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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
by Michael Peverett
Section 5. 1945-1975
Contents
R.S. Thomas
(1913-2000) approximate sonnets
Jane Cooper: Selected
Poems (1947-1983) not being able to say what you mean
P.G. Wodehouse:
The Mating Season (1949) loser strategy
Borden Chase: Red River (1949) NEW
Douglas Hyde: I
Believed (1950) leaving the party
Walton Hannah: Darkness
Visible (1952) elusive
freemasonry
The Naked Spur (1953) an MGM western movie
Jean Giono: The Man
who Planted Trees (1953) political literature
Kathleen Raine
(1908-2003) what Google tells
JRR Tolkien: The
Lord of the Rings (1954-55) unconvincing happiness
Gunnar Björling:
You go the words (1955) NEW inquiring with och and
att
John Ashbery:
Selected Poems (1956-) modern content
WE Anderson armchairs in the antarctic
C.P. Snow: The
Affair (1960) the better for what it is
Colin Turnbull:
The Forest People (1961) problems of ethnography
Pak Chaesam
(1933-1997) Korean quietude
John Updike: Of
the Farm (1965) the cost of brilliance
Angus Wilson just try
and be natural
Van Der Graaf
Generator: Albums (1970-1976) in the organ-loft
Ashokamitran:
Water (1971) novella round an
image
Luke Rhinehart:
The Dice Man (1972) do you take a chance, FAN?
Chet Cunningham: Guld till döds (1973) NEW
Adrienne Rich
(1974-77, 1985-88) talking about a new art
R.K. Narayan does senility have a story?
Helen Forrester
(1974)
poverty
is timeless
Well, I’ve read the Collected Poems (1945-1990) now, or skimmed them, which is the trouble with ample Collecteds. This one encompasses 20 collections, and there are five subsequent collections (one posthumous) published by Bloodaxe and now available as Collected Later Poems (1988-2000). (Some have said that these are his best.) But the most satisfactory way of reading Thomas is a few poems at once, even one only.
The reason for this arduous immersion was Gösta Ågren’s admiration for Thomas. I find Ågren’s poems in every way more human and useful, but I do sense too that there’s more in Thomas than I am capable of grasping. (But is there any worthwhile thing happening unless the reader grasps?)
You can understand why Andrew Duncan wrote that Thomas worked over the same handful of ideas for sixty years, and “it seems like more”.
There is slow development. The earlier poems are more absorbed in the details of Welsh country life. This changes, slowly, around the time of H’m (1972). From then on the themes are more nakedly philosophical and religious. Thomas’s hatred of modern technology, his sense of the bareness and irrelevance of the church, alternate with moments of religious affirmation.
But new subject matter (e.g. the poems about painting) doesn’t necessarily mean going anywhere. You have a sense from his first couple of collections that you already know what he thinks - about everything.
Alive (p.296) and The Flower (p.280) are examples of the affirmation. Both are from Laboratories of the Spirit (1975), which is the most religiously positive of the collections.
But there are few positives in these poems when seen in the mass; the past, present and future are all of them cruel and fraudulent; the people are not heroes; the land is dreary and cold; God is absent or enigmatic or sadistic. But Thomas’s poems are allowed to contradict one another.
Nevertheless, he often works his way to a position that supplies no hope, and his poem lives - even thrives - in that location. Fair Day (p. 380) is a good example.
He is attracted by the form of a universal history, or a history of a life, reduced to a few lines. The poems are often concise allegories, somewhat along the lines of George Herbert.
Travellers (p. 308) is an immediately striking poem, and one of his best.
I think of the continent
of the mind. At
some stage
in the crossing of
it a traveller
rejoiced. This is the
truth,
he cried; I have
won
my salvation!
What was it like
to be alive then?
Was it a time
when two sparrows
were sold
for a farthing? What
recipe
did he bequeath us
for the solution
of our problems
other than the statement
of his condition?
The territory
has expanded since
then. We
see now that the
journey is
without end, and there
is no joy
in the knowledge.
Going on, going
back, standing aside
- the alternatives
are appalling, as is
the imagining
of the lost
traveller, what he would
say to us, if he
were here
now, and how discredited
we would find it.
Aleph (p. 383) is another good poem; it seems to include a lot of his themes in one bony structure (After a while, rather mazed by the number of poems, I begin to see this as a crude standard of excellence).
Despite these completenesses I sense a reluctance in R.S. Thomas to build on things he has already said. He always starts again from nothing. So to read a large number of his poems is not to be satisfied by a growing sense of gain.
R.S. Thomas’s “Sonnets”, early and late
About 50 of the collected poems are “sonnets” - typically unrhymed, and with no regular meter, but quite often divided into traditional octet and sestet. They are usually separated from each other in the collections, so little consciousness of the form intrudes upon us. The poem strikes us as not setting out to BE a sonnet, but only to BE itself, while vaguely stealing some of the sonnet-form’s authority, by a sort of allusion. Most of the 50 “sonnets” are scattered around the mid-period of his career - say, from 1960-1975. 9 of the 29 poems in H’m (1972) are “sonnets”. It’s at this point that the “sonnet” becomes a channel (though only one among others) for his central writing.
In 1952, “Maes-yr-Onnen” (p. 24) is a kind of aside, and too consciously sonnet-like:
You cannot share with me
that rarer air,
Blue as a flower and heady
with the scent
Of the years past and others
yet to be ...
The poem confesses to a personal, nostalgic experience: something that the poet isn’t yet ready to tackle seriously. The poem has “beauties”, extractable phrases which can be enjoyed - such as “the hurrying grass”, or “the stale piety, mouldering within”. It is a piece of English Literature. I like the poem for being a door that someone else might open.
This “memorable” quality is thickly present in the early poems, for example as rhetorical force on the Yeatsian model:
An offence to the ear, a
shackle on the tongue
That would fit new thoughts
to an abiding tune?
(“The Old Language”)
Or direct, arm-grabbing, opening lines like these:
I am the farmer, stripped of
love
You remember Davies? He
died, you know,
To live in
Shelley dreamed it. Now the
dream decays.
Song at the Year’s Turning (1955) is a beautiful collection. (I wish that the publishers, or the author himself if he was responsible, had marked where collections begin and end in the text. The polemical intention seems to be to return priority to the individual poem. Possibly the author thought that the shaping of collections for publication had been a factitious exercise forced on him by circumstance. If so, he had forgotten how much instinctively assimilated information was contained in the arrangement, and how much it helps us.)
Since the poems I’m talking about are “sonnets” rather than sonnets - in other words, they allude to the form rather than instantiating it - I could possibly include a poem of approximately sonnet-length, such as “Lament for Prytherch” (13 lines). There is no definite break. However, “The Last of the Peasantry”, with its occasional rhymes and half-rhymes, and its octet/sestet division is clearly much closer to the alluded form. The poem denies a resonant conclusion. The last line:
Is cold now, blow on it as
you will.
Yet this poem, and the last in the collection (“No Through Road”) are as central to it as any. The last begins by saying farewell to “My long absorbtion with the plough”, yet ends by rejecting the alternative. In fact the sequence contains its hidden response to Thomas’s despairing rejection of value in the world of the peasant. If the children of the first poem have a “centre” that “you cannot find”, then perhaps the peasant with “a small gift / For handling stock” has a centre too. In fact the collection as a whole confesses to a vaguely romantic sensibility that was (and is) no doubt shared by his audience. So far as that goes, we are still at an early, baffled stage of poetic development.
H’m (1972) is possibly Thomas’s most intense and innovative collection. It makes him as a poet and perhaps destroys him, too. It is not a “statement” - in fact it is more contradictory than before. The collection can contain both “The River” and “The Island”, both “Petition” and “The Kingdom”. Not to mention the bizarre “Nocturne by Ben Shahn”, the fragmentary “Pavane”, a poem with no punctuation or capital letters (“H’m”), and so on. Eight of its poems are “sonnets”, the title poem most vaguely.
Soon afterwards, Thomas begins to move away from the “sonnet”. It becomes a form that happens sometimes. I suppose he saw that the classical English sonnet-form wasn’t worth attempting now, but recognized some perennial significance in the shape, some basic unit of meditation, like a long breath.
(2001)
Jane Cooper :
Scaffolding (New and Selected Poems), Anvil, 1984 (the poems date from
1947-1983)
“The Builder of Houses” is my favourite
poem - indeed the only one that matters to me apart from “Threads”. (“Morning on the
The seriousness of “The Builder of Houses”, for me, can be indicated by the fact that I disagree with the author’s commentary at the end, though I see it’s true, too. The poem has one or two failures arising from a rather complex, rhymed, form (“blazing” being the worst) - but it gains from the form, too.
Why was this last, diminished
And never-mentioned mansion
The one she never could finish?
The question (like the subsequent answer) has something spurious about it. But the “mansion” is made to live.
“Feathers” is good for the line “a wreckage that will melt into spring”. Grace Paley blurbs, on the back cover: “they have about them a great deep patience... a waiting in quietness”, which seems absurd to me. It does bring into my mind a suspicion that Jane Cooper may be one of those poets who can’t often find a way to say what she really feels - that’s something I recognize. Here she is “patiently writing” in “March”; she mentions “loves and angers” in the last line, but to mention them is not much. The sequence doesn’t add up, probably because it’s gaptoothed. “Back” says not enough about a relationship - Purcell is unhelpful. As for No. 6 “In Silence Where we breathe”, not only is this conspicuously un-March-like, but its threadbare non-narrative is lost in the interest of description. The author annotates references to Pasternak (which isn’t enough to make me run out to the library) and is clearly happiest evoking nature - 1, 5, 7. If she had only done that, it might have been enough.
“Threads” is a fine poem in its loose-limbed way - I am sure there is a need for poems like this, to counter-act the false positions of novels (even the best). In some passages the dismembered prose sustains a unity of .... rhythm? tension? ... over a long distance. I have usually imagined that would be the most difficult challenge.
(2001)
P.G. Wodehouse:
The Mating Season (1949)
For around five years in my teens, my reading consisted solely of P.G. Wodehouse, along with a few westerns, half-despised war books (Sven Hassel), and pony books borrowed from girlfriends. Wodehouse’s writing career (of around 75 years) produced 90 books, and I think I owned about sixty of them in the end.
The influence marks me; when I’m being amusing I still appropriate his expressions (something that I want to praise stands out “like a jewel in a pile of coke” etc). Perhaps the influence was baneful; I found a humorous way to justify idleness to myself. Why did I need this?
Of Wodehouse’s permanent claims to
distinction the first five Jeeves novels are pre-eminent. The Mating Season
is the last of these. Later Jeeves novels are slimmer and repetitious. His
other claims are the earlier Jeeves short stories, perhaps the two volumes of
golfing stories, and The Luck of the Bodkins, perhaps too the war-time
broadcasts - I think that’s all, but it’s more than enough. (On this side of
the
In his proper world the Wars do not exist (perhaps, you might add, not in the broadcasts either). But this has given the books longevity - what we do find in them continues to have, at least by analogy, a vigorous existence in life; we (at least, we boys) socialise, drink, get into scrapes, bet on horses, make clubman jokes and pretend cancer or despair don’t exist... we pretend that our chief care is to grab food, or we come over all mock-epic and pretend that to have to spend time with someone, to attend a boring meeting perhaps, would be an appalling disaster to be avoided at all costs. Which is not to deny that the image in Wodehouse has no allure whatsoever for most people.
I thought I would quote from the book, and make the usual sort of comment about how reluctantly one attempts to explicate the humour.
For no dog, white or not
white, woolly or not woolly, accepts with a mere raised eyebrow the presence of
strangers in bushes.
’Did you hear Master George
Kegley-Bassington on the subject of “Ben Battle”?’
‘Yes, sir. A barely
adequate performance, I thought.’
As this is Wodehouse’s last great book,
written in his late sixties, one naturally looks for signs of autumnal decline
or “serenity”. There are few. The page that is spent recapitulating the story
of Bingo Little’s baby is an example of how Wodehouse
will subsequently eke out his last quarter-century of production. The ending
(and indeed a page or two of the village concert) have an undramatic sweetness
about them, perhaps what might be imagined from an author now banished from
From a biographical point of view there is more about the War than appears openly. The poems of Christopher Robin are pilloried, and surely it’s no accident that A.A. Milne was prominent in the torrent of condemnation that Wodehouse earned for his collaborative acts. The very language of high moral reproof, endlessly voiced during the war, is used repeatedly for comic effect, for example by Esmond Haddock:
’The fish-faced
trailing arbutus!’
’He’s not a bad chap.’ (He, being “
’That may be your opinion.
It is not mine, nor, I should imagine, that of most decent-minded people. Hell
is full of men like
or Gussie:
’Well, let me put you quite
straight,
Gussie’s Malvolian objections are of course soon deliciously undermined by Corky’s Treatment A, though he remains characteristically brusque. Bertie says:
’You’ll knock ‘em cold. I’m
sorry I can’t play Pat myself --‘
‘A good thing,
probably. I doubt if you are the type.’
‘Of course I’m the type,’ I
retorted hotly. ‘I should have given a sensational performance.’
‘Corky thinks not. She was telling me how thankful she was that you had stepped out and I had taken over. She said the part wants broad, robust treatment and you would have played it too far down. It’s a part that calls for personality and the most precise timing...’
Bertie comments:
I gave it up. You can’t
reason with hams, and twenty minutes of Corky’s society seemed to have turned
Augustus Fink-Nottle from a blameless newt-fancier into as pronounced a ham as
ever drank small ports in Bodegas and called people ‘laddie’.
Hollywood (Corky is a film star) and the
stage are the author’s cakes and ale. They stand for humanity, tolerance and
love, and he must have turned to them with relief as a support against the
tirade of righteous condemnation he faced in
Perhaps, in his incarceration, weakness, age and sense of having done wrong, he also turned to Marcus Aurelius. “Does aught befall you? It is good. It is part of the destiny of the Universe ordained for you from the beginning. All that befalls you is part of the great web.”
In The Mating Season a running joke
is made out this. “I doubt, as a matter of fact, if Marcus Aurelius’s material
is ever the stuff to give the troops when they have just stubbed their toe on
the brick of Fate.” But that is in the Wodehouse world where all troubles are
trifling. I think he had really been consoled by Marcus Aurelius, as by
Shakespeare. At any rate Bertie’s respect for the classics is a notable
complement to his
Wodehouse’s comedy incorporates tolerance because tolerance is also a way of letting yourself off - as Bertie does about opening telegrams not addressed to him. “You know how it is.”
Bertie’s profound wisdom is after all self-serving.
My mental attitude, in
short, was about that of an African explorer who by prompt shinning up a tree
has just contrived to elude a quick-tempered crocodile and gathers from a
series of shrieks below that his faithful native bearer had not been so
fortunate. I mean to say he mourns, no doubt, as he listens to the doings, but
though his heart may bleed, he cannot help his primary emotion being one of
sober relief that, however sticky life may have become for native bearers, he,
personally, is sitting on top of the world.
Bertie’s comic despairs reflect the author’s real ones. There is a double perspective in a sentence such as: “When Esmond Haddock in our exchanges over the port had spoken of the times that try men’s souls, he hadn’t had a notion of what the times that try men’s souls can really be, if they spit on their hands and get right down to it.”
To all which it may be objected that Wodehouse’s values were exactly the same before those notorious war broadcasts and all the talk of treachery. Of course; what he did so publically then was just an instance of the same tactic that he had resorted to throughout his life. He knew himself to be a gentle, flexible, timid kind of loser, and his books were made for losers.
(2002)
Borden Chase:
His name was Thomas Dunson, born in Birkenhead across
the Mersey from
Ahead, the lead wagon dipped its tongue as the team
moved down the grade of a dry stream bank.
In these opening sentences the book’s methodology is completely contained. Sentences are atomized into cinematic fragments. There are fine expressions which are then recycled so that we recognize them as a convention of a self-invented trove of epic diction – for example, we will hear a lot more of the analogy between eyes and bullet-nubs, nearly every time that Dunson reappears. And the best thing in the prose is its convincing use of what sound like authentic cattleman’s lingo (like the wagon dipping its tongue) - which may, for all I know, be as sheerly invented as the epic diction.
Dunson is indeed a brute, a man without pity, a phlegmatic deadshot, a tyrant impervious to reason. He is just about redeemed by some consciousness of his place in history, a vision that is united with a nation’s destiny. Having just killed a Mexican, he muses to his adopted son:
Here I am, Mathew, and here I’ll stay. On all these
lands north of the river I’ll grow beef. Food for the bellies
of every man in our country. They’ll need meat, Mathew. They can’t build
their cities without it.
This 1949
The implication is that though the father
must in due course give way to his less brutal son,
Mathew glanced at Donegal’s men. They were hard – hard in a vastly different manner from the
trail drivers. Theirs were the eyes of the great vultures that sweep down from
the skies to prey on dead things. Each man wore gloves. Each wore a gun.
Hard-working western men driven by plain
desire for ownership, domination, women, money, self-preservation and sleep are
OK. But these alien leeches are another matter.
Chase (pseudonym of Frank Fowler, 1900-1971) was a leading light of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.
(2009)
Douglas Hyde: I Believed (1950)
Subtitled, The
Autobiography of a former British Communist.
Douglas Hyde resigned from the Communist party in 1948, some twenty years after joining. He also resigned from his job at the Daily Worker, where he had been News Editor (Bill Rust was Editor) for most of the eight years he had worked there. Hyde and his wife had converted to Catholicism of a conservative kind (he was drawn to the neo-medieval Distributist movement that began with Belloc and Chesterton). A couple of years later, true to his campaigning and journalistic instincts, he wrote I Believed, a book aimed squarely at Middle England and intended to supply it with an understanding of British Communism on the know-your-enemy principle.
It will come as no surprise that Hyde’s name does not featurely largely in pro-Communist histories (his book was immediately exposed as treacherous lies). But one doesn’t have to be a Communist to view the book’s narrator with certain misgivings; somehow, politicals of all colours have succeeded in making us queasy about turncoats – the word is deeply pejorative, yet what other term is there?
Hyde himself as a Distributist is almost laughably true to his character; an instinctive journalist and campaigner, used to making enemies, and capable of arguing himself into incredible positions.
I had believed that Catholic
culture had been outgrown at the time when the new economic system of
capitalism had broken the fetters of feudalism, that it could all be explained
in terms of economics. But had men outgrown it? There appeared to be a
convincing case for saying that it was not outgrown but that there had been an
attempted murder which had not quite succeeded...
(Hyde’s favourite books had always been Chaucer and Langland. They had once taken their places “quite naturally at the side of Morris’s Dream of John Ball, Marx’s Das Kapital and Lenin’s The Proletarian Revolution “, but now they led him in a different direction.)
Anyway, we appreciate unreliable narrators,
and these misgivings about the author only add to the absorbing interest of his
book. The credibility of Communism was at its apogee. When Hyde joined up, the
Paris Commune was still within living memory, the October Revolution was
recent, and very soon there would be Communists running Madrid and Anarchists
running Barcelona; the overthrow of capitalism in Europe was something that
could happen. And superficially the Red tide was still running when Hyde left,
since the end of the war meant a host of new Communist nations in
The Parties invited to the
initial meeting had been those of
Hyde’s change of creed clearly didn’t mean a change of everything. And, especially in the early chapters, one senses that while writing them Hyde re-vivifies his erstwhile beliefs. He is still full of admiration for Communist directness, organization, opportunism and power to mobilize ordinary working people.
At great
His accounts of e.g. the successful takeover of a local Labour party in Surrey, of illegal preparations for the national underground Press organization (during the ban on the Daily Worker early in the war), of passing secrets to Russia, and of on-the-spot reporting of the V-1 blitz, are exciting, sympathetic and often tinged with pride.
The deepest of his beliefs had perhaps never changed. The book registers a continuing distrust, sometimes rising to condemnation, of his new book’s new audience.
They went over so frequently
that suburban
But the “comfortable” folk
in the district where I lived felt secure enough in the main and their sense of
comfort was heightened, if anything, by the sound of jobless Welsh miners
singing, unceasingly, for pence in the street outside, the inevitable “Cwm
Rhondda”, “Bread of Heaven, feed me till I want no more”. Then, in little
groups on the
The professional Communist’s contempt for fellow-travellers, those sympathisers who lacked the moral courage to join the Party outright, is something that Hyde can transfer wholesale to his new position. Or consider this, about those “sensitive intellectuals” (Hyde sounding like Kipling here) who were troubled by the sharp switch of Communist policy at the time of the Soviet-German pact.
Their attitude was summed up
in a letter I received from a well-known poet who, after being drawn to the
Party because of its anti-fascist propaganda, wrote: “A plague on both your
uncles, Uncle Joe and Uncle Adolf” – then disappeared into an ivory tower from
which he has never since emerged.
“Emerged” suggests (naturally enough) a media-oriented view of human behaviour. Hyde never changed his mind about contempt for the “ivory tower” and he uses the phrase again, in vastly changed circumstances, to explain why as a Catholic convert he could not retire into one, but must now write this book.
This reminds me that the book-jacket quotes a review by Stephen Spender in The Spectator, perhaps not one of his best-known texts:
Alas, this book goes a long
way to justify the Red scares emanating from
Hyde’s account of Communist thinking is more complex than that.
Communism is necessary and
desirable above all else. The fight for communism stretches across the world,
which is divided by the two opposing classes and not vertically by different
races and nations. In fighting for a communist
But at one point in that
world front there is a whole nation on my side, a great State, the U.S.S.R.,
where a strong-point has been established, around which all future battles will
tend to turn and without which any other, local victories must fail. At all
costs, therefore,
The Soviet-German Pact therefore in August 1939 did not trouble the trained Marxist at all. The Soviet leaders had a responsibility to the working-class of the world to defend the U.S.S.R. and could, if necessary, for this reason make an alliance with the devil himself. ...
It was this last part that the sensitive intellectuals had trouble with. The foregoing argument is not meant sympathetically by the the post-Communist Hyde, who intends the ironic glance at the pretensions of a “super-Patriot”, but in fact it retains its logical force. In civil war, loyalty to a Nation ceases to supply a normative guide to behaviour. The Communists projected a real civil war in every capitalist state, but they were already engaged in a mental and emotional civil war within themselves; therefore national loyalty was a mental weakness which meant nothing more than subservience to the present crop of robber-barons and their troops. But the argument extends much wider than Communism; few people today would want to think of themselves as Nationalists or believers in a Hobbesian “law and order at any price”. So what exactly are the grounds for our de facto civil obedience?
It’s easy to see, however, how Hyde’s
lifelong love for Somerset Gothic churches, apparently so trifling, led to
hairline fractures that slowly but eventually shattered his Marxist credo.
(Perhaps he should have talked it over with Alan Mitchell, the strongly
left-wing expert on the show-piece trees of
Communism justified free love (defying “outworn, bourgeois conventions”) but this is something that Hyde never seems to have felt much enthusiasm for (of course, this could be the Catholic speaking, or perhaps he thought that any kind of defence just wouldn’t play in Middle England). Hyde’s (and his colleagues’) attitudes to women were, in fact, fairly unreconstructed:
Go to any Communist Party
Congress and watch the hard-faced women who go to the rostrum. The hatred which
the Party kindles and uses is often quite shockingly apparent in eyes as hard
as those of a
“We get women in the Party,
and they are all right for just as long as they remain obscure,” one Political
Bureau member complained to me, “but within twelve months of our turning them
into Marxists they are about as attractive as horses.”
The Party aims by its
training to produce “men of steel”. But “women of steel” attract neither other
women nor even the men of steel themselves... Thus, the working-class housewife
or the fresh young girl who comes into the Party is at once the centre of
attention... She is useful for breaking down the suspicions of other women and
so is seen as an effective “front”, and at the same time she is a welcome
relief from the steely, hard-faced, betrowsered women who have made their way
to the top and who are, in Party parlance, so utterly unbedworthy.
[Unattractiveness of senior females] is general enough to be a matter of concern to the Party leaders and even from time to time to feature on agendas as a problem to be solved. ...
But I want to quote some sentences,
finally, about the attractions of Communism, without which there would have
been no book and nothing to write about. This was in
As I watched and helped to
lead each demonstration of unemployed, my feelings were a compound of both
anger and pity. As I saw them trampled under the horses’ hooves during baton
charges, or tugging with bare hands at paving-stones in their search for
ammunition to be used against the police, hope and pride would mingle with my
anger. Each man who disappeared between warders from the court-room into the
cells added to my own hatred of the capitalist system and of the capitalist class,
and strengthened my revolutionary determination. ... We sang of the revolution,, dreamed of it, fought for it, studied for it, worked for
it and, often enough, suffered for it too.
As the economic crisis
deepened, the poverty, and the vast scale of that poverty, appalled me. ....
When the Daily Worker began to appear, the unemployed queued at the
“bomb shop” in the Horsefair in order to be able to read it free of charge. And
the
Note
Hyde's switch from
Communism to Distributism was not quite so perverse as
it may seem. William Cobbett had long ago shown that pre-Reformation rural
labourers were far better provided for than their grossly oppressed descendants
in the nineteenth century. Socialists and neo-mediavalists recognized a common
enemy in Protestant capitalism.
(2006)
Walton Hannah: Darkness Visible (1952)
Subtitled: A Revelation and Interpretation of Freemasonry.
For many of us the life of Anglican clergy of the 1950s is almost as shrouded in mystery as the life of freemasons. So I think this is an interesting book.
Some years ago a brother
priest approached me with a view to my becoming a brother Mason. He kept within
the law by not asking me outright, but indicated that it would be a very good
thing if I did so, and that he would always be glad to propose me. It really
comes to the same thing. I replied that I was extremely reluctant to join any
organization of which I was allowed to know almost nothing in advance. To which
he answered that if everyone felt that way there would be no Masons at all, for
no one outside the Craft could possibly discover its secrets, and what was good
enough for the bishops who had become Masons ought to be good enough for me.
It was that reply which
interested me in the subject. I remembered a Member of Parliament telling me
(long after such a revelation could have been indiscreet) that even at the
secret sessions of the House of Commons during the war it was considered too
dangerous to reveal top secrets of policy and strategy even to some six hundred
trusted M.P.s, and that in general they were occasions for members themselves
to discuss such delicate topics as shipping losses and tank deficiencies. Was
it then probable or even possible that an organization of some five million
people, doubtless including good, bad and indifferent, which had been in
existence for over two centuries could really keep the rest of the world in
complete darkness as to their secrets? I was intrigued, and started to
investigate.
I was surprised at the
facility with which information could be unearthed in a manner explained in the
first chapter, – and yet increasingly perturbed at the nature of that
information. Accordingly I wrote to a Masonic bishop whom I had once met
personally setting forth some of these perplexities, mentioning the inclusion
of Baal in the secret name of God in the Royal Arch, making it quite clear that
I was asking him for guidance as a bishop in a matter which concerned faith and
morals.
The reply was more taken up with surprise tinged with indignation that I had discovered supposed secrets than with any anxiety to allay my misgivings. He said very courteously that if I did not like Freemasonry I had better not join, but he was not allowed to discuss these things with any who were not Masons. To which I wrote in return that I was truly appalled at the implications of this remark. I had made a prima facie case (and I then claimed no more) for the Craft being incompatible with Christianity, and appealed to a bishop for guidance. And his reply that he was bound by oath not to refute or even discuss such matters, although they admittedly concerned faith and morals, with any who were not similarly oath-bound to secrecy clearly implied that his Masonic obligation took precedence over his Episcopal oath to banish strange and erroneous doctrine. But there was no reply.
Admit it, you’re hooked. So was I, and so, clearly, was Hannah himself, intoxicated by the self-evident justice of his position.
The bulk of Darkness Visible consists of collated transcripts of masonic rituals. So far as English masonry is concerned, this is more or less a complete liturgy, excluding only certain higher degrees which are not universally practiced. This material (generally said to be secret) is, Hannah informs us, relatively easy to obtain, e.g. from masonic publishers. But their work sometimes abbreviates certain phrases in order to maintain a formal cloak of secrecy. Hannah expands these abbreviations by referring, for example, to the many published exposures of masonry. The result was, at the time, the most complete guide that was easily obtainable. Masons themselves are said to have found it useful.
However, the intended audience was, of course,
members of the Church of England. Hannah had raised the question, not by any
means a new one, of whether it was appropriate for members of the clergy
(including bishops and indeed the then-current archbishop of
It is pleasingly written, logical and by its own lights completely persuasive. Freemasonry clearly claims to be a religion, or super-religion. It proclaims as something adequate a body of teaching that pointedly excludes all mention of Christ. Anglican clergy who become masons cannot possibly be acting in accord with their clerical duties. Hannah did not, it seems, receive any answer in his own terms; indeed, it is hard to conceive one. As he anticipated, he met with ad hominem attacks, cold shoulders, light dismissals and a wall of silence. It must have been infuriating, but he had set himself up for that. A few years later he converted to Catholicism (the Roman Catholic church had long ago banned clerical freemasonry). Doing so must have adversely affected the impact of his polemic on the Anglican community, but presumably he no longer cared.
Some of the ad hominem attacks may
have been justified. He was not exactly a standard country vicar. I have found
a biographical note that tells us: “Walton Hannah was born in
I have described Hannah’s argument as logical. The hair-raising masonic oaths must be either rashly taken (in advance of knowing what they entail) or else frivolous (since they are sworn on the Bible, that would make them blasphemous anyway). If you accept that one can only believe one of two logically contradictory opinions, as Hannah clearly did, then you could not justify clerical freemasonry. Augustinian Christianity, with its emphasis on the moral and spiritual status of right belief, ultimately depends on such an assumption. It leaves no room for woolly liberal Anglicanism, and no room either for the rapprochement with other churches and religions that, of course, was just then beginning to gather momentum. Though Hannah’s subject is freemasonry, the position in which he finds himself in fact had analogues in the church’s attitude to many other subjects, and of course it had analogues outside the church too.
I take some more homeopathic pillules for my indigestion, and they do me good.
The problem with Hannah’s argument is that, not only may we do things that we cannot justify logically, but we may also say things without any corresponding belief. He makes a good deal, for example, of the middle element of JAH-BUL-ON (which is inscribed on the masonic Altar); it is cognate with the Assyrian deity Baal. (The third element is the Egyptian On or Osiris.) But if these, like the rest of masonic ritual, are merely verbal patterns that the participants can believe anything they like about, then it all becomes much more imponderable. An Augustinian view of belief has difficulty dealing with behaviour that is not grounded in anything so definite as belief. But this aspect of freemasonry was in fact portentous. What it already was in 1952 is what most western religion was tending to become: a sponge not a sword.
The relevance of Hannah’s dilemma to those of us who are not Anglicans or masons may perhaps be made clearer from the following passage. Hannah is considering the response that, whatever view he may take of the words of masonic ritual, his views are of no account because he has not experienced the atmosphere or context of the ritual as actually practised. He says:
A play can be understood,
and understood with accuracy by reading it and following the stage directions.
Even though it may come to life only by being performed, the meaning and
significance of it remain fundamentally unchanged however much different
nuances of interpretation are acted into it.
It would be ridiculous to blame Hannah for not being a literary theorist. One might not want to use exactly these words, but what he says here does represent fairly accurately the principle, embedded deeply in our educational system, on which all readers actually operate when they pick up a volume of Chekhov or Shakespeare. The potential difficulties with this view become manifest when Hannah argues that participating in Masonic ritual is very different from acting in a play:
For the Freemason identifies
himself with the mysteries, not in the sense that a good actor identifies
himself with his part, but by a solemn oath and in the name of God he
participates in the paganism of the play, and associates himself spiritually
with it.
This is much as to say, as he does elsewhere (in rebuttal of the argument that a priest going to the masons is merely like a priest mixing with his parishioners down at the local), that “initiation into Masonry is not merely ‘meeting’ people at any level at all. It is joining them – identifying oneself by solemn oath with those people and with their sub-Christian beliefs”. But plainly the distinction between meeting and joining is in fact a blurry one. In popular drama (which today means on a screen) both audience and makers are pushing hard towards the point at which the frame between enacted fiction and real life break down. From one direction this leads us toward “reality TV”; in the other direction it reflects our desire to enter the fictional frame ourselves and to inhabit it. Our drama moves towards being real event, e.g. economic triumph, violent humiliation, sexual act, endurance test or perhaps even religious ceremony; at the same time as being entertainment and sometimes art. Yes, to imagine oneself participating in the drama does entail jettisoning logical belief, but that’s OK. Like drinking or taking drugs, it’s what keeps things ticking over tolerably for us; in short, it sustains our civilisation. And thus Hannah, though admirably unassailable, bought himself only a shrug of the shoulders.
Some of Hannah’s points depend on a historical orthodoxy that even many Christians will now reject (e.g. the objectionableness of Baal). However, I think this passage, on a fundamental moral dilemma of Masonry, merits consideration from anyone.
Not every Mason, not even
every Christian Mason, could reasonably be expected to be a theologian or
perhaps to realise even the possibility of his Craft being at variance with the
exclusiveness of the Christian faith. Yet surely anyone capable of clear
thinking must realise that in Masonry is an inescapable and insoluble moral
dilemma.
If Freemasonry claims to
possess secrets the knowledge of which would benefit all mankind in enabling a
man to lead a higher and more moral life, it is immoral to keep that knowledge
to itself.
If Freemasonry does not
possess such secrets, it is equally immoral for it claim
that it does possess them.
And after all, why should
any knowledge about morals and the nature or name of God be
kept secret? The Tracing Board Lecture of the first degree attempts an answer,
it is true, but an answer which would be scorned as fatuous in an enlightened
twentieth century. For this lecture implies that the teachings of Masonry are
kept secret for the same reason that higher knowledge was the secret and
oathbound possession of the few in ancient Egypt, because it conferred occult
powers which might be mis-used in unworthy hands.
But can our democratic and enlightened Masons of to-day think of a better answer? Their own ritual nowhere suggests one, but it is difficult even after the most exhaustive examination to consider that ritual ‘enlightened’. However symbolically the turgid nonsensicalities of its mysteries may be interpreted, this, apparently, must always remain an unexplained mystery. Even to Freemasons.
Close examination (the sort that you make
when you’re typing something up) reveals this not to be a true dilemma at all,
since “Masonry does not claim to possess secrets with such straightforward
benefits” avoids both horns. The secrets of Masonry, if there really are any,
are perhaps better named mysteries. One does not “possess” a mystery; one,
well, joins it. As I’m typing up, thinking at the same time of the Rudyard
Kipling who wrote “The Church that was at
To end with, we ought to have a sample of the “turgid and nonsensical ritual” itself. From an outsider’s perspective it really is extremely dreary. Even here, in the obligation of a candidate to the Third Degree, potentially sensational content seems to be undercut so that it ends up meaning nothing much at all. I suppose it’s a playscript one needs to perform.
And finally, that I will
maintain a Master Mason’s honour and carefully preserve it as my own; I will
not injure him myself, or knowingly suffer it to be done by others if in my
power to prevent it; but on the contrary, will boldly repel the slanderer of
his good name, and most strictly respect the chastity of those nearest and
dearest to him, in the persons of his wife, his sister, and his child.
All these points I solemnly
swear to observe, without evasion, equivocation, or mental reservation of any
kind, under no less a penalty, on the violation of any of them, than that of
being severed in two, my bowels burned to ashes, and those ashes scattered over
the face of the earth and wafted by the four cardinal winds of heaven, that no
trace or remembrance may longer be found among men, particularly Master
Masons.
(2004)
JANET LEIGH
ROBERT RYAN
The Naked Spur (1953)
The titles appear, in
the kind of lettering that is reserved for westerns. Then,
close-up on the shining steel spur of a rider. He is riding urgently
through the scenery of the
We follow them to the
spot. There’s signs of recent habitation, but the killer (who knows Kemp is on
his trail), has moved on. They start to track him, interpreting the signs. The quarry are moving slowly – there’s more than one of them,
and it seems they have an injured horse. Just as Kemp and Jesse are ascending a
narrow path below a cliff, they’re nearly taken out by a rockslide. Is it
natural? They try to make the ascent again – again the rocks come crashing
down. So now they know that the killer is somewhere up there on the cliff-top.
They retreat out of
range and make a plan. Jesse is to keep the outlaw busy by remaining below and
firing frequently, while Kemp will try to scale a sheer part of the cliff and
surprise him by emerging from another direction. But at this point in their
deliberations they are interrupted. A stranger comes riding past. His name is
Cut to the cliff-top.
Ben, the killer, is up there, and holed up with him is a good-looking blonde
girl with a shorn “orphan” cut – Leena (Janet Leigh).
At this point Kemp tries
to pay Jesse off with the remaining ten bucks and to get rid of
They tie Ben’s hands in
front of him – this apparently means that he can’t escape. Why had he holed up
and not kept on going? Because one of their horses was sick.
They walk over to inspect the horse – it’s Leena’s. It’s lying down and has
difficulty breathing. Kemp decides to shoot the horse – Leena pleads, and Ben
takes her aside and puts his arms over her head to hug her, his hands still
tied. This is an image that will recur several times. Is it fatherly or sexual?
And we hear the shot. Not much to endear Leena to Kemp at this stage.
Now the journey to bring
Ben to justice in
Ben has already begun to
create tension between his captors. The others are journeying to collect a handsome
reward; he’s journeying to be hanged. He may be (as Roy later says) “not a man,
just a sack of money”, but he is a human being out here – he eats,
sleeps, rides – and he can talk and make trouble. He alone knows Kemp, though
probably less well than he pretends - (he over-familiarly calls him
“Howie”) - and he takes advantage of
this to breed fresh suspicions.
Roy, a serial womanizer,
tries to get fresh with Leena from the start. Ben doesn’t seem to mind. He
starts to stir up sexual jealousy by predicting to
Ben also chatters away
to Jesse about gold-mining. Jesse is quite open about it; he’s been searching
for years but he’s never made a strike. Ben tells him about a fellow he knew
who did find a rich strike, just round here in fact, but who never could
exploit it for lack of water.
Finally, Ben reflects,
in everyone’s hearing, that a reward split only two ways would go a lot further
than a reward split three ways.
The dialogue cracks
along, while we watch the party organizing who’s going to ride behind whom,
discussing directions, making camp under the stars. Around them is nothing but
wild, wooded scenery, mountains and rivers.
Ben’s back aches, he
complains of stiffness from riding with his hands tied. He likes to get Leena
over to massage his back. Partly so they can have quiet conversations in which
he can encourage her to use her good looks to cause dissent. Are you really hurt,
or do you just like to be rubbed? she asks him – “A
man needs what a man likes,” he replies. Since Ben is a captive up against the
odds, there is a potential sympathy for him in our minds, and at such moments
we, like Leena, have a soft spot for him and would like to think he is not a
murderer.
The camera tracks up
through a group of pale tree-trunks, and rests heart-stoppingly on a watching
Indian, mounted and armed. Seasoned viewers of westerns know that an Indian
episode is always a colourful diversion, though here, as often, the film’s
deeper interests do not include them.
Kemp has been the least
talkative of the party. Ben makes sly innuendoes about Kemp’s past, hinting
that he’s being driven by disappointed love for a woman who betrayed him. Ben is
hitting him where it hurts, but Kemp manages not to lose it; he becomes ever
more peremptory and bad-tempered. Is he fundamentally a good, principled,
dutiful man in a hard land, or is he just after the money, or deranged by lost
love? The portrayal of Kemp rides a thin line, casting doubt on whether these
alternatives make sense. Is Kemp truly a real Man in some sense that is denied
to Jesse, Roy and Ben? Is a hero anything other than a killer without a sense
of humour? Is Kemp’s dream really of settling, or of ownership? – why does he seem to think that there’s a moral value to
possessing a ranch?
How Leena fixed up with
Ben isn’t very clear, but she was an implausibly footloose orphan, and she
thought that by going along with him she’d have a chance of settling in
California, which appeals to her as a place where you can start a new life, and
where no-one knows who you are. Ben has always claimed to her that he wasn’t
the
When Kemp kneels over
someone (the sick horse, or Ben), his leather chaps reveal a bright blue,
baboon-like behind. Later, we’ll see Leena kneeling over Kemp and revealing her
own plump, shapely ass in lilac, high-waisted slacks.
Kemp and Jesse have gone
on ahead of the rest of the party, when they suddenly catch sight of a dozen
Blackfeet, a hunting party south of their usual territory. “Hunting for what?”
Kemp wonders.
They return to the
others. Roy (a self-professed Indian killer) is for attacking the Indians. Why
make trouble for ourselves? asks Kemp – and more
acutely: What are you afraid of,
The rest proceed
cautiously through the trees, and are soon being followed at a distance by the
twelve braves. Kemp orders calm. Leena is beginning to respect him now. The
camera pans aside to show us an anxious
A battle ensues.
Eventually all the Indians are lying dead, strewn around the clearing. Kemp has
been shot in the thigh. He’s furious with
Cut to the night. Kemp
is delirious with pain, moaning and revealing details of his past as a soldier,
and the ranch he bought for his Mary, the ranch she sold up while he was away
in the civil war. In his delirium he mistakes Leena for Mary and starts to
embrace her. Reluctantly she listens to what the others tell her to do, and she
makes soothing replies, speaking as if she was indeed his lost Mary.
Ben maliciously fills in
details of Kemp’s sorry history. What Kemp wants to do now is buy a new ranch
and start over. Jesse uprightly says that they shouldn’t be discussing this, it’s Kemp’s private business. But Ben points out: a split of
the reward won’t be enough for Kemp to buy his ranch. And that is your
business.
The party move on
through the wilderness.
Kemp, slowly regaining
strength, talks to Leena about his plans. He rhapsodizes about settling down.
Leena says she couldn’t stand to think that his ranch was financed by Ben’s
corpse. Kemp asks her what’s she doing tagging along
with Ben. Leena denies being Ben’s mistress. Leena says that her dream was for
Ben to buy a ranch when they made it to
Bad weather breaks –
thunder and heavy rain. They take refuge in a cave. Ben is complaining; he
wants his back rubbed again. He must get away soon. “Time’s running out,” he
tells Leena. She moves forward to the cave mouth where Kemp is on his own, begins a conversation and, a bit awkwardly,
manages to sit down beside him. Kemp’s suspicions are gradually lulled. They
talk about the music that the pattering rain is making on the tin mugs. Kemp
begins to speak fervently about his ranch again. He says to her: when I’ve got
it, I’d like you to come and see it. Do you realize what that means? He’s
looking at her. He grabs her and they kiss passionately.
In that moment Ben makes
his break for freedom, trying to clamber and wriggle through a passage in the
back of the cave. After a clumsy struggle Kemp manages to haul him back.
They’re in the main part of the cave again. Tempers flare, and Kemp unties
Ben’s hands and invites him to draw (someone must have lent him a gun). Ben
refuses; it’s three against one and he plainly hasn’t got a chance. Kemp, full
of pent-up fury at his unwanted colleagues, and Ben, and Leena’s Judas kiss,
looks like a killer himself now, with his hat pushed low over his head.
Eventually everyone calms down, but only temporarily.
The rain stops and they
move on, but they come to a swollen river that they can’t cross. They’ll have
to make a long detour, delaying them for maybe nine days. But perhaps there
might be a chance of getting across if they don’t have to watch out for Ben.
Roy and Kemp are
exhausted and out of action. Ben is talking to Jesse about his friend’s mine
again. Jesse says – you mean, your mine. You
wanted me to figure it out and you were trying to hook me. Yes, Ben admits, if
you’d only help me to get away, then maybe we could work the mine together.
Jesse thinks he’s got the upper hand and can drive a hard bargain. He insists
on sole ownership of the mine if he helps Ben escape. Ben objects violently at
first, but in the end he gives in. “I’m in no position to argue”. As Jesse
moves away, we see Ben’s suppressed whoop. He’s finally located the weak link.
That night, Jesse wakes
Ben and unties him. Ben insists on taking Leena along with them, and Jesse has
to give way. Ben wakes Leena with a hand over her mouth. The party finally
breaks up.
Cut to Jesse, Ben and
Leena – it’s daylight now. Their path has kept them by
the turbulent river. They stop to discuss the route. Ben’s words harden
suddenly. Almost without warning, he pulls his gun. Jesse begins to think about
making a different arrangement, conscious of the suddenly altered circumstances.
Ben says to him: “Thinking was always your problem, Jesse.” And he shoots him
in the heart. It’s a palpable shock. These had been five human beings. And now
Leena knows for sure what kind of man Ben is.
He forces her up to a
cliff-top, and starts firing more bullets in order to attract the laggardly
pursuers, Kemp and Roy. I think Ben hits her at one point. As at the start of
the movie, the pursuers have the problem of trying to get to him when he’s
holed up in a superior vantage-point. This time Kemp does manage to climb up the sheer
face, snatching off one of his spurs and using it as a hook to gain purchase in
small crannies. Ben, surprised by this frontal assault, stands up on the
skyline and
They have to retrieve
Ben’s corpse if they want to claim the reward. Roy hurries down to the
river, lassoes the tree root on the
other bank, ties it taut on his own side, and, with great daring, his legs in
their trooper hose swinging around wildly and flailing the water, manages to
get across and lashes Ben’s body to the rope. But then a huge tree-trunk comes
whirling down the river and smashes him unconscious. Leena screams from the
shore. His body is swept away and that’s the end of
Kemp reels in Ben’s
corpse and jacknifes it over his mount, dripping wet. As he does so, he
delivers an angry, self-disgusted monologue. Leena doesn’t care about him. All
he wants, all he’s ever wanted, is to collect on the killer’s corpse. The
money, that’s all.
But Leena does care for
him. She does care for him, but he has to give Ben a burial. So Kemp sacrifices
his $5,000. Instead, they’ll turn around and travel back in the other direction,
making for
(2004)
Jean Giono: The Man Who Planted Trees (1953)
According to his daughter (in an afterword), Giono, a hardworking professional writer well thought of by Gide, Malraux and Henry Miller, did not realize that his article for the Reader's Digest 's "The Most Remarkable Man I ever Met" was supposed to be factual. It is, however, written as if factual, with precise dates and places. But it's an imaginary account of a shepherd who slowly reafforests an area of moorland, and of the social regeneration that follows. I rather tend to think that the deceit was intentional, gaining welcome publicity and posing the question rather more sharply in our minds, whether this kind of afforestation scheme would really be practicable and whether it would indeed work out with the good effects described in the fable.
[I have doubts about the survival of the seedlings in a location otherwise so short of leafy shoots. I think because of the wind you'd have to make (or grow) windbreaks first, and fence the saplings, which could not go unnoticed. Nature is intolerant of introduced plantings. But I don't know.]
Just as Elzéard Bouffier ignored both world wars, so the story ignores all social and economic changes and supplies no answer about rural employment, subsuming everything to the dream of an acorn. Since Bouffier lives in total isolation his class and culture cease to exist and do not trouble a middle-class audience - Wordsworth had done this too. It is thus a fairy tale in which little unseen acts of altruism visibly transform the world. It is an extension of the hope that beautifying one's garden á la Candide does good to one's society, and that it is not necessary to communicate with that society in order to benefit it. In fact it's better not to: "If they'd suspected what he was up to they'd have tried to stop him".
Giono is good on the forest as a reservoir of water and on nature's ability, once properly started, to grow on hugely and to self-transform. He saw the power in the acorn rather than its vulnerability. Belief in the virtues of tree-planting was nothing new, but Giono pitched his fable not at estate-owners but at helpless, ordinary people. His simple tale with its optimistic message thus provided both a fantasy and a striking contribution to popular environmental awareness in the West, subsequently of great political importance. His tale was self-validating, itself an acorn that burgeoned astonishingly.
The implications for a political literature are: that it has to be so simple as to be held totally in the mind after one reading; that all style is counter-productive; that its political meaning is created by the reader rather than the author.
(2007)
[First appeared in the blogzine Intercapillary Space, under the title Googling Kathleen Raine]
[This collage arose from reading a
selection of Raine’s poems in Penguin Modern Poets 17 (1970). Raine shared that
volume with David Gascoyne and W.S. Graham, and that’s not a random grouping,
because the same trio had done a reading tour of the States in 1951, under the
banner of ”Three Younger British Poets”. Raine had
known Gascoyne since the thirties. All the other material is from online sources.
MP]
The clarity of the crystal is the atonement of the god.
(from ”The Crystal Skull”,
1943)
Winsome ”Kathie”
Kathleen's life had its pleasures, but much pain. She was beautiful and
intelligent, and knew the passions of the heart and body as well as the
immortal longings of the soul. At
After
Once, at his request, they shared a bed, without sexual contact. "Every
night of my life, since then, I have spent alone," she wrote in The Lion's
Mouth (1977), her third volume of autobiography. In it, she tells their story
with surgical honesty, not avoiding what she came to see as her most terrible
act, the words she spoke in her despair by the rowan tree on Sandaig that had
symbolised for her the eternal quality of their bond: "Let Gavin suffer in
this place, as I am suffering now." Maxwell's beloved Mij was killed, for
which Kathleen blamed her negligence; his house on Sandaig burned down. He
endured other losses and failures, and died prematurely of cancer in 1969.
(from Janet Watts, Guardian obituary of Kathleen Raine
(1908-2003))
I saw on a bare hillside an ash-tree stand
And all its intricate branches suddenly
Failed, as I gazed, to be a tree
And road and hillside failed to make a world
(from ”The Mirage”, 1951)
An undergraduate’s view (Oct 1954)
When we arrived at the house, [W] walked straight in, and of course I had to
follow. His friend Gavin was seated there talking earnestly with a woman as we
entered. ([W] told me later that this was Kathleen
Raine, who is apparently quite well known as a poet. But there was an
expression on Gavin's face which seemed to be rebuking us for the intrusion. He
relented however, and drinks were offered - although Kathleen Raine continued
to look as if it were impolite of us to have stolen some of his attention away
from her.
Gavin Maxwell had some work of his own to finish, but Kathleen Raine came on to
the lecture with us, accepting a lift in [W]'s car. But [W] may have gulped
down one too many - and having a rather small body, he does seem to show the
effects of drink rather more quickly than others that I know. Anyway his
conversation was becoming more peculiar every minute - reverting to the subject
of having to obtain the right kind of dents in an accident to his car, but now
creating a vivid impression of it all being just about to happen - driving up
on the pavement, and round the other side of a lamppost, with exclamations of
excitement thrown in for good measure. I was in fits of laughter, but the
elderly poet-lady appeared much on edge, endeavouring to restore a semblance of
intellectual fibre to the conversation. I noted at one point that she was
suggesting something about Blake's symbolism. But [W] was giving her no
encouragement whatsoever, talking instead about running over policemen and
playing bumper-cars. So finally she froze into an icy silence. And as soon as
we arrived at the hall where the lecture was to be delivered, she jumped out of
the car and ran in ahead of us. That was the last we saw of her in fact.
(later the same evening...)
Then [W] took me to a restaurant club which he declared to be Gavin Maxwell's
favourite haunt. I was curious to see that Gavin was pleased to see us this
time, when we arrived. For whatever reason, there was now a complete switch in
mood and he was now quite welcoming. In fact I enjoyed the meal very well,
striking chatterbox form. I liked to suppose that I was becoming the focal
point for the attention of these two distinguished intellectuals!
(Alexander Thynne’s diary -
the author was in his second year at
There is stone in me that knows stone,
Whose sole state is stasis
While the slow circle of the stars whirls a world of
rock
Through light-years where in nightmare I fall crying
’Must I travel fathomless distance for ever and ever?’
All that is in me of the rock, replies
’For ever, if it must be: be, and be still; endure.’
(from ”Rock”, 1951)
Giving with one hand
There is no doubt that the quality of these preoccupations and the pure
underivative language in which they are expressed have resulted in some very
fine poems ("Shells," "The Invisible Spectrum,"
"Air") which prove Miss Raine to be one of the most serious living
English poets - serious, that is, in the sense of utter devotion to her vision.
(Philip Larkin, from a Guardian review of Raine’s first “Collected”, 1956)
Scipio saw
Among those seas and
continents, but blotting out all galaxies
When to the assault he came which razed from time
Dido’s bright palaces.
(from ”The Eighth Sphere”,
1965)
The Queen Mother (early 1980s)
The Temenos experiment was hardly mainstream, and it was funded at first by the
sale of paintings and occasional donations, for Dr Raine was not wealthy. But
she was surrounded by friends, and the sufferings and religious searching of
her earlier life seemed now to bear fruit in a cultural movement centred around her house in
(from Stratford and
Léonie Caldecott, Kathleen Raine: A Challenge to Catholics in Second
Spring: a Journal of Faith and Culture)
The helix revolves like a timeless thought
Instantaneous from apex to rim
Like a dance whose figure is
limpet or murex, cowrie or golden winkle.
They sleep on the ocean floor like humming-tops
Whose music is the mother-of-pearl octave of the
rainbow
(from ”Shells”, 1951)
Punch and counter-punch
GL: Would you be a poet again in your next life?
KR: Oh no! No.
GL: Why? Because you've done it already?
KR: I've done it already. I don't have much faith in poetry.
GL: You don't have much faith in poetry?
KR: At one time poetry implied that the poet was contributing a special kind of
wisdom, passing a judgment of the values of eternity on the values of time. But
now poetry seems to be just writing down whatever comes into your head. Any
idea of poetic tradition and poetic technique has totally been thrown out.
GL: When do you think the change happened?
KR: With the modern movement, which is basically a
materialist movement. The idea that there is a spiritual order on which
poetry is supposed to draw is completely gone from our civilization. It's just
not there anymore...
GL: ... You say the modern movement, and I'm trying to place that. Do you mean
the poets of the thirties, the socially conscious poets, Auden...?
KR: Well, it's the gradual loss you see. Eliot's poetry is a lament for the
loss of tradition. But people went on cheerfully after that and said "Oh
well, we don't need tradition. We reject the follies of our parents. We'll
write free verse and don't need to know anything." So we get poetry as
self-expression, as therapy, social or political poetry. Or
moaning about the universe. I don't know why we should moan about the
universe. I think it's wonderful.
GL: What advice would you give a poet today?
KR: I'd say forget it, and do philosophy instead. Or learn history. Start to
learn things. Temenos, after all, is trying to reestablish true knowledge. You
see, you can't write poetry when there's no one who'll read it intelligently.
There has to be an ambiance in which you can communicate. Otherwise you're
talking to yourself.
(from an
interview with Gary Lachman for Lapis Magazine, 1997)
Her activity as a propagandist and critic of modernity has been considerably
less enlightened. Interviewed at the age of 84, she was still smarting at
conversations of 60 years before, and replaying them without being able to
persuade the reader that she had understood the other person or was giving a
fair account of their position. Her religiosity is astonishingly self-serving,
it seems to be little more than a way of invalidating people who are more
intelligent than her and who pointed out at various stages of her life that she
wasn't intelligent enough...In some remarkable autobiographical interviews,
Raine has recalled how, as an undergraduate, she was laughed at by everyone for
her stupidity, and how everyone around her was more intellectually
sophisticated; impressed by this, she nonetheless found her way to spiritual
verse in a stanzaic form derived from the nineteenth century (or do I mean the
sixth century?). The statements are remarkable for their frankness in admitting
that she was wrong about everything, and for their arrogance in assuming that
she was right about everything that mattered, and everyone else was wrong.
Again and again she hammers home the message about thinking being bad for you;
a kind of mispronunciation of 'I am bad at thinking'... Close examination of
claims may seem 'cynical' and 'materialistic', but where someone makes such
appalling accusations against other people, one has to examine the evidence.
She is unique in the scurrility of her claims about other people, in this
scenario of purity and defilement, and in her image of English poetry as two
opposing camps...
(from Andrew Duncan, online
essay on four Christian poets in pinko.org)
A dying seabird standing where the burn runs to the
shore
Between rank leaves and rough stone,
Its nictitating membrane down
Over eyes that knew a wild cold sky,
Head indrawn,
Into neck-plumage and wing pinnae furled,
Disturbed in its dying becomes for the last time a
gull,
Opens eyes on the world,
Brandishes harsh bill
And then withdraws again to live its death
And unbecome the gull-mask it was.
(from ”The Hollow Hill”, 1965)
(2006)
J.R.R. Tolkien:
The Lord of the Rings (1954-55)
12/8/00 Sudden sharp desire to re-read Lord of the Rings ignited by borrowing it from Grant in the office. The first two chapters are really fantastic.
13/8/00 My Birthday. Raining in Bath - Hanging baskets - 75% reductions in BHS - chips, peas, carrots and gravy - Mary making my mobile phone ring (Bach) every minute or so.
In
Why, contrary to all habit, I’ve actually bought a new book is hard to say. In the end I bought the cheapest version. I wanted to read in large print on good paper, but I was disappointed to find that not even the hardbacks in Waterstone’s were very good quality - certainly not like those grey volumes with their fold-out maps of black and red. And I have prepared my reading carefully - I’ve now read the “Note on the Text”, the Foreword, the Prologue... (it’s toward the end of this, discussing the Shire Records, that my first ungracious doubt about the value of all this imagined history briefly intrudes).
On the first page I mentally note: Trollope. The manner of the storyteller at this stage owes something to him - but perhaps this is sparked off too by the general resemblance of the map of the Shire to Barsetshire and the map I have seen in those books.
Tolkien’s map is loosely congruent with
Western Europe and draws on our myths of e.g.
11/9/00 I am in the middle of reading Lord of the Rings - the company are separated but converging on Minas Tirith. In my anxiety dream, I had to implement a communications network, starred from Minas Tirith, to connect the characters (Merry, Aragorn, etc) with each other. C.S. Lewis, I think, pointed out that the prevalent emotion of Lord of the Rings is anguish.
1/10/00 Lord of the Rings, finally. I can’t see me reading it again. I hoped to find in it an odd sort of masterpiece, but for all its achievements - a vast and spacious narrative, and two good voices in Gollum and Treebeard - there is something too sickly about it. The poverty of the presentation of female characters is too apparent. And with that goes something else - a lack of convincing happiness. Hobbits’ meals are a poor substitute for sex and religion. Tom Bombadil and his lunatic - but impressive - river-wife are as near as we get. The high-archaic-Malory style that besets the Return of the King is dreadful stuff. Once only I felt the genuine tremor that seemed to be promised by that glance at Grant’s copy. It was in Appendix A. The story of Arwen, and especially her death - the very last act of the whole history - is truly mythical in a mode that an adult reader can accept. But these are cold words.
Postscript (2002). That was my judgment from a “literary” point of view; and this is not to belittle it and pretend that there is some higher court of appeal. However, with all the excitement over the films I have been able to witness a couple of other, more naïve, readers deeply immersed in the book - a man of about thirty, for the first time; and an eighteen-year-old woman, for the second time. The depth of their delighted absorption was clearly greater than anything else they have experienced in book form; and both, though they’d enjoyed the film, were now qualified in praise of it - the book was, as it were, the “reality” by which they now automatically oriented their opinions. There is something remarkable about how seriously they could take a book about childish hobbits and booming ents, a book, moreover, drawn out of the quaint imagination of a spinsterly medievalist fifty years ago. It was the power of the book’s ability to invoke imaginative excitement that stilled argument about its methods - they became irrelevant. Not everyone cann yield to it - Grant, for example, did not, though he’s mad on the film of the first part. Germaine Greer, on a television program, clearly could not settle to the task, expressing mere astonishment at the infantile materials. Perhaps she didn’t try very hard - her own vast engagements had already prejudged it. Knowledge is, alas, sometimes disabling. It is, after all, a matter of the first importance why - for example - I should suddenly find myself having litterary conversations with unliterary people. Those who live near the English departments of universities may not appreciate the rarity of this phenomenon. The whole canon of our educated tradition is, as it were, locked in a chest and unavailable to most people. But the Lord of the Rings admits them. One reason might be that Tolkien himself seems to believe in his world; he does not write down, does not betray any awareness that he is “casting a spell”. - I think there is a lurking doubt in the mind of any reader who does yield to it that Middle-Earth might be, in some intangible way, “not made up”. And they do see the point of reading about another world - though they consider they have more than enough information about their own - at any rate, they have no thirst for books about it.
(2000, 2002)
Gunnar Björling: You go the words (1955)
first published in Intercapillary Space.
O we all when the days go out
to see can it lights itself
all
who wants it that
the birds go out?
You go the words ends like this,
with the gentlest of appeals, gentle indeed considering how the book is fraught
with loss, longing, warmth, pity, loneliness. It was published in 1955 when
Gunnar Björling was 68, and was dedicated to the memory of Martin A. Hansen
- aa name unknown to Google, perhaps the
author's lover, a close friend anyhow. And Björling's book is filled too with
premonitions of his own death five years ahead. Despite this you don't think of
its author as old. He sets about these matters as if they are something he's
consideirng for the first time; as if it's you the reader's concern rather than
particularly his own. Photographs of Björling tell the story; he was the kind
of person who never learnt to be old and psychologically never became old. He
never accepted enough explanations.
Difficult I am to explain, the less thou shalt explain away. (in the journal Quosego,
c. 1929)
For all
that, he also claimed that his life's work proceeded according to a definite
logic, and it is a philosophical as much as a passionate exclamation that
erupts from the opening poem of the collection:
We go and search
and we wander
we go and search
it is not in the
words
it is not words
words not
but of a nothing
o your day (I, 1)
It's
impossible not to become involved in an inquiry that begins with such a
welcoming invitation. And if the effort to think along with these poems becomes
rapidly more formidable, it's not so much that the poems have become difficult
as because the difficulty was always in the terms of that inquiry. Many of the
poems are object lessons in how much is possible with the barest minimum of
materials:
And that you
you
and day, and
follows
day
and that you
you
you or someone
someone or you
life and honor
life and honor
you honor
you
you
and life and
honor! (II, 2)
There
are things we miss here. I'm sure Fredrik Hertzberg, who made these
translations, would concede that it's a good idea to keep glancing across the
page at the Swedish text; to pick up, in this case, the visual connection
between day ("dag") and you ("dig" - intimate object form),
or the felt connexion between honor ("ära") and being ("är"
is the present tense form of the verb to be). Still the shape of the poem is
quite clear - how "follows" in the first part and "honor"
in the second - those relatively enormous two-syllable
words are tossed like bricks into a fishpond and leave the whole expanse
trembling. And it's also clear that a tender, painful irony coexists alongside
the unforeseen festivity of that exclamation mark. Which is
fas as I go in explanation, given another of Björling's remarks (quoted
in the Introduction): "I know that if I lifted a red flag before the
statue of Alexander, they would ask why I'm wearing a green scarf."
As poem
follows poem there develops behind the slight words a soon-luxuriant bloom of
backward reference. As far ahead as IV,3 we suddenly
turn a corner and find ourselves face to face again with the book's opening
line:
A head
face
a bowed head
like seeing
with the hand
What day and courage
and goes and seeks
you
(the Swedish is "går och söker", a direct quote
from "we go and search" in I,1) - and yet,
of course, it isn't the same at all, now that the object of the search becomes
"you". But I'm also quoting this because of "seeing / with the
hand", which is not only about a hand across the eyes. Of the many vectors
of imagery that circulate restlessly behind the poems, none is more persistent
than images of seeing where there's no means getting a glance - between stone
and stone, between body and body-part, into past days and closed graves - and
of seeing with the unsighted, e.g. hands and fingers. Seeing with fingers is
certainly the best way of finding the right-sized potato in a 3kg bag.
- or stone
and straw
o me
is
Sky sucked
air took
your toe melted
together
Like a dog, like a rat
like a floor
that I rest
Your toe A nail
and cut off
Th'straw of hair Skin's
fold
Your blood's
saliva
Everything lost
: the
capture
in
your hand
Agglutinative
and fragmenting aspects of language are terribly wracked in the effort to open
up these equally un-visible materials: your day now, your day then, and the day
that wasn't your day but someone else's. Hertzberg in his introduction has a
good phrase for it: "material opacity". It is a need that sees; though
it seems impossible it isn't, and I think Aase Berg calling the poems
"overjoyous" is thinking more of what she has taken from Björling
(this sounds like a description of her Uppland)
than of Björling's own joyousness, grounded in a logic of discovery and
eventually placed centre-stage in the six season-songs of the ninth section.
But after thinking this I go back on myself reading the following poem; perhaps
Björling does acknowledge, as of these stubby fingers peering, a necessary
"stupidity":
So slight
that in animals and
limbs
- what
more that in reputation and disrepute -
like a worm and
trampled down
and like me
and soon
burnedthrough
So slight
and as
all
so slight and
perishable
But today is day and roses
blossom
that not
not to
overlook
roses
and like
people
people hearts
yet
And the stupidity
Perhaps the unshakeable stupidity of a dog who, when you point something
out to it, gazes in a troubled way at your finger.
The
intense and (as it seems) intensely relevant fascinations of Björlingian
technique can make us forget: these seem like poems that were written yesterday
and it's only occasionally that a period sigh (of roses, perhaps), like a
languishing portamento, reminds us that we're reading a poetry that belongs to
a world of black-and-white photographs and we can hardly imagine what it meant
- or just as pertinently what little it meeant - in Björling's lifetime. Now
these poems seem like exemplary studies in how to get to new places very
quickly.
Notes:
1. Gunnar Björling published twenty collections, of which
this was the last, and is said to have written 30,000 poems. He is not the sort
of poet that you can ever "possess". Though he was recognized as one
of the important figures (along with Edith Södergran, Elmer Diktonius and Henry
Parland) in Finland-Swedish modernism, none of his poems, so far as I know,
were translated into English until more than twenty years after his death. (It
would hardly have surprised him not to have featured in Voices of Finland (1947), which I think contained the first
translations of modern Finnish and Finland-Swedish poetry into English. Elli
Tompuri, the editor, reasonably explained: "In selecting the material for
this small anthology I have attempted to give a picture of the literary trends
which are most illustrative of the broader outlines of Finnish life. For this
reason purely subjective poetry has been excluded." All the same,
Södergran and Diktonius were in it; in a nation with such a short history of
written poetry - and indeed of nationhood -, contempt for innovation could
never be quite as comfortably entrenched as e.g. in
A singer I wanted to be, to give the
suffering day, give the happy a longing. A singer whose song would strike hard
through the day.
And the word was nothing but sounds and
light in my heart! (from Resting Day,
1922)
Is not
dada necessary for lightweightless eyes?
DADA:
I slay dust
beneath my foot,
I am the
voice shaken out into space,
I am the
sieve that let through
and built
the hall of pillars.
Your lip gives off its colour and the
tongues twist, you change your head, you meet the gaze of your fate on the
streetcorner or right in front of your very nose's cut-out. (from Kiri-ra! 1930)
Like a
splash of God's blood is each moment an object in my
hand.
- like
tufts on the skin of the ordinary we shall walk on the wrath
that wells from our intestines.
Like a
cosmopolitanism, without losing our balance
in the
increasing moment. We
with the
will of our hands, that our breasts might rest as in
dissolvedness,
andall
were sprays and streams
and as
though all were like a well-run milkbar
in which
all receive exactly as much as they can drink. (from Sungreen, 1933)
From this kaleidoscope of different kinds of poetry it was
clear that Björling was energetic, driven, inventive, clearly a formidable
writer and perhaps a crazy one. But it would take an acute reader to infer the
tenacity of the investigation that Björling would undertake in his later
poetry. The first glimpse of this, also provided by McDuff, appeared in the
large anthology of poetry from
Then Johannes Göransson translated some of That in one's eye (1954) for the SFSU
periodical Fourteen Hills (1996); and, around the same time, a long extract
from Where I know that you (1938) in
the online Typo 7 (http://www.typomag.com/issue07/)
- a highly recommended anthology of innovative Swedish-language poetry. But
a poet like Björling can never be properly encountered in selections, and You go the words, in English with the
Swedish text on the facing page, is now clearly the right place to begin that
encounter. Why Hertzberg should have settled on this final collection he does
not discuss, which leaves us wondering. This is not the poet who stirred things
up in the twenties with Parland and others and who thus demands his place in
any literary history of
2. och and att
It may not be immediately apparent that nearly all the
variety of disjunctive effect in Du går
de ord is produced using a surprisingly limited toolkit. Björling's means
are sentence decomposition by heavy cutting, an astute but quite restrained use
of layout and the frequent interpolation of just two words, och and att.
How to translate these words is a question, since they are
included not so much for the meanings they bring with them as for the meanings
they splinter out of other words. Leaving that aside, the Swedish word och presents no particular difficulty:
it means and, and it's used in much
the same way (except in Björling's poems).
But att is a
different matter altogether. It has two functions for which English uses
different words. Both are present in this sentence:
Jag önskar att jag hade en vän att
anförtro mig åt.
I wish that I had a friend to confide in.
The first way that att
is used is as a subordinating conjunction, where English uses the word that. The second is before the
infinitive form of the verb, where English uses to. But both the English words have a range of other uses that att will not bear: it cannot be used as
a demonstrative adjective or demonstrative pronoun or relative pronoun (like that) nor as a preposition (like to).
What is a translator to do? Hertzberg generally goes for that, but the problem is that this
sometimes glosses over a syntactic impossibility in the Swedish:
att är
that is
The English is fragmentary, but as a fragment it provokes no
further discomfort; the Swedish does.
The most pervasive problem is that it's precisely the
meanings that att can never bear,
the adjectival/pronominal that and
the prepositional to, that are most
likely to cross our minds in that fleeting moment when we are struggling to
construe what can't be construed.
Here's an instance of how these problems with att can mount up:
jag
kryper till en fot
fot
att
kryper
Därutanför
att
himmel
luft
och
grönt
I creep to
a foot
foot
to creeps
Outthere
that sky
air and
green
For the reason mentioned above, Hertzberg avoids "foot /
that creeps" - which would seem to the English reader all too simple to
construe. His choice, "foot / to creeps", preserves the syntactic
violation, but it does so at the expense of rousing a memory of "creep
to" a couple of lines earlier - an echo that isn't there in the original
text; the real structural connection, with "that sky" a couple of
lines further on, is completely obscured. And when we read "that
sky", we instantly construe "that" as a demonstrative adjective;
as if a meditative rambler was pointing out "that sky over there", as
happens in many another poem, but not in this one.
How much does all of this matter? Well, in this particular
passage I think the thread of Björling's poem is irretrievably lost. But though the problem appears radical,
overall it matters less than you might expect. In poem after poem the package
of words and disjunctions (even if they are not quite the right disjunctions)
delivers an eloquent charge that silences my doubts: this, I'm convinced, is
something like what Björling is like - so to speak. And of course there are
some other aspects of these poems that translate into English particularly
well: a good few of Björling's key words (e.g. fot, hand, finger) cross the language barrier
automatically.
3. "bluebells"
- has not
scents' eyes
has not
day
and has
forsakenness
- the
bluebells at the driveway
(beginning of V,1)
Blåklockor does literally
translate to "blue bells" (though klocka
also means "clock", "watch", "the time" -
which complicates the ringing of bells that subsequently drifts through the
rest of section 5). The reference here is to the circumboreal Campanula rotundifolia, which is called
"bluebell" in
that the
summer
On
worldspaces'
the
onetimegrave
(Photo from Den
virtuella floren (http://linnaeus.nrm.se/flora) by Arne and Anna-Lena
Anderberg)
(2008)
John Ashbery (poems from 1956..)
Tonight I picked up Ashbery again - the selection in Penguin Modern Poets 19. With reluctance - I still imagine that I don’t enjoy reading Ashbery. But that’s out of date; increasingly, I realize that I am enjoying it very much.
The poem was “Soonest Mended”, the usual kind of infuriatingly oblique title.
I don’t really know any other kind of poetry like this. It all happens in the process of reading. Nothing, in itself, is really very worth quoting; even so fine an image as “this careless preparing, sowing the seeds crooked in the furrow..” really depends for its impact on the whole construction.
The theme is never explicitly stated (is there a theme?). In practice, your own mind fills up the vacuum. Like every other Ashbery poem, you end up making it out to be about “the nature of (our) life”, or something as vague and cloudy as that. “The general state of the world today,” the theme that, C.S. Lewis says, “never attracts a good writer and always exposes a bad one”. I applaud, but I have to admit that in the end he’s wrong. That theme now seems overwhelmingly pressing, though it may not have been in any earlier time.
Global media shouldn’t dictate the terms of our poems, but the fact of global media and how it changes the way we experience our existence is simply too significant not to confront.
Actually, one can make out a bit more than that. It’s plain enough that one element in this poem is “we ... were merely spectators” - our life unheroically lived by proxy. And here’s another - that we are irresolute, always retreating from the impossible intangibles of where we’ve got to back to the childish early terms, when we knew what we were doing (a superb comparison here with “the friendly beginning of a geometrical progression”). A memory of infant aspiration - wanting to be “small and clear and free”, contrasted with the life we find ourselves in, full of “the loose meaning, untidy and simple like a threshing floor”. Simple? Yes, because the complexity is not something we can make a construct out of, it’s just an assortment or a heap.
I think it was in a Christian apologetic that I first read that you can’t start at the beginning, you are compelled to go from where you are now. And though you don’t have it all clear in your mind, and therefore don’t feel confident of the answer, you have to make a decision anyway. Exactly why this might move one to embrace “The Foolishness of God” (I think that was the title of the book), I can’t remember. But I absorbed the description. Ashbery’s poems seem to surf that wave, of “existence in time” - they present it to you in the reading. I don’t necessarily want to read lots of Ashbery, it seems a very unprogressive activity, you can never pin things down and then start to “build”. But the poems - some of these early ones, anyway - do “work”, and they do it in an astonishingly original way.
And the image here, of what life feels like within an overwhelmingly populous culture, is highly relevant to my environmental concerns. I come at it more crudely, less prepared to put up with it (I mean in poetry, not in life). Ashbery is, unquestionably, focussed on modern material - how rarely can you say that!
*
THE COUPLE IN THE NEXT ROOM
She liked the blue
drapes. They made a star
At
the angle. A boy in leather moved in.
Later they found names
from the turn of the century
Coming
home one evening. The whole of being
Unknown absorbed into
the stalk. A free
Bride on the rails
warning to notice other
Hers and the great
graves that outwore them
Like faces on a
building, the lightning rod
Of a name calibrated
all their musing differences.
Another
day. Deliberations are recessed
In an iron-blue
chamber of that afternoon
On which we wore
things and looked well at
A
slab of business rising behind the stars.
(from Houseboat Days, 1977)
Reading this poem, whatever you take from it, I think you would agree that
what happens happens in the sentence beginning “A free / Bride on the rails...” Just prior to that, the word “stalk” spits at us with a sudden brassiness, displacing the ambling narrative of the opening. Before we have time to think about what this image is doing, the epic sentence hits us. It may be signalled by the word “great”, but what makes it stand out is the difficulty of “free”, “rails” and “Hers”. (Ashbery loves to use his unfashionable capital letters to provoke syntactic uncertainty.)
The last line of the poem is mainly there to hold in check the elegy that would effloresce in our minds if the poem ended “that afternoon / On which we wore things and looked well”. It is true that the “stars” (like “blue” and “name”) refer back to the poem’s opening, and you can extract a biography out of this which makes sense of the poem’s title and typifies the way that we always do infer stories about neighbours we don’t know. Perhaps they are getting married or having a baby (what else do such couples do?).
You can admire a traditional kind of skilfulness in the multiple meanings of “outwore” and “looked well”. What I like still better is Ashbery’s awareness of ways in which we understand a stalk – (a) the bit that isn’t the essential thing itself (e.g. the stalk of an apple); (b) the bit that IS the essential thing itself, what a plant has instead of a mind or skeleton; (c) its conductivity, something that stuff passes through, like a lightning rod. But what I like best is that sentence in the middle, the place where you can dive repeatedly and be in rough contact, without quite knowing what it is, with the thing that happens.
(2001, 2005)
W. Ellery Anderson: Expedition
South (1957?)
This is a run-of-the-mill travel book about the Antarctic - more specifically, it’s about a year in charge of a survey station.
It is competently done, rather unromantic though of course it uses romantic expressions and thought-forms. We are made to feel, for some reason, little affection for the author or his comrades. He seems, to my unexploring mind, unnecessarily captious. The very tremendousness of the Antarctic (place, and weather) is made somehow commonplace without becoming less terrifying.
Suddenly I saw a whale jump
clean out of the water like a gigantic salmon. A moment later another, a little
nearer to us, did the same. The a third went up. We immediately got out our
cameras hoping to photograph a jumping whale, but none obliged.
We were getting used to the
sight of whales, but were certainly not prepared for what we encountered in the
next pool, a short distance away. It was a small pool, perhaps a hundred yards
long by fifty yards wide, and in it were about twelve Adèlie penguins, four crabeaters, one leopard seal, and occasionally two
Killer whales, all swimming about together in perfect harmony. Such a scene in
Then, as we watched, a pack of five Killers appeared from under the ice less than six feet from where we stood. There was no mistaking them. They were certainly Killers, yet they went porpoising through the group of seals and penguins, without harming them, and we saw a swirl of glistening backs and the flash of dorsal fins as they dived under the ice on the other side.
Characteristically, no explanation is forthcoming. They saw it, and we see it, but don’t know what to do about it. Only the facts speak - the writing is unable to explore them, and is indeed poor. The helpless transition-sentence at the beginning of the second paragraph is an example, and “perfect harmony” requires an effort to overcome its connotative baggage.
After the middle of May I
began sending out small parties on minor sledging journeys from forty to sixty
miles. Most of these were for local survey, but I also wanted to get as many
men as possible away from base. I was opposed to the idea that personnel should
be categorized as “sledging” or “non-sledging”. It was bad for the morale of
those whose duties tended to keep them indoors if they did not get a chance of
some real Antarctic travel.
Naturally, I suppose, the
sledging parties preferred to wait for fine sunny mornings before setting out,
but I insisted that, provided it was safe, people should leave in fair weather
or foul. If they only emerged on fine days, we were not going to get very far
in the Antarctic. This policy, I am afraid, nearly resulted in tragedy.
It was to be a short run,
for two parties consisting of Worswick and Kenney, and Taylor and Willis, but
it was blowing quite hard that morning and so the trip was postponed. Taylor
and Kenney both said that they thought it would mean taking a risk, and I told
them they could please themselves. Next day conditions had improved a little
and I made it clear that I disapproved of them holding back. To please me, they
went. They returned the next day with a terrifying story.
They had set out in the
early afternoon, but by the time they reached Summit Pass they were facing a
head wind of gale force, so they decided to camp and lie up for the rest of the
day. They fed their dogs and “storm-pitched” their tents on the pass. This was
done by tying a rope to the apex of the tent and anchoring it to the sledge.
The tent was then laid on the snow, pointing into the wind, the skirt flap of
the back wall was picketed to the ice and the four poles jerked upright. With
the top held to the sledge the wind helped to drive the poles firmly into the
snow.
After a meal the occupants
of both tents turned in. As
At about ten o’clock the
tent began to move slightly as each frenzied gust punched it. The give was
imperceptible at first, but as the guy-ropes were loosened the movement of the
tent poles increased, and the tent rocked under each screaming blow.
’I think we’d better get
dressed,’
They lit their candle, but
it was immediately blown out by the flapping tent walls, so they had to feel
for their several layers of clothing in the dark and dress in the confined
space of the tent, with the flapping impelling them to hurry. That only made
dressing even more difficult.
These precautions
undoubtedly saved their lives, for without warning the tent was whipped away
from over them, and they were suddenly out in the blizzard, with the drift
coming at them like sand out of sand-blasting gun.
Meanwhile, Willis was
holding onto his sleeping-bag in a grim embrace as he and it were being rolled
over and over in the wind. He could not say how far he was taken, but managed
to stop by writhing in the snow until he was lying with his head into the wind.
He had lost touch with
Willis knew the other tent
was up-wind and began crawling towards it, dragging the sleeping-bag under him.
Drift blinded him. It choked him so that he had to stop every few feet to
breathe by ducking his face down and inhaling in the slipstream. Whenever he
looked up, the force of the wind pressed back the flesh on his cheeks, and
although he did not know at the time his face was being frost-bitten.
Time was difficult to
assess. Willis thought about twenty minutes passed before he encountered
Taylor, who was looking for him, shouting into the blizzard. Willis heard one
of the shouts on the wind. It was as though somebody had called his name in a
dream. He went forward, and there was
Together they inched forward
into the numbing blast, crouching heads down in the wind as each frenzied gust
struck them and the drift quickly piled up ahead. They could see nothing but
the ice grey-flecked darkness, and had no idea where they were.
After some time
’Shut up, you bastard,’
A moment later it was
licking his face with a warm tongue, greeting him delightedly, quite oblivious
of the blizzard.
Finding Worswick’s team
immediately indicated to
The four of them spent the
rest of the night huddled together in the one tent. Next morning the wind had
abated considerably, and they went out to look for the other tent and
equipment. Nothing remained and all that they ever recovered was a a part of
the tent which had been blown down the snow-slope and a fifty-pound box of
sledging rations which they found over three miles away.
This was surely worth writing. In travel-books we confuse literature with life - for example, we admire the author for what he did as much as what he writes.
For the reader, though it is ourself, we have some contempt: we think “armchair-traveller”. Yet memories of camping and bad weather, feebly incomparable as they may be, are enough to persuade of the reality of this. It is an efficient way of arriving at a corner of experience that no-one can get to easily or often.
(2001)
C.P. Snow: The Affair (1960)
At some point C.P. Snow will have his due. It may be that anyone who reads more than one novel in the Strangers and Brothers sequence will be overcome by the sense of a writer who composes his own clichés, unwittingly parodies himself and has an absurd self-regard. Snow is perhaps not a novelist at all, as Leavis proclaimed. So much the better, I think.
The “Establishment” is such a mysterious and inaccessible world that it’s very gratifying to be permitted to enter it in so much detail, even though the author makes no bones of his admiration. Indeed, he could not write these books without the admiration.
The Affair is a book without sexual adventure or death. And yet not altogether a comedy, though there is something in the book’s procedure that reminds you of comedy. It’s mostly conversation about the business – a doubtful matter that cannot be finally resolved, though I think we are perhaps meant to suppose that Nightingale destroyed the photograph – but, as in real life, there is room for doubt. (It would be more or less certain if you could treat the text of the book itself as evidence in the trial it describes, because what Nightingale says before the hearing doesn’t make sense if his assertions during the trial are entertained; but you can’t give even the most skilful sort of novel that kind of weight within its own fiction). The persistent doubts, the essential vagueness of the technical matters, are there to provoke the complex reactions of the participants.
It would have been hard to
tell whether Martin had heard what Skeffington had just said. He was not
looking at Skeffington. He gazed steadily at the hearth, in which the electric
fire had one small incandescent star, much brighter than the glowing bars,
where a contact had worked loose.
I’m quoting this because it reminds us, as other stray sentences do, of everything that this book isn’t about – everything that other books are about.
A few pages taken from the middle of the book will illustrate what is distinctive in Snow, both for good and ill.
In April I had to go to
The mock-modesty of that “as it happened” – one was always dealing with top secret matters – is one reason why you might object to Snow, and remember Buchan ungratefully. Briefly Lewis Eliot looks out of the windows of the conference-room:
it was a piercing
blue April afternoon, a sunny afternoon with a wind so cold and pure that it
made one catch one’s breath.
The word “pure”, with its strong implication of public-school chastity, is again Buchanesque.
...resentful ...
as though once I had been out in the cold free air and known great happiness. And yet, my real
memories of days like that in
That is comfortably beyond Buchan. Yet we are soon back at the conference-table, and once again his spectre rises.
There was a fair amount of
ability in the room, two Nobel Prize winners, five Fellows of the Royal
Society. For imagination and sheer mental drive, I would have put Luke before
any of them...
(This unacademic psychology, this “shrewd judgment of men” which Snow prided himself on and probably possessed, is a key element in what his books are about.) Everyone here is idealized, Luke in particular, Crawford later. That is also a significant part of Snow’s intention in portraying the decision-makers. Also an element of his style; even the unamiable Howard is somewhat gratuitously supplied with this:
One felt that, change his
temperament by an inch, he would have made a good regimental officer.
This is a book about good people.
That conference-room scene is a generous introduction to the splendid succession that follows – the top secret business is an aside to the plot. Now follows the scene in which the bad news of the Seniors’ reconsideration comes through.
He and I sat there in
silence, watching Laura gaze with protective love at Howard. He was holding the
newspaper low, so as to catch the light from the reading-lamp. The only movement
he made, the only movement in the whole room, was that of his eyes as they went
down the page.
Then Howard explodes, and Martin (Lewis’s brother) catches some of the flak. Lewis admits:
He [Martin] was no saint. He
had none of the self-effacingness of those who, in the presence of another’s
disaster, don’t mind some of the sufferings being taken out on themselves...
Naturally this wins our sympathy. Soon we are told to have more:
People often thought that
those who ‘handled’ others, ‘managers’ of Martin’s kind, were passionless. They
would have been no good at their job if they were.
We don’t take this so easily. Eliot/Snow seems to be bullying us – on the basis of their joint expertise, which of course we little readers can’t remotely compete with.
I forgot to mention a moment in the Howard scene, when he says to his wife:
’You know nothing about it.’
He spoke to her roughly – but there was none of the suspiciousness with which he would have spoken to anyone else that night. Between them there flared up – so ardent as to make it out of place to watch – a bond of sensual warmth, of consolatory warmth.
Snow only mentions love if it’s relevant to power, but he does so persuasively. Marriage is the form of love in which he’s interested, and as it’s an institution and a power he inevitably over-praises it. The Skeffingtons’ marriage is almost a sham, but
With her own kind of clumsy
devotion, she was with him whatever he wanted to do. Others might admire him
more, other women might long for the chance of admiring him, but she happened
to be married to him.
Now follows another great chapter.
We had walked right into the
hiss and ice of a quarrel.
Arthur Brown’s imperturbable handling of the atmosphere, and his utter rejection of Tom Orbell’s political advice, strike us like beorhtword, somewhat in the manner of a saga hero. Of all the great and the good, Brown (though on the “wrong” side) is probably the hero that Eliot/Snow adulates most.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see Strangers and Brothers overtake A Dance to the Music of Time in critical estimation. Powell’s book has no heroes. Snow’s is more informative. At present both these statements still seem shallow and irrelevant to serious literary judgment; but it’s easy to foresee a time when that might change. A more American time, perhaps.
(2002)
Colin M. Turnbull: The
When the author discovered that the molino was a pilfered drainpipe, he wavered. He had readied a myth of noble savagery, and the Mbuti didn’t quite fit it. He was mythmaking, almost as if he already had that controversial companion-volume, The Mountain People, in his sights.
It so happened that I had read The Mountain People a few years ago, but had forgotten its author’s name. When I read this book, I assumed that it described a way of life that was now extinct. It turns out this is not exactly so - the Mbuti, in a threatened sort of way, still exist. More surprisingly, perhaps, the Ik (the anti-heroes of The Mountain People) also survive.
The mythmaking was perhaps wrong inasmuch as it presented a snapshot as a record of unchanging existence. In fact, the life of any group of people is different from yesterday. Turnbull himself was one of the facts in it, perhaps a rather important one. I had not realized how widely these readable books are studied in the West.
The image of the Ik in The Mountain People, i.e. of a society that had gone brutally wrong and should be dispersed, is the more influential one. Searching the Internet, I have found it in travel diaries and in sermons, turned to surprising ends. We swallow our own “discoveries” and they become part of “our” culture.
[This evening of surfing led also to the Kvens and the Sami, and to uncomfortable conflicts between “conservation” and the ways of life of indigenous people. Whether excluded or included in “national parks”. And what happens when a Sami shoots a wolf?]
In fact, this goodnatured book is a minefield. The whole business of ethnography is controversial. On conservation you get drawn towards a limited view of on doit cultiver son jardin - but ownership and nations (and gardens, too) are somewhat opposed to the notion of wilderness.
And yet, it pleases me to read: “The pygmies seemed bound by few set rules.” The assumption that members of a society are bound by rules is immediately laid open to question.
[Since this particular note is not turning
out the way I thought it would, here’s something else that came up. Some Samis
object to the tourist excitement of the “
What is
astonishing in The Forest People is not the forest but Turnbull’s
ability (which must have depended on fluency in the language) to portray a
complex scene such as the reconciliation with Cephu. But at this point the book
is not really ethnography - we can be in complete sympathy with the scene
because everyone acts in just the same way as they would in, say,
Or
perhaps a little better, because of the organizing power of the molimo.
Turnbull is keen to say that the Mbuti have no laws and no government. He
portrays them as in many respects rather slack and irreverent. Yet the singing,
and conceiving themselves as “forest people” – these lead to a practical
co-operation. This is rather idyllic, yet it seems to me possible that a
hunter/gatherer existence could have benefits that are denied to civilisations.
It is not because of greater happiness that people start farming or
working in cities. I have read elsewhere that leisure-time was greater and
nutrition better - and this seems likely, though not at all times. It was
vulnerability - to nature generally and to more populous societies in particular
- that meant the end for hunter/gathering.. Increasingly this way of life seems
to need some kind of break to become feasible. In the case of the Mbuti, the
“break” was a symbiotic relationship with the croppers; because of these other,
less fortunate beings, a small number of Mbuti could be sustained. “Symbiotic”, or “parasitic”? We know that in nature the two
modes grade into each other. And “parasitic” is a word potentially loaded with
moral disapproval - the common attitudes to gypsies and other travellers in
Ethnography
is a problematic form of documentary because it implies that “I will tell you
what A and B did, and how C responded - so that you can understand the people.”
That last phrase is the problematic bit - the rest of it is just normal
documentary. It imposes a sort of interpretive frame, which is associated with
the phrase “colonialism of science” that I have read somewhere. And yet, to
talk of Kenge or Moke without saying “these are Mbuti” is to miss something
important about how they see themselves, too. But what they mean cannot
be the same as what I, the reader, mean.
It would seem that an ethnographer, more than most, would be aware of the intense significance that most human beings place on belonging to a people. Perhaps that’s why the notorious page in The Mountain People, where Turnbull made recommendations for breaking up and dispersing the Ik people, appears so shocking. One commentator used the phrase “gentle genocide” - but this seems unfair to me, for the word has always been associated with the extermination of individual lives. Even the South Sami have not used it, though the Swedish government has no such reason as Turnbull had, of rescuing people from a culture that seemed lethal. But it seems that Turnbull’s horror at a purely destructive culture was misplaced.
I take a kinder view of the paragraphs in question. Mistaken they may have been, but I recognize that for him to value humans higher than cultures was a courageous and optimistic belief; and one he had earned the right to hold. Those of us who, from our end of the earth, like the idea of other people living a postcard life that we don’t contemplate for ourselves, - and yes, I am one - shouldn’t give to our tastes a high moral valuation.
(2002)
His name is also transliterated as Pak Jae-sam. I’ve placed it here
because the first of Pak’s fifteen collections was published in 1962.
This is a review (first published in Intercapillary Space) of
Enough To Say It’s Far: Selected Poems of Pak
Chaesam, trans. David R. McCann and Jiwon Shin,
*
Twentieth-century Korean poetry has, like
twentieth-century
What’s probably more to the point is the often neglected element of expatriate interest in the market for poetry translations; that growing number of people worldwide who may not especially care for poetry in general and who are thoroughly turned off by matters of poetics but who have an imaginative involvement with a distant mother country whose language they may not even know very well, and who sometimes buy poetry books that are felt to re-connect them with it. Not to labour the point here, but isn’t there an often-remarked connection between Quietude and regionalism generally?
Anyhow, that’s one good reason for presenting poetry translations alongside the original texts; there will be some readers who are semi-competent in the original language and use the English as a crib not a substitute, and that may be, well it is, the best way.
But as for me I can’t even make the sounds of those pages written in the Han-Gul alphabet, which makes me feel particularly incompetent to write a review, but I’m glad those orginals are there because Han-Gul is very fascinating. The writing is organized by syllable not by word, each syllable occupying a square (Korean writing books look like our arithmetic books). The syllable-squares can be arranged either top-down then right-to-left in the Chinese manner or (now predominantly) left-to-right then top-down in the Roman manner. Syllable-counting forms like sijo are thus instantly apparent in a way that is totally different to our accentual meters which when read rather than heard have to be extrapolated by inference – a skill that does not automatically pass on to new generations. The Han-gul system, invented in the fourteenth century, is so limpid that it involves no such black art as “spelling” and Korean children are overwhelmingly literate from a very early age.
So yes, the package is appealing, those left-hand pages and the beguiling monochrome cover: a photo of a group of conical islands playing in the mist, as in one of the poems:
At times they may seem to
bow their heads
as if to pick up beads...
*
A few of the 72 poems in this selection are sijo but they aren’t the easiest place to start. It’s in slightly more ample poems that you can see how Pak implies an absence by going round it and leaves that absence standing at the end, a bit like the lost wax method.
Thus a poem about a friend who has gone away sidles from abstract speculations into familiar fallen leaves but then at once sets us to work at conceiving the elusive image of a weight of wind that hangs on the branch-tips, precisely displacing the leaves that aren’t there any more. The second half proceeds thus:
So today I push
my way through a
forest of letters
to shape verses,
knowing well
there is no comparing
them
to the wind’s still
lingering
in the branches of
the tree.
My friend, your leaving
causes me
to feel deep in my
bones
there is nothing of
the ordinary about this.
Those letters are inevitably envisaged as leaves; by design, they are present entities themselves and can only refer to presences. Thus the poem is as dubious a concept as the difficult image of the wind lingering in those leaf-spaces, an image that seems to be trying to have it both ways: in order to make absence present to our imaginations, it ends up re-constituting it as spectral presence. But, having finished reading the poem, we kick away the ladder and – there it is.
We are fairly familiar with poems like that, I know. But perhaps because the absence approached here is objectified in Korean culture as han (grief, unfulfilled yearning, but with an intellectual implication), Pak’s use of his method can become very intricate; almost in inverse proportion to the text, the absences can multiply thick and fast. You’ll want to see this for yourself in a complete poem:
Recollection 16
In the sea near P’alp’o my
home,
one aunt drowned
herself.
A distant aunt had drowned
herself too,
and others; their
precious lives they gave away.
Suicide: why choose that?
What shattered dream
fragment
made them long so to
end their lives?
Did the sea resemble a
flower garden?
Was that the reason they all
removed their shoes
before they leaped?
I tried to imagine
they had forgotten
the faraway,
already distant causes
of their own sorrows,
drenched, intoxicated as
they were by that greater beauty.
But to my eyes now I have
passed fifty, the sea
has become a dull thing, and plain.
We learn from the introduction that this is autobiographical, and the occasion of those cliff-edge suicides was husbands lost at sea. But “Recollection” here refers not to the events directly but to those past, childish thoughts of a beautiful communion; a communion in sharp contrast to the distances and isolations in which the poem is taciturnly veiled. If the poem is about the occlusion that news of a suicide both creates and reveals as having already existed (“why choose that?”), it invokes other absent things too: life-long trauma – Is it there? but trauma always conceals itself –; and also the mystery in that dull, plain sea that withholds but is recognized as withholding such histories and such precious losses. So that at the same time that the last lines dispel the pitiful nonsense of that flower-garden, something like a shimmer wells up from beneath.
With poetry of this kind the challenge for
a translator may be not so much the words but also translating the reader’s
mind; to know what is not being said may require cultural backgrounds we just
haven’t got. A few of these poems don’t seem to me to do much; a few more seem
to do something, but I know I don’t really know what it is, and these ones
arouse a kind of idly poetic interest that probably doesn’t have a lot to do
with what Pak was writing about. On the whole McCann and Jiwon seem to have
preferred literalism at the risk of creating a few puzzles; thus the middle
part of “
The lamps and other lights
that gather
at elder brother’s
house for the ceremonies
may be lights, but I
have seen the autumn river
burning in tears as the
sun sets.
which I have also seen unprofessionally translated as:
Though the lights at my
ancestral home
are lit for our
forebears’ rites,
I watch the autumn river at
sunset in tears afire.
I’m sure the first rendering is more accurate but the second one makes me realize that when I read the first I didn’t really catch on to the significance of “elder brother’s house” (hence I almost made him into a character in the poem) and I didn’t understand anything about what kind of “ceremonies” would be going on there.
But if translation of the nouns tends to literalism it’s also clear (even without knowing any Korean) that the translators have employed plenty of latitude when it comes to word order, particles, punctuation and so forth; for example it’s easy to find places where Pak repeats the same form of words while the translators decide to vary them. The plain repetitions in “New Arirang” (a folk-song form), for example, are artfully submerged in the English version; I’m not sure why, but I think the idea is to produce something that reads more like a familiar kind of modern poem, less like a translation. And perhaps that’s why, more often than I feel they ought, stray bits of phraseology remind me of well-known American poets: Wilbur, Roethke, Bishop, Ashbery, and generally these reminiscences suggest ways of making poetry that don’t seem totally apposite.
Which shouldn’t be allowed to detract too much from the benefits of this book. 72 poems may be a small proportion of Pak’s fifteen collections but it’s a generous enough sample to give a real idea of a Korean poet and to me that’s worth much more than the snippets you get in anthologies. There is a cumulative effect in reading all these poems together; they provide context for each other and one begins to know the shape of Pak’s world. For example, the lines in “As for Love”
and then in winter’s
empty embrace
between the bare
branches
while snow fell
gentle,
a hazy white that
might have calmed me
interact with “Looking at Winter Trees” where both trees and poet strip, and
now as I settle
into the bath, I see
them drawing bit by
bit
more gladly near,
waving
their hands at me, the
landscape
taking form in the mist
and evening glow
These embraces that are not quite realized are the middle-aged, mournful yet resigned obverse of distances that however desolate are also not quite realized. I’ll end with the title poem which I hope will provide another illustration of what I mean by these poems’ mutual commentary:
Enough to say it’s far
About the distance
to the sun and
moon, to the stars,
whatever else, it is
enough to say it’s far.
And the distance between
my love and me,
since it cannot be
measured with a rule,
for this too
it is enough to say
it’s far.
I cannot see beyond
these things, afloat,
glimmering,
in the bowl of cool
water.
And because of my thirst
now I have no other
thought
than to drink of this
cool water.
(2006)
John Updike: Of the Farm (1965)
I recently read Updike’s “Of the Farm”. The first-person narrative seemed to make more emphatic a basic technical problem in his fiction; the seeing eye is Updike’s own, and its exceptional vision lacks credibility when it’s attributed to some other, less outrageously gifted, human being. For Updike wants to write about ordinary people, it’s the source of all his interest. In the third person this is not so bad; we are prepared to believe in Rabbit’s acute sensitivity because we aren’t also asked to believe that he could put it into words. In Of the Farm the author more or less confesses to the problem by avoiding for so long the subject of what Joey does on week-days. The paragraph that tells us he does something vague in advertising, though his mother wanted him to be a poet, is as perfunctory as it is implausible: he is, quite obviously, a great novelist. Of the Farm is minor Updike. There is some cheapness, too, in the mother’s eventual statement that the new wife, Peggy, is right for Joey, as the first never was. It’s the way that the wise old retainers speak in Mills and Boon romances, and as in them it seems we’re supposed to accept the convention of the quasi-prophetic insight of the old. This sentimental ending does little justice to the painful, grinçant quality of earlier scenes. Updike was always prone to over-praise marriage, though he dissects it so pitilessly. Something to do with the residual Christianity that at times flavours his writing, though I’ve no knowledge of his beliefs outside it. Nevertheless, I was gripped by the book, staying up late to finish it. He’s a favourite author of mine.
*
(2001)
Angus Wilson: As If By Magic
(1970?)
This book, coming after Late Call and No Laughing Matter, should be a masterpiece but isn’t. It’s still worth reading twice, though.
The Old Men at the Zoo fails like a book about the near future is bound to fail. Set in
1970 but written in 1960, it reads like a black farce about the fifties. As
If By Magic (written1970-ish) does not deal with the future, but by setting
forth to write about characters who are much younger than himself Wilson throws
himself open to similar problems - he just doesn’t understand ‘60s culture from
the inside (a few references to Lord of the Rings really isn’t enough -
he needed to be inward with music and films and much else). His young people
are too intellectual and too unrooted to be representative, so it can’t become
an analysis with wider implications. Then there’s a severe structural problem
with the hero, whose incurably socialite imagination draws him into adventures
that don’t connect with the possible grand theme of agronomy (which
Despite all this the book feels worthwhile.
(2000)
Van der Graaf Generator: Albums
1970-1976
(previously published in Stride Magazine, August 2005)
Van der Graaf
Generator: The Least We Can Do is Wave to Each Other (1970)
Van der Graaf
Generator: H to He Who Am the Only One (1970)
Peter Hammill: Fool’s
Mate (1971)
Van der Graaf
Generator: Pawn Hearts (1971)
Van der Graaf
Generator: Godbluff (1975)
Van der Graaf
Generator: Still Life (1976)
(Remastered re-issues, 2005)
*
It wasn’t easy to happen across Van der
Graaf Generator. They had no champions on the NME (Geoff Barton of Sounds
and Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman seemed, in their different ways, rather alarming
standard-bearers). So I never lingered over the band’s name until, belatedly,
in some listless moment I happened to flick through that unpromising
publication, the Times Educational Supplement – it was my dad’s copy. I
was 15 – it was 1973. In those days it was a matter of principle that the
quality press never mentioned rock music; in their world, music meant Sadlers
Wells and occasionally a bit of jazz. (This would all change a few years later,
when Channel 4 had come along, and journalists who had cut their teeth on the NME
went on to write for The Independent.) Well, VDGG got a full page
write-up in the TES – this was because of ‘Plague of Lighthouse
Keepers’, of course. It was probably the first piece of rock music that English
teachers recognized as offering the same sort of spiritual nourishment to our
tender minds as Heart of Darkness.
This was an impressive testament, at the same time a disquieting one. The British (or rather, English) progressive rock movement had no first-hand contact with modern art, it didn’t have those sexy links to the real art world that rock was managing to forge in other countries (I mean like Andy Warhol’s Velvet Underground, or Can with their much-publicized Stockhausen connections). Its social bedrock lay quite clearly in the middle-class, Anglican world of the home counties – as others have since pointed out, a lot of this generation of progressive rock musicians came straight out of the choir and the organ-loft. They inherited the essentially un-modernist aesthetic of the cantata (that beloved English form), and with a bit of Pomp and Circumstance for good measure. This background was dragged into a bizarre hybrid with rock, which then seemed so limitless, and the results were generally dire, or at any rate quite beyond my narrow powers of empathy, which were even narrower in those days.
Beat music aside, the transatlantic form
that penetrated furthest into middle-class consciousness was the musical. This
was the era of ‘rock operas’ and the formative days of Andrew Lloyd Webber. I
know that VDGG were much better than that, but that’s why, I think, you’re
intended to listen to every word, respond to the puns and internal rhymes,
appreciate the cleverness of Peter Hammill putting on a loony voice to sing the
word ‘madness’, or a Black Riders voice to sing the word ‘death’, or the music
dropping out completely while he sings the word ‘silence’. It’s hugely zestful
and confident, but it takes a bit of gritting your teeth now. Some fucking
hippie on
Anyhow, that’s my sociological account of British ‘progressive rock’ in general; not art-rock, but cod-art-rock, a pastiche of the manner of art as it filtered through, with the usual distancing effects, to the class mentality that is so hard to detach from someone’s individual mentality. But then, British rock music always did verge on being cod, or camp, or clod-hopping, a necessary consequence of the crude aping of American forms detached from their cultural origins. It didn’t necessarily achieve more when it learnt the moves, learnt to be ashamed. (I’m thinking of The Fall as the essential test case here.)
As a matter of fact, if Hugh Banton was a (very talented) church organist and Peter Hammill (vocals) a science graduate belatedly preaching secular humanism, on the other hand Guy Evans (drums) and David Jackson (saxophones) were at least serious modern-jazz-ophiles. The creative talent on display was impressive, but the question of whether anything worthwhile could come out of this improbable backwater remains anguished and ever-present in the music; they were having a lot of fun, but if there’s a well-merited sense of triumph arising from all this fervent creativity there’s also a sense of rage. However, if the English mode of progressive rock could ever transcend its dubious pedigree, then it seemed to me that this was the band. This was the crucible.
The Least We Can Do was the band’s second album, their first for Charisma – in the light of what followed it sounds a bit pallid. Things get going with H to He, which it so happens I never got to hear at the time. Listening to it now is a timely reminder of what a new VDGG album used to sound like back then: loud, dissonant, inventive and flamboyant, harsh, ugly, then painfully beautiful in a way you couldn’t often share. You wanted to play it alone in your room, and that was in fact the only place you could rely on the audience allowing you to hear the whole song, but you kept worrying about the neighbours. A couple of years later we played punk records and we wanted to annoy the neighbours; British music suddenly became community-aware again. Even if at first that mainly meant shock and offensiveness, it nevertheless showed that we’d become sensitized to where we were living.
By contrast VDGG were unconscious of the details of our grey 1970s world. This was very directly and unmessily about Man in the long marches of Eternity, or perhaps me alone in the lighthouse of my student bedsit. Here, beset by the existential doubts stimulated by a dog-eared Penguin Modern Classic I subsisted off my grant – it wasn’t a loan in those days – and thought about the BIG questions (I mean the ones that preoccupy bright teenagers who don’t have to work). Peter Hammill dealt with all of them.
What was the meaning of existence? (‘Childlike Faith in Childhood’s End’) If no-one knows you exist, do you exist? (‘Pioneers over C’) Was it worth being alive at all? (‘Lemmings’) What if you could live for ever? (‘Still Life’) What would you feel at the moment of death? (Godbluff, passim) If you seemed to be flooded with love-hormones, why did you so often behave hatefully? (‘Killer’, ‘Man-Erg’) What would it mean to have sex? (‘La Rossa’) What would happen if you really had no friends? (‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’).
Pawn Hearts, the band thought at the time, was their definitive record. It still sounds magical – the fearsome machinery of ‘Cog’, the dead and deader modulations that are finally stamped on at the end of ‘Lemmings’, the part of ‘Man-Erg’ when the killer and the angels amaze you by careering around together in celestial/infernal harmony. The whole of side 2 was devoted to ‘A Plague of Lighthouse Keepers’, an impossibly rich piece of musical narrative. It’s a work of the purely English imagination, which means it harks back to the last time that middle-class English culture was untouched by the modern world; this comes from Kipling (pertinently, The Disturber of Traffic) and Vaughan Williams (5th symphony, Sea Symphony). It’s overwhelming. Who needs modernism?
Perhaps this is where you should start if you don’t know whether you’re interested in VDGG. Quite early on there’s a sea-picture with foghorns that should sort you out; or if not that, the wonderfully lonely organ-voluntary with its swelling modulations that follows. The hardest thing, now, is to tolerate lyrics that use sword-and-sorcery imagery of the ‘camps of panoply and majesty’ type. We’re basically uncomfortable with English allegory, though we don’t have a problem with the American book of legends (‘Chestnut Mare’, ‘That Song About the Midway’, ‘King Harvest’...); the language of progressive rock is somehow pre-cinematic. As it is we’d prefer ‘Lemmings’ to drop the crashing waves and be nakedly about drug culture. That said, there’s plenty of things in this magnificent tapestry that do reach out and grab you, though no lower than the throat.
Mind and machinery box-press our dreams
I’ve been the witness, and the seal of death
lingers in the molten wax that is my head
Locked in silent monologue, in silent scream
Alone, alone, the ghosts all call,
pinpoint me in the light
Oceans drifting sideways
Near the end there’s an organ-note (or perhaps it’s Fripp’s guitar) that is not so much a whinny as a racehorse in your face. This is over a whole-tone sequence that is wakeful like a meadow thick with dew, and then the percussion flakes into spume at dawn. To be strictly objective.
Godbluff (1975) is different, and it now strikes me as even better. The band had split up, then reformed to do this. Much had changed: the epic vertigo, the frank emotionalism had gone, the landscape became flat and mocking. It’s split into four tracks, but is clearly a single drama, a Faust-story that, Peter Hammill claimed at the time, occupies about two minutes of real time. There are fewer colours in this sound-world, and compared to Pawn Hearts it seems like chamber music. But it also transcends it. It’s not that VDGG threw away their past – in fact there are more hooves and medieval weaponry than ever – but two things advance this music forward. The first is that Hammill multi-layered the script; by inter-relating the songs so thoroughly, he liberates an image which is not defined in any one of them – in fact, he unexpectedly came up with a modernist form. The second is that during their four-year recess someone in the band had learnt funkology. Like Marlowe when he wrote his own Faust-story, Hammill crammed the beginning and end with eloquence, and found himself with a desolate gap in the middle; drama meets its limits in the tick of a clock at one second per second. The interlude, in this case, is filled with a compulsive (funk-based) essay on time and motion, both hyper-ventilating and idling (‘Scorched Earth’ and ‘Arrow’ respectively). The album moves from ‘you still have time’ to ‘if I only had time’; the warmth is only in the brilliance of execution, but listening to it you find yourself ‘half in love with easeful death’.
Still Life (1976) hasn’t got this concentration but all VDGG fans cherish it. In ‘Childlike Faith’ Hammill ascends the secular pulpit for one last, crazy attempt to say everything about the Life Force; he more or less succeeds. Hammill disposes of two millennia of Christian apologetic in a couple of lines (characteristically and elaborately rhymed):
Even if there is a heaven when we die,
endless bliss would be as meaningless as the lie
that always comes as answer to the question why
do we see through the eyes
of Creation?
Well, if you know how to make a song out of this, then shouldn’t you?
But earlier on, body-centered concerns have started to bend this whole awesome monument to left-brain rationalism out of shape, both in that fearful hymn to eternity ‘Still Life’ (‘to couple with her withered body’) and in the university-town lust-saga of ‘La Rossa’, which is very funny and thrilling.
I’m slightly disturbed that I still know
all the words by heart. I haven’t listened to VDGG for 25 years plus. To go
back has not felt nostalgic. In Europe (above all in
These reissues (following the band’s recent re-emergence) take us up to the point in 1976 when VDGG suddenly became irrelevant to my life – or so I liked to think. With that insistent zeitgeist in the offing, listening to VDGG, even their masterpieces, seemed like a furtive pleasure, and I hardly noticed World Record (1978) and what followed it – I just remember it seemed to fit in with the judgments I then wished to make: distended, ponderous, empty. By the time of World Record the punk mantra of “I don’t care” and “I don’t wanna” seemed a perfectly sufficient response to all those BIG questions.
They’ve thrown in Peter Hammill’s first solo album, Fool’s Mate, which is a very inadequate guide to the wrenching depths of his subsequent solo albums. In it, Peter and the other VDGG boys exhumed some of his older, more poppy material. Inventiveness and skill are plentiful, but in every time and place there have always been inventive and skilful musicians. I can’t think of a good reason for listening to this, certainly not a socio-historical one – If you want to tune into Britain in the early seventies, then Cat Stevens’ Teaser and the Firecat now seems ten times more revelatory and authoritative – for instance. If you’re going to listen to VDGG at all, it’s better to go with them doing what they assumed they could do, merely to assault the bounds of space and time.
(2005)
*
Note
Here in no
particular order I add some vague thoughts about this British genre,
"progressive rock" and its accompanying form the "concept
album". Those were the terms at the time. ["Prog-rock", now
commonly used, did not exist then. This term emerged a couple of decades later
and though it was adopted by latter-day fans fondly acknowledged the
ridiculousness of the genre - the intervening era of total condemnation meant
that these fans themselves could no longer take it seriously but to a certain
extent celebrated a camp excess built in to the genre which in the earlier era
would have been hotly denied.]
When I wrote about
VDGG I didn't set them very precisely in this context. In a sense their music was
quintessential progressive rock; but there was a common awareness that they
were on some kind of intellectual fringe of it, not far from King Crimson and
attracting a basically different audience from ELP, Yes, Genesis or Jethro
Tull. Still, they were not truly cool like David Bowie, whose Ziggy Stardust etc might well be called concept
albums - musically however they lay quite outside the progressive rock genre.
But this is complicated. What about Wishbone Ash's Argus, which was a fully-armoured sword and sorcery concept album
but musically sounded more like Crosby Stills Nash and Young? Few VDGG fans
would have had any time for Tull or Genesis, but does this intellectual elitism
hold up, in hindsight? You could argue that Tull's despised A Passion Play (1974) is not as far away
as you might want to think from VDGG's Godbluff
(and it has more complicated time signatures). Musically VDGG are very
close to their more commercially successful peers. The basic vision in their
heads remained this: of long pieces made out of short segments of rhythmically
complex and undeveloping thuds interspersed with calmer bits and all adding up
to some kind of hopeful statement about the nature of existence. (Stravinsky's Rite of Spring was, I now think, a big
though scarcely recognized influence on the whole genre.) Of course there are
differentiations to be made: VDGG for example had very little
The beautful part is: meanwhile rock has, through its
growing goodness and through the graces of the generation that stayed with it,
built up a huge audience for quality rock, creative rock, people who'd rather
hear a good ten-minute rock track than an easy-to-listen-to, dull, catchy
two-minute thing... We're getting into what all of us have been waiting for: a
broad, creative music interacting with every facet of our world, reacting off
of other kinds of music and more than that, other kinds of art, on a scale so
large we can't even begin to guess at the consequences. But Brian Wilson must
be the first composer in history to know that twenty million people are going
to hear, and respond to, his new composition, within a month of his completing
it... We are moving towards the audience-author relationship that made
Shakespeare possible... (Paul Williams in Crawdaddy! March 1967)
Williams soon
learned the tough lessons of John Wesley
Harding and Wild Honey and tuned
down his gigantist fervour, but progressive rock in Britain would continue - in
a vacuum detached from sixties social change and hence drained of real
seriousness - to toy with the paraphernalia of gigantically ambitious musical
forms.
There is some
connection between those weird-time-signature repetitive thuds of progressive
rock and what was happening at the same time in black music, i.e. funk, i.e.
the groove. VDGG, as I've noted, drew them together a bit. But yawning differences: the obvious one being that in progressive
rock it's totally unsexual.
Music for white
male teenagers reflects the yawing of hormones - this is my next speculation
beginning. As a social tool of self-identification, some music is basically
driven by the groin; at other times, or as part of a long-term strategy of
social gouping, you chose to identify yourself with music that etherealized
love into misty fair maidens and the nature of existence. If you wanted party
music, the Stones or (one of my favourites then) the J. Geils Band, you don't give
a toss about the pretensions of dreams, visions, knights in armour crossing an
empty landscape, and the meaning of life. At least to
appearance. (I am thinking as I write this that Led Zep rather cut
across this great divide, which however has continued down to the present day
to be reflected in the various kinds of music a male adolescent might buy.) If
the hormones are never more imperious than at that age, so too is an unspoken
fear of sex. Party music is a play of tasteful euphemisms. Why keep me cold when it's so warm inside? (J. Geils Band,
"Give it to me") - beautifully put. Progressive rock denied the
imperious hormones completely, and if they did emerge it came out tastelessly: I sucked on your breasts, your legs open
wide (The Strawbs) - this was castigated at the time; their kind of music
should never include sex, only painful or ideal love. We were, at least I was,
fantastically prudish.
(2008)
Ashokamitran: Water (1971)
Ashokamitran (b. 1931) is a Tamil author. Tannir
was serialized in 1971; it is set during the 1969 drought in
That sentence about the drought gave me some disquiet. I could also say, with no less disquiet, that it’s the story of Jamuna and her younger sister Chaya, two women in various sorts of trouble. What’s striking about Water – a sort of novella-length short story – is how it deviates from the expectations aroused by these literally true descriptions. It does not seem to be concerned with its subjects in quite the expected way – it leaves spaces, is not quite pinned down and not by a second reading either. Substantial scenes are devoted to other, unnamed characters. The author has said that he began only with an image of a girl carrying a water-pot, and that enigmatic and steady image seems to be always present, no matter what we’re reading. Water does not entirely cast itself adrift in narrative.
Ashokamitran’s prose is plain to the point where you have to deal with it. Bhaskar Rao, Jamuna’s lover, comes to take her out. Chaya arrives soon after; she disapproves very strongly.
Jamuna handed Bhaskar Rao a
cup of tea, placed another cup on the table and then went to the stove and blew
it out. Chaya helped herself to a single brass chembu of water and left the
room. Bhaskar Rao drew a long breath and looked intently at Jamuna. Jamuna
avoided his gaze. When she caught his eye by chance after some time, he
signalled to her, ‘Go on, get ready.’ Jamuna took hold of another small chembu
by its narrow neck and dipped it into the water, filling it just half full.
Chaya came in then, her wet hair clinging to her forehead. Jamuna went out of
the room, taking her own vessel with her. Chaya immediately placed her chembu
beside the buckets and left the room as well. Jamuna came back into the main
room, having used her half chembu of water with extreme care, contriving to
wash her hands and feet as well as her face. Bhaskar was standing up by this
time, impatient, having finished his tea. When he saw Jamuna, he said softly,
but with grim determination, ‘Get ready’. Jamuna wiped her face and opened her
trunk. At that moment Chaya too returned to the room and began to drink the tea
that Jamuna had left for her on the table.
It’s through Bhaskar, desperate to get
away, that we experience the unpleasant tension that comes through these
neutral-sounding stage directions. At the same time we are completely aware of
Jamuna’s submissive/determined awareness of her sister, the meaning of the tea
on the table (remember we share our life here just as usual, Chaya, please
don’t walk out on me), the meaning of Chaya being so quickly not in the room (I
wash my hands of you, my routine is not disturbed) and back in it (I have a
right to be here, and you know what I think, are you mad enough to ride
roughshod over me). And there’s the so-limited water, not a literary symbol of
the author’s contriving, but a de facto symbol that everyone in
The scene inevitably slides downhill. Water has a good many ugly, powerful scenes like this. With only the faintest shift of emphasis Ashokamitran can also use almost the same technique to make episodes that, we decide, are funny. The later nocturnal scene when the rain is coming down, and an unnamed husband and wife wrangle about filling just one or two more containers, is like a jauntier setting of the earlier melody.
With the rain pouring off
the ribs of his umbrella, he returned to his rooms. Immediately his wife asked,
‘Why couldn’t you leave this one somewhere as well?’
‘I was only able to find a
place for one of the tins.’
‘It must be full by now. Go
and fetch it.’
He hesitated for a moment.
Then he opened his umbrella and started out again.
‘While you are about it, why
don’t you take this one along as well? When you bring that tin away, you could
put this one in its place.’
‘Go and get rid of it yourself.’ He flung his umbrella towards the tin. Being already open, it fell elsewhere, swaying a little.
That recalcitrance of the umbrella’s flight makes it one of a sequence of objects whose motion is hard to control. The taxi, after the driver pulls over in a street where the streetlights have failed, slipping into an open ditch :
There was a sudden strange
noise. After that the car moved, as if of its own
volition, still further to the left. Then it came to a standstill with a sharp
grinding sound.
Or Jamuna’s mother in her dreadful bed:
He lifted Jamuna’s mother a
little, standing behind her shoulders. Jamuna peeled away the sari and removed
it together with the sacking. She wiped her mother’s waist and thighs. Swiftly Chaya
wrapped the fresh sari around their mother. Then the older woman fell back
heavily, on to the bed.
Through the spaces in the text you are still aware of the pot-carrier, clambering over walls, edging her water pot under a communal tap.
(2006)
Luke Rhinehart: The
Dice Man (1972)
FEW NOVELS CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE. THIS ONE WILL says the front cover. The Dice Man was a cult classic and it knew it. The way it works is this. Someone tells you at a party about this book they read; they tell you about the premise of the book, which is that this guy decides whether to carry out various shockingly lurid actions, depending on the throw of a die. It’s an ineresting idea to discuss, whether you’ve read the book or not. Then you read it. Then you tell someone else about it. And so on. The legend snowballs. There’s a song about it on Dragnet, the Fall’s cult classic album of 1979. And so on.
The account you heard at the party suggests
an unshaven, burning-eyed protagonist like Raskolnikov or the underground man.
That’s wrong, as it turns out; Rhinehart is a bored bourgeois psychoanalyst,
married with 2.4 children and an apartment near
One of
poisonin’ rain...
actin’ insane...
inflictin’ pain...
The dice-throwing is maybe the least
interesting part of the book, except the first time. We learn not to feel tense
about this. By towards the end we are free-wheeling. Rhinehart has been told by
the die to attempt to carry out a murder, and when he throws again to select a
victim it chooses his psychotic former patient, the wrestler Osterflood. They
meet and Rhinehart can’t think of anything to say to prolong the meeting except
that someone is trying to kill Osterflood. They go to a
‘Daddy? Why do I have to
brush my teeth every day?’ the little girl asked.
‘Try this new
tube I’ve got for you, Suzie, and you’ll never ask that question again.’
[Close-up of a
big long tube of Glare toothpaste]
But I had to look
away because Gina was kneeling on the floor, her hands tied behind her back
with her bra, and Osterflood, with his pants and undershorts bunched at his
feet but still dressed in white shirt, tie and suit jacket, was thrusting with
his erect, pink weapon at her mouth, cursing her at every poke. I felt I was
watching a slow-motion movie showing some huge piston at work, but some flaw in
the machinery resulted in the rod’s seeming frequently to miss the wide-open
mouth which Gina, large-eyed and expressionless, was presenting. Osterflood’s
sword of vengeance against the female race kept sliding past her cheek or her
neck or poking her in the eye. Whenever she would seem to have a good mouthful
(she would close her eyes then), Osterflood would withdraw, raging, and thrust
away sporadically, redoubling his curses. It wasn’t clear whether he hated her
more when she sucked him in or when he missed contact and bounced painfully off
her forehead. In both cases he seemed like a movie director enraged because
she, the actress, didn’t mouth her lines correctly.
‘Ahhhggg! How I hate you,’
he yelled and lurched forward and collapsed onto the couch beside me. I smiled
over at him.
He struggled
sideways into a sitting position.
‘Undress me, you
disgusting, filthy hole,’ he said loudly.
Eventually Rhinehart tries to get on with the murder.
‘Come into the
kitchen,’ I said.
He stared
wild-eyed at me.
‘I want to show
you something,’ I added.
‘Oh,’ he said,
and with a great effort he turned himself onto his hands and knees and
staggered to his feet.
I flowed off behind
his whalelike form toward the kitchen, and as he passed through the door in
front of me I drew my gun from my pocket, raised it in a long endless arc up
over my head, and then down with all my force onto the top of Osterflood’s huge
head.
‘Wha’sat?’ Osterflood
said, stopping and turning, and slowly raised a hand to his head.
I gazed
openmouthed at his erect, swaying, hulking body.
‘It’s . . . it’s
my gun,’ I said.
He looked down at
the black little pistol hanging limply from my fist.
‘What’d you hit me
for?’ he said after a pause.
‘Show you my
gun,’ I said, still gaping at his blank, bleary, bewildered eyes.
‘You hit me,’ he
said again.
We stared at each
other, our minds working with the speed and efficiency of lobotomized sloths.
‘Just
a tap. Show you my gun,’ I said.
We stared at each
other.
‘Some tap,’ he
said.
We stared at each
other.
‘Protect you
with. Don’t tell Gina.’
When he stopped
rubbing the back of his head, his hand and arm dropped like an anchor into the
sea.
‘Thanks,’ he said
dully, and moved past me back into the living room.
Like Osterflood’s body, the world is massively stable. Throwing the dice is meant to break up human identity, but Rhinehart and all his pals go on remaining distinctively and comically like themselves. What it does supply, both to Rhinehart and ourselves, is inventive entertainment and outrage; a sort of metaphor of shenanigans in general.
Eventually the scene ends with Rhinehart and Gina engaging in a prolonged ecstatic fuck while Osterflood, rather bewilderedly, expires on the floor. With all the Scotch and hash and punishment sex he probably didn’t notice. Osterflood is marked for us, he used to rape and kill little girls; Rhinehart breaks taboos by the ton but, ultimately, he just doesn’t break through the moral stone wall labelled reader-cannot-forgive. Which is not a paltry evasion. After all the material is much more varied on this side of the wall.
The life experienced by the characters is entirely focussed on human, social, psycho-intellectuo-sexual concerns. No-one looks out of the window and Rhinehart admits earlier, considering how to bump off Osterflood, that he ought to have driven him to some dimly-lit nowhere and done it there, but he didn’t know any dimly-lit nowheres. Description of the non-bodily world causes him something like a pathological embarrassment. So he turns aside from it with a joke:
(After abandoning Lil and the kids)
I had gone to a dingy hotel
in the
(In the
I sat up, blinking my eyes and looking toward the ocean past the rise of sand in front of me. Without my glasses it was only tan blur and blue blur.
Places are run-down or smart, that’s all.
They also have a farmhouse in the poison-ivy fields of eastern
For Rhinehart’s dice decisions to carry an element of risk, they need to have a public, someone who might react. But that’s really only for it to go well in a story. For the patient the important thing is what they change about themselves. Thus Rhinehart’s (or anyone’s) “concern” for their effect on others is another name for the patterned behaviour that is to be vanquished. And as others have discovered, rolling the hateful dice makes rolling the loveful dice play a lot better anyway.
Still, Rhinehart’s concern for the human
and bodily is intense, which is why he plays games with it.
There’s another day that Rhinehart happens to be in beautiful surroundings –
one lovely Indian Summer
day, with the birds twittering outside in the bushes of my newly rented
Catskill farmhouse, the autumn leaves blowing and blinding in the sun and a
little beagle puppy I’d just been given wagging his tail at my feet.
What’s this? Is he really interested in this? – No, it’s here for a purpose. He’s idly tossing dice. Then the dice come up snake eyes and he has to kill someone. In a complicated way he throws to find out who, and after some elimination he’s down to a shortlist of six, including his son and his closest work colleague. He begins to sweat, and now the earlier paragraph pays out.
Anxiety is a difficult
emotion to describe. The colorful leaves outside the window no longer seemed
vibrant; they seemed glossy as if being revealed in an overexposed technicolor film. The twitter of the birds sounded like a
radio commercial. My new beagle bitch snored in a corner as if she were a debauched
old bitch. The day seemed overcast even as the sun off a white tablecloth in
the dining room blinded my eyes.
Why the puppy suddenly becomes female is intriguing. But the description of the emotion is all too recognizable. And Rhinehart, like other gamblers, though registering the indifference to surroundings caused by intense anxiety, is now fully awakened. Beautiful days, by contrast, affect him as a sort of sleep.
(2005)
Chet Cunningham: Guld till döds (1973)
This is a western genre novel, originally Die of Gold. I read it in Swedish to brush up on my Swedish (översättning: Solveig Rasmussen, 1982).
The covers of Westerns were I suppose taken from a pool of generic images; this one shows a gunfight in the street - there isn't one in the story - and is fairly blatantly homoerotic, though homoeroticism has, superficially speaking, nothing to do with the book or its audience.
Jim Steel (should I pronounce it,
"Yim"?) is the honest but independent hero. His two girl-friends are
Melinda, a light-fingered saloon-girl, and Ruth Wentz, a real lady - Melinda is
of course much more pleasing. But in the end Yim settles for neither, he rides
off on his own. The villains are Bert Ronson, a sadistic brute, and (when we
get to
The first part of the book is a journey
across the
råskinnen=roughnecks
puffare=six-shooter
The basic shapes of the Western remain the
same, though the moral code may appear to have changed since Jim Green (Oliver
Strange's Sudden) rode the
The Dream of a Common Language (Poems 1974-1977)
The title refers to poetry; that much, you could conclude from the poem in which the words appear, Origins and History of Consciousness. But not just any old poetry – this poetry. I think I wasn’t so off-track in at first supposing that it also has a specific feminist weight; a connexion with the dream of a common sisterhood.
So the book is to some extent meta-poetry, poems about a search for a new poetry (I suppose many good poems are like that to a certain extent; stopping short of being just Klein bottles...). But NOT just any poetry. The art that is being sought and dreamt of is so close as to be identical with a life (but not any life) and a power and a society.
Perhaps it might all be mixed up with the sort of polemical assertions that new love tends to induce in poets. But Rich gives an honest answer to that:
I want to call this,
life.
But I can’t call it life
until we start to move
beyond this secret
circle of fire
where our bodies are
giant shadows flung on a wall
where the night
becomes our inner darkness, and sleeps
like a dumb beast,
head on her paws, in the corner.
It so happens that the central part of the book is a sequence called Twenty-One Love Poems. In fact there are twenty-two of them, and only the unnumbered one is truly a love poem, an aching concession to feeling. The rest is taut with watchfulness, open to the world and to unmendable wounds. And the relationship it memorialises, fails. It wasn’t the Nirvana that she wanted it to be,
and soon I shall
know I was talking to my own soul.
(XX)
But this is a momentary dejection (the anger is less momentary). In an earlier part of the sequence she says:
Your small hands,
precisely equal to my own –
only
the thumb is larger, longer – in these hands
I could trust the
world, or in many hands like these,
(VI)
Do I trust Adrienne Rich’s hands?
It’s a collection that you’re compelled to
read as a whole, straight through; all of the poems are focussed on and veering
towards the “common language” of the title. But some of the poems I don’t like.
Phantasia for Elvira Shatayev is one (and it’s the second poem in the
collection, and substantially longer than the first, so that’s offputting). The
Lioness, the last poem in the first part (which is called, and is about, Power)
is another. And, in the third part, Paula Becker to Clara
Westhoff – and a few others. At first I just shrugged my shoulders
about these perversities of taste, but if I stop to examine them there seems to
be a pattern. I seem to have a problem with the poet speaking through the
mouths of, or pretending to look through the eyes of, other women. Basically I
feel that she’s somehow co-opting them to say what she thinks – that she
isn’t showing them enough respect. And that also applies to the lioness. I find
myself thinking: We men have used women enough; must you do it too?
But now it’s possible that I’m reacting to something right, and righteous, and right-on in the book. Perhaps to the pride in these words:
My guilt is at least open,
I stand convicted by
all my convictions –
(Hunger)
It really wouldn’t be surprising if my hopeful stance of the man-who-would-understand (Natural Resources) was found out and thoroughly implicated by this book, of all books.
The poetry leaps out of a voice that is often plain, even skeletal.
while her mind and
body in
than the smell of
eucalyptus coolly burning on these
hills
(Splittings)
The drift of the sentence actually tries to
undercut the evocativeness of “coolly burning” – not to mock it, but to accept
its limits. It wants to speak freely and
not be constrained to putting out a steady production line of flowers. “mind and body in
Nevertheless there is a continuous subtlety of form in the poems. The best ones, it seems to me, are Origins and History of Consciousness, Splittings, Cartographies of Silence, and the three poems at the end of the book: Natural Resources, Toward the Solstice and Transcendental Etude.
All these poems are medium-length – a few pages – and I suppose they might all be called meditations. There is a great deal of cross-current between the poems: for instance, “the gap / in the Great Nebula” (Natural Resources) and “the rift / in the Great Nebula” (Transcendental Etude); or the spiders’ webs in A Woman Dead in her Forties, Natural Resources and Toward the Solstice. Nevertheless, each poem keeps its own identity; it has a distinct music, a distinct form though it is nothing so mechanical as a stanza form. You have to read the poem to hear it.
In the first of these poems, Origins and History of Consciousness, the key word “simple”, which ties it all together, is delayed until the beginning of the third paragraph:
Thinking of lovers, their
blind faith, their
experienced crucifixions,
my envy is not
simple.
The poems often circle before dropping down on their chosen line of progression. Their right-on-ness, their compulsion to tell the truth and to be on the right side, is what can’t be wished away, for it makes them what they are: confrontational, directly challenging, unapologetic. They nevertheless admit to complexities: consider how in the lines just quoted the word “experienced” can mean both “something they actually felt” and “something they were practised at”.
There is insecurity, too. Cartographies of Silence ends with this positivity:
what
in fact I keep choosing
are
these words, these whispers, conversations
from
which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.
But the poem is haunted by a different power, the power of silence. Or perhaps “power” is the wrong word, since Rich views it with such misgivings:
She died a famous woman denying
her
wounds
denying
her
wounds came from the same source as her power
(Marie Curie in Power)
Natural Resources, again, ends forthrightly enough:
I have to cast my lot
with those
who
age after age, perversely,
with
no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
But the poem has insecurities. In the
“circling” opening we happen on the image of a woman miner. Immediately the
poet is on the defensive: “The miner is no metaphor”. Well, perhaps. There were
more than three thousand woman coal miners in the
Toward the Solstice is equally uncertain, and I think (perhaps I’m not meant to) there’s a promise in its uncertainty. The solstice is a hard, physical fact; it’s a time that does come. Is it a winter or a summer solstice? And what does it mean, for the speaker? “It seems I am still waiting / for them to make some clear demand...” The poem is about a revolution, but isn’t 100% committed to revolution though it would like to be. A vein of images ties the speaker to continuities. She finds herself
trusting
to instinct
the words would come
to mind
I have failed or forgotten
to say
year after year,
winter
after summer, the
right rune
to ease the hold of
the past
upon the rest of my
life
and ease my hold on
the past.
That ringing phrase, “the right rune”, jumps out of the flow of the sentence. You could say that it epitomises the confrontational, idealistic, engaged position that The Dream of a Common Language often arrives at, and always dreams of.
In the rather random lines I’ve quoted, a preoccupation comes to light: time after time, age after age, year after year. These phrases are absolutes: they assert the conviction, the amassed evidence, with which the poet puts forward a proposition. But they also suggest continuity, waves of time that go round. That seems to me characteristic of much of the revolutionary art of the 1960s and 70s. It starts with folk music, not with futurism.
Time’s Power: Poems 1985-1988
This collection, too, has a mannerism. You can see its origin, in fact, in the lines just quoted above:
to
ease the hold of the past
upon
the rest of my life
and
ease my hold on the past
The lines describe a relationship, and then they switch it round. So the first poem here, Solfegietto, addressed to the poet’s mother, ends:
What was worth
fighting for? What did you want?
What did I want from
you?
(The title means something like “in the manner of scale exercises” and the poem is about the mother’s failed attempt to make her daughter a virtuoso. In Transcendental Etude Rich had spoken out about how little she trusts that kind of achievement. This poem attempts to probe beyond that statement.)
The next poem ends:
– Do you think I don’t remember?
did
you think I was all-powerful
unimpaired unappalled?
yes you needed that from me
I wanted this from you
(This)
It’s a sort of companion-piece to the first poem (now it’s Rich who is the mother). But the double questions and the reversals of relationships continue through the poems that follow:
does
she ever forget how they left, how they taught her leaving?
(Harper’s
Ferry)
What would you bring
along on a trek like this?
What is bringing you
along?
(Turnings)
Time’s Power is less absorbed with the poet’s own mission. It has less wrong with it than The Dream of a Common Language, and is less urgent; less exciting, maybe. The double questions admit the otherness of the world. Yet the poem I like best is Harper’s Ferry, not least because the abused child’s wounded leg is a covert allusion to the poet’s own disability (the poem that comes after it begins with her “walking in a walker on the cliffs”). Harper’s Ferry is complex, and owns up to the poet’s own involvement in its docufiction. It’s about armed struggle, and the verse is urgent, from the “October-shortened sun” of the third line; time, it seems, moves forward rather rapidly, for later we find
the decanter
of moonlight pours its mournless liquid down
steadily
on the solstice fields
I suppose solstice continues to imply a milennial or critical moment (see Toward the Solstice, above). I want to quote this, too:
But this girl is
expert in overhearing
and
one word leaps off the windowpanes like the crack of dawn,
the
translation of the babble of two rivers. What does this girl
with her little family quarrel, know about arsenals?
(The answer is, quite a lot...) These two passages give an idea of the odd, excited nature of the poetry. You could say that it’s a poem that’s in love with guns. But it’s in love, too, with cold mint tea. And it’s also horrified, for example, by the brothers who have
climbed her over and over
leaving
their wet clots in her sheets
The other poems that I’ve gone back to most often are Living Memory and Turnings. I haven’t pondered the desert imagery in the collection as much as I might; I think the image of God’s eye through a microscope at the end of Turnings resonates with the un-quaint slides in the attic (The Slides)...
(2003)
Narayan was born in
In the story his self-imposed adventure consists of a futile search for a place where, half a century before, he behaved badly to a woman (S. in his diary). He would like to bring her some sweets (he is unable to grasp just how long ago everything is, and we know that he imagines her coming to him, still plump and jasmine-smelling, like a girlfriend abandoned “years ago” but basically unchanged). Eventually a dog scares him and he drops the jilebi; the mongrel takes them off, gratefully wagging his tail. He muses: “Who knows, S. is perhaps in this incarnation now...”
Rao’s transactions with others are, to say the least, limited. He is not sure of any names and can hardly hear. He is not interested in what they have to say, anyway; his own questions are on the edge of meaninglessness.
And then a young shop
assistant came out to take his order. Rao looked down at him and asked,
pointing at the cross street, “Where does it lead?”
“To the next street,” the
boy said, and that somehow satisfied him. The boy asked, “What can I get you?”
“Oh, will no-one leave me
alone?” Rao thought with irritation.
He is immensely alone. Nevertheless, he buys some sandalwood soap, and then he decides that S. must have smelt of sandalwood, not jasmine.
Rao, we assume, gets home. He will not remember this day, nor will anyone else. “Nevertheless” may represent our overall response to the story, though that places all the emphasis on what Rao still retains, not on what he may now have; in other words it accepts certain assumptions connected with the word “decay”. Rao still somehow registers the world – (The word “somehow” is a key one in the story, representing certain mental gaps.) He is not Alzheimered though he might be doting. Our vocabulary for these far steps is poor.
Narayan uses comedy as a highly complex illuminating instrument. Young people laugh, old people are funny. I don’t know why old people laugh so seldom, and can hardly even smile for a camera; they lose, obviously, the vanity-aspect of this display, for smiling is a communication, it is not frequently completely spontaneous. Rao’s internal commentary is sharp and spiced, but with only the ghost of humour; “nevertheless” he relishes, enjoys and becomes excited in his circumscribed way.
I want to run jostling through the rain, and I do. If I ever find any pages that are more eloquent about those last stages of life that we may reasonably hope for without enthusiasm, and tremulously observe in others, then I’ll mention it here.
Of Narayan’s other stories the ones I like
best are “The Evening Gift”, “Selvi” and “
(2004)
Helen Forrester: Twopence to cross
the
Books about poverty are timeless. This is
an autobiographical account of a traumatised middle-class family whose
bankruptcy leads them to
Does the book “record” or “re-create”? It was a question that didn’t occur to me while reading, yet it seems unlikely that after forty years you would remember the exact contents of a kindly priest’s rescue-box:
six loaves of bread,
oatmeal, potatoes, sugar, margarine, a tin of baby milk, two bottles of milk,
salt, bacon, some tea, a bar of common soap, a pile of torn-up old sheeting
(for cleaning, and for the baby, he explained apologetically) and, wonder of
wonders, a towel, a big one.
On the other hand, such caressing detail is a mark of the experience of having nothing.
Greater even that her desire for food is Helen’s desperation to go to school. She was clearly a gifted child. Most of the children I know have a marked aversion to learning, nor can I claim to have ever felt this hunger for education myself - it is so endless available in “cheap” books- or the other kind of hunger, either. Perhaps they go together.
As good as anything is the account of the Christmas parcel (these were given to the poor for relief). They don’t know that it is a Christmas parcel, until
suddenly a golden orange
rolled out, sailed slowly across the table and fell with a juicy plonk on the
floor. An orange! An exquisitely perfumed, golden fruit was sitting
right in the middle of our floor.
Thanks to a neighbour’s kindness, they manage to cook the turkey at midnight on Christmas Eve. Helen vainly suggests it should be left until the next day.
Tony’s eyes looked enormous
in his death’s head face.
Again the saliva gathered in
my mouth, but I said, ‘It’s not Christmas until tomorrow.’
’To hell with Christmas,’
said Alan bitterly.
An hour later, there was
only a small white skeleton left, scraped clean by small clawing hands and
teeth. Even Mother came alive, after devouring nearly a whole leg with the
gulping enthusiasm of an ex-prisoner of war. We ate the baked potatoes, skin
and all, we ate the sweets and pudding, every scrap.
We slept.
(2002)
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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