et vituperatio, Peirce, Bletchley Park, Callot, Haig, Gower, Masaryk, Arras, the Convention of Cintra, Petronius... The mere identification of these references, "sources" and allusions is, of course, merely a beginning for readers. Such a gathering is undoubtedly daunting, and uncharacteristic of contemporary writing, not least because, in the face of current theorisations of the death or irrelevance of the author, Hill strives to take responsibility for this vast intertextuality and to explore its difficult relation to history. Moreover -- Mercian Hymns has long since taught us as much -- there is nothing of the dispossessed Hoggartian scholarship boy about Hill: far from limiting himself, self-protectively, in the realms of "high culture", Hill provides as good a record -- for posterity -- as any of colloquialisms, of popular idioms, of popular culture, past and present. To be adequate to Hill, readers will have to know about Gracie Fields as well as Thomas Bradwardine. Hill may not be cricket, but he knows about football, and about the horses, about brands of dog food, and about Monopoly -- albeit Monopoly resonantly transformed:
Ur? Yes? Pardon? Miss a throe. Go to gaol.
The reviewers, discussed above, were confronting the inadequate Penguin paperback edition of The Triumph of Love, a slim and bland mid-blue and yellowish book with an understated blurb. One suspects they would find it harder to take the superior American edition, a hardback published by Houghton Mifflin in 1998. There the inside of the dustjacket declares:
Geoffrey Hill is a moralist, and his subject is pain -- the suffering of man at the hands of man. He judges us all -- for the enormities of this sordid century and our cowardly responses to them, for our lack of self-understanding, for our inability to acknowledge what is properly owed the dead. He judges us for our failings, but he judges himself more fiercely. He prays for divine forgiveness, and for the grace that we need to begin to forgive ourselves.This is entirely in keeping with the poems that follow and makes it clear that being difficult and being direct are not incompatible aims. It is outrageously funny; it may also be true. However, the majority of Hill's readers are, it seems, not amused.
The dustjacket illustration of the American edition is a triumphal arch in black and white, adapted from the title page of The Tryumphes of Fraunces Petracke, edited and translated by Henry Parker, Lord Morley, c.1553. It bears the date 1998, the author's name in black capitals, and, at the centre, the collection's title in red. When one finds, on the first page of the book, Geoffrey Hill telling us in the voice of Nehemiah, four times in four different languages and more in exasperation than out of defensiveness, that he is engaged in "A GREAT WORKE", then one cannot resist the comparison with another Renaissance poet, Ben Jonson. Jonson's great Folio of 1616 has as its title page an elaborate triumphal arch at the centre of which the word "WORKES" faces down any suggestion -- such as that made by Suckling and many others -- that all Jonson was about was "but Plaies".1 Jonson gave primacy to his medium -- language; it is what all his writing is about; and he is the great poet of the English language, something different from being the best poet in the English language. For Jonson "Language most shewes a man: speake that I may see thee"; and Jonson knew "Wheresoever, manners, and fashions are corrupted, Language is. It imitates the publicke riot."2 Hill, too -- the evidence is everywhere in his work -- is a great poet of language. He experiences words as an intense, at times violent, physical presence. He tells us this again, now in cartoon fashion, in The Triumph of Love:
The nerve required to keep standing, pedaling,No contemporary writer can match Hill in being alive to and alive in the language, and no writer is more alert than Hill to "the tongue's atrocities". Hence it is staggering to find the TLS reviewer missing the point to the extent that he complains that Hill's verse is "clotted with ambiguous syntax and abstruse allusions". And "clotted"? Are we in Devon or Accident and Emergency? In the context of a poem which has "the blown/ aorta pelting out blood", such linguistic inattention is remarkable. Perhaps, after all, we can diagnose a want of proportion in Hill's latest work; perhaps The Triumph of Love isn't angry enough.
grinning inanely, strikes me (splat!) as more
than temperamental luck.
Hill has always been attentive -- for many readers too attentive -- to words. But, in The Triumph of Love, Hill's relation to language has undergone a cruel, ironic change. And it is again to Ben Jonson that we might go to reveal that change since, in Volpone and in the figure of Corbaccio, the ever linguistically attentive Jonson exposes the vicious yet rich linguistic comedy of deafness:
MOS[ca]: Your worship is a precious asse --Deafness, for Jonson, is the archetypal sick joke.
CORB[accio]: What say'st thou?
MOS: I doe desire your worship, to make haste, sir.
CORB. 'Tis done, 'tis done, I goe.
The Triumph of Love is hard of hearing. Undeniably eloquent ("You can say you are deaf in several languages --"), it insists on a difficult relation to its own time ("For definitely the right era, read: deaf in the right ear.") and a difficult relation to its interlocutors:
-- Well as I hear I hear you but as IIt is a (non-)dialogue of the deaf, of the diversely deaf, for Hill's readers are as deaf as his speaker:
hear you you are in dumb-show. --
Excuse me -- excuse me -- I did notIf, amongst so much else, the later Beckett became the poet of old age and Parkinson's Disease (in the Hillianly-entitled Ill Seen, Ill Said, for example), then Hill has become the poet of ageing, of isolation and of encroaching deafness. In discussion of the writings of these two great figures of the second part of this century, we have no choice but to renew and realise, amongst other necessarily difficult terms, two of the tiredest of critical words: in part because of its precise imaginative realisation of what it means to be deaf, The Triumph of Love is a moving and beautiful work. But it also full of loud, insistent repetitions, abrupt buttonholings, staccato explosions, sudden exclamations and spluttered exasperations. Even the most hostile of readers must notice this poem's extraordinary energy, energy which serves anger and memory and refuses to "forget it".
say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in
the lifting. No -- please -- forget it.
The experience of the world as errata ("For Cinna the Poet, see under errata.") has a harshly, tragically satiric appositeness. Sean O'Brien notes that there are jokes in The Triumph of Love but jokes "from all of which Hill's normally punctilious timing is missing": yet notice the important "all" here -- not just hit-and-miss, but a thoroughgoing, conscious consistency of missing. In a poem which "well understands itself not well-disposed" and a poem which puts the normal in question, a poem a-roar with mishearings, mistakings and misplacings ("Where/ was I?"), mistimings are decorum. The jokes in The Triumph of Love are not bad; they are terrible, and terribly funny: "Who are you to say I sound funny." --
In loco parentis -- devouredSo many hideous mistakings are part of a strategy which allows Hill, unlike so many, to expose and to resist a hideous world, albeit a world in which Hill knows himself to be as fully implicated as the rest of us.
by mad dad. Hideous -- hideous -- and many like it --
"A hideous world?" Is not that to overstate matters, particularly in relation to what might be mistaken locally for a mere conservative grumble about the decline of Latin into "Latin/ Through Pictures"? So far I have shared in the emphasis of reviewers to the effect that The Triumph of Love is primarily about Geoffrey Hill; and certainly this collection is highly self-conscious in its own right and in relation to Hill's own earlier works. However, self-consciousness in Hill is never an end in itself, but always part of an effort to address something beyond the poet. The problem is rather that the reviewers seem to be bored by the matter that Hill is addressing. In particular, the TLS reviewer can barely stifle a yawn in encountering what he describes as "Hill as cicerone to the Holocaust, pointing out a particularly grisly scene" and he argues that horror in Hill is aestheticised:
This danger is most evident when Hill rails against the Holocaust, which appears throughout the poem as the high crime of the century, the final proof of contemporary wickedness. Obviously, the subject is one about which all decent people, certainly all his potential readers, agree; Hill will find no one to dispute that it is a hideous blot on human history. But just for that reason, to try to make one's own condemnation of it louder and more sincere than everyone else's, to treat it as in some sense a personal affront, does not drive home its evil with greater force. Instead, it deflects attention from the crime to the judge, and demands admiration for his moral sensitivities.One wonders if the tone of decent reasonableness in the above is dependent on a necessary inattention. A familiarity with Hill's own writing exposes the inertia of the language here: "a particularly grisly scene...appears...Obviously...all decent people...certainly...a hideous blot...just for that reason...". But, in support of the argument, TLS readers were offered partial quotation of the twentieth poem in The Triumph of Love, given here in full:
From the Book of Daniel, am I correct?This is poetry of a difficulty which no reviewer can fully address. It is true that there is loud coarseness and aggression here, uncharacteristic of Hill's earlier verse addressing the Holocaust, but it is to miss the point to take the poem straight, to assume that Hill is speaking or "railing" simply and sincerely in his own voice. Nevertheless, of those who habitually lament the lack of human warmth in Hill one must coarsely ask: is this warm enough for you? And of those for whom Hill describes an England in which no one lives, one must ask: is this what you intend by a land devoid of human life?
Quite correct, sir. Permit me:
refocus that Jew -- yes there,
that one. You see him burning,
dropping feet first, in a composed manner,
still in suspension,
from the housetop.
It will take him for ever
caught at this instant
of world-exposure.
In close-up he maintains appearance --
Semitic ur-Engel -
terminal agony none the less
interminable, the young
martyrs ageing in the fire --
thank you, Hauptmann -- Schauspieler? --
Run it through again and for ever
he stretches his wings of flame
upon instruction.
This poem concerns a "particular...scene" in more senses than the TLS reviewer recognises. Hill's 'September Song' from King Log, scrupulous in its insistence on the anonymity of its Holocaust victim, on the vast plurality of such victims, and on the routine, unexceptional nature of the Holocaust, should have taught us that any claim to sum up the Holocaust in one "particularly grisly scene" is suspect. (Compare Schindler's Ark or Schindler's List, which, shaped by a narrative which traces the survivors and leaves the dead behind, is false to the history it offers to depict.) Any attentive reader must wonder why the voice is so intent on "that Jew -- yes there,/ that one". How is one to assess degrees of the grisly in a context where, as Hill repeatedly reminds us, the very notion of proportion is put in question? The twentieth poem of The Triumph of Love is suspicious of itself, and must be read in sequence as the preceding poem ("You will have to/ go forward block by block, for pity's sake,/ irresolute as granite. Now/ move to the next section.") and the one which comes after ("What did I miss?", "Should I leave it like this?") both make clear. This poem also relates to Poem LXXXV, in which Hill remembers the "Photo-negatives" of his seventh year and "stills of the burning ghetto"; and to LXXX:
Hopelessly-lost storyteller found.
Self-styled czar of ultimate
disaster movies says
everything must go. Daniel
a closed book.
The "abstruse allusions" in the twentieth poem matter -- even if this reader is as yet unable to grasp their full significance. The Book of Daniel which introduces the scene of this poem bears, with, for example, its "fiery furnace", a complex, multi-faceted relation to it, and to the collection as a whole. Moreover, the voice in this twentieth poem seems to be addressing an actor, a Schauspieler, (a "showteller") or Hauptmann. This, I presume, is Gerhart Hauptmann (1862-1946), the German playwright, poet and novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1912. The creator of naturalistic drama, he wrote starkly realistic tragedy which shocked audiences. In the words of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, he aimed to create an "artistically reproduced social reality". In later years, he showed himself privately hostile to the Nazis, who barely tolerated him, yet he stayed in Germany to be denounced by émigrés. Thus an awareness of the naivety of naturalism and of the compromised nature of any art in attempting to treat the Holocaust is present in this poem in a more complex manner than reviewers can manage. Art is never more suspect than when it claims to be loud and direct.
But it is the language of film and photography which is so noticeable in the poem, to a degree that makes it surprising that any reader could mistake the poem as an effort simply and directly to reproduce reality: "refocus", "in a composed manner", "still", "this instant/ of world-exposure", "close-up", "maintains appearance", "Run it through again". The poem voices the peremptory directness of the movie maker, but the poem itself is a work of marked and heavily ironic indirection, as words seek to reach though the cinematic distortion of the visual to an unassimilable reality. And if this "documentary" film is silent, then, in being deaf to "so many routine cries", the falsification is all the greater. We are told of a film of obscenity, but we are also alerted to the potential obscenity of film. In this difficult poem, the analogy with present day czars of disaster movies is sadly all too plain.
The Triumph of Love might be read as an elegy for a verbal culture, at a time when we embrace, all too glibly, the authenticity of the visual. Hill's great and awful subjects in The Triumph of Love -- two World Wars and the Holocaust that was part of one of them -- have become merely cinematic clichés. We have saved Private Ryan and compiled Schindler's List; the Holocaust is now Hollywood. In a remarkably short time, matters once held to be well-nigh unspeakable have been assimilated and left behind, a closed book. It is this incredible change, a change in the "potential readers" of Hill's verse, which goes some way to explaining Hill's increased anger, his raising of his voice. But how is such a change to be justified?
Notes
1. Ben Jonson, ed. C.H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn
Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925-1952) 8: 625 and 593.
2. Ben Jonson 5: 39-40.
(from issue 13)
Why?
Carol Ann Duffy: The Pamphlet. London: Anvil Press Poetry, £5.00.
Twelve poems -- one, admittedly, a five section sequence; all right, call it sixteen poems. There is no obvious connection between them; they are billed on the front cover as "an interim selection of new and uncollected work including poems written since her award-winning collection Mean Time (1993), poems from The World's Wife and poems for children". My first question on reading this description was "why?" and having read the poems, it still is.
There might be various reasons to publish a slim volume of sixteen poems on their own rather than waiting till one has enough for a full scale book. They might be topical, and need to come out while that's still so. Or they might be a sequence, which the author feels should stand alone. Or they might be so extraordinarily seminal, exciting and wonderful that no one would want to wait for them.
None of these being the case, we need another explanation, and the only one I can think of is a bit worrying. It is some time since 1993, and we might reasonably have expected a whole new collection. But the word "interim" suggests that this might still be a while coming. Is it simply that she isn't feeling inspired to write much (or is too busy doing other things like judging poetry competitions); that Anvil too are conscious something is due out and have cobbled together what little there is? If this is all she has written lately, it isn't much; if the word "selection" implies that it's the best of what she has written lately, there is still more cause for concern, because frankly by her standards not much of it is memorable.
'Standing Stone', commissioned for the opening of the Museum of Scotland, is more memorable than anything else in it. Its technique of linking artefacts to their imagined owners, who are then also linked to each other via coincidences, images and verbal echoes, creates what she is after, a sense of diversity and continuity which adds up to a people's history. And its final section evokes quite successfully the feeling of kinship and love that tends to sweep over you when looking at the odds and ends of the long departed:
This is Betty Plenderloath's sampler,
Unto No Image Bow Thy Knee.
Here's a pound from the Union Bank of Scotland,
to fill six stockings on Christmas Eve.
Here's a thumbscrew, a heart brooch, a hair ring,
to torture, to charm, to mourn the deid.
Here's an ivory chessman from Lewis,
just who was in check as the seagulls jeered?
Things then go rather rapidly downhill with 'Three Swift Poems'. 'Swift' presumably refers not to Jonathan but to the circumstances of their composition, which I can believe; they look as if they took about five minutes each and the first, 'My Favourite Drink', is a pure waste of the reader's time. It needs quoting in full, because I doubt, otherwise, that anyone would credit just how trivial, shapeless and self indulgent it is:
My Favourite DrinkAnd the same to you, and why, as a reader, have I just wasted thirty seconds of my life? It's actually "Brains' Dark", by the way; nobody calls it Dark Brains, but I suppose it's petty to quibble about that when one could be asking what on earth "remembering this/ in words not dissimilar to these" is meant to convey, or who wanted to know in such detail the location of the Red Dragon.
was in the Red Dragon
in Penderyn
near Hirwaun
in mid Glamorgan
where I ordered up
two halves
of Dark Brains
and took them out
to drink on the grass
alone
as a whopping apricot moon
bulged in the sky.
Remembering this
in words not dissimilar to these,
I count myself lucky indeed;
as I do
that you love me still
and the end of us both
is a good few years away yet.
Cheers.
Apart from 'Standing Stone', three other poems in this pamphlet, 'A Disbelief', 'Holloway Road' and 'To the Unknown Lover' engaged my attention and left me feeling I hadn't been wasting my time reading them. The rest I don't care if I never see again. 'Mrs Faust' and 'Mrs Icarus' fall into a category I am beginning to think has been done too often. The first is at least a serious attempt to gain a different perspective, but I could see the end coming a mile off:
the clever, cunning, callous bastardThis is 'Mrs Icarus' in full:
didn't have a soul to sell.
I'm not the first or the lastThat isn't even vaguely funny, because the "hillock" is so extraneous to the poem that it is obvious it's been introduced purely for the rhyme. Eric Morecambe used the word far more credibly and inventively with his ode to the cow:
to stand on a hillock,
watching the man she married
prove to the world
he's a total, utter, absolute Grade A pillock.
The cow roams over field and hillock,
Turning green grass into white millock.
I'm not sure which poems in this were written for children, but I suspect 'The Invention of Rain' may be one. If so, I think she is on the wrong track; most children I know like their myths far more powerful and less soppy than this:
Rain first came
when the woman whose lovely face
was the sky
cried.
Wet, in all senses.
I have liked a lot of Duffy's work, and I found this "interim collection" a fearful disappointment. I just hope something happens to kick-start her work again soon.
(from issue 13)
The Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost
Ciaran Carson: The Alexandrine Plan [Versions of sonnets by Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, with French originals on facing pages]. Dublin: Gallery Press, £7.95.
There's a parlour game played by mathematicians where the object is to name the technical term most like the title of a thriller: Bianchi's Second Identity, say, or The Fredholm Alternative. By Plan, Ciaran Carson may allude only to marked-out space -- of an allotment perhaps, eight rows of cabbages, six of runner beans. There again, he may not: the Alexandrine, the twelve-syllable line, so pervades French prosody that a conspiracy seems almost plausible. From early medieval Alexander romances (hence the name), it held sway in drama and verse of all kinds for most of the millennium. In 1800, to decline to use it could still seem a statement of repudiation, but by 1900 the supremacy had ended, and somewhere in between are the roots of French modernity. Here also are Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé, appealed to as "origins" of one movement or another for decades after their deaths and even (in Mallarmé's case) today -- posthumously contemporary, as Tennyson and Browning never have been. Baudelaire, the Father, principal works written 1840-60, painter of a damned city; Rimbaud, the Son, 1870-75, an apocalypse of adolescent disruption; Mallarmé, the Holy Ghost, 1865-97, whose locked-off worlds of artistry coloured the century to come.
The classical alexandrine is shored up by a number of rules, which were each undermined, rather as a bridge might be demolished. For instance, twelve syllables is more than an earful, so at least one pause is essential. But the unwearying halving of lines into 6/6 could stultify content as well as manner, much as the English heroic couplet could, and by 1850 poets were experimenting with 4/8, 8/4 and 4/4/4. If that seems a pretty tentative sort of rebellion, consider where it ended: in 1897, Mallarmé's astonishing masterpiece Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard is made up of "lines" (areas, really) like so:
Even in regular verse, Mallarmé is more free than Rimbaud, who is more free than Baudelaire; and in their rhetorical moods, long runs of quatrains -- a Romantic staple -- are increasingly supplanted by extraordinary prose poems. But like the Whig version of history, to regard poetry as a steady progress towards modernism is a prejudice. One might equally say that with greater fluidity and enjambement fraying at the edges and divisions of lines, yet with stanza form and vertical layout still unquestioned, the mid-19th century was a golden age for the sonnet. Any short enough poem stood a good chance of being one.
COMME SI Une insinuation simple au silence enroulée avec ironie ou le mystère
Like mustards, sonnets divide first by nationality. The French version opens with two quatrains abba abba or abba cddc followed by two tercets carrying three rhymes (e.g. eef ggf or efg efg) and if it lacks the pungency of the English sonnet's closing couplet it more than makes up in flavour and variety of its concluding moods. The first eight and last six lines can be launch-pad and flight, or establishing-shot and close-up, or the writer can just soldier on. There is plenty of room: where a Shakespearean sonnet offers 140 syllables, a French one of alexandrines has 168. For all this extra space, French sonnet "sequences" sometimes shift to quatrains or five-lined stanzas for discursive passages or summings-up. Baudelaire uses adjacent sonnets to oppose and parallel each other, like matched pairs of duelling pistols; Les Fleurs du Mal surely has some architecture of arrangement; but he doesn't knock together a terraced row of sonnets to house one long argument, as his English contemporaries might (cf. Sonnets from the Portuguese, 1850, or Modern Love, 1862). The sonnets of Rimbaud and Mallarmé are generally isolated works, too, anecdotal or exemplary.
Carson has chosen for clarity over obscurity, easiness over puzzle. Mallarmé's more exhausting epiphanies are passed over. The selection from Rimbaud favours the "road" poems, the memoirs of the teenager who ran off to Paris: not linguistic fireworks, nor mysticism. Carson faintly hints, perhaps, at a connection between the socially slumbering patriotism of France in 1870 and Ireland today, as in 'The Green Bar':
Pleased as Punch, I stretched my legs beneath the shamrockLong lines are seldom so speakable as Carson's, though inevitably there are staccato moments. The idiom belongs to the present-day, but these are, after all, "versions", and with creditable honesty the book cites the translations used as cribs. What, then, does Carson use the freedom of the "version" for? Not to alter the shape: the sonnet form and rhyme schemes are preserved. It is the text which is fair game.
Table. I admired the tacky '50s décor.
Then this vacant waitress in a tit-enhancing frock
Came on and wiggled up to me, her eyes galore
A mildly tiresome adulteration of self-references casually implies a stronger unity for the book than it really possesses -- Carson has both Mallarmé and Baudelaire describe themselves as "sonneteer", as though they might have welcomed being represented only by sonnets, in a book like this: in the first case on the strength of "le sonneur" (literally "bell-ringer"), in the second case from no source at all. He has the grandiose "my alexandrine plan" where Baudelaire wrote only the self-deprecating "lignes", not even the more usual poetic term "vers".
Our versioneer is more engaging when his final flourishes improve on original endings, furnishing quotable last lines: an "improvement", that is, to English tastes. In 'O Happy Death', the worms
Delve and seethe and eel into my ruined corpus;Baudelaire's original conclusion to 'Le Mort joyeux' ("The Happy Dead Man") is more diffuse, French rather than English mustard, and the last line refers to torture:
Tell me all the tortures I must re-enact.
Then consult me under "death" in your thesaurus.
Pour ce vieux corps sans âme et mort parmi les morts!Carson's version throws out the tricky bit about souls -- "c'est un corps sans âme" can be used figuratively of the living, to imply "he has no soul" -- and replaces the blandness of "a dead man among the dead" with something more memorable though, of course, altogether different. Elsewhere this book is more faithful, and it transmits much of the authentic Baudelaire style -- a cloyingly sweet, repellently decayed, hypnotic sublimity, like over-strong jasmine tea laced with something you distrust. Especially good are the versions of 'La Géante', the most open of Baudelaire's half-sexual fantasies about giant maternal women; and of 'Correspondances', one of the master's few stand-alone masterpieces:
Like blue extended husky echoes from awayThis is an enjoyable short book, and not a bad introduction to the French 19th-century sonnet. As such, Peter Jay's excellent translation of Gérard de Nerval's 1854 sequence Les Chimères (Anvil, 1984) would make a useful supplement.
Far off, which cloud together in the inner or
The outer space of constellations in a mirror,
Shimmery perfumes, colours, sounds, all shift and sway.
(from issue 14)
In 1949, the Fellows of the U.S. Library of Congress awarded the Bollingen Prize in poetry to Ezra Pound's Pisan Cantos. Pound had been declared insane and confined to St. Elizabeth's mental hospital in 1945 in order to avoid his facing the death penalty for treason. Anti-modernist poet and critic Robert Hillyer attacked the award as immoral, given Pound's pro-fascist past; a variety of American poets and critics responded. Asked for an essay on Pound and the Bollingen Prize, Randall Jarrell began, but never finished, an essay he called 'The Pound Affair'.
Probably slightly later, in 1950, Jarrell began a larger essay, tentatively called 'Notes on Pound', which never progressed beyond the stage of outlines and sentences in notebooks. Jarrell had conceived that essay as a review of Pound's 1949 Selected Poems, and as a response to recent essays on Pound by Eliot, R.P. Blackmur and John Berryman, who in Jarrell's view "overestimate [Pound's] poetry: potentially he seems quite as good as they say, but actually he rarely is". Other notes concern Pound's overlooked and substantial, in Jarrell's view, debts to Heine, and the origins of Pound's allusive prose style. Parts of 'Notes on Pound' (but not of 'The Pound Affair') made it into Jarrell's later reviews and essays concerning Pound, notably in his 1962 'Fifty Years of American Poetry'. Jarrell's other admiring and critical views on Pound may be found in his reviews of successive volumes of The Cantos, collected in Kipling, Auden & Co. (1980) and excerpted in No Other Book (1999).
Presented here is Jarrell's last draft of 'The Pound Affair', along with paragraphs from notebooks and earlier drafts that seem both relatively finished and clearly intended for 'Notes on Pound' or 'The Pound Affair'. All that remains of 'The Pound Affair', along with 'Notes on Pound', can be found in Jarrell's notebooks and papers at the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.
My thanks to the Berg Collection for their assistance, and to Mary von S. Jarrell for allowing this material to be published.
The Pound affair has been, as a whole, a terrible parody of He that is without sin among you - a parody in which Christ's hearers end by seriously and righteously throwing stones upon the guilty woman. Even to somebody who thought Pound's politics crazy, his poetry must have seemed tempered by occasional flashes of charm and genius. (Contrast Secretary Acheson's statement about Hiss, which evoked so much anger, respect and astonishment simply because it was a personal moral statement - people expected expediency or cant - and went against this mechanical age's tion that public affairs are necessarily of a different order of importance from private ones.) Most people felt so extraordinary an interest in Pound's case because here at last was an aesthetic question, a matter of art, from which the art could be almost wholly excluded, leaving nothing but politics and public morality. Our time has been neither widely nor deeply interested in art - it preferred works of art secondhand, in criticism, and told the artist that he was saved or damned, truly employed, only as he belonged to a party, a church, or the Parents-Teachers' Association - but it has been obsessively interested in politics and in the sort of public morality which consists mainly of unfavorable judgements about other people's political statements. If Pound had murdered his wife and son, cheated his friends of their savings, repudiated every moral or aesthetic principle he possessed, and then been executed by the Italian government for his part in a conspiracy against Mussolini, he would now be remembered as an anti-Fascist martyr whose life had been blemished by certain personal failings. And he would still be, from time to time, the subject of violent attacks by [right-wing newspaper columnist] W[estbrook] Pegler and Senator McCarthy. Our time said: Tell me a man's politics and I will tell you what he is; which is another way of saying I have no interest in what he is - this Man of yours is a hypothesis I have no need for. "Politics is death," said Nijinsky - who was insane; "Politics is destiny," said Napoleon to Goethe, and his statement has been admiringly repeated every since, to end in Mann's monumental-statuary paraphrase: "In our time the destiny of man finds its expression in political terms." What a destiny! what an expression! For the artist, for a "private man" - and in what matters most to us we are necessarily private men - Napoleon's statement is more insane than Nijinsky's; and today who has not begun to see in Nijinsky's words a certain elementary empirical truth?
Is it true that some of the worst people in the world vote with us, some of the best against us, no matter how we vote? That man does not live by virtuous indignation alone? That men themselves are more important than the systems which gather around their heads like clouds, and are dispersed like clouds? How few of us can say! These are truisms which it has seemed almost the profession of the living - those engaged artists - to ignore. Many people nowadays, in their bare mean fervent world of politics and its continuation, war, have been forced into so marginal an existence that they have only a few times in their lives been able consciously to afford the concessions, the absurdities, the irrelevancies, the saving graces, the incnspicuous waste, unfunctional ornament - the paying too much and asking too little - without which man is a poor forked animal. One goes from their suburbs of raw brick boxes, "where a roof itself cannot afford to jut out an inch over the wall it covers," to the shady sooty streets of the past, to the big frame houses with their eaves and porches and dormers, all that excess the spirit inhabits - and one feels, with sorrow and terror, that along with these things went some ease and grace, disinterestedness and generosity and goodnatured indifference, for which there is no longer room in the houses our time can afford.
[What follow are complete paragraphs from notebooks drafts of 'The Pound Affair' and 'Notes on Pound'. In the notebook they are interspersed with more fragmentary material, and with sentences and notes about specific poems: this was Jarrell's usual way of writing an essay - as he got closer to publication he would untangle and rearrange the sentences and paragraphs he wanted.]
The virtuous left, top, good half of our time said to each of us: "You have one responsibility, the world. You must remember to treat each end - wherever it is possible or expedient, that is - except your own; your own life is a means by which those other lives, present or future, can be changed for the better - when you yourself have become nothing but a means, a means to that end, you will no longer need to feel to such a degree, the guilt which you feel, and are right to feel, at present."
None of us need to read about the period of the religious wars; we have lived through those ourselves. Many people nowadays in the midst of our world of politics and its continuation by other means, war, manage not to believe some of the things that everybody believed, or was supposed to believe; to live as if their own lives, too, were ends, not means; to be an inhabitant not simply of the little Manhattan Island of the present, but went back to the past not for the lace and the castles, but for the extravagance of an age which had not yet become our Age of Iron, when people could afford to do things which had no immediate relevance whatsoever.
One goes from this Manhattan Island of the present, everything carried to an extreme, lifeless extravagance never extravagance of leaves and flowers or unconsidered joy, with hysterical fanaticism - one goes back to the continents of the past not for the saints and the castles, but for the generosity and humanity that can flower from the common assumption that there are certain things which no one would find it possible to do, certain things which no one would ever find it possible not to do[.] Their poets often supported their feelings, and were disregarded when they did not; these people had not found, as we have, that all these beliefs are superfluities which a functional society or art or thought (will/can) eliminate; that the world can go on - or, at least, end - perfectly well without them.
One of the American's inalienable rights, one has to suppose, is saying anything at all that occurs to him about Ezra Pound. This new Selected Poems of his is a sort of index for a body of work, a question of culture (which it would be incongruous to write an ordinary review of); the book requires one to say a good many things, and a good many sorts of things, or else nothing.
[I] once heard somebody over radio say we must make this the Centu of the Educated Common Man. Pound always wanted passionately (1) to educate him by making him read and admire many things (almost all, naturally, in other times and other languages); (2) to indict him and his society for never having heard of it, for not being able to read and admire; (3) to look up to Pound [as a] great scholar for knowing, reading, admiring, and [the] fact that Pound was not a great scholar made this even more imp[ortant] to him; (4) to wink genially and knowingly, to band together loftily with his "own kind who mate upon the crag." So this gave him tone of (1) missionary urgency and zeal, (2) of prophetic denunciation, (3) of endless reference, quoting in original scholarly (4) of witty supercilious allusion and superiority, and his great motto was[:] refer to cryptically, or if not that, translate in so mannered a way that only somebody who already knows the original can really get the translation, or if not that (but it rarely came to this point).
If in Pound's political life, in his obsessions with politics, he was foolish and immoral, in rest of his life he was not tho' he was often exaggerated and absurd; about as objective meo, but generous, brave, reckless, sincere, indefatigable in efforts for everything he thought good - had so much influence on poets that knew him precisely because they knew it was not an envious competitor of theirs speaking, but somebody so eager for well-being of Poetry that he was delighted in the [well-being] of the poet - exact opposite of one of my favorite living poets, whom I once heard speak of Shelley's running around with other men's wives in order, in his jealousy, to discredit Shelley with that audience.
If you ever meet Pound there's something sympathetic and appealing, a gentleness and delicacy, under all fireworks, so you can see how Yeats, Eliot and all the rest were able to be affected by him as they were. [He c]omes off worst if we take a Buddhist attitude, and count ignorant mistakes as sin; he was too much of an enthusiast, too little able to reason or get the distance from a thing that objectivity requires, ever to be correct about many things outside of poetry. Perpetual revolutionist; and if he took all his examples of what he wanted from the past, if he said it was the past his revolution was returning, would return us to, surely no one is so foolish as to believe there was ever any past like that; those highly selected jewels of interest seen through a glass brightly - through one of the brightest of all glasses, Ezra Pound.
It seems to have gone unnoticed in the UK that in spring 1997 Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia bought, for an undisclosed sum, the entire collection of Ted Hughes's papers - all 2.5 tons of manuscripts, notebooks and letters. The 86 boxes containing the definitive archive of the poet were expected to take two years to catalogue, Stephen Enniss, Curator of Literary Collections told me at the time, but processing is still ongoing. "Some portions of the collection can be made available to scholars now", Steve told me recently.
The news of this acquisition broke as I was about to return to Bretton Hall College after a semester teaching at Lenoir-Rhyne College in North Carolina. So fellow Hughes scholar at L-R, Rand Brandes, suggested we drive to Atlanta to get a sense of what this archive contained. Steve Enniss had very kindly offered to display a sample of the material for us to see.
After four and a half hours on the road I was in the Woodruff Library at Emory handling a scrapbook in which Sylvia Plath had pasted documents of her husband's first successes - telegrams from Faber and Faber accepting The Hawk in the Rain for publication forty years ago, a note of congratulations from T. S. Eliot, a receipt of the $63 payment for the first publication of the poem 'The Thought-Fox', the cover of the New Yorker in which it appeared.
There is also sad evidence of Plath's manic behaviour towards the end of their relationship. Some of the handwritten drafts of poems are burnt around the edges, relics presumably of the fire in which she tried to destroy Hughes's work. A typewritten manuscript page from her novel of mental breakdown, The Bell Jar, has been used on the reverse side for a handwritten poem by Hughes called 'Digging'. This is one of hundreds of unpublished poems here. It has been torn in two places and taped back together. In his inventory for the papers Hughes wrote, "Torn by S.P. and repaired".
The range of unseen material in this collection will keep Hughes scholars busy for years to come. There's an unpublished comic poem for the Queen Mother "about her dream". There are four pages of notes to the Arts Council about how tprove sales of poetry. There's a box full of material relating to Hughes's complaint to the Press Council about Ronald Hayman's biography of Plath and letters correcting other biographers. One Quinton Christopher, who was a six-year-old boy from St Bees Village School in 1969 when he sent a poem in to a competition judged by Hughes, might be amused to know that the reverse side of his pink paper was the first of four sheets used to plan one of the major poetic works of the twentieth century, Crow.
Some of the personal correspondence is closed for 25 years, but the letters between Hughes and Heaney "might be viewed 100 years from now", says Steve Enniss, "like the correspondence between Wordsworth and Coleridge". Professor of Modern English and Irish literature at Emory, Ronald Schuchard, says "it will help us hire new lecturers in the field who will have at their fingertips material that will launch their scholarly careers". The Hughes papers join those of the Irish poets Yeats, Longley, Muldoon. Emory also has a small collection from Seamus Heaney, although he has not yet made his complete collection of papers available.
So why did the Hughes collection go to America and not to Leeds or Sheffield uniities? The answer is quite simply that in 1979 Emory was given $105 million in Coca-Cola stock which has been used to build a collection of manuscripts from contemporary poets. When I entered Schuchard's office he was going through the catalogue of a London book dealer ticking his next purchases.
Hughes was quoted in an Atlanta newspaper as saying that his papers "could not be at a better place nor in more congenial company". But there may have been two further reasons why he was happy to have his papers in America. In the USA Hughes has, as the American Hughes scholar Len Scigaj put it, "been skewered by the American feminists as being the person who killed Sylvia Plath, and that is in no way accurate". Consequently, there has been little interest in his work there. Now it is clear that the future compilation of the Complete Poems and the Collected Letters will require much time spent in America. Everything is in place for a Hughes revival in American academia. Emory is planning to offer scholarships to fund the study of the Hughes collection as an extension of the two currently available for work on their Irish material.
Secondly, his reputation in the USA deprived him of the pot of gold that American universities have delivered to Seamus Heaney. This sale might have gone some way towards compensation for that. But the loss to Britain is sad. The fact is that British universities have been too aloof to seek the kind of private and corporate endowments that gave Emory its purchasing power. In a recent TLS article Ferdinand Mount indicated that money is available to purchase papers for the nation, but that either university libraries or authors are unaware of it. "In the case of the Hughes papers, for example," Mount writes, "the dealer involved had already been rebuffed by the Heritage Lottery Fund in his efforts to secure Alan Sillitoe's papers for Nottingham" (TLS 9.4.99). Mount suggests, however, that the sums available would not even have approached Emory's offer.
In 1996 Hughes's contemporary at Cambridge, Peter Redgrove, deposited his papers at Sheffield University where Neil Roberts teaches, the first person to write a monograph on Redgrove's work. This option was always open to Hughes, although he'd have taken a lot less ney. But were any British universities seriously interested in raising the money to keep this major twentieth-century archive in the UK? More recently Emory have added to their Hughes archive his letters to Lucas Myers from 1955 to 1968, and 400 manuscript drafts of poems from the late 1950s and early 1960s. All this later material was in private hands and thus not previously available for study. The result is that future Hughes scholars will be going to Atlanta and swallowing the power of Coca Cola. Certainly there could be no better place for their conservation, and future collections of Hughes material will now join the original 2.5 tons from Devon. It may be an advantage to scholars to have all the material in one place for the work that is to come.
Steve Enniss can be e-mailed at librse@emory.edu
This essay is about the teaching of poetry in schools. You may think you're not interested. Before you decide it is a dull subject in general, though, try this parlour game. Sit round with a group of friends and make a list of fifteen twentieth-century poems that children should have read bsixteen. Pass the lists round anonymously, and guess whose belong to whom, on grounds of politics, prudery, and sheer nostalgia. Then decide whose list is best, for youth and for the nation. If the Kiplingites seem likely to have a stand-up fight with the Plathites, remind them of the bit of 'If' about keeping their heads when all around are losing theirs.
Most people lose their heads about schools - their feelings are too personal, and lie too deep, to stay calm. The consequences, especially in politicians, can be strange indeed - consider John Major's masochistic quest to recreate the very grammar schools which failed him so miserably, or David Blunkett's current pounding of the primary teachers who patronised him forty years ago. Feelings about poetry in schools are doubly irrational, since many credit it with being the nation's soul, and even those who loathe it accord it a mystical, suspicious power. It is understandable, then, that in the ideological conflicts over the curriculum which have rocked schools in the last fifteen years, poetry should have been a favourite battleground: it was, for example, the proposal to teach Pope and Dryden to all fifteen-year-olds, irrespective of their basic literacy, which finally brought down the ghastly John Patten. What is less self-evident is how Ted Hughes, rather than Yeats, Eliot, Auden, or Larkin, should have triumphed in these battles to become, overwhelmingly, the twentieth-century poet whom today's pupils are most likely to study and write about (Adrian Mitchell and the Liverpool Poets are, of course, the poets most likely to be merely read and enjoyed).
Hughes's The Hawk in the Rain blew into schools with Kes and mixed-ability teaching, promulgated by a generation of radical young sixties and seventies teachers. They took the Alvarez line, and embraced Hughes as a poetic Alan Sillitoe or David Storey: a passionate, demotic alternative to fusty old Larkin. The Tory assaults of the 80s were designed to batter exactly these teachers, but, though the curriculum was endlessly reformed by Clarke, Baker, and Patten, though committees resigned, were reappointed, though English Literature emerged as a narrower, more tested and trammelled subject than it had ever been, Hughes retained his popularit popping up in every anthology, appearing in curriculum orders and exam questions. These were the days of Clause 28, the times when Daily Mail reporters were regularly sent out to "monster" teachers: Hughes's work was popular not least because it was perceived as ideology-free, since it was about nature, and hardly ever dealt explicitly with human sexuality or politics. In the cowed, rattled nineties, Hughes became more popular still, boosted by his increasing status in the literary world, the tainting of Larkin's and Eliot's biographies with un-PC discoveries, and the fact that even though Seamus Heaney is a Nobel Laureate, his work still requires teachers to explain Ireland. In many schools, Hughes now fills, with Wilfred Owen, an extremely large proportion of the very small space - fifteen poems are probably a generous estimate of poems actually written about - which the curriculum allows for twentieth-century poets.
To be specific: primary pupils will read at least The Iron Man and probably Meet my Folks! during Literacy Hour (Season Songs is less popular, strewn as it is with dead fluffy lambs). If they're lucky, they may go on to study some ms from the Hughes and Heaney edited The Rattle Bag during Years 7 and 8 (that's Senior 1 and 2 to anyone who left school before 1990). This will be followed with 'Hawk Roosting' in Year 9, complete with a classroom display of fascist-looking eagles, and a selection of animal poems in Years 10 or 11, illustrated or not, depending on the braininess of the pupils. Other poems studied at this time may well be taken from Hughes and Heaney's National Curriculum conforming volume, The Schoolbag. At A' level, Lupercal and Crow are popular set texts - Crow, in particular, is a frequent progenitor of black tee-shirt wearing and mounds of execrable teenage verse - while essays comparing 'The Thought-Fox' with Heaney's 'Digging' are so frequently set that you can download dozens from the internet. Even students studying the anorexic's friend, Sylvia Plath, will probably be doing so out of Hughes's Selected. Hughes has, in effect, been nationalised.
It is a strange position for a poet such as Hughes to occupy. He is no Pope, eager to set down rules of human behaviour, no Kipling, making national myths and seeking to speak in the voice of the common man - no Larkin, even, reflecting on the encroaching cities, on work, secularism and disappointment. Hughes' poetry has ploughed one furrow only: his verse presents the Other, the animal, the savage, to civilised man. Almost by definition, it must be read in opposition to other literature. 'The Thought-Fox' is not a metaphor for thought, it is a momentary flash of itself - "A sudden sharp stink of fox" - which cannot be contained long - between two ticks of the clock only - on the printed page. It certainly cannot stay long enough to develop a metaphysical argument, or to point a moral, or to be a national anthem.
Why, then, are we as a nation so anxious to expose the young to Hughes? Partly, I think, for fear of the younger generation and what we have done to them. The young are another country, even those only fifteen or twenty years younger than us. Today's teenagers, even the minority who live in our increasingly crowded countryside, have grown up in a world incomprehensibly warmer, less textured, more sexualised, more secularised, more crowded with consumer labels, computeres and video images than the world of our own childhood. They have run less, are fatter, and have encountered far fewer animals. Those animals they do see are mostly domestic pets, which appear, relentlessly anthropomorphised and subject to "rescue" and operations, on all channels. The effects can be extraordinary. Where I most recently taught, in outer London, I found myself uprooting daffodils from my garden to illustrate Herbert's 'The Flower', because my students simply did not know what a bulb was. I kept a list of words of which they had never heard: Calvary, Eden, pagan, crimson...
Of course, faced with such a generation, we want them to read 'Pike', and confront them with "stilled legendary depth... deep as England". We long to treat sentimental Babe watchers to Hughes's 'View of a Pig' - "just so much/ poundage of lard and pork", or 'Furby' owners to 'Esther's Tomcat'. We want to change them with this confrontation with the Other, stir them up with the romantic sublime. That is exactly the problem. The sublime - someone else's sublime - can be extremely annoying.
Do you remember being taught Wordsworth's 'Daffodils'? As an adult, I appreciate the poem for its simplicity and grace. As a child, I simply thought the poem wasltingly smug and soppy, and that Wordsworth was a poof - dancing with the daffodils, indeed. I do not think I was alone in this - I recently taught 'Daffodils' on an "environment" themed paper for GCSE, and noted that its capacity to enrage was, if anything, enhanced in an audience who were not completely clear on the difference between a daffodil and a tulip.
Hughes and Wordsworth have more in common than simply being radical nature poets who settled down to be Poet Laureate. The structure of 'The Thought-Fox' for example, is startlingly similar to that of 'Daffodils': both open by showing us the poet in contemplation - Wordsworth wandering "lonely as a cloud", Hughes sitting at his desk; both are then surprised by a natural phenomenon which grows larger and nearer until it fills the eye - the daffodils out-do the waves, the fox comes across clearings until we see "widening deepening greenness" of its eyes; both poems end with a reminder of the poem's literariness - Hughes is back at his desk, Wordsworth on his couch; Hughes's "page is printed", Wordsworth reminds us that the daffodils are a memory, one he can call up at will. These endings enact the paradox of recording the romantic sublime - that it cannot, by definition, be contained in words, that only its shadow can enter the page. The poet's task, therefore, must be to use sensual details - the snow and the woods, or the hill and the daffodils - and the music of verse to make the reader's imagination into a "dark hole" for the fox to enter.
To make this journey, though, the reader must be able to imagine some of the sensual details, and here Hughes is almost as liable to lose a young reader as Wordsworth. Hughes's language has, of course, for the modern ear, far more vigour and ease than Wordsworth's, his observations are startlingly devoid of sentiment - but none of that matters if the reader has never experienced a lonely walk, or a high wind, or seen a lamb or a pike or even a scruffy tomcat, or if, like many teenagers, he is so focused on human emotions, such as desire or resentment of his parents, that the natural world seems, for the moment, an irritating adult fiction. When he is then expected to perceive the sublime within this landscape and, inevitably, fails, he is often made to feel nost stupid but lacking in soul. It is a worse experience than reading Herbert without a bulb on hand - for Herbert's flower is in the end a metaphor, part of an argument, not a flower in itself. You can disagree with it, but not fail at it.
This is not to say that poetry should be "relevant" in the dreary sense of mirroring the reader's life. Nor that teachers should not teach Hughes, or indeed, shouldn't make their pupils angry - as a teacher, I always made sure I did both. But if Hughes is the establishment - the nationalised poet - rather than an alternative voice to, for example Larkin, who approaches his sublime through advertisements, graffitti, and ambulances, then many pupils will leave school believing that poetry is concerned with experiences other than their own, and that they have failed at it. The vast majority, unlike, for example, the majority of Italians or Finns, will never read any literary poetry again.
Paradoxically, schools seem to be turning away from Hughes at the very moment when Hughes's literary reputation is undergoing a beatification. Armitage and Duffy are set this year for the first time on a GCSE syllabus, and will be studied by all fifteen-year-olds. The effort this entails for teachers will certainly mean that their work, and the work of other contemppoets, will trickle down into lower years. The Rattle Bag, Hughes's and Heaney's 1982 anthology, will probably always have a place in schools, since this tumultuous gathering of the ancient and modern, ballads and fragments, jokes and lyrics, the laconic and the tragic is certainly the finest anthology ever put together for a younger readers, and many adult readers' favourite anthology of all time. The School Bag, however, issued in 1997 to corner the market in the twenty-four dead good poets prescribed on the National Curriculum, is, though equally romantic in taste, a far more lumpen volume. Like so many nationalised industries, the Laureates forgot their customers: much of The School Bag consists either of hefty texts which schools already possess, such as 'Lycidas' and 'Letter to Dr Arbuthnot', but without the notes necessary to teach them, or texts which schools do not possess for the sound reason that very few children can, or ever will, understand them - Ezra Pound's 'Canto I', and Browning's 'Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came'. In many classrooms, it is quietly being shelved.
Now that we have Tales from Ovid, The Birthday Letters and innumerable plaudits and prizes for Hughes's work, though, they may be taken down again. The literary world seems, for once, to be following schools, creating an atmosphere of holiness around Hughes's work in which it is difficult even to say that his achievement was, by its nature, a narrow one. I do not think this new sort of nationalisation is useful to the enjoyment of Hughes's work - the thought-fox should be a flash of private delight, not compulsorily taught, nor stuffed and displayed in the Millennium Dome. I do wonder though, if the current enthusiasm has anything in common with our impulse to teach Hughes: an apparent escape from politics, gender, psychoanalysis and ourselves; a wish to relocate poetry and the sublime back where the Romantics put it, in a natural England, a world of textures, sounds and creatures which few of us have in fact experienced.
Neil Astley (ed.): New Blood. Newcastle: Bloodaxe, £9.95.
A friend, a mild fan, and scrupulous collector, of what is still sometimes called "stadium rock", once made me a tape of live examples. It now seems strangely definitive both of the genre and of its peak period, the Eighties, and perhaps that is because there are no songs on it. Instead, run together -- over a background of echoey whistles, gusts of applause and bursts of feedback -- are introductions to songs, bizarre verbal interludes from concerts by, amongst others, U2, Simple Minds and The Alarm. These "intros" range from the mostly harmless (Bono: If you want to say no to torture, if you want to say no to the false imprisonment of prisoners of conscience, sing: "no more"...) to the mostly gormless (Jim Kerr: It’s going to be one of those mad mad nights... just look at that moon!) to the entirely giftless (Mike Peters: I want to be one of you tonight! Can I be one of you tonight?). The tape might have been called Most Atrocious Rock Introductions In The World... Ever!
I was reminded of this quirky assemblage while reading Neil Astley’s introduction to his anthology New Blood in which he quotes Adrian Mitchell’s beguiling dictum: "Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people". Astley deploys this phrase as moral support for his popularising approach to poetry, a negative touchstone for a book which will probably seem as much of its period, the Nineties, as any stadium rock turn was of the Eighties. Astley ignores, if he is aware of it, Mitchell’s later admission that he deliberately placed the phrase at the beginning of a book so that critics would discuss the proposition rather than the poems it introduced. Significantly, we remember Mitchell’s "spin", but not the book it spun.
All the contributors in New Blood are doubly introduced, by a brief essay of their own (there is one exception) and by an even briefer, blurb-studded appreciation by Astley himself. It is from the latter kind that we learn Elizabeth Garret has "formal grace and sinewy intelligence" (Maura Dooley), that Gwyneth Lewis has "a tough, demanding intelligence" (Maura Dooley), and that Maggie Hannan’s poems "glitter with an intelligent, dark humour" (Maura Dooley). Happily enough Maura Dooley is introduced as having a "sharp and forceful intelligence" (Helen Dunmore). Less is more, Maura less. New Blood is such a family affair, a "house for life" according to Astley, that one feels one has stumbled, cold and sober, on a stranger’s wedding reception, where everyone has long since become embarrassingly intimate.
But it’s when the poets introduce themselves that the fun really starts (there’s more than enough rope in 300 words). From the mainly harmless: "When I become absorbed in working on a poem I feel it physically -- a prickling sensation on my skin, a warm tightness in my belly, a sort of arousal..." (Linda France); to the mainly gormless: "The idea of the poetic persona is attractive to me. I am prolific and protean: qualities which have their drawbacks" (Roddy Lumsden); to the entirely giftless: "To me Ruskin is sexy. He was born old and it’s all happening without him. But his head is another planet, mysterious and full of wizardry. He finds the deep peace that is being not doing. Sex has to end sometime. Neither a rock nor a woman can be dissected for their soul. Water can fall upwards" (Deborah Randall). Discuss.
Sixty years ago, Geoffrey Grigson brought out one of the most focused and durable poetry anthologies, New Verse. Drawing on contributions from his magazine of the same name, it included many of the great and good poets of the 30s, from Auden to Allott, from MacNeice to Madge. In his quirky, prickly and instructively sceptical introduction Grigson was prepared to be critical of his contributors, and (can you imagine?) even to make fun of them. Bearing in mind the sport New Verse had with the "old Jane" (Edith Sitwell), what would Grigson make of Pauline Stainer, or of Astley’s description of her as "a latter-day English mystic"? Stainer, whom we can almost see dancing by the Aegean in a toga with H.D., writes an introduction which is in a league of pottiness all its own: "My poems are full of journeys made and unmade... I am drawn to luminous horizons... I made a journey to the salt edge of things. Like Keats after reading Lear I hear the sound of the sea constantly".
Perhaps it seems unfair to talk so much about commentaries and commentators rather than the poems commented on. But if this anthology is important it is for what it says about the promotion of poetry -- for belonging as much to media culture as to literary history. This point is well illustrated by how self-conscious some of the poets are on the subject, even when they attempt a defensive satrire as in Brendan Cleary’s The New Rock n’ Roll’ (where he points out a poet is not a rock star):
& we never held our lighters up, grinning near the endSimilarly, W.N. Herbert, with the New Generation promotion in mind, writes about himself writing about himself as a New Man who changes nappies: "Sensitive male minus labour pains equals poem". Like the language the jokes are flat. What sets out to be a satire of media culture ends up as another of its many satellites. What else could compel Don Paterson to write, "These poems clearly compelled themselves to be written" (about Tracey Herd’s work). What other than a lazy promotional culture? Since Paterson’s words don’t even make metaphorical sense (how can anything compel itself to be written?) the only sense we can make of it is as part of a promotional continuum (this film demands to be seen), a sign flashing up automatically when automatically triggered.
when he kicked into his sonnets like anthems...
The kind of poetry you write arises from what you think poetry is -- if you think like Marianne Moore that a poem is an imaginary garden with real toads in it, or, like Ian Duhig, that a poet is an exiler of toads, you will write accordingly. If you think poetry is about transmitting signals of belonging (can I be one of you tonight?), you will write like many of the contributors here. And you will write poems which are easy for a pull-out supplement to categorise, poems easily spun, like the ubiquitous New Lad poem, or the ubiquitous Cosmic Woman poem. While the former usually involves allusions to football and rock music (Geoff Hattersley’s title Frank O’Hara Five, Geoffrey Chaucer Nil’ says it all), the latter is usually a narcissistic, sub-Plath cocktail of blood, moon and Universal Rhythms like Ann Sansom’s The World is Everything’:
Where I come from the language is water,Certain poets here do rise above the rest; there are correct, solid poems from Julia Copus, Nick Drake, Maggie Hannan, John Kinsella, Stephen Knight, and Katrina Porteous. But one writer who shows up almost all the others is Ian Duhig. He has in abundance what some of the others lack altogether: personality. His is the anthology’s one classic poem, From the Irish’, and his too are most of the anthology’s very good poems. It’s a pity that Duhig is incorrigibly slapdash -- but he is always interesting (most people are not interested in most poetry because most poetry is not interesting). An original who writes, more than an original writer, either he doesn’t belong in this book or he’s one of the few who do, there being much to exile from this imaginary Guardian with real toadies in it.
the essential beat of a line is tidal,
a sweep of blood to the heart
before the slow boom of a mother’s voice.
(from issue 15)
"After thirty Falls I rush back to the haunts of Yeats/ & others", Berryman wrote in Dream Song 281 (The Following Gulls’), remembering his first trip to Dublin in 1937. A little after seven in the morning on the third of April 1937, "fifteen minutes after a most uncomfortable and entirely sleepless night on the Liverpool boat", in a letter not included in Richard J. Kelly’s invaluable We Dream of Honour (1988), Berryman wrote to his mother from the Phoenix Park Hotel in Kingsbridge, "I’m determined that Dublin shall be fascinating and I shall set out about time to prove it". By the time he left Dublin after his return visit in 1966 Berryman certainly had put the Irish capital at the centre of his protagonist Henry’s (precarious) free state, where the "majestic Shade" of Yeats presided as a ghostly chief magistrate. But did he really rush back to Dublin and "the haunts of Yeats"? Three years prior to his 1966 transatlantic trip Berryman was altogether uncertain about the suitability of Dublin for a year’s sabbatical leave from his teaching duties as Professor of Humanities at the University of Minnesota. Among the "BAD" things about Dublin as a possible location for the trip he had been planning as early as 1963, according to entries in one of his diaries for that year, was the fact that there was "no Sh.[akespeare collection]" of any significance there. Money was an important consideration too. Given the (previously unpublished) evidence from his 1963 diary, one realises that Berryman finally decided to spend the year in Dublin not because he wanted to "have it out" with Yeats, as he would write in Dream Song 312 ("I have moved to Dublin to have it out with you,/ majestic Shade"); rather, Dublin was "CHEAP; English spoken, [and it was] n[ea]r London & [the] continent".
Proximity to London was important for a number of reasons but primarily because it was still, as far as Berryman was concerned, the centre of contemporary poetry it had been when he lived in Cambridge as a visiting Kellett Scholar thirty years earlier. Regarding the contemporary Irish scene, of which John Montague was a rising star, Berryman wondered on the same page of his diary, "[a]re there any Irish poets of interest?" Three years later, having arrived in Ireland in the same year that Montague published the first section of The Rough Field as a Dolmen chapbook, Berryman remained largely indifferent to and unimpressed by the local talent. As he put it in one unfinished and until now unpublished Dream Song fragment written while he was living in Dublin (which is prefaced in the MS by the remark, "In 10 min. you present yr. life’s work. OK. Ugh"):
All these poets! Holy God!Fragments of poems such as this, selected from the thirty-six linear feet of papers that constitute Berryman’s vast manuscript collection in the University of Minnesota, offer an extremely valuable insight into Berryman’s life and work and, moreover, new perspectives on some particularly important periods of his tragically shortened career, such as his trip to Dublin in 1966-7.
Many are drunk & some are odd.
What am I myself here doing
when I could be off & doing?
"What am I myself here doing/ when I could be off & doing?" It is perhaps surprising that John Haffenden, in his otherwise scrupulously well-researched biography of Berryman first published in 1982, did not delve a little deeper into the manuscript material, especially where his account of Berryman’s time in Dublin in 1966-7 is concerned. Relying rather too much on John Montague’s problematic account (he quotes several large chunks), Haffenden’s biography devotes far too little space to what was arguably the most important period of Berryman’s career, when he was trying to finish his long poem of a decade’s labour, The Dream Songs. Haffenden, however, has shown just how difficult the process of working with Berryman’s manuscripts can be, having spent over twenty years editing and preparing the recently published, and widely praised, Berryman’s Shakespeare. He also edited the first collection of Berryman’s posthumous verse, Henry’s Fate & Other Poems, which was published in 1977. Berryman’s Shakespeare, as Hugh Kenner points out in his review of the book in the Times Literary Supplement (17 September 1999), is finally a collection, a highly valuable and engaging collection, of drafts and fragments. "Yes, Drafts and Fragments," Kenner writes, "[that] pertain, moreover, to a scholarly context that must now be re-created from up to six decades ago". Berryman’s Shakespeare, however, is but one completed editorial project of the many that have not even been started in the Berryman manuscripts collection, a collection that contains hundreds, perhaps thousands of previously unpublished letters and notes, poems and fragments of poems, essays and drafts of essays, Dream Songs that Berryman "killed" before he culled the "final" 308 included in His Toy, His Dream, His Rest in 1968, innumerable clues which can but further elucidate the life and work of this brilliant but difficult poet who once wondered whether "assistant professors" would "become associates/ by working on his works?" after he had been "lowered underground" (Dream Song 373).
One cannot help but feel that a great deal of the material in the Berryman manuscript collection may yet merit publication and, indeed, Berryman’s later "drafts and fragments" may one day be viewed with the same kind of critical attention now commanded by the late unfinished works of Pound in particular. On the matter to hand, however, there can be no doubt that Berryman’s papers offer further clarification of his 1966-7 trip to Dublin and his impressions of the people he met there. Contrary to the account given by John Montague and the myth it has helped to propagate, John Berryman did not have a "positively happy" time in Dublin. "Berryman is the only writer I have ever seen for whom drink seemed to be a positive stimulus", he writes in Henry in Dublin’, taking the kind of approach to literary production one might expect from a member of an undergraduate literary society. Montague, it would seem, was more taken in by the boozy and pretentious literary Dublin of the 1960s than the American visitor. Of course, Montague is not the only writer who has sought to provide a romantically refracted version of Berryman’s experiences in, and of, Dublin. Berryman himself played up the role of the bard with an insatiable appetite for liquor when Jane Howard and Terence Spencer came to Dublin to do a Life magazine presentation of the blustering "whiskey and ink" poet in 1967. Berryman’s dissatisfaction with the scene he encountered in Dublin, however, was not presented there, though it has been illustrated elsewhere -- in Dream Song 321, for example, where he criticises the "brainless senators" and various unnamed "enemies of Joyce & Swift,/ enemies of Synge,// enemies of Yeats & O’Casey", and in letters such as that dated 2 January 1967, included in Richard Kelly’s selection, where he wrote "I’m tired of Dublin; [there’s] no genius here".
The previously unpublished poems that have recently appeared in the TLS (30 April 1999) and Metre 6 offer further evidence of Berryman’s unhappiness in Dublin. In the second of the three pieces published in the TLS, A fire, a drink, a cigarette, a fire’, Berryman conjures an image of desperate solitude, far from the madding crowd of a Dublin pub, "while nightly affright him the horrible cliffs in the end/ & the meaningless penis-harden". Similarly, in the pieces printed in Metre, we can see that Berryman was far from impressed with either the Dublin literary set or the Irish social set-up: as he wrote in one previously unpublished Dream Song, a verse-letter to his friend William Meredith now available in Metre: "Brace yourself, William: you have a country before you,/ uncivilised". Berryman severely doubted the kinds of assumptions about his work and his way of working indicated by Montague’s remarks. As he wrote in one of the manuscript pieces recently published in Metre, "every time most people praise me/ I figure there must be something wrong with my style/ trudging away at perfection". So much for Berryman’s estimation of the local talent and certain of his new-found companions’ powers of critical appraisal.
That Berryman did not finish his long poem in Dublin, that Dublin did not provide him with either the space or the inspiration necessary to lay Henry to rest, is a point critics seldom remember. Of course, Berryman did bring many of his problems with him to Dublin, but there is a strong sense in which the social environment he encountered there in the mid-sixties accelerated his alcoholic decline. Critics usually link Berryman’s final decision to travel to Dublin in 1966 with what is frequently (and, one feels, far too simplistically) described as his life-long wrestling with W.B. Yeats, his Anglo-Irish precursor. Dublin and Yeats figure very prominently in The Dream Songs and especially in Book VII, where the American poet’s quarrel with Yeats is generally viewed as the central, closing drama of Berryman’s long poem. Berryman’s reasons for moving to Dublin, however, were more complicated than has often been granted, and The Dream Songs cannot be explained simply or finally in terms of his engagement with Yeats. In the following two stanzas of an unfinished Dream Song written in Dublin, Berryman shows that his engagement with culture and the history of literature was counterpoised at all times by an earnest desire to observe and understand the mysteries of the quotidian:
Here in my villa, with gardens front & back"Without notes", Dennis O’Driscoll has written, "too many of them [Dream Songs] leave the reader knocking in vain for entry -- taunted, snubbed, frustrated". The business of annotating The Dream Songs, a project that has already been impressively if somewhat tentatively started by Sean Ryder in an unpublished doctoral dissertation submitted to University College Dublin in 1989, needs to be considered seriously as a further addition to Berryman scholarship. The best notes to Berryman’s published work, however, are those which he made himself and which remain largely unpublished in the Manuscripts Division of the University of Minnesota, soon to be moved from their home of over twenty years in Berry Street to an impressive structure on the West Bank of the Mississippi, less than a stone’s throw away from the place where Berryman leapt to his untimely end in 1972. With the passing of time and with the publication of more of his letters and notes, drafts and fragments, how we read Berryman and his long poem may undergo substantial revisions or, at the very least, important clarifications.
what can I hope to learn? The Irish have had their say --
You might say that with Whitman & Eliot we had:
O yes, we had, & so did they, with Synge
& Yeats: perhaps after all it has all been said?
I wither that idea daily. My daughter gives me a smack
nightly, but that is not the real good-night:
that comes when for the sixth time she unwinds
with troubled questions & dreams down the stairs --
she must know the Goya ceiling,
that never has come less, than beatitude
blue & red-rose hang the listening angels
Acknowledgement is here given to Mrs. Kate Donahue Berryman for granting permission to quote from the John Berryman Papers in the course of this essay. Among the various published sources quoted are: John Montague, Henry in Dublin’, in The Figure in the Cave and other essays (Dublin, 1989), 200-207; Denis Donoghue, John Berryman’, in Reading America: Essays on American Literature (London, 1987), 276-280; Dennis O’Driscoll, Majestic dreams: John Berryman and W.B. Yeats’, in London Magazine (June/July 1995), 43-57. I would also like to thank Al Lathrop, the curator of the Manuscripts Division at the University of Minnesota, and his assistant, Barb Bezat, for their help during the time I spent working with Berryman’s papers in 1998, a research trip funded by the Fulbright (Ireland-United States) Commission for Educational Exchange.
Aeschylus: The Oresteia (Agamemnon, Choephori, Eumenides) . A new version by Ted Hughes. London: Faber, £7.99.
The tiny pool of molten gold in the crucible of Athens, or bitter herbs crushed in its mortar and pestle? The thirty-one surviving tragedies of fifth-century Greece are exalted cultural glories -- the best books in the Alexandrian library, the first link in a chain through the New Comedy, to Plautus and Seneca, to Shakespeare, to Robert Bolt or David Hare. They are also administered as social medicine, for instance by the Belfast voices of Heaney’s The Cure at Troy (Sophocles’s Philoctetes), in the forlorn hope that they retain some of their mimetic power for civil disturbance or persuasion in turbulent times. These two views meet when the plays are invoked as touchstones of wisdom, as in Rattigan’s The Browning Version (1948), where a weak, indecisive husband with an ungovernable, unhappy wife is evidently Agamemnon to her Clytemnestra, and where it is Robert Browning’s translation (1877) which alone offers a bleak consolation of certainty. Almost as an afterthought, a good half of these dramatic poems remain plays still worth staging; it has been the classicist poets who have most vigorously written for actors and not readers, as with Louis MacNeice’s Agamemnon (1936) or Tony Harrison’s Oresteia (1982). Regardless of quality, nobody’s Oresteia lasts long in rep, because there are always new translators eager to take a crack at it, and this year, rather than revive their celebrated Harrison, the National Theatre commissioned Hughes.
A. E. Housman, perhaps best qualified of all ("I know very little Greek -- scarcely more than the professors"), left only a merciless parody (1883), but one with something to tell us about the difficulties of rendering the densely-imaged question and answer passages which are a hallmark of Attic drama:
Alcmaeon: I journeyed hither a Boeotian road.Here, at the boundaries joining their long, almost lecture-like speeches to their equally long, pensive silences, the chorus are at their most dynamic, elucidating motive and action, or proving a point, or getting the facts on the record, or -- or whatever it is they do, for Greek chorus remains a most mysterious narrator. Even in Aeschylus (c.525--456 BC), earliest and supposedly clearest of the three Greek tragedians, moral verdicts brought in by the chorus are anything but clear and the playgoer often returns satisfied but, on reflection, confused. After the soundbites -- Man must suffer to learn -- should, or should not, a wife stab her husband in the bath?
Chorus: Sailing on horseback or with feet for oars?
Alcmaeon: Plying by turns my partnership of legs.
Chorus: Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?
Alcmaeon: Mud’s sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.
In the Eumenides, surely the oldest courtroom drama, the goddess Athena convenes an ancient court to try Agamemnon’s son Orestes for killing his mother to avenge that stabbing. In the event her casting vote is required but in future, it seems, the court must manage on their own. Hughes translates Athena’s creation of constitutional justice as though she were founding English common law: "From today every homicide/ Shall be tried before this jury/ Of twelve Athenians". But the text (Eu. 683-5) is more like "This court of judges shall preside over the Aegean peoples forever", and earlier she had hand-picked them from "the best" Athenians (Eu. 485-9: Hughes gives "wisest"). This same court, for it is explicitly named, was in the year of Aeschylus’s audience a reactionary and interfering check by the aristocracy on a barely-rooted democracy. Imagine a play about the barons signing Magna Carta, written by somebody like Bernard Shaw and put on amid the general election after the House of Lords defeated Lloyd George’s socialist budget of 1909: only someone from another world, or another millennium, could mistake it for a historical pageant. Where comparison with a polemicist like Shaw breaks down is that Aeschylus seems stubbornly moderate. Athena’s speech -- unhelpfully instructing commoners to respect the court and vice versa -- has been taken both as supporting the court’s abolition and as opposing it. Playwrights were born among "the best" and their producers were often politicians-to-be, buying a direct connection to the people; so was Aeschylus a decent but unquestioning member of his class, or a radical constrained to reactionary form? We do not know.
Today’s audience need not be told any of this, but Hughes does an injustice when he suppresses the nuances by which Aeschylus conveys the difficulty of reaching an ethical society. The final speeches of Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus as they declare their reign (Ag. 1662-73) are given a more simplistic, absolutist ring than in the original. When Orestes decides that Clytemnestra’s nightmare means that fate wants him to kill her, Hughes’s chorus replies "Your logic has the temper of bronze", which bears little resemblance to the original (Ch. 551) in which the populace says that it chooses Orestes’ interpretation, not that it is correct. It is as if Hughes takes the hauntingly ironic ending of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal IX (1938), about teaching the classics under an England overshadowed by fascism, at face value: "And how one can imagine oneself among them/ I do not know;/ It was all so unimaginably different/ And all so long ago".
The Oresteia, often called complete if somewhat tattered in the Choephori, once ended with a satyr play called Proteus which is lost altogether; but other fragments show that Aeschylus was as accomplished at knob-jokes as the next farceur. His mythological backdrop was as convoluted as anything in the Star Trek universe and has attracted pretty much the same trainspotting scholarship, but each episode spells out anything you really need to know. He was a famous choreographer and showman, probably wrote the music as well and knew how to please a crowd of 15000 with a spectacle they would remember long after the nuance of the words -- such as the arrival of Agamemnon’s chariot, or the vastly triumphalist processions at the trilogy’s end, like the almost demented number of C Major bars at the end of Beethoven’s fifth symphony. The shows fell on solemn and sacred festivals; but in a society without electric light and founded on manual labour, is this so surprising? For that matter, BBC repeats of The Sound of Music correspond very well with Christmas, but they are secular fun just the same. We must always remember that the Greek tragedies were an entertainment, because all we have left is the equivalent of a tenth-generation bootleg audio tape of the serious bits, with many dropouts and indistinct voices.
In the comically literal Loeb edition crib (1926), Clytemnestra stalks off magnificently (Ag. 612), declaring that she knows no more of adultery than of dyeing bronze, whereupon the Herald remarks to the Chorus that: "Boast like to this, laden to the full with truth, misbeseems not the speech of a noble wife". MacNeice among others thinks these two lines are Clytemnestra’s: "Such is my boast, bearing a load of truth,/ A boast that need not disgrace a noble wife". In Hughes’s version, she claims ignorance not of "dyeing bronze" but of "wearing weapons" -- a pity, because it loses the echo when Cassandra prophesies a bronze blade stained with Agamemnon’s blood (Ag. 1265), a blade which Clytemnestra will expertly wield -- and the delicate reservation expressed by the double-negative is rather crudely spelled out:
Herald: Are such words necessary?We shall never know whether Herald or Queen spoke these lines, on a wooden open-air stage one morning in 458 BC. The poignant sense of tragedy which accompanies the Greek plays in today’s culture is as much for the thought of all their lost sisters as for their own mood. Of 80 titles attributed to Aeschylus, some doubtless wrongly or in duplication, we have just seven, or six if Prometheus is an imitation rather than hack-work. Ever since Aristophanes’s parodic critique The Frogs -- which, because both acute and uniquely placed, is the source of most opinions ancient and modern -- Aeschylus has been the gruff spirit of the good old days when men were honest, who put his money where his mouth was by fighting at Marathon and probably Salamis and Plataea as well (so, both against and alongside the Spartans). This too makes him a tragic figure, because entreating all sides to act in good faith is always a lost cause. The polity he wrote for was to collapse amid a groundswell of xenophobia which, we like to think, he would have despised.
A Queen boasting so strangely?
Why should she trouble us
With such denials?
According to Aristotle, who was over-fond of systematic explanations, Sophocles and Euripides were more sophisticated dramatists because they were allowed three masked actors on stage at once, plus chorus, where Aeschylus had only two. The same glib reasoning might be turned to say that he uses the chorus better, as we see perhaps in the climax to Agamemnon, where onlookers to a struggle of kings are suddenly caught in the cross-fire. Yet even if Aeschylus is the least as dramatist, he is the greatest as poet, and of all the poems embedded in Greek drama none are so vivid as Aeschylus’s accounts of events cascading across whole countries, in great cataracts of nouns -- the relay of mountain-top beacon fires from the fall of Troy in Agamemnon; the messenger’s report to the court of the Persians. These are the best parts of Hughes’s text, too, but then they are the part least needing him; despite which he rewrites. Plain "urns and ashes" become, marvellously, "little clay jars/ Full of sharp cinders" (Ag. 436) but the distinctive image of flowering rendered by Peter Levi as "I have seen the corpses blossom on the sea" (Ag. 659-60) is, for Hughes, simply "an ocean clogged...with men".
Hughes finds the superficialities of these plays to his taste, with their prophecies written in dreams, their dooms and portents. He does everything to make their spillings of blood still bloodier, for instance having Orestes disembowel Aegisthus and cut out his heart. Now Orestes is not the Hollywood kind of hero, as the cat-and-mouse dialogue with his mother, prolonging her wait to be murdered, makes abundantly clear. Nevertheless he kills Aegisthus quickly with a sword, nothing more (Ch. 870-4). Hughes also knew more than anyone would want about family suffering -- which is not a nice point to raise, but Iphigenia’s death cannot but recall Sylvia Plath ("Daddy!, she screamed, Daddy!") and Hughes has also freely translated Euripides’s Alcestis, a story alluded to by Aeschylus (Eu. 723-4) in which a wife suicides to save her husband. But this Oresteia shows no unique insight, and is not one of the late fruits of Hughes’s Indian summer. It reads as a hasty first draft, with all of the sound and fury but little of the significance.
(from issue 16)
What poetry mustn't do is talk to itself. Nothing is easier than to get a gathering of poets to extol the value and insight of poetry and to lament its marginalisation. Apart from the warm glow that this confers, it doesn't achieve very much. A convention of beer-drinkers or foxhunters would claim as much. But the danger of introversion is particularly acute in the case of poetry, a verbal art which uses as its medium the terms that people employ in all their acts of communication. The poet borrows the currency of general exchange and must spend it productively; otherwise the loan is abused. The users of the language as a whole are entitled to an opinion on how it is used in poetry. As it happens, despite a lot of complaining by poets about the slighting of poetry, people in general are curiously respectful of it: more than it deserves, I often think. If someone makes out they are a poet, then they have to answer to the responsibilities as well as claiming the considerable privileges and kudos. The fact is that poetry mostly manages to maintain its social status without making much social return.
This is a delicate business, of course. It has to be decided what society the poet writes out of, and to. When Antoine Raftery wrote his great lament for 'Anach Chuan' about a multiple drowning in Lough Corrib in the 1820s, the constituency was clear enough. As proof of its aptness, his poem is still sung in the locality two centuries later, in Irish and English. But when Andrew Motion, with commendable generosity of spirit, wrote a poem for the TUC Conference, it was not so clear that he was writing for a constituency he belonged to. There is something satisfyingly profound about the twist by which the singer of 'I belong to Glasgow' finds that when he has "a couple of pints on a Saturday, Glasgow belongs to" him. It is true; you can tell by the accent he sings in.
The point here, I suppose, is that it is much easier to be a local poet than a national one. That is, it is much clearer what poetry is for locally than nationally. What is the national poet to do, to repay the debt to the society which recognies him/her? The least they can do, it might be thought, is to take society and its politics seriously. But the problem is that there isst political poetry in English, at least on the home front. We are much more ready to admire political poetry in the distance: distance either of place -- like Eastern Europe -- or time -- like World War I. This was interestingly borne out by the coldness which greeted Tony Harrison's Guardian poems during the Gulf War. It was striking that the objection mostly took a familiar disingenuous form: a pretence that what was being objected to was the formal quality of the political poem. Harrison's powerful and bitterly vivid poems were said to fall short in prosody. Likewise, Seamus Heaney's more declaredly political poems were greeted with more unease than most of his writing, even it sometimes seemed by the poet himself. The obvious case was Heaney's light-hearted murmur of protest against his inclusion under the heading "British" in the Motion--Morrison Penguin anthology in 1982. People kept saying: "he can say what he likes. But it's not very well written, is it?"
In these cases, it is clear that those objecting to public pronouncement in poetry -- what Yeats deplored as 'opinion' -- are reluctant to descend to public statement themselves, even in criticism. They want the debate to proceed in mannerly formal terms, in commentary as in poetry. The issue in Heaney's case arose again last year when much of the public comment in England failed to see that he couldn't possibly become the Poet Laureate even if his Northern Irish birth entih citizenship. How on earth could a Dublin-based poet of Northern Irish Catholic origins, however well-disposed, take on a role that implied that he should write paeans for the British Royal family? And how on earth could some parts of the English poetic world have thought that he might? It was another example of failing to locate poetry in a public context.
Heaney, as it happens, is a complex case. He has always spoken for a very wide constituency, and he takes his responsibilities towards poetry at least as seriously as those towards the public world. One of his most important books is The Government of the Tongue where he says "poetry can be as potentially redemptive and possibly as illusory as love". But what he yearns is that the poet's tongue should be liberated from the tyranny of having been "governed for so long in the social sphere by considerations of tact and fidelity, by nice obeisances to one's origin within the minority or the majority". Repeatedly he has said "poetry has its own jurisdiction" (or words to that effect), not in itself governed by the laws of "the minority or the majority", the local or the national.
I am no so sure. Wilfred Owen is much quoted for saying: "Above all, I am not concerned with poetry". The conditions in which Owen was writing were especially terrible ones in which a primary concern for poetry might seem crass. But we could do worse than keep Owen's dictum in mind in all circumstances. It is tempting to say that anybody who thinks poetry is the most serious thing will not be capable of writing serious poetry because they cannot see what things are really serious.
This will all sound very churlish, coming from someone who has, I think, had more recognition from the poetic world than I have earned. In an age of mindless materialism (which is of course how writers have always characterised their own, unappreciative times), it will seem to be weighing in on the wrong side of the scale. But of course it is not that I am against poetry or writing or art. They are the things that mean most to me professionally, by definition; indeed I have no remaining aspirations beyond involvement with literature and the arts. Everyone, however slight their practice of poetry, understands the observation of Patrick Kavanagh: that he started to toy with verse and woke one day to find that it had become his life. But that doesn't exempt us from trying to say anew in every generation why poetry is important: why it warrants the exalted status accorded to it. We no longer, I trust, claim anything as grand as vatic insight or as insignificant as private solace ("I write for myself"). In the end, the answer is that poetry means something different in every generation and an important part of the poet's duty is to find out what its meaning is for their own time. The Northern Irish crc Edna Longley says that every poem worth its salt is in part about poetry. I think this is absolutely right. Moreover, poetry has to be redefined not only in time but also in place. We can't rest on shared laurels and say: "Poetry is what Dante and Shakespeare wrote; I am a poet, so let's have a bit of respect".
As it happens, I find myself writing repeatedly about the same place, the part of Ireland I come from, which is a still a relatively hermetically sealed community with active interest in language, history and archaeology, and a musical tradition which can only be called classical. It is a very easy community to write out of. The most obvious form to write back to it in is elegy. But that is all local, writing for the minority. Like Auden's valley cheese, "local, but prized elsewhere", such writing is very fortunate if it d of appetite in a wider world. It is a kind of talking to yourself which must try to be alert to the context in which it is overheard. And it must be equally grateful to the world that provides its material and the busy world of communication that pauses to listen.
(from issue 16)
Karen V. Kukil (ed.): The Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950 -- 1962. London: Faber, £30.
Sylvia Plath was a writer, or she was nothing. Literally. The complete texts of her (so far as we know) existing journals, unlike the intimate revelations of other famous diarists, are not so much records of a life as desperate verbal lifelines. "My life is a discipline, a prison: I live for my own work, without which I am nothing. My writing. Nothing matters but Ted, Ted's writing and my writing." Written in March 1958, when Plath was teaching Freshman English at Smith College, lines like these recur too often to be dismissed as reflections of a passing mood. Though the (stolen?) journal covering the last two full years of her life is still missing, enough is revealed in 674 pages of transcription from the Smith manuscripts to convince us -- as if we needed convincing -- that Plath was no ordinary, ambitious American writer. Intelligent, superbly gifted as she was, she identified the "demon" in herself ("only left to myself, what a poet I will flay myself into") with the writer she had to be, and so was unable to stop its taking her over completely. Her journals show her wrestling with her word-demon as she willed herself into its power. A fascinating tale, a Faustian myth, a tragedy that left reality behind, together with two real children.
In a fine fantasy novel recently published in Australia (John Dutton's Dreamguard Trilogy) two boy heroes watch as their poet-mother is carried away in a word cocoon spun by an insidious word-spider, Dr Homely-Sage. This excerpt from it throws some light on what may have happened to Sylvia Plath:
John...pulled out his knife and flicked the biggest blade open. Then he hacked at the thread about her head. The cocoon jerked about sluggishly, but the thread was too tough to be cut... "Mummy," said Charles, "what's happened to you? How did you get into this thing -- these horrible sticky-slimy threads?"
"Dreams," said Emer. "Beautiful dreams. Dreams of being someone else."
Charles peered at the shimmering strands. Then he used the magnifying-glass attached to his Swiss Army knife. "This stuff is weird... it's crawling with words, words all moving about. It's not made of silk at all, but of letters writhing in and out of each other. What on earth is it?"
"Glitteri"the glittering words she spoke of. What else is to come?"
"Departure," said the voice of Doctor Homely-Sage from somewhere near them. "I am taking her away, of her own free will. Away from this dreary place full of dreary anxious people. I am taking her to my Institute, where her special needs will be understood, and where she will receive the treatment and professional care she deserves."
"You're not taking our mother away from us," said Charles. "You can't."
"You are quite right," said the Doctor, his eyes glittering like a spider's from behind his pebble-thick glasses. "I can't, but she can. She is leaving you. Don't try to interfere with us."
In the novel the children have all kinds of adventures in illusion-land, searching for their lost mother, but in the end they free her from her word cage and defeat Doctor Homely-Sage by opposing a painfully acquired language of reality to Homely Sage's shimmering cage of what turn out to be not dream-worlds but nightmares.
Whether or not John Dutton had Sylvia Plath in mind when he wrote his Dreamguard Trilogy, its relevance to her story hardly needs pointing out. Except that Plath, ready as she was to throw herself into the power of every spirit doctor -- male or female -- who promised her self-fulfilment, in the end has to be recognised as a word-spider sans pareil who, in her repeated efforts to remake herself after every apparent failure, tragically wound herself up in her own language. When words failed her -- that is to say, when she herself became aware that her mythologies were as much a cage as a passage to a better world -- she was stranded. And she had no other faith to put in their place. Word skill. Words kill. On the first day of February, 1963, eleven days before she died, Plath wrote a poem called 'Words' -- one of her greatest and saddest -- as a cryptic testament to the closed options she perceived to lie ahead of her before she finally summoned up her own life. Courageous she had always been; her journals bear witness to that, all right. But they also give evidence of a frantic, desperate inability to live through difficult periods of life -- painful growing periods -- without fiction-making, without writing them up. The result of this dependence upon written language to get her through, as it were, was that immediate impressions were inscribed on paper as on stone. Fears, speculations, enthusiasms, accusations, love affairs, hate affairs (the latter, mostly with rpeople she hardly knew) together with the "dreams, directives and imperatives" she described in her journals as a "litany", or sometimes a "Sargasso", were crammed, helter-skelter, into words. Except during periods of acute depression and breakdown, or in rare times of relaxation from self-obsession (as in the summer of 1959, when she was pregnant and travelling with Ted Hughes around the American West), Plath enslaved her life to serve the tyrannical demands of her writing.
And, of course, Plath's journals are a riveting read! Even I, who before writing Bitter Fame had read almost all of them in the Smith College Library, can hardly put this published collection down. Sylvia Plath was not only a phenomenally gifted writer, she was a close observer, a true artist, a perceptive critic (not least of her own work) and a virtuoso of description. Read , for example, the notes on Cambridge and Grantchester she made in 1957 when she was first married to Ted Hughes and living in Eltisley Avenue. Or even more entertaining, turn to her often hilarious account of the couple's honeymoon in Benidorm the previous summer and her description of the dubious housekeeping of the Widow Mangada. As Tim Kendall stressed in his review for the TLS, some of Plath's finest and most objective prose can be found in her notes on her Devon neighbours and the on birth of her son, Nicholas, early in 1962, about the time she was writing Three Women and 'Crossing the Water'.
Much of Plath's objective reporting, to be sure, was selected for the American edition of the Journals, tactfully edited by Frances McCullough and Ted Hughes in 1982. The chief advantage of that selection is its chronological arrangement, whereas this new, complete edition consigns any loose notes that were not part of the bound journals to fifteen appendices. The earlier selection, too, balances the writings of a perceptive, self-centred, self-critical but more or less cheerful Sylvia Plath with some of the resentful passages that indulge her aggressive terrors and dislikes. Nor is this new edition the first to reveal that Plath considered hating her mother to be an important stage of her psychotherapy with Dr Ruth Beuscher during the winter of 1958-59. Most of the sealed material that Te unsealed before his death consists either of sharp, cruelly acid character sketches (Hughes obviously wanted to spare the feelings of living people who might have been hurt by Plath's remarks) or of whole pages taken up with accusations hurled at her parents, particularly at Aurelia Plath, whose misfortune it was to be Sylvia's long-suffering mother.
A propos of Dr Ruth Beuscher, a recent article by Norman Elrod, an eminent Swiss psychoanalyst, draws attention to the probable damage done by Dr Beuscher when, in December of 1958, she gave her weeping and vulnerable poet-patient "permission" to hate her mother ('Sylvia Plath and Ruth Beuscher: The Tragedy of a Patient's Blind Love for her Doctor'. A paper presented at the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies in New York, M 2000). We already knew what that permission meant to Sylvia; it appeared plainly on page 265 of the 1982 edition after a note from Aurelia Plath herself explaining her reasons for consenting to release passages from the "therapy journal" for publication.
Ever since Wednesday I have been feeling like a "new person." Like a shot of brandy went home, a sniff of cocaine, hit me where I live and am alive and so-there. I am going to work like hell. Better than shock treatment: "I give you permission to hate your mother."The difference between the 1982 selection and the full text published by Faber is that entries in the latter go on in this vein for ten and more pages at a stretch. As you read it becomes clear that Plath's fantasies -- how her "Nazi" father hated her mother, how her mother had to marry "an old man" after failing to attract a young one, and so forth -- gave her just the impetus she needed to throw out the inadequate figure of poor Mrs. Plath and replace it with that model mother-substitute, her psychotherapist. According to Dr Elrod, this is a normal and often health-restoring development between analyst and analysand, but in Plath's case, he suspects that Dr Beuscher may have found gratification herself in winning Sylvia's love away from her mother. I am not qualified to comment on Dr Elrod's thesis, but it is clear from the journals how utterly and uncritically Plath came to depend on Dr Beuscher for guidance. We know, too, that when, in the autumn of 1962, Plath's marriage with Hughes finally did come to grief, that Beuscher wrote to Plath "as a friend", advising her to divorce and cut her losses rather than wait and see what a temporary separation might do to save the marriage.
The complete text of these journals, then, is a valuable contribution to Plath scholarship, not only because it proves beyond doubt that Hughes edited them with her protection in mind, but because it is full of brilliant writing that tells us a great deal about how the poet in waiting became the poet we know. In Karen V. Kukil the Plath Estate found an ideal editor. Informative, unopinionated, discreet, scholarly, she is everything Hughes (and Plath) would have approved. Especially useful is a comprehensive index which means that a reader can find out in a matter of seconds what Sylvia Plath thought of Henry James or Virginia Woolf or any other writer that impressed her. In the event that this review gives a negative impression of Plath through her journals, let me end by quoting a passage that makes me positively love her. It's from the Northampton journal, dated March 1, 1958:
This morning after Ted left I blest his diminishing black figure -- turned to chanting verses & got magnificent sense of power: learned the brief "call for the robin redbreast & the wren," "Thou art a box of wormseed," and began "Hark, now everything is still" -- how to describe it? -- The surge of joy and mastery as if I had discovered a particularly effective, efficacious prayer: some demons & geniis fuse, answering when I chant. I will learn Eliot, Yeats, Dunbar -- chnted the 'Lament of the Makaris' on the toilet. I will learn Ransome, Shakespeare, Blake and Thomas and Hopkins -- all those who said to words "stand stable here" and made of the moment, of the hustle and jostle of grey, anonymous and sliding words a vocabulary to staunch wounds and bind up broken limbs...That's our poet! Thank you, Sylvia.