salon des refusés

a note on christopher hitchens

2011-12-17T17:05:00.000Z

Nobright reversion in the sky for Christopher Hitchens – he'd havenone of that ethereal humbug (even if the phrase was AlexanderPope's). But our pre-eminent essayist is gone, the political flytingnever to resume, and the work with its elegancies and asperitiessummarily rounded out. His friend Ian McEwan tells how, in his verylast days, Hitchens was completing a review of the new Chesterton biography, each sentence a torment to produce. But when it appears,we can be certain that it will have his signature graces: stylisticpanache and intellectual rigour. Hitchens never permitted falsequantities to mar his prose, and if he was a good hater of theHazlittean stripe, he could articulate his loves with unsurpassedpassion and cogency.

Hispolitical trajectory will be picked over and debated in the days tocome – his 'apostasy' from the radical Left evidently still rankles insome quarters – but it might be worth reminding ourselves thatHitchens was also a brilliant literary critic, possessed by theconviction that literature still matters, as the great benefice of the ironic mind - even when imperilledby the tohu-bohu of an uglified, celebrity-blighted culture on the one hand, and the enormity of political tyranny on the other. (Hitchens described the cultural landscape of the former as 'a tundra of pulverizing boredom' which could be applied to the former with equal justice.)

even supposing

2011-10-29T21:53:00.000+01:00

RobertDouglas-Fairhurst – Becoming Dickens

It'sdoubtless to John Carey's The Violent Effigy that we owe ourdeepened, richer, less complacently knowing sense of Dickens thenovelist. Carey tartly sandbagged the sociological Dickens, thejacobinical Dickens, the Dickens that Friedrich Engels would haveacknowledged as a fellow traveller – the Dickens who somehow becameassociated with the Condition of England novel, and for whom eachbook was a polemical Tract for the Times: in short, the publicDickens. Carey drew our attention instead to the riptides ofimaginative energy that surged beneath the surface of the text, theobsessive fondling of certain images, the unruly, contraryinstability of Dickens's creative practice – the 'maelstrom ofoddity', as John Bayley has it. Certainly theyoung Dickens was a brilliant improviser, assembling his skits andsketches with a harum-scarum energy. He was compelled to forge astyle on the wing. (The critic James Wood recently complained thatthe “..big contemporary novel is a perpetual motion machine thatappears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want toabolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence. Stories and sub-storiessprout on every page, and these novels continually flourish theirglamorous congestion.” Wood also decries 'the pursuit of vitalityat all costs': but isn't this a just account of Dickens's writing,and the earliest work a fortiori?)
Thepoetry of his fiction – language vigorously destabilised, unrestingand impossible to corral; the way Dickens's mind repeatedly returnsto its fund of pictures and scenes and 'stage properties': Careyprivileged an aspect of his work seldom attended to by moresober-sided critics. Indeed he freed us to think of Dickens as lessMr Popular Sentiment (in Thackeray's jaundiced formulation) than as awriter who – at certain moments and in certain moods – waspossessed by almost a Beckettian tournure d'esprit. A kind ofunholy violence seizes his work, something demonic in its antinomianpitch. Clubbable, genial Dickens conceals within himself a murderousvagabond, and Carey presented this new perspective in his slim,pointed critical study. G.K. Chesterton and Humphrey House becameyesterday's men, critically speaking, at a stroke. (“Dickens,”Carey says at the outset, “is infinitely greater than hiscritics.”)

Doubtless,too, that Robert Douglas-Fairhurst has been a great gainer fromCarey's influence. (There are faint chimes, deliberate or no, atsentence-level - “The fragmented vision results in both nightmareand farce. Naturally enough since farce is only nightmare of whichwe are no longer afraid.” (Carey) “Getting laughs out ofchildhood poverty allowed him to transform his hidden fears intonightmare's comic alternative: farce.” (Douglas-Fairhurst).) Thecritical donnéeestablished by Carey – that Dickens's imagination took flight underthe impetus of things seen and felt, that biography subventscreativity to an unremitting degree – is one Douglas-Fairhurstsubscribes to. Becoming Dickensessays a close-reading of the period in Dickens's life when art andcircumstance settled on a decisive course, and the young clerksucceeded in transforming himself into the celebrated novelist. Douglas-Fairhurst bases his study on the conceit that things couldvery much have been otherwise, that it was at this point that – ifyou wish to put it this way – the quantum multiverse split andbranched into one stream of possibility, ghosted nonetheless by thealternatives: “Footfalls echo in the memory/Down the passage whichwe did not take.” Counter-lives throng Dickens fiction. One ofhis deep themes is the question of the vast complex of event thatbrings us to where we are, to what we are – and the insistentspeculation that goes with it: how precarious our current fortunes,if so little depended on our choices and our determined will. Dickens's rise, of course, was a marvel of creative and professionalentrepreneurialism. He was borne along by extraordinary energy andaudacity. But he was sharply conscious also that his success had analarming element of hazard about it – and his fiction oftenfeatures elaborations of those aborted selves, some of whom remainedimpoverished copy-clerks or orphaned children. (DavidCopperfield might be read as arefracted autobiography, for instance: Dickens experimentallymassaging and modifying his own life history – the net effect comesperilously close to naked self-aggrandisement.)

In the course of a decadeDickens was engaged in a rigorous project of self-fashioning. Here,the young man of indeterminate social status – his family alwaysseemed distinctly degringolade, always on the verge oftumbling another rung down the scale – husbanded his considerableresources and undertook to break onto the metropolitan literaryscene. Douglas-Fairhurst examines the early magazine work with ascrupulous care seldom devoted to it and normally reserved for themajor novels and stories. And he shrewdly cautions us: “Of course,reading Dickens's early sketches as windows that open onto his futurerisks falling into a form of critical doublethink, in which the earlywriting is praised as promising, but only because we know that itspromise was subsequently fulfilled.” The sketch-writing andparliamentary reporting was elaborated – in an astonishing briefperiod of time – into the narrative bricolage of Sketches by Bozand The Pickwick Papers, works whose governing principle wasone of insuperable forward motion, the format of monthly instalmentsimposing on Dickens the need to respond with each number to thefluctuations of his readership's mood. Douglas-Fairhurst seizesthroughout this study on 'biographical tipping points',where Dickens's life could have taken any of a number of differentpaths. One such moment was the suicide of Robert Seymour, anillustrator and caricaturist of a peculiarly neurasthenticdisposition. Dickens had been commissioned to add text to an albumof Seymour's satirical sketches of sporting life – a subordinaterole for the fledgeling writer. But Dickens's rambunctious egoismprompted him to make criticisms of Seymour's work that – and no onecan be quite sure what the causal link might have been – radicallyundermined the man, leading him to take his own life with his'fowling-piece'. This allowed Dickens to wrest control of theproject, out of which grew The Pickwick Papers and the onsetof literary fame. And again: it was only the invention of Sam Wellerin the fourth instalment that secured the ultimate critical andcommercial success of the venture. Another 'tipping point', anothercrux at which things could have been very different. As Pip observesin Great Expectations:

That was a memorable day forme, for it made great changes in me. But it is the same with anylife. Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think howdifferent its course would have been. Pause you who read this, andthink for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns orflowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation ofthe first link on one memorable day.

It's Douglas-Fairhurst'scontention that Dickens was throughout his career hag-ridden by thissense of alterity, of other possible lives that might have been hishad chance not interposed itself. (Henry James's late tale 'TheJolly Corner' is a reprise of the theme – the narrator is hauntedliterally by a version of himself who hadn't fled America, and hadgrown monstrous and degenerate.) Fiction became for Dickens anoccult form of self-mastery, by which he dragooned the multiplicityof selves, real and virtual, that inhabited him. The singular meritof Douglas-Fairhurst's critical biography is that – not being acradle-to-grave narrative – the contracted timeframe affords himthe scope to concentrate in greater depth on largely neglected workthat, scrutinised in a certain slant of light, further enhances ourunderstanding of this formative period

the buried life

2011-10-17T12:20:00.000+01:00

AlanHollinghurst – The Stranger's Child

In the first of her RichardEllmann memorial lectures delivered at Emory University in 1999(published in On Histories and Stories), A.S. Byatt reflectsthat “[o]ne very powerful impulse towards the writing of historicalnovels has been the political desire to write the histories of themarginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded..”; and thisobservation assonates with one of the principal themes of AlanHollinghurst's novel The Stranger's Child – its solicitudefor the buried life, the generations of men who were compelled toconceal or deny their sexuality, the unrecapturability of historicaltruth.

The minor poet Cecil Valancespends a weekend at the family home of his friend George Sawle. Valance composes a poem based on the visit – 'Two Acres' – afairly mediocre pastoral elegy which will become an anthology staple(inscribing it in the autograph album of George's sister Daphne). The two undergraduates covertly engage in sexual by-play, whileDaphne, sixteen and starstruck, nourishes an infatuation for thepoet. The Sawles are a touch déclassé,and Valance descends on them with all the condescension and mystiqueafforded by his own aristocratic background. He appears only in thisfirst section of the book: slain in the Great War, his literaryimmortality is assured – and it's the after-life of his reputationthat forms the motor of the novel. His life and work become a siteof contention, for those who knew him and those – biographers andscholars – who didn't. The visions and revisions of the successorgeneration (the 'stranger's child' of Tennyson's InMemoriam – unknowninheritors) run athwart the mute ravening of time. And –challengingly, frustratingly – the novel's structure enacts thesedisplacements: divided into five sections, its plot doesn't proceedin smooth linear fashion; rather, each part sets us at a pointperhaps many years later, where it often isn't clear what hasoccurred to the characters in the interim. (Between Parts One andTwo, for example, Valance has been killed; between Two and Three, theSawle children have grown into late middle age, their lives in themeantime only faintly hinted at.)

Latterlywe follow the attempts of Paul Bryant, a young bank clerk, to piecetogether Valance's biography; braided with his erotic dalliance witha schoolmaster Peter Rowe, someone else with a concern in Valance'sposthumous fame. Characters earlier introduced rematerialise, butdiminished, somehow: and it's this unaccountable reluctance onHollinghurst's part to give them their narrative due that hobbles TheStranger's Child. Scenes from the childhood of the Valancechildren – Corinna and Wilkins – are drawn with brilliantintensity, lit from within: but, when both reappear decades later,they are soured, broken and barren: with Hollinghurst offering noclue as to why they might have been alloted this fate. (It makes nosense humanly speaking; nor formally and creatively.) Paul Bryant istiresome and priggish – but occupies a significant stretch of thenovel's middle passage – we spend time with him in the reasonableexpectation of some pay-off, of one of the conventional deliverancesof narrative fiction. Yet he too slips below the story's horizon,and we glimpse him once more, in the final chapters, after afurlough, a bluff, bloated beneficiary of the Valance legacy, wherehe stands betrayed as an exploitative cynic for his own careeristends. For a novel that stakes its authority and fidelity on thetender, patient delicate restoration of lost lives, it seems perverse that its characters should be so carelessly deposited in thelandscape of the novel. Hollinghurst writes exquisite, lambentsentences with Jamesian finesse: and this evidently licenses him tofeel that he can press his characters into the service of prose stylealone; as if secretly he longed to dispense with the heavyobligations of the classic realist novel, yet feared – given theemotional reserve he so prizes, the controlled rage for order –the lawlessness of the experimental.

generously angry

2011-10-12T18:08:00.001+01:00

ClaireTomalin – Charles Dickens: A Life

Aleviathan of literary prodigality, Dickens. Not so much a novelist,as a compulsive manufacturer of worlds, a novelising magnate, thescribbler-as-captain-of-industry. 'Inimitable', maybe, but also theimpresario of his own riotous invention. Since his friend JohnForster's authorised account, Dickens has challenged professionalbiographers to locate the wellspring of his genius (no other wordwill do), through the passages of a life as populous and energetic asany of the books. A shilling life might give you all the facts, butPeter Ackroyd's Dickens was one English novelist's eccentric,shambolic, unwieldy, undisciplined response to another: animaginative compte rendu onthe Dickens world. It meant to be determinedly unacademic, and drewCraig Raine's fire as “bloated with contradictions,literary-critical baloney and suspect generalizations”. MichaelSlater's biography is generally better regarded; but the claim to be'definitive' at once eludes and galvanizes each new attempt.

Dickensquite certainly incorporated material from his own life into thenovels – and not always in a manner that needed much in the way oflit-crit parsing. To say he 'drew heavily' on his life experienceunderstates the case radically. For the most part, there was nothingunforthcoming about Dickens and his resort to his early life. Thedynamo of his creativity was powered by the impulse to take this rawmaterial and refashion it – as if in a bid to grasp its ultimatesignificance, as if more fully and decisively to possessit. Dickens's imagination is recursive, relentlessly so. The novelhe said he was fondest of, David Copperfield,approaches closest to outright autobiography: Dickens revisits theuncertainties of his youth, recasting them, dramatising them. And,with an air of mingled self-reproach and self-knowledge bitterlyfought and won, he writes, in the voice of David Copperfield, of thesiege of contraries beleaguering his character, that has been meatand potatoes to biographers since:

The man who reviews his ownlife, as I do mine, in going on here, from page to page, had need tohave been a good man indeed, if he would be spared the sharpconsciousness of many talents neglected, many opportunities wasted,many erratic and perverted feelings constantly at war within hisbreast, and defeating him.

Dickens is the ardentconservator of his own origins; but his own licensed myth-maker, too. Even with the approach of his bicentenary next year, however, it'sworth considering how many more re-evaluations of the life and workmight further serve to illuminate either. (I might note that JohnCarey's The Violent Effigy is probably the best piece ofDickens criticism in many a long year.)

ClaireTomalin's Life beginsbriskly enough, retailing the stuff of Dicken's childhood unfussily –disposing of it in a couple of brief, neat chapters. While Ackroydseemed obsessed with mythologizing this period of Dickens's lifequite as unstintingly as Dickens himself, Tomalin sticks to thefacts, as far as they can be ascertained. This is salutary, andharms the book in no way. (Ackroyd was altogether given too much toshamanic communing with his subject; as if he were attending aséance.) Tomalin's narrative economy is apparent in the openingstaves of her book – perhaps in implied acknowledgement that thisis ground that has been covered extensively before. We needn'tdwell, therefore, on the helter-skelter round of Dickens's life inthe 1830s – when he flirted with the theatre, became aparliamentary reporter (and no mean stenographer), cutting adandified figure around the purlieus of Covent Garden, finallydiscovering his metier as sketch-writer – and Tomalin's account ofhis meeting and engagement to Catherine Hogarth is sharp,unsentimental and largely without comment. We're aware, at this latehour, that Mr Micawber is an exasperated – and broadly truthful –portrait of Dickens's improvident father: and Tomalin doesn'tbelabour the point.

And one feels that the apparentredundancy of another Dickens biography has in sense freed Tomalinfrom some of the obligations besetting previous life-writers. There's little new archival material that might have broughtsomething new to the table (Tomalin herself did precisely this in herearlier work, The Invisible Woman, casting valuable light onDickens's relationship with Nelly Ternan – genuinelyground-breaking; but stealing a march on her own full-length life ofDickens.) And certain events in Dickens's life are relateddispassionately, almost coldly – and typically without the feverishspeculative boutades biographers of a more critical turn ofmind are goaded into. The death of Mary Hogarth, Dickens'ssister-in-law, for example, is related by Tomalin again as a baresequence of facts. Tomalin refrains from suggesting – as do otherwriters, Ackroyd chief among them – that Mary's early death sostruck at the core of Dickens's creative spirit that her revenantappears time and again, passim, in the novels, as the figureof the frail female child of Grace – Little Dorrit, Florence Dombey– resurrected and reanimated in fiction... A self-denyingordinance of Tomalin's, perhaps. But she is altogether more engaged,more delighted in Dickens's male friendships – it's in detailingthese that she allows her approval to shine through - not least withhis friend, sometime agent and confidante, John Forster. (Dickens'sdealings with the publishing world Tomalin recounts with a fullnessnot found in her accounts of his domestic life.)

George Orwell's essay onDickens is, in some ways, unsurpassed: it's in the narrow ambit offorty-odd pages that Dickens's talent, his politics, his flaws andtriumphs are forever locked down. “When one reads any stronglyindividual piece of writing,” Orwell rounds it up, “one has theimpression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page...”:

..Well, in the case of Dickens Isee a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs,though it resembles it. It is the face of a man about forty, with asmall beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of angerin his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of aman who is always fighting against something, but who fights in theopen and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generouslyangry – in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a freeintelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly littleorthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

This verbal cartouche could,maybe, stand for all the gallons of ink spilt by biographers andcritics wishing to pin Dickens's down to a truthful formulation. Tomalin's contribution to the bicentenary celebration next year ishonorable, judicious and free of the scatty self-indulgence ofAckroyd's - but perhaps nonetheless a little de trop.

giuditta decapita oloferne

2011-10-10T17:35:00.000+01:00

“Atlast don't you think that the only aim of Giuditta is to move away toavoid the blood which could stain her dress?” - Roberto Longhi

Sumptuous,sanguinary,

themorbidezza of her flesh, her butcher's forearm.

Frowningdeliberation.. They might be, the women,

twomidwives at a bloody accouchement,

litby the bale-fire of politicised passion:

Caravaggio'slantern. Fabric creased, distressed,

shadowssoftening brisk violence,

thespray of arterial blood finely stippling

tribalvengeance and the secret strength of women.

Andshe smote twice upon his neck

withall her might, and she took away

hishead from him...

(Thatblood-speck on her breast!)

There'sa staged composure to it, sculptural

witha commissioned poise.

Thewarm richesseof the palette

startsthoughts of the kitchen,

themuscular rite of dismemberment

undergoneby the boar, ahead of a feast.

Ceremonialgusto, the carvery's business.

Thecircumflex of the maid's eyebrow

sayssomething about domestic chores,

aboutservice and the aesthetic poor.

Arewe meant to see, we tarriers in the future,

Christ'sface in the upended satchel

ofHolofernes's? The martyred look.

Theeyes locked on a dream of Justitia...

Oris it simply a genre-piece, confected

tothe unspoken dictates of Medici taste?

the eye in love

2011-10-07T12:02:00.000+01:00

CraigRaine - How Snow Falls

Raine prizes the ugly, thedeformed, the unpoetic – regarded often in theirmetaphysical aspect – over the inane, self-complacent suavities ofa certain metropolitan literary culture. And this stance has provento be the defining quality of most of his output: a democratisingvision, a narrow-eyed rejection of the Parnassian mode. He submitsthe body to scrutiny with a watchmaker's loup – is hospitable inhis poetry to its pitted imperfection, its oils and flaws. But itseems like rote performance, more often than not: a trick, a bit ofverbal legerdemain. Of discursiveness there's very little, and atypical Raine poem abstains from the nervy self-justification thatclots the line of other poets – each is an ideogram, theself-consuming artefact that is its own argument. His 'Martianism'has always secretly sought to deflect and discomfit criticism. Apoem's thisness must have the ungainsayability of an object,of a material fact that you can no more unpack than a toadstool. Thecelebrated early poem, 'A Martian Sends a Postcard Home', arrestsRaine in the fixative of achieved style:

Caxtons are mechanical birdswith many wings,

and some are treasured fortheir markings -

Such effects require a certainsuccession of readerly readjustments, so fine as, when we 'get' it,quickly become imperceptible – like learning to juggle, thedifficulties of the outset vanish into virtuosity. (We're not to bedetained over the question of how the Martian availed itself of thecultural-historical datum of 'Caxton' as in the inventor of the book,while he is unaware of the lexical one of 'book' – the periphrasistends to disintegrate if we examine it too closely.) Raine'sminiaturism is underwritten by a kind of exultant attentiveness tothe unremarked blebs and flecks on the surface of the world. Likehis admired John Updike, whose hyperthrophied noticings make for anart bristling with contingent stuff, Raine suggests our blockishautomatism – and insensitivity to the phenomenal world in which wefind ourselves – has an implied ethical dimension. “I am thesteward/of her untold wealth,” he has it in the poem 'Rich', with'she' as Nature, perhaps, “keeper of the dictionary,/treasurer ofvaluables,//accountant and teller,/and I woo her with words/againstthe day of divorce.” This view of the matter might beunexceptionable – but when it appears to license Raine to documentthe private humiliations of family and friends (notably in hiselegies to his mother and former lover Kitty Mrosovsky), and to, ineffect, ransack intimacy for creative capital, the high-mindedpungency of his position errs dramatically into the grotesque. Thelong poem À larécherchedu temps perdu, republished in How Snow Falls (andbook-ending the poem about Raine's mother's death), overbrims withillicit life, wrought in a fit of dislike, bafflement and tenderness. But critics (among them Sarah Maguire) found its openness cynicaland, yes, rather ugly. It is a catalogue raisonnéeof human suffering – but it's free inventorying of the dead woman'sbody, her sexual exploits, raised hackles. (The squeamishness wasrehearsed a generation before, when Robert Lowell composed a poetrycollection from the private papers of friends and lovers.) Rainewould doubtless insist that there's no sense in glozing the parts oflife we find disagreeable. And would endorse Auden's opinion that,although we want a poem to be 'a verbal earthly paradise, a timelessworld of pure play,' we also want it “..to be true, that is to say,to provide us with some kind of revelation about our life which willshow us what life is really like, and free us from self-enchantmentand deception, and a poet cannot bring us any truth withoutintroducing into his poetry the problematic, the painful, thedisorderly, the ugly.” And yet, and yet. There's something to besaid for reticence.

Against the day of divorce:in a phrase, the nub of Raine's salvatory aesthetic, never so flatlystated, but informing his poetry and extenuating maybe thedistressing candour of the poetry dealing with the death of lovedones. Each image, each line granted its specific weight is a refusalof death's wholesale erasure – to be dead is to no longer to feelin our nerves and sinews and on our skin the vibrant presence of theworld (Raine's work an extended palinode to Larkin's 'Aubade'); and,cumulatively, what we have in the end is a secular prayer to thesuperabundance of life, its interrelatedness, the gap betweenperceiving subject and the object perceived roundly abolished. It'sa natural theology, tricked out with mild scepticism, but happy tocountenance the shabby unfinishedness of things and our humblingbelatedness.

The early poetry drew its vigourand interest from the stylistic kinks that Raine tosses up, wherehe'd gone some way to rehabilitate the simile – no longerineffectually decorative, but a device that stood for a particularway of engaging with the world. And what's notable about his outputas a whole is that this deft jugglery has remained its chiefcharacteristic. Formal experiment interests Raine very little:technical élan has neverbeen part of his repertoire; and the triplets and clipped quatrainsthat are like so many pendants to his ways of seeing reoccur fromstart to finish. Not minimalism – not the wire-drawn brevities ofthe postwar Eastern European poets - but a dedication to a kind ofobsessive poetic microscopy. Language as a tweezer, plucking outdetails like so many ingrown hairs. Once in a while Raine lays outthe principles of his own art, and the art he especially admires:“Good writing is a criticism of life: it describes, selects,contemplates defining features, beauties, flaws; it puts reality onpause; it searches the freeze frame; it is an act of measuredconsideration, of accurate re-presentation.” Italicizedreality, as he has it. Yet the question of what such a pause canyield in terms of meaning and significance – whether the horstexte can finally instruct us in anything at all, even if putunder the fiercest scrutiny – dogs Raine's poetry. A cow sippingfrom a pond, “..her snooker table, torn,/where only oneplayer/attends to a solitary red.” - what licences Raine to thisfigurative fancy, that seems no more telling than a metaphoricalscribble? Once we 'see' that the player is an angler, what then? Ifit seems a mite inconsequential, that's because it is.

How Snow Falls is Raine'sfirst collection in a long while – Àla récherchewas published in stand-alone book format a decade ago. (A poet'sparsimony usually hints at the expectation that a new volume will bean 'event'.) The title poem rehearses the fractured imagism of hisrecent work, the sensuous dédoublementbetween natural phenomena and the state of the soul: “And thenlove's vertigo,/love's exactitude,//this snow, thistransfiguration,/we never quite get over.” The 'exactitude'comprises precision of observation and feeling – our gift ofregistering the impalpable and making it articulate, something thatcan usefully be passed from hand to hand. Yet 'How Snow Falls' isunusually blurred for a Raine poem. Its verbal singularity isundercut by the uncertainty of its occasion. Elliptical,undemonstrative, it seems to claim its metaphysical cachet withoutearning it first. Raine wants to record a moment of vision, but somescruple turns him from it.

daughter of the law

2011-10-01T17:55:00.000+01:00

GillianRose - Love's Work

The memoirist seeks to allowfree converse between memory and desire, between mere happenings andthe inner carnivalesque. Less circumstantial than self-exculpatory,such writing can seem wilful and freighted with occult significancethat the reader is obliged to decode. Straight autobiography tellsit as it happened – with the usual elisions and contractions andskatings-over-the-truth. The memoir shares more with the prose poem,formally and substantively: it can possess a beautiful perversity, alyric finesse, that might not compromise its truth-claims toofatally.

Gillian Rose died in 1995 ofovarian cancer. A specialist in German metaphysics (with a twist ofAdorno), her work explored the possibility of an erotics of theethical. The ferocity of her intellect can seem self-consuming, and,in Love's Work, it is put in service of articulating the agon– her own stark term – that provided the motive force for all heractivities. Candour and obscurantism are tightly inwoven in thisbook. We're compelled to make (perhaps unwarranted) inferences fromcertain of the lines Rose pursues with her customary intensity. Thebook is populated by a number of individuals brought to the fore andutilised emblematically, almost. Rose asserts their importance toher without strictly illustrating it. The first we meet, Edna, anonagenarian whose life-gourmandise is undiminished (cancer haddestroyed her face, and she wore, without vanity, a prosthetic jawand nose), she is Rose's 'Intelligent Angel' – an exemplar of onewho'd found an ideal orientation towards life and death. “She hasnot been exceptional,” Rose concludes. “She has not lovedherself or others unconditionally. She has been able to go ongetting it all more or less wrong, more or less all the time, all thenine and a half decades of the present century plus three years ofthe century before.” Rose bids to identify her peculiar glamour– in the etymological root of the word: “..the kind of magicwhich Edna believes in: the quiet and undramatic transmutation thatcan come out of plainness, ordinary hurt, mundane maladies anddisappointments.”

But Edna doesn't seem quite so'unexceptional' to me. Nor does Rose isolate the quiddity of thewoman so attractive, so enabling to her. The personae who by turnshaunt and vitalise the book remain somehow radically enigmatic – orRose's language renders them so. This may simply be a matter of tact– the memoirist is duty-bound to spare the feelings and preservethe privacy of those she describes, chiefly because this form ofdiscourse trades on a powerfully amplified exposition of feelingsoften contrary and disreputable. The honesty topos determines thereevaluated bounds of the sayable. When Rose mentions in passingthat another of her friends, Jim, '..had been asked to leaveBennington on the charge of corruption of students..”, thecircumstances of this expulsion are left unstated (although Rosemakes the predictable association with the fate of Socrates). Whendiscussing Yvette – a woman d'un certain àgewhom Rose befriended during her tenure at the University of Sussex –her erotic idiosyncrasies are admiringly set forth (instancing thatnaked vitalism that Rose, facing death herself, cleaves to), but Rosedisplays an odd coyness over the question of whether certain of thiswoman's instincts (her blitheness with regard to childhood sexuality,for example) mightn't be subject to a more critical scrutiny. Thisvotary of the 'universal and sacred spirit of lust' could, viewedfrom another perspective, come across rather more as a recklesssexual raptor – whose instincts shade into the pathological –than the ardent maquis of love – a kind of post-feminist Jacobin -that her portrayal connives in.

Love'sWork is peopled withsuch human trouvailles,such outliers of eros. Rose places herself among them as a kindlyanthropologist, forgiving them, absolving them by the lights of herown secular covenant. Their courage in the face of bodilydissolution draws from her a guarded admiration. But we're to takethem as somehow exemplary, for the boldness of their negotiationswith death.

Thepoet Geoffrey Hill, in a pained, exasperated elegy for Rose, hints ather intransigence, at her absolutism: “You/do, of course[understand him], since I am using your three primers...”:

MourningBecomes the Law,Love's Work,Paradiso:

agood legacy which you should be proud of

exceptthat pride is forever irrelevant

whereyou are now. So it continues,

thework, lurching on broken springs

orhaving to be dug out or jump-started

orwelded together out of two wrecks

ordonated to a good cause, like to the homeless

inthe city that is not just, has never

knownjustice, except sporadically:

Solon,Phocion – and they gave him hemlock

andburned his body in an unhallowed place.

Andhis ashes were taken up and smuggled

intohis own home, and buried beneath the hearth.

['In Memoriam: Gillian Rose', A Treatise on Civil Power]

Rose'sthought pivots on the axis of Love/Law; yet, in contention here arenot simply abstract donnéesthat yield their own measure of intellectual marrow. “I findlove's work,” Hill goes on, “a bleak ontology/to have tocontemplate; it may be all we have.” For Rose, it is only when weadmit our primal wounding that the 'work' can begin.

Thebook represents among other things a fleshing-forth of these concepts– a companion-piece on praxis to set beside the theory of heracademic work. Rose has set herself to tutor us in our physicalvulnerability, and nowhere does she do it more magnificently andterrifyingly than in the chapter detailing her cancer treatment: “Myinterest is in the uncharted; my difficulty that I will inevitablyenlist, by connotation and implication, the power and grace of thesymbol. I need to invent colostomy ethnography.” Incarnationis the severe central armature of the book. Rose botanizes hercancer. She sweeps aside the iatrogenic niceties of the medicalprofession, searching instead for a thematic hook on which she canhang her experience – something novel, an idiolect new-minted;something distinct, on the one hand, from the complacencies of the'screwtape spiritualism' she deplores, and, on the other, thelanguage of systematic depersonalisation made use of by Medicine andits functionaries: 'the esoteric but fatal language of clinicalcontrol'.

the wolf in the mind

2011-10-01T15:59:00.004+01:00

A.S. Byatt - Ragnarok: The End of the Gods

Myths and fairy tales – the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves – are an abiding preoccupation of A.S. Byatt. In her most recent novel, The Children's Book, Olive Wellwood compiles, for each of her own children, personalised tales that reflect the natures (and, perhaps, destinies) of her sons and daughters: their essences or unadorned selves. The tales are nightmarish, with an appropriately naif surrealism; peopled by heroic children and their quest companions. They also bespeak Olive's deep anxieties about her own origins, her Midland childhood – her father and brothers died in mining accidents - reflected (but never so stated) in the perilous Underground through which her characters travail. But it's precisely the conviction that 'stories are ineluctable' which lends Byatt's recent work its noble terror. Tom Wellwood's fate is 'plotted' as pitilessly and inescapably as the fate of Baldur – no matter what provision might have been made to free themselves from it, neither can refuse the iron logic of the stories they're welded to.

Others in the 'Canongate Myths' series make use of the fashionable device of 're-imagining' or 're-purposing' myths, but Byatt has, in Ragnarok, written a slender, vital book that at once rehearses a powerful fable and tells a tale of the origins of a writer's imagination – without feeling the need to squint at the source material through the lens of 'contemporary relevance'. (Although she does concede that the apocalypticism might offer itself as a figuring of environmental disaster.)

“Myths are often unsatisfactory,” Byatt says, “even tormenting. They puzzle and haunt the mind that encounters them. They shape different parts of the world inside our heads, and they shape them not as pleasures, but as encounters with the inapprehensible.” As John Ruskin domesticated Greek myth – in such lecture series as The Queen of the Air – and brought to it an 'improving' mentality, with a view to the edification of the public, so Byatt purposely resists the temptation to point any moral with her version of Nordic legend. Indeed, she suggests that myth as ur-narrative must necessarily be immune to the sclerosis of overdetermination, be it ethical, political or doctrinal; [it must be in serene keeping with Keatsian 'negative capability', denying sponsorship of human institutional meaning;] it must disengage itself from the formularies of creed, even timeliness. Byatt's gods are merely what they are, not ciphers of ideology or doxa; neither exemplary nor realistic. They embody elemental forces, a reckless energy that, paradoxically, as Byatt comes to admit, is peculiarly human.

In this intensely visual rendering – image tumbles over image, set-piece spawns set-piece - Byatt doesn't signpost the themes of the tale, there's no editoralising, as it were. This isn't a work of explication, or mythography in quite the sense of an unriddling. What we make of it will depend chiefly on our prepossessions. It 'tactfully suggests' possible interpretations. Byatt lays out the stories themselves in all their bracing purity, her prose lyrically sensuous but without the impedimenta of . These stories woo our imaginations. If the catechisms of the established church have palpable designs on us, she as much as says, then the raw unleavened violence of these myths, their exuberant physicality, ought just as well to survive without our input. In the nightwood of myth only instinct and imaginative openness can guide us.

Grafted onto the 'stipe' of the primary tale is the 'thin child's' story, Byatt's avatar, her younger self, as she makes exploratory inroads on the perhaps unanswerable question – why is there something and not nothing? “The thin child, reading and rereading the tales, neither loved nor hated the people in them – they were not 'characters' into whose doings she could insert her own imagination.” Given a book, Asgard and the Gods, by her mother, she sets herself to the job of making sense of the war-time world she finds herself in. The tale of Ragnarok, 'the dark water over everything', tutors her in the stark possibility that, once lost, things can never be recovered (in contrast with the Christian myth of redemption and resurrection). The thin child's reading equips her with images – 'the wolf in the mind', 'the picture of the end of things, like a thin oval sliver of basalt or black slate' – which become fixtures in her psychic life: sense-making eidolons to set against the onrush of experience as it assaults her.

This, Byatt implies, is the supreme significance of myth: not hortatory, not prescriptive, but fluid lit images in the service of permitting us to orient ourselves to the universe. They assist us in coming to terms with our radical contingency, with the bitter fact of our being inessential. We can take them or leave them as we please. But they persist as vagabond memories, shadowing the human enterprise.

staggered repeats

2008-06-22T21:12:00.013+01:00

Ciaran Carson – For All We Know

The bitterest love poetry you'll ever read - George Meredith's Modern Love – fairly rubbishes romantic passion as a snare of fools, or a wasting disease – a kind of phthisis of the soul. The toxicity of the poems is conveyed at the level of its gnarled syntax and the emotional colour of a Walter Sickert in its imagery. If Donne spoke of the 'spider love', Meredith replies with the 'scorpion love' of these sonnets. The marriage portrayed doesn't so much as merely break down - it undergoes time-lapse decay in the astringents of infidelity and mutual hatred; the least of it flawlessly masked by the bourgeois domestic proprieties of the day. The male speaker registers complex responses of disgust and slighted rectitude; looks on his wife as a beguilingly dangerous Lamia who nonetheless commands his abject devotion:

Yea! filithiness of body is most vile,
But faithlessness of heart I do hold worse.
The former, it were not so great a curse
To read on the steel-mirror of her smile.

“Shall I,” he asks, “unsustained,/Drag on Love's nerveless body thro' all time?” - Meredith juggles the emollient hypocrisy of polite society ('Dear guests, you now have seen Love's corpse-light shine.') and the cankered tissue of a marriage in extremis. The poems are teasingly crypto-autobiographical – Meredith's wife, the daughter of Thomas Love Peacock, cuckolded and left him for the artist Henry Wallis – and they work around the vexed problem of public self-exposure by a heavy reliance on figural language, rhetorical make-shift, and the feeling-tones of melodrama. (Its atmosphere anticipates the parched, airless recrimination of Ford's The Good Soldier.) The Meredithian sonnet – fifteen rather than the conventional fourteen lines – manages at once to be innovatory and classically sanctioned; yet seems unnervingly out of joint, with the addition of that single line (Tony Harrison adopted the stanza for his School of Eloquence.). Much like Tennyson's In Memoriam, Modern Love lies somewhere the contested territory between public utterance – decorous, seemly, graceful – and the need to articulate vortices of private anguish: “These two were rapid falcons in a snare,/Condemned to do the flitting of a bat.” Suppressed hints of sexual violence and (mutually administered) emotional cruelty curdle the poetry. What may or may not be a mariage blanc is a torture-chamber, with Bluebeard presiding over the banns. Conjugal union becomes as pleasurable and edifying as waterboarding to the parties involved. The essential modernity of this love, it seems, entails the discovery of the unbridgeable gulf between the visione amori and the shabby ordinariness, the grudging compromises of real life. But the disagreeable fact remains: there ain't no cure for love.

The zugzwang – in the exotic argot of the chess world – is a forced move, one the player is compelled to make, even though it might damage his position. Ciaran Carson, in For All We Know, understands this ambiguous tactic as the necessity for the mind to recuperate systematically the fading details of a love affair, lest they finally pale to illegibility and the circumstantial vividness of the experience – its meaning and significance - be lost. (The book's doubled end-pieces are titled 'Zugzwang': "...as the old chess master cannot say if ever he learned/the game, since each new game blossoms with new constellations...")

A sonnet sequence, For All We Know is composed of the voices of a man and a woman, Irish and French, who meet in the seventies at the onset of the Troubles: Gabriel and Nina. Essentially plotless, yet tightly bound together by a calculated recurrence of image, theme and phrase, the narrative prosecutes itself as a verbal ricercare, a highly patterned exposition of key 'topics': the lovers' first meeting, the twofold idea of the 'fetch' as doppleganger and behaviour of waves, language concealing identity, tolling bells, fairy tales, heirloom watches and Mont Blanc pens; cryptic misrememberings, renegotiated selves and exploratory rewritings of experience... The book's overall structure itself lends it coherence – indeed, its aesthetic effects depend more on these thematic intervals than what goes on inside each poem. Its two halves mirror each other – the titles of the poems in the first half are the same as those in the second. Intimate vignettes are replayed, differently weighted. The poems speak to one another, correcting themselves, glossing and revising. Memories are spontaneously reorganized in the telling. The epigraph by Glenn Gould – 'So You Want to Write a Fugue' – rather too obviously drops the hint as to the structural principles operating in the sequence: “Fugue must perform its frequently stealthy work with continuously shifting melodic fragments that remain, in the 'tune' sense, perpetually unfinished.” And 'continually shifting melodic fragments' are precisely what we get here. (In terms of emotional bias, some lines from T.S. Eliot's 'Marina' might have served as epigraph just as well: "What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands ... What images return...") The soft sift of decaying memories are startled into intelligible shapes at the touch of the poet's finger. Thus reconstituted, they cast another light on the fugitive moments of this petite histoire.

Carson's language is rigorously disciplined. He renders the flitting banalities of the daily course of a love affair with fine scruple; yet each iteration alters itself, often shifting with surreal suddenness into the mythic and heraldic:

You stepped out from the shadows wearing a linen jacket
I'd never seen you in before, buttoned on the wrong side.

A sere-cloth dipped in oak-gall ink with buttons of black jet.
A clasp of ebony in the open book in your hands.

Characters of archaic Hebrew Gothic dazzled the page,
black stars danced in the blank universe between the lines,

your mouth disgorging a stream of language not known to me
or any man, for all I knew of what had gone before.

('Before')

Sean O'Brien has called Carson a 'secular mystic', and written of the 'intense everyday aestheticism, a relish of the thing' in his poetry. True, the 'melodic fragments' of For All We Know are arranged with a combinatorial energy that summons up unimagined symbolic connections – to the point where the mundane exchanges between the lovers take on the fine luminous perfection of the diamond absolutes... Yet due honour is done to the limitless shiftingness, the Heraclitean unrecapturability of the instant: “...Everything was, as it were, provisional,//slipping from the unforeseeable into tomorrow/even as the jittery present became history.” The structural complexity of the book becomes itself a kind of forcing-house for unresolved mysteries, labyrinths of meaning:

...Fugue, my professor said, is a kind of trance

in which the victim disappears for years on end, until
he comes to himself in a strange town and quits the double

life he led unbeknownst to himself. In musical terms
the fugue must perform its often stealthy work with shifting

melodic fragments that remain perpetually in
abeyance, or unconsummated, so to speak, you said.

And I think of the blank darkness that descended on Bach
as the music which blazed in his head became forgotten.

('In the Dark')

The charge often laid on George Meredith's verse is that he was too indulgent in allowing the febrile chaotic emotional bass-note underlying it to issue in quite alarming – to his first readers – formal disfigurements. Literary decorum was violated; and the relative merit of the result is unsettled. The sonnets that comprise Modern Love strain and heave under the pressure of giving voice to feeling that might have done well never to have been brought to light – the poems are syntactically wrecked, broken-winded by their spiteful flawed candour. For All We Know, with its mirrorball sonnets, revolving and flinging off their tesserae of light, might similarly be criticised for its favouring of elaborate formal play over fidelity to emotional clarity and truth. It's not an easy book: the many thousands of casual poetry readers who snapped up Carol Ann Duffy's Rapture – hoping to find in it some clue to their own predicament, as in a piece of wisdom literature – would be roundly stumped by Carson's portrait of the triumph (in the old sense) of love. Carson owes something to the playful ingenuities of Paul Muldoon; and shares something of that poet's obscurity and tricksy verbal braiding. But its textured loveliness, its sensuous fire, will move anyone ready to take time over For All We Know. As, too, will its note of sweet, aching elegy:

I'm the lady propped up at the bar beside you, who puts
words into your mouth before you even know what they are.

I'm the lady who sleeps in you until death do you part.
I'm the lady you see in your dreams though she be long dead.

('Filling the Blanks')

drum-song of murder

2008-06-16T10:44:00.013+01:00

Ted Hughes – Collected Poems

Hughes's death in 1998 must have seemed - to a certain generation of readers – an impossibility and a perjury. The poet-elementalist, whose work was violently instinct with the life force itself, and in whom British poetry for the better part of forty years found its hetman, was simply, irrecoverably gone: “The day of his death was a dark, cold day...”

With the possible exception of Seamus Heaney, no other poet had established decisive authority as Hughes. In terms of sheer stature, he could plausibly be described as heir to T.S. Eliot – yet Eliot's public reputation evolved into that of a cultural magnate of the old kind, a discourser on matters wider in scope than literature, projecting schemes for the renewal of society itself. Eliot grew into a private asceticism coordinated with his political views; he embodies a manner and an attitude that, with the passage of years, becomes, to us, coldly estranging, if not downright problematic.

But Hughes was enormously respectful of Eliot – his centenary tribute, published as A Dancer to God and later collected in Winter Pollen, is a sinewy compte rendu of the sources of Eliot's gift, from one of poetry's Roundheads to its suavest Cavalier. As with a fair few of Hughes's prose ventures – nominally concerning themselves with a Shakespeare, a Coleridge or an Eliot – 'The Poetic Self' secretes hints of a poet's self-portrait, foreshadowing the fraught psychic parthenogenesis out of which Eliot's poetry ... one is tempted to say, slithered, in keeping with the conceptual tenor of Hughes's description. (Rewriting Eliot's corpus by his own lights.) Of the early image of St Sebastian that crops up in the juvenilia, Hughes asks “..What was it? Among other things....”

...it was proof, perhaps, that Eliot was able to contain within himself, more fully than any of his contemporaries, none of whom invented anything like it in inclusive complexity, depth and power, the spiritual tragedy of his epoch – of which this was an image, as it was in a more specific way of his own immediate psychological plight. Within this icon, that ascendant spirit of totalitarian, secular control – sceptical, scientific, steeled, flexible, rational, critical – displays its victim, the most profoundly aware and electrified plasm of the martyred psychosoma.

Eliot, by Hughes's estimate, was a poet 'of an utterly new species'. Others before him may have had vague intimations of – in E.M. Forster's phrase – the impact of the unseen on the seen: the mystical tradition in English verse reaches further back than Vaughan and Traherne, to be sure. Hughes picks up in even the earliest of the poetry traces of a vatic disposition, a mind that was fitted like no other to submerge itself in the amniotic fluid of the reptilian mind, as it were, granting Eliot access to altered states that fructified into poetry of such elegant mystery that oftentimes the critical sense is beggared. Hughes's criticism reads as much as a treatise on embryology, as anything else. He invites us to perceive in Eliot's work a form of natural supernaturalism for the age of the Treaty of Versailles, of bimetallism and of the spiritual vacancy entre deux guerres....

Hughes peels away the membrane of drawing-room civility and cosmopolitan savoir faire sheathing the great poet – T.S. Eliot the stockbroker-ish icon of literary London – seeking rather to show that, within the modern urban publisher and cultural panjandrum, a fragile tortured creature coils, bristling defensively. Eliot's wyrd is not that of the conventional Bloomsburyite; but something ancient, hunted and terrifying. He has courted, perilously, his 'true self', the avatar of Tiresias pathologically sensitive to the peculiar psychic violence broiling around and within us. In a certain respect Eliot is an unexpected object for Hughes's laudations. But some remarks of his on the work of the artist Leonard Baskin may have some bearing here. “New art awakens our resistance,” he observes:

...in so far as it proposes changes and inversions, some new order, liberates what has been repressed, lets in too early whiffs of an unwelcome future. But when this incidental novelty has been overtaken or canonized, some other unease remains... An immanence of something dreadful, almost (dare one say it) something unhuman. The balm of great art is desirable and might even be necessary, but it seems to be drawn from the depths of an elemental grisliness, a ground of echoless cosmic horror.

Hughes esteems Eliot as a 'pain-diviner' and 'pain-fathomer': that 'immanence of something dreadful' stirs constantly in its minatory way through even the satirical quatrain poems of the first books. Primitive religious vision curls vividly about the address of the poetry. As Hughes sought in his own work to unlock the sinister areté perhaps mercifully at bay in our daylight selves – the brutality and savage joy of the unhoused human subject – so he was the more disposed to divine it in the work of his great poets.

Scanning the pages of Hughes's Collected Poems, you immediately sense not the modest nudgings of a poetic sensibility toward a pleasant lyric truthfulness; but a semi-feral intellect moving ventre à terre through a dense boscage, scenting the air, ever alert to the subtlest hints signalling invisible threats in the undergrowth. The voice was almost fully achieved early on. Great baroque flourishes of slick blood-boltered verbiage. A world of raptor and prey. Myth not as adornment but as vital constituent. Festal dithyrambic energies given unchecked vent. Nature as a region of sudden violence and obscure undocumented ritual. The Hughes of The Hawk in the Rain, Wodwo and Lupercal is recognizably the same Hughes of Wolfwatching and Birthday Letters. Each book organically sets the conditions of the next – in few modern poets is there so consistently maintained a development, so traceable a physiological growth – the 'biological imprint', as Hughes has phrased it elsewhere. The verse pursues the jagged beeline of its own rhythm, incantatory and at moments unnervingly insinuating. 'Second Glance at a Jaguar', from Wodwo, dramatizes a kind of seductive nightmare of unblinking sight, scalpelling through the superficies of familiar response to an articulation of the mysterious 'unhuman' jaguarhood of the jaguar – Hughes enjoins the needful 'second glance':

Skinful of bowls he bowls them,
The hip going in and out of joint, dropping the spine
With the urgency of his hurry
Like a cat going along under thrown stones, under cover,
Glancing sideways, running
Under his spine. A terrible, stump-legged waddle
Like a thick Aztec disemboweller,
Club-swinging, trying to grind some square
Socket between his hind legs round,
Carrying his head like a brazier of spilling embers...
....
... A gorged look,
Gangster, club-tail lumped along behind gracelessly,
He's wearing himself a heavy ovals,
Muttering some mantra, some drum-song of murder
To keep his rage brightening, making his skin
Intolerable, spurred by the rosettes, the Cain-brands,
Wearing the spots off from the inside,
Rounding some revenge.

Forcefully Hughes alerts the reader to the dim obscenity of this creature. It shucks off the symbolic cope draped over Rilke's panther, an example of the 'concentrated excitement' he has written of, the purpose of which “..in this arena of apprehension and unforeseeable events, is to bring up some lovely solid thing, like living metal, from a world where nothing exists but those inevitable facts which raise life out of nothing and return it to nothing.” The 'selving' of the animal comes about from a long programme of the poet's discipling the senses. Hughes has talked of the 'poetry of positive violence, poetry about the working of divine law in created things', that shuns the 'stereotype, sentimental, weak, loose, media misreading of [the natural]'. Herein implied is the breaking of humanism, its belated forfeit, as, with greater urgency, we must acknowledge that we can no longer pretend to the seigneurial disdain we have, as a species, so long enjoyed. Hughes's work reminds us of our imperilled kinship with the divine law in created things. But – it bears restating – he is no mere anodyne 'eco-poet'. The goblin footfalls are ever-present.

Perhaps the oddest of all Hughes's productions is the Crow sequence. Much-controverted, it stands as an experiment in raw mythopoeia. Hughes allots it a place with Trickster literature, the skew-whiff songs of near-forgotten folkways, that “..draws its effects from the unkillable, biological optimism that supports a society or individual whose world is not yet fully created, and whose metaphysical beliefs are only just struggling out of the dream stage”; and in which “..optimism and creative joy are fundamental, and the attempts to live, and to enlarge and intensify life, however mismanaged, fill up at every point with self-sufficient meaning.” - the 'optimism of the sperm still battling zestfully along after 150 million years'. Casting an eye over these poems, you may find this description superficially unpersuasive. They require of the reader a kind of subtle inner readjustment to the symbolic melodies of what seem to be bleak tone-poems. Crow is demonically Chaplinesque, almost. A dark intensification and subversion of the Shakespearean Fool, or a blind courier from an unthought-of hell:

Crow was so much blacker
Than the moon's shadow
He had stars.

He was as much blacker
Than any negro
As a negro's eye-pupil.

Even, like the sun,
Blacker
Than any blindness.

('Crowcolour')

Poem as blood-blister... A fractured fairy tale, Crow lends a seething unstable form to the generative violence so prized by Hughes. Yet it takes no mean perversity to assign to it qualities of 'optimism and creative joy'... Crow himself, 'a bombcloud, lob-headed' is a dybukk and a gluttonous sprite, a tattered capering horror from a Jan Svankmajer film – yes, these poems are an account of his thrashing, convulsive attempt to live, to birth himself in the midst of a blasted world; but their ugliness and spastic eccentricity make them more fascinating than engaging. As a whole they resemble nothing so much as a shillelagh clagged with blood and hair. Hughes wanted to draft fresh mythic constellations: but Crow is a cosmogony of bitter pain, the sorrows of an abortive miscreant, for all his protestations to the contrary:

Once upon a time there was a person
Almost a person

Somehow he could not quite see
Somehow he could not quite hear
He could not quite think
Somehow his body, for instance,
Was intermittent
...
So he just went and ate what he could
And did what he could
And grabbed what he could
And saw what he could

Then sat down to write his autobiography

But somehow his arms were just bits of stick
Somehow his guts were an old watch-chain
Somehow his feet were two old postcards
Somehow his head was a broken windowpane

'I give up,' he said. He gave up.

Creation had failed again.

('A Bedtime Story')

Ted Hughes is perhaps popularly regarded most of all – apart from his relationship with Sylvia Plath, and the Laureateship – as a poet lodged deep in English natural history. The Collected Poems have the weight of the anvil behind them; but they are alive, too, to seasonal change and the small unregarded things around the agrarian enterprise. A sequence like Moortown Diary exhibits Hughes blissfully attentive, sunk in the living warp of days. Here is the poet-farmer, the practical man, sensitized to the rhythms of the natural world. Hughes acquits himself as a writer of considerable tact, authorized by the gift of deep seeing to picture the land and its occupants. “We have some beautiful beasts,” he wrote to Ruth Fainlight and Alan Sillitoe in January 1974. “I'm getting quite involved in them. Impossible not to. They're giving me more than I give them. I was quite intensely enmeshed in their world when I was an infant – but I felt I was losing it. Fishing isn't enough. But now this working on the land & these animals has given it all back double. I feel to be waking up for the first time in my life... Also, it's a revelation to watch at close quarters somebody like Carol's father [Jack Orchard] (he does all the real work) – from farmers in unbroken line as far back as they can trace. He's a mobile archive of know-how & understanding – and the perfect attunement.” Hughes's admiration for the unaffected Orchard way of life enlivens the poetry of Moortown Diary to a vivid enchanted tenderness. Antaeus-like, Hughes's father-in-law draws his strength from the earth:

...Now you have to push your face
So tool-worn, so land-weathered,
This patch of ancient, familiar locale,
Your careful little moustache,
Your gangly long broad Masai figure
Which you decked so dapperly to dances,
Your hawser and lever strength
Which you used, so recklessly,
Like a tractor, guaranteed unbreakable...

('Now you have to push')

The flurry of curiosity, baffled prurience and critical excitement over the publication of Birthday Letters has since subsided, and we're perhaps better placed to consider it on its merits. The Collected Poems reproduces for the first time a thematic companion-piece, Capriccio, memorializing Hughes's lover Assia Wevill in much the same style, with much the same imagistic palette, as the Plath ensemble. Here, the psychodramas are once again nakedly set forth, riddlingly elaborated. Intimate observation and the mythic impulse entwine hectically. The buried privacies of a relationship glitter through, but are fitful and bizarrely attired. As with Birthday Letters, there's somehow the feeling of an open-handed promise of candour, of the free settling of accounts; yet one so obscured by poetic busyness the reader may set these poems down none the wiser.

You had lifted off your future and laid it lightly
Before the door of Aphrodite's temple
As the drowned leave their clothes folded.

Exchanged your face for the mask of Aphrodite
Marriage for the manic depression
Of the ovaries, for the ocean's heave and spill.

Exchanged the plain security of your life-line
For those holy years: the blood-clepsydra
Limit of Aphrodite's epiphany.

'After forty I'll end it,' you laughed
(You were serious) as you folded your future
Into your empty clothes. Which Oxfam took.

('Fanaticism')

You're assaulted by a suspicion, reading these poems, of Hughes – whatever his conscious intention – seconding the personal anguish of Wevill and Plath to a compulsively overmastering poetic vision. And vision in its strongest sense. The sinisterly fatidic trumps the mildly personal, as in 'Dreamers' from Birthday Letters:

We didn't find her – she found us.
She sniffed us out. The Fate she carried
Sniffed us out.
And assembled us, inert ingredients
For its experiment. The Fable she carried
Requisitioned you and me and her,
Puppets for its performance.

Posthumous editions of a poet's work can be troublesome things, when all is said and done. (The stock of Edwin Muir will surely rise with the appearance of a radically pared-down Selected Poems from Faber.) They may ultimately only be of academic interest, however thrilling the completist might find them. Larkin's literary reputation was impaired somewhat by the first Collected Poems, which disregarded the careful selection and apposition Larkin employed in assembling his books. The temptation to pile Pelion on Ossa is a live concern for the doughtily loyal executor. And Hughes's Collected – good though it certainly is to have it – suffers from a kind of dropsy, a too-muchness: if Hughes's obsessions remained consistent throughout his life; and his style, hit upon at the very outset, with its thunderous consonantal hoof-beats and scarred ellipses, served him to the end; then, taken in the lump, experiencing this poetry can feel rather like something between a chastening and a bludgeoning. In Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes made a bid, in a tireless, obsessive fury, to find the last nucleus of Shakespeare's creative vision. The labour, he was to claim, so weakened him that it enabled the cancer that killed him to take hold. That he identified the poetic endeavour with the vital economy of the body is one final clue to the heft and vigour of his poetry. Poetry as a resistless agon against the brute fact of matter.

the last observatory

2008-05-26T20:33:00.007+01:00

Milan Kundera – The Curtain

The Novel as foundational art form, as the moral engine that manufactured European culture and society: Milan Kundera's firmness on this point is definite. Modernity and the Novel are coevals – the latter stands as the most complete expression of the Enlightenment project that we can hope to have, secular, ironic, pluralist. Within its galleries homo faber and homo ludens finally merge, finding a medium at once gravely humorous and humorously grave.

If Harold Bloom credits Shakespeare with the invention of the human – those shifting states of interiority and sceptical self-awareness – Kundera asserts the claim of the Novel in this regard. “Western society,” he writes in his earlier essay collection Testaments Betrayed, “habitually presents itself as a society of the rights of man; but before a man could have rights, he had to constitute himself as an individual, to consider himself as such and to be considered as such; that could not happen without the long experience of the European arts and particularly of the art of the novel, which teaches the reader to be curious about others and to try to comprehend truths that differ from his own.”

The art of the novel is our most effective riposte to priestcraft... While the latter craves the formal fixity of ritual and dogma – including their political aspects - the novel flourishes in an atmosphere of doubt. While religion enshrines purity and spiritual vigour, the novel enjoys an ethical hygiene all its own. It recognizes the ill-wrought, lopsided brokenness of the average human being, even as religion chivvies us to attain a glassy perfection. It liberalizes discourse, as religion endeavours to purge and straiten it. And religion earns itself, too, the especially Kunderan anathema reserved for kitsch – what Nabokov once termed poshlost – as does totalitarianism as such, and the gaudy simplifications of socialist-realist art and police-state surveillance, etc. (Not to forget those for whom Rabelais coined the name 'agelasts' – joyless wraiths incapable of laughter...) The 'secular tyranny of kitsch', as Kundera has it, derives its sway over people from a cynical appeal to the desire for Komfortismus, easy consolation – making dupes of us all. On contrary, the novel of Kundera's great tradition shuns such cheapening, is constantly at sword's point against the hypocrisies of power. Kundera elaborates a theory in which history – as mobilized in nation states and war and the clash of ideologies – is set in opposition to the history of the novel, the radiant diachrony in which the art exists beyond the blind impersonal forces that buffet mankind. “Here I am making a declaration of involvement in the history of the novel,” he adds in Testaments Betrayed, “when all my novels breathe a hatred of history...”:

...of that hostile, inhuman force that – uninvited, unwanted – invades our lives from the outside and destroys them. Yet there is nothing inconsistent in this double attitude, because the history of humanity and the history of the novel are two very different things. The former is not man's to determine, it takes over like an alien force he cannot control, whereas the history of the novel (or of painting, of music) is born of man's freedom, of his wholly personal creations, of his own choices. The meaning of an art's history is opposed to the meaning of history itself. Because of its personal nature, the history of an art is a revenge by man against the impersonality of the history of humanity.

('L'histoire du roman en tant que vengeance sur l'histoire tout court.') Kundera's conception of the 'history of humanity' assonates with that given form in Tolstoy's War and Peace, for example. Throughout that great work (Tolstoy was loath to describe it as novel), History figures as the oceanic indestructible... In the epilogue Tolstoy subtly dramatizes the tragic opposition between the chronos of historical time and the kairos of fictive time – Pierre Bezukhov, having survived the battle of Borodino and capture by the French, now married to Natasha and installed as a respectable homme d'affaires, conceives a new enthusiasm for what will – beyond the limits of the book – become the Decembrist movement: we know, of course, that the leaders of the revolt were later executed as traitors; and have no reason to suppose that Pierre's fate will be any different. Tolstoy's epic rounds itself up – but history proceeds across the stormlit landscape, insensible of the lives swarming below, its dark thunderheads laden with lightning....

Kundera further deepens his thesis of the novelist's essential attitude to History-with-a-capital-H in his new suite of essays, The Curtain (La Rideau):

Because History, with its agitations, its wars, its revolutions and counter-revolutions, its national humiliations, does not interest the novelist for itself – as a subject to paint, to denounce, to interpret. The novelist is not a valet to historians; History may fascinate him, but because it is a kind of searchlight circling around human existence and throwing light onto it, onto its unexpected possibilities, which, in peaceable times, when History stands still, do not come to the fore but remain unseen and unknown.

The novel will defend its autonomy to the last. Kundera proposes that its essentialism – its sovereign right to scrutinize life in its very existential nakedness – must be the chief guarantee of its validity. The Curtain – like its predecessors, The Art of the Novel and Testaments Betrayed – is arranged as a fascicle of brief ruminative excurses. Crisply tied together by a number of unifying themes, they orbit the central notion of the Novel as the premier means of making sense of, lending definition to the human condition. Kundera valorizes this most amenable form with great intensity. The concept of Weltliteratur comes quickly to the fore, and Kundera makes it clear that only the novel has license to be a supranational mode, uninterested in political or social imperatives, triumphantly decontextualized – only by considering itself against the tapestry of the history of its internal development, can a work properly call itself a novel. Moreover, for Kundera, it's the generous panopticism of the form that warrants its supremacy: Ernesto Sábato “...says explicitly that in the modern world, abandoned by philosophy and splintered by hundreds of scientific specialties, the novel remains to us as the last observatory from which we can embrace human life as a whole.”

And the curtain itself? As per the fugue-like structure of his essays, Kundera recurs to the idea of the 'curtain of pre-interpretation' - “A magic curtain, woven of legends, hung before the world. Cervantes sent Don Quixote journeying and tore through the curtain. The world opened before the knight errant in all the comical nakedness of its prose.” Here we have presented the elementary beginnings of the novel, its impulse towards demystification. It abolishes the sickly lyricism of the Romantic forms, the solipsism of lyric poetry, and turns its gaze on the world's festival: “If I imagine the genesis of a novelist in the form of an exemplary tale, a 'myth', that genesis looks to me like a conversion story: Saul becoming Paul; the novelist being born from the ruins of his lyrical world.” Tearing the curtain means, among other things, breaching the valances of self-deception, the political lie, delusions about our place in the scheme of things, false consciousness; it means minting afresh our perceptions, besoming clean the lumber-room of our premade assumptions... The novelist is the arch-individualist, the inheritor of a tradition that will not overwhelm and absorb him; a refuser of the obsolescence of the efforts of his forebears (there is much still to learn from the example of Rabelais), one who makes it his business to 'seek out the never-said', to bring to bear on human experience articulate energies wrought to a fine pitch; an ironist and humourist in the old style... Cleanly translated by Linda Asher, The Curtain sorts well with the arguments of Kundera's earlier essays – reads rather as a coda and reprise of them - and confirms him as still one of the most passionately convinced of the novel's practitioners.

zizek and the eclipse of the world

2008-05-17T16:53:00.018+01:00

Slavoj Žižek – In Defense of Lost Causes

"The time of big theories was the time of big results." - G.K. Chesterton, Heretics

Reading Žižek, this Barnum of the radical Left: how can you prepare, except by a regimen of intellectual calisthenics, or perhaps even a cross-country yomp – on a rain-flayed moor, in the depths of November - with the breeze-block of Lacan's Écrits in your backpack? His flashing eyes, his waving hair...

A certain Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft of Weissnichtwo, sitting alone in the Grüne Gans in that venerably ancient university town:

..over his tumbler of Gukguk ... reading Journals; sometimes contemplatively looking at the clouds of his tobacco-pipe, without other visible employment: always, from his mild ways, an agreeable phenomenon there; more especially when he opened his lips for speech; on which occasions the whole Coffee-house would hush itself into silence, as if sure to hear something noteworthy. Nay, perhaps to hear a whole series and river of the most memorable utterances; such as, when once thawed, he would for hours indulge in, with fit audience: and the more memorable, as issuing from a head apparently not more interested in them, not more conscious of them, than is the sculptured stone head of some public fountain, which through its brass mouth-tube emits water to the worthy and the unworthy...

“A wild note pervades the whole utterance of the man,” Carlyle goes on, “like its keynote and regulator...”:

..now screwing itself aloft as into the Song of Spirits, or else the shrill mockery of Fiends; now sinking in cadences, not without melodious heartiness, though sometimes abrupt enough, into the common pitch, when we hear it only as a monotonous hum; of which hum the true character is extremely difficult to fix.

Thomas Carlyle, of course, was satirising the scholar-enthusiast - peculiarly European, peculiarly remote from the workaday world: Sartor Resartus is a batty exercise in almost Popean debunkery. The twentieth-century uneasily subverted the stereotype with figures from Sartre to Bernard Henri-Levy entering the public arena, styling themselves as political theorists, activists and commentators – but, on the whole, they betrayed themselves as ideological charismatics too readily seduced by fame.

Slavoj Žižek – tenured Professor of Things-in-General at the University of Ljubljana as Carlyle's Teufelsdrockh was at the University of Weissnichtwo – emerged in the Nineties as a tireless explicator of radical politics through the prism of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Forbiddingly prolific, he has written some thirty three books with such playfully riddling titles as Enjoy Your Symptom! and Everything You Wanted to Know About Lacan ... But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock. Doubtless he'll have written another by the time I reach the end of this paragraph...

Since the public intellectual is somewhat in bad odour these days, you might be inclined to regard Žižek as a sort of latterday Comus, Milton's seductive magus, tripping the light fantastic toe... Few thinkers so exult in the play of thought, so plausibly leaven their arguments with illustrations from Hollywood blockbusters – treating them with due seriousness, as Žižek does here in the case of 300, for example – even fewer still can set forth their arguments with such charm and humour. A book by Žižek is an expansive tour d'horizon, and Žižek himself is a Tiggerish guide. Yet, his customary brio and zing notwithstanding, Žižek's thought remains ineradicably pessimistic, acknowledging as it does the nameless obscenity at the core of the human subject. History, if we're to be less deceived, must be recognized as a charnel house; human nature as a corrupt enigma; and the two unassailably entwined. Among the lost causes in this book, a 'global emancipatory politics' might only be achieved if we come to terms with our species-being itself; and effect a renovatio on an unprecedented scale...

“Better a disaster of fidelity to the Event,” Žižek pronounces in the first pages of In Defense of Lost Causes, “than a non-being of indifference towards the Event. To paraphrase Beckett's memorable phrase ... after one fails, one can go on and fail better, while indifference drowns us deeper and deeper in the morass of imbecilic Being.” And what might this Event whereof he writes actually be? Žižek appropriates the concept from the Maoist philosopher Alain Badiou, who describes it in his study Ethics as one of the 'major dimensions of a truth-process', “...which brings to pass 'something other' than the situation, opinions, instituted knowledges; the Event is a hazardous [hasardeux], unpredictable supplement, which vanishes as soon as it appears..” The term clarifies a little with examples, with the event “..compel[ling] us to decide a new way of being..”:

Such events are well and truly attested: the French Revolution of 1792, the meeting of Heloise and Abelard, Galileo's creation of physics, Haydn's invention of the classical musical scale... But also: the Cultural Revolution in China (1965-67), a personal amorous passion, the creation of Topos theory by the mathematician Grothendieck, the invention of the twelve-tone scale by Schoenberg... [Ethics, p. 41]

(A radical twist on the Black Swan meme, one might say: something that springs unbidden from the merely contingent, undetermined by it, which changes everything...) Žižek, taking his cue from Foucault, adds the Iranian Revolution to this list - “..a momentary opening that unleashed unprecedented forces of social transformation.” But Foucault was wrong, Žižek asserts. “How so?” you may find yourself asking. In celebrating the irruptive Event of the 'collective will' that pointed a way out of the 'deadlock' of European modernity and Western liberal democracy, Foucault 'blundered':

One can claim that he did the right thing for the wrong reason: the manner in which he theorized and justified his engagement is misleading. The framework within which Foucault operates in his analysis of the Iranian situation is the opposition between the revolutionary Event, the sublime enthusiasm of the united people where all internal differences are momentarily suspended, and the pragmatic domain of the politics of interests, strategic power calculations, and so forth – the opposition which, as we have already seen, directly evokes Kant's distinction between the noumenal (or, more precisely, the sublime which evokes the noumenal dimension) and the phenomenal.

Clear? Splendid. Žižek appears to concede that Foucault's error was in applying too inflexible a theoretical framework on a political moment that was complicated in excess of the abstract binarism he sought to bring to bear on it... In this regard, Žižek extenuates Foucault's failure by arguing that it wasn't fully grounded in his philosophy. (Indeed Foucault seems not to have understood what was happening at all – hence his 'blunder'.) Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism, on the other hand, Žižek puts down firmly to its consonance with the logical progression of his thought. He may have 'erred ontically'; but, ceteris paribus, was on the right track 'ontologically'. And Žižek wonders if perhaps Heidegger needed his suspect engagement with Nazism in order fully to grasp the implications of his ideas, to work them through to their fullest realisation... The 'technological nihilism' critiqued by Heidegger – the modern stain – could only have been effected from within it. So argues Žižek.

He cites these examples of woefully misplaced political faith, not because he simply wants to indemnify these great figures, but because in both we find a comparable gap between the rightness of the theory and the blind alley up which its misapplication led them. The pure virtuality of their philosophies was corrupted by those 'politics of interests, strategic power calculations, and so forth' – and it was their profound distrust of liberal democracy, and their ill-starred bid to locate an alternative, that brought them to the logical impasse of Nazism and Islamic theocracy. Theory and praxis were tragically ruptured. Žižek, however, must burrow deep into the Heideggerian corpus to turn up his mitigations. (There's more than a hint of special pleading to it.) Yet it is Žižek's purpose to persuade us that the sole rejoinder to the advance of what he calls biopolitics must be a determined recovery of the old 'grand narratives' – post-Marxist, Lacanian – and the “'Messianic' standpoint of the struggle for universal emancipation.”

Not so much lost causes as forms of radicalism seemingly rendered obsolete by the onward march of liberal democracy and the unassailable preponderance of capitalism:

Modern society is defined by the lack of an ultimate transcendental guarantee, or, in libidinal terms, of total jouissance. There are three main ways to cope with this negativity: utopian, democratic, and post-democratic. The first (totalitarianism, fundamentalism) tries to reoccupy the ground of absolute jouissance by attaining a utopian and harmonious society which eliminates negativity. The second, the democratic, enacts a political equivalent of “traversing the fantasy”: it institutionalizes the lack itself by creating a space for political antagonisms. The third, consumerist post-democracy, tries to neutralize negativity by transforming politics into apolitical administration: individuals pursue their consumerist fantasies in the space regulated by expert social administration.

The bloodless hollowed-out inauthenticity of such a society – with its managerialism and atomised self-involvement – must be countered; its prevailing doxa challenged. Žižek makes the rather unexpected claim that revolutionary movements such as the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks essentially grasped the problem of societal change – in spite of the sanguinary sequelae – and they oughtn't be so readily dismissed for how they conducted themselves subsequently... “Instead of withdrawing from political engagement,” Žižek writes, “one should remember the motto that, behind every fascism, there is a failed revolution.” (Žižek urges the identification of a 'third term' between liberal democracy and Islamo-fascism.):

The ideological universe of movements such as Hezbollah is based on the blurring of distinctions between capitalist neo-imperialism and secular progressive emancipation: within the ideological space of Hezbollah, women's emancipation, gay rights, and so on, are nothing but the 'decadent' moral aspect of Western imperialism...

In Defense of Lost Causes is densely argued, wildly digressive (Žižek can't resist kicking an insight around, stress-testing it); and oftentimes jars with its outré formulations. Its waywardness has its charm – sometimes Žižek reads like a mild Chestertonian paradoxographer; sometimes his prose edges dangerously close to unreadability as such. A diffuse book, frustrating and exhilarating by turns; overillustrated, too much in hock to theoretical esoteria. But, taken all in all, the casual reader may well find the whiff of nostalgie de la boue about it – its demonstrative patience with revolutionary terror, its plea-making on behalf of unpleasant ideologies – a little too much to stomach.

scar spirit

2008-05-06T12:06:00.010+01:00

Les Murray – Fredy Neptune

Poetry – whatever else it might be – is a pledge of truth in concentrate. And modern poetry especially has thrown in its lot with precise statement, briefly set down: gnomic, imagistic, short. That a poem should prolong itself, spooling out its dazzlements to book-length, seems to us a kind of gaffe, as if it outstays its welcome by running to more than twenty lines. The long poem - unless explicitly parodic, like Clive James's Peregrine Prykke's Pilgrimage, say; or an adaptation like Derek Walcott's Omeros – has a hard time justifying itself to readers accustomed to pithy brevity. What can it offer, that prose fiction itself can't?

Literary historians hold that, at some point in the nineteenth century, the epic finally ceded to the novel. (György Lukács elaborates this view in Theory of the Novel.) Prose proved more serviceable to the temper of the times; it became almost a species of journalism. Poetry retreated into the Tennysonian mist of Idylls of the King; or, later, the tired pastoralism of the Georgians. The bulky straightforwardness of a realist novel was more open to the emergencies of modern urban society. In the poem, the literary voice was privatized. It turned to inwardness and an almost solipsistic indifference to the social world. The novel's promiscuity – its sheer busyness, its mimicry of the voices of the agora – forced poetry to withdraw into a place insulated by silence.

When Matthew Arnold complained to his friend Arthur Hugh Clough that the times were 'unpoetical', Clough sat himself down and wrote Amours de Voyage, one of the finest narrative poems of the Victorian era. Clough's trick was to ironize the high style, and give free rein to the prosiness of prose in his verse. It was a clever response – using classical hexameters to 'get down' the contemporary moment – in this case, the Revolutions of 1848. But Clough is largely forgotten today.

What can the verse novel achieve by its stubborn irredentism, its bid to reclaim lost ground from prose fiction? Didn't Pushkin pretty emphatically made any later efforts in the form de trop? Eugene Onegin settles the hash of any writer who wants to expand poetry's scope to take in character and plot... The application, by the novelist, of the sedimentary layers of detail, patiently hoarding up life's little tschotchkes – trifles making up the sum of novelistic life - is a process sharply at odds with the deep excavation of language the poet undertakes, the poet's job as verbal mosaicist. (Craig Raine, Martian and miniaturist, threw caution to the wind in his History: the Home Movie, cheekily ignoring the problem altogether and assembling his verse narrative of the Raine-Pasternak families in a chaptered sequence of triplets – successfully, I think, whatever its critics might say. Although the risk was considerable: that of the story grinding to a halt beneath the weight of poetic finickiness.)

The Australian poet Les Murray chews over all this in his note to the novel sequence The Boys Who Stole the Funeral: “I wanted to reclaim the narrative for poetry, to recapture ground which the senior literary form had begun losing to the novel as early as the end of the seventeenth century, and which it had decidedly lost to film and TV in the twentieth. But how to do it?..”

Murray discusses the technical problem of finding a formal template for his long poem. One able to manipulate language at the cellular level – as the lyric poet will do – yet able also to take the broad narrative sweep. As a poem tends to slow the reader down, each syllable potentially charged with meaning, each image soliciting our close attention; so story must barrel unstoppably along.. The stanza of Fredy Neptune – unruly, ill-crafted – discourages the reader from squinting too much at the prosody: Murray is being artfully artless.

Friedrich Boettcher (a.k.a. Fred Butcher, Fredy Neptune), merchant seaman and Australian of German extraction, on shore leave in the port of Trabzon, witnesses the death by fire of a group of Armenian women:

They were huddled, terrified, crying,
crossing themselves, in the middle of men all yelling.
Their big loose dresses were sopping. Kerosene, you could smell it.
The men were prancing, feeling them, poking at them to dance -
then pouf! they were alight, the women, dark wicks to great orange flames,
whopping and shrieking. If we'd had rifles there
we'd have massacred those bastards. We had only fists and boots.
One woman did cuddle a man: he went up screaming too.

Fredy is thus swept up, Zelig-like, in the vortex of history. The spectacle of the women has a physiological effect on him – he's left bodily numb (he attributes it, mistakenly, to psychosomatic leprosy), trapped in a Nothing, an asbestos shell. Fredy's gentleness and innate decency are stunned into this unresponsive blank. Transformed into a kind of Strine Golem, he must 'relearn human', as Murray put it in another context. How we're meant to understand this symbolically, isn't quite clear. Fredy remains inwardly the man he was – shell-shocked, he certainly isn't. “I just curled up in my hammock, like a burnt thing myself,/and turned my back...” Fredy must exert himself to conceal his condition from other folk; and moves through the world as a pariah, his body bearing the stain of what he saw, perhaps almost in reflexive disgust at our creaturely fragility. Indeed, in due course, he comes to realize that he's endowed with both enormous strength and physical invulnerability. Les Murray seems to be saying that – exposed to the nightmare of history – Fredy's mind and body have been traumatically dissevered, the latter brought up hard against the fact of its coarse materiality. Bodies break and burn and are otherwise wrecked. How can their complex of nerve, blood and bone really be us? To accept our physical limitations is necessarily to accept that we're bondslaves to matter. Murray, in his prose writings, makes the distinction between the 'wholespeak' of poetry and the 'narrowspeak' of .. everything else. Fredy succumbs to the narrowspeak of a body that is solely a machine. Wholespeak would encompass body and spirit in an unbroken circuit. (“Wholespeak is the soul's language, and it can only be spoken about effective in that integral language.”)

Fredy Neptune froths and foams with plot and incident – one damn thing after another! Fredy finds himself an accidental tourist among the ruins of the twentieth century. He meets a stellar array of historical figures, from T.E. Lawrence to Banjo Paterson. Marlene Dietrich attempts, unsuccessfully, to woo him with a recital of Rilke. From the Ottoman Empire to Hollywood, via Shanghai, the Holy Land, Depression America, Berlin and the Outback – picaresque on the grand scale. Les Murray invents in this book a poetics of yarning. Fredy's tale swoops, yaws, stumbles, stravaigs this way and that; as does the teller. There are a fair few 'with one bound he was free!' moments. It does have the decided air of a shaggy dog story, with all the rambling inconsequentiality and fidgety aimlessness of that genre. Fredy's voice, however, is an extraordinary, sustained creation. Of unlettered bushman stock, he conjures from his life an idiom quite unheard of in the Western literary canon. (Fredy, in the Murray lexicon, is a 'groover'.) The tricks of singularity in this voice – its ornery pungency, its random brilliancies, its pathos – are quite, quite unique:

One time, it dreamed my body was made of fire,
not hurting me, but no flesh human could come near.
It was tough flowing orange, glaring hard gold
out through its buttonholes and gaps; the clothes weren't affected.
Another time, the Army handed it over to Pilate
but he knocked it straight back
because it didn't eat grass or divide the hoof.
In the fire dream, I could reach inside it, touch its innards

even trace inside the null bulbs it wasn't worthwhile playing
lonely-games with, awake. Even they were alive from inside,
only from inside. I got the weeks, that last war-year,
on work, branding, cutting, feeding, watering, training.
I wasn't heavy, but not weightless either, in the day.
I could hear my boots, stamp dust, see things resist and bend,
balance, and talk, and pass for white.
At night I was dark and fell with the dark through the world.

The book is riddled with Wordsworth's 'visionary dreariness'. What you might call a vernacular Sublime. Fredy responds to the deployment of the Atom Bomb - “..and then the screen bulged white/with scrolls spreading wide from the bottom as it hoisted/like as if a billion beings were charged outwards, and it/towering straight above them under the boiling top cloud..” - as to a belated revelation of human oneness: “I brooded on the white because I was a scar spirit.” And it's the lesson of Murray's poem, if I can put it this way, that humanity must salvage what it can from its wounded state, that war, political violence and the like only confirm, in the end, the indefeasibility of the human.

“If there was any sort of meta-artistic concern in the book,” Murray wrote about The Boys Who Stole the Funeral, “it is probably for the despised and relegated country poor, the people I come from and belong to, and to whom I dedicate everything I may achieve. And I guess that, here, I don't finally mean only Australian country people, but all who have to put up with this world's Pilates and Pharisees.” The enemy, in any of its multitudinous manifestations, is what Murray calls interest - “..narrowspeak risen socially, full of judgment and scorn, terrified of death..”:

It subordinates, and will not be subordinated. It seeks ravishment, but will resist fiercely even as it affects to surrender, and so knows nothing of attentive, truly receptive silence. The bearer of interest is typically a consumer, not celebrating objects and honouring their life, but absorbing them and discarding them, often only partly digested. Where poetry seeks fusion, interest avoids it and substitutes excitement for poetic experience. The linkage with dream is often absent, and where it is present we feel the underlying dream is not in harmony with the surface utterance. When interest turns away from something, it believes that thing has utterly vanished and no longer counts.

“Interest is a human mode which has no soul of its own. And thus perhaps no soul at all.” Murray obsesses, throughout his work, with the deficits of Enlightenment, on what was lost by the valorization of Reason. (In his more unbuttoned moments, he claims that we are inmates of an inner police state.) Fredy Neptune elaborates further, a poem against Interest; it is a Missa Solemnis, booming out against hatred, the bloodless utilitarianism that'd reduce us to mere automata, against tyranny and the Star Chambers of the world. In the end, Fredy himself takes his bow, hungrily alive to the going-on of things: “But there's too much in life: you can't describe it.”

the kidnapped diamond

2008-04-28T22:33:00.011+01:00

Cynthia Ozick – Dictation: A Quartet

In her Paris Review interview Cynthia Ozick – amusingly chippy towards her interrogator – talks of her gradual reversion to the short form:

It's not my 'ambition' that dictates the size of the enterprise. I am not interested in ego, if that's what this question is about. 'The Pagan Rabbi', for instance, a short story written so long ago, touches on a large theme: the aesthetic versus the moral commitment. Profound subject matter can be encompassed in small space – for proof, look at any sonnet by Shakespeare! Multum in parvo. I am not avoiding length these days – not consciously. But perhaps there's some truth in the speculation that I may be living my life backwards! Doing the short forms now, having begun with a 'Great Work', a long ambitious 'modernist' novel of the old swollen kind.

(The interview was conducted in a rather unusual way: Ozick responded to spoken questions by clacking out her answers on an electric typewriter - "Ozick is a rapid typist and the exchange flowed quickly.")

The temptation for the contemporary novelist, certainly, must be quite overwhelming: tourbillions of facts swirl around him, the world has become an all-too-accessible wiki database; the urgencies of the hour make their crowing demands. Fiction bloats as it strives to be equal to it all. In gloomier moments, a reader might reflect that only the hyperlexia of a David Foster Wallace could be adequate to the job of mapping modern reality. We're beset, not so much by Mandelstam's 'noise of time', as by the noise of now. Clamorous, importunate, it breaks over our heads in a toho bohu of factoid and op-ed: the War on Terror! Islamic fundamentalism! Third World poverty! Climate change! (The world is too much with us – poor unsuspecting Wordsworth...) Big themes, inundating the private, the modest, the unassuming. Suddenly we're all of us outside the whale, clinging to its flukes for dear life...

Refreshing, then, to find in Cynthia Ozick a literary practice altogether formally scaled back; and an unwillingness to be seduced by the grating presentness of things. A brilliant essayist, Ozick time and again avers her total commitment to the art of fiction. Her astringency and passion adhere to her every word. (A lesson for the drearily self-regarding Creative Writing wannabes who stuff our universities.) Her collection The Din in the Head is coloured by a sadness and defiance both. A valediction for a lost culture. Yet a full-throated rallying cry, too:

...the notion of desire, ambition's womb; desire applied to the kind of willed (or dreamed) achievement that outlasts personality; that is the opposite of taste, which is all personality. Or call it by the plain and ultimately discordant name that Henry James, remembering the expulsion from bright-leafed Eden, gave to his own desire: doubt. “We do what we can – we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest,” he said, “is the madness of art.” What reader, coming upon these reverberating words, whether for the first or the tenth or the hundredth time, will not take them to heart?

James stands for Ozick as a pre-eminence. Her career has been shadowed – fruitfully shadowed – by his work and example. His absolutism – choosing perfection of the work over the life – and his monkish indifference to the world, the flesh and the devil, epitomise the hieratic aspect of literary art: James as Simeon Stylites, what Ozick terms 'the superannuated consciousness of anointment'. She kindled to “..the worldliness of his characters, the visual brilliance of his long scenes, the seductiveness of his betrayals, the veiled innocence of his young women, the subtlety of his moral conundrums, and not least his debt to human possibility, and also to human taint. His muse was tragic; and so was mine.” James 'seizes your life'... Or imperils your career. The current fashion for all things Jamesian is well-noted by David Lodge in The Year of Henry James, his painfully candid account of a publishing pile-up, the bookbiz as a Brian Rix farce; where he reflects that interest in the biographical novel “..could be taken as a symptom of a declining faith or loss of confidence in the power of purely fictional narrative, in a culture where we are bombarded from every direction with factual narrative in the form of 'news'...” (24-hour rolling news has colonised our sensibilities: we're quidnuncs now with a global reach.) And readers do tire of hearing about the latest enfant terrible, the latest Next Big Thing touted by the literary press. Perhaps the figure of Henry James, 'master of nuance and scruple' as Auden called him, portends a kind of cultural reculer pour mieux sauter...

“Literary grandeur is out of style,” Ozick laments – perhaps a trifle shortsightedly... (I guess that she means grandeur of theme and psychological presentment, rather than mere wordage.) But Ozick is on a run: Heir to the Glimmering World has been (comparatively speaking) a bestseller; and she has only just received both the PEN/Malamud Prize and the PEN/Nabokov Prize. Nor does her latest, Dictation: A Quartet, seem at all like a piece of idle book-making, a sop to her publisher, honouring a contract. The same ardour, the same shrewd felicity as we find in all her work, crackles through these stories – a novella and three tales. Multum in parvo, indeed.

The centrepiece 'Dictation' seems, at first blush, a jeu d'esprit: mischievously conceived, it makes mild mock of the pretensions to High Art of Henry James and Joseph Conrad. This 'blest nouvelle' draws into the limelight two women, the secretaries of the novelists; both so thoroughly forgotten that they go unrecorded even in Leon Edel's biography of James... With splendid economy Ozick draughts the relationship between the literary lions – their rivalry concealed by a frigid politesse – but it's they who are sidelined on this occasion. Theodora Bosanquet - “She was far from mad; she was consummately clever..” - and Lilian Hallowes, indispensable helpmates to our two novelists – not least because of their mastery of 'the Machine', an early model Remington typewriter. Theodora has a plan – she wants to take advantage of their privileged intimacy with the masters to put her stamp on literary history... Her “notion of everlastingness was more cunning than any such homage given to the longevity of a proper noun..”; it must be done by stealth, undetectably. Scholars would one day pore over the novels and tales of James and Conrad – and be none the wiser.

Lilian – a timid, bleached spinster who looks after her ailing mother; 'fearful dry celibate Lilian' – is at once smitten and repelled by Theodora, whose boldness and erotic zest come as an unwanted provocation. Yet Theodora's argument wins the day. She plays on Lilian's chaste infatuation with her employer and her jealousy of Conrad's wife, the woman's presumption: “'Because she sleeps in his bed. In his bed, in the oblivion of night! - when it is you who in the light of day drink in the minutest vibrations of his spirit. What will Mrs Conrad ever know of the kidnapped diamond. As long as you live, you will own this secret...'” Theodora is much given to musings on the matter of immortality. Her plot has almost the air of an imperceptible 'happening' – a subtly subversive démarche on literary greatness:

Plot? Should art be dismissed as conniving? The will to change nature's given is the font of all creation. Even God, faced with the tohu vavohu, welter and waste, formlessness and void, thought it suitable to introduce light and dark, day and night: the seamlessness of disparity. Or regard the mosaic maker, painstakingly choosing one tessera to set beside another, in a glorious pattern of heretofore unimagined juxtapositions – yet because the stones as they were found have been disarranged, shall he be despised as a violator?

Ozick has produced, in 'Dictation', a work so magisterial that it almost defies criticism – one, dare I say it, almost perfect... A meditation on literary fame and its precise opposite, the darkness visible of obscurity – the two women “..leaving behind an immutable mark – an everlasting sign that they lived, they felt, they acted!” - it has all the mysterious slantedness of James's short stories themselves. Ozick has earned the right to tease James and Conrad as she does: the great formalists, who lacerated themselves over the placement of every subclause and syllable, failing to notice the silent emendation made by their amanuenses..! Faultlessly judged, executed to a nicety. Ozick's well-tempered prose hovers close to James's own style without being so maladroit as to lapse into pastiche. It buzzes with observational acuity, it charms with its sly ironies; distinguishing itself by its absence of cruelty at anyone's expense.

The novella is supplemented and enhanced by three short stories, each a model of the art. 'Actors' handsomely repays its debt to Isaac Bashevis Singer, for example. And from 'At Fumicaro' - a tumid tale of mediterranean Catholicism, very Jamesian in its suggestion of Old European spiritual stagnancy - such nodes of fine writing as this:

...Frank Castle circled all around the medieval man of wood. Red paint, dry for centuries, spilled from the nail holes. Even the back of the figure had its precision: the draw of the muscles elongated in fatigue. The carver had not stinted anywhere. Yet the face was without a grain of devout inspiration. It was as if the carver had cared only for the carving itself, and not for its symbol. The man on the crossbar was having his live body imitated, and that was all. He was a copy of the carver's neighbour perhaps, or else a cousin. When the carving was finished, the neighbour or cousin stepped down, and together he and the carver hammered in the nails.

The nails. Were they for pity? They made him feel cruel. He reflected in their cruelty - piety with a human corpse at its center, what could that mean? The carver and his model, beating and beating the nails.

Ozick, after a half-century of travails and humiliations (about which she has preserved a battle-scarred good humour), deserves the acclaim she currently enjoys.

monstres sacrés

2008-04-24T16:59:00.005+01:00

Terry Eagleton – Holy Terror

Pointless, perhaps, any attempt to grasp the abysmal depths of hatred that prompts a young man – or even more incomprehensibly – woman to transform themselves into a bomb. What we blithely term the 'sympathetic imagination' balks at the vicious enormity of it. The left-liberal progressive view maintains that despair is at its root – dispossession and brutalisation at the hands of imperial overlords; the body as their only weapon. Other voices, less forgiving, hold that such people are the instruments of a quasi-fascistic ideology, dehumanised not by the repressive measures of an Israel but by the brainwashing of a mass cult. In any case, we are, when all is said and done, quite thoroughly at a loss...

Our writers – those who interpret the times, who might at least edge towards an answer - have been cagey on the subject, on the whole. John Updike, in his flawed novel Terrorist, lavishly outfits the inner life of a would-be suicide bomber, but it's a medley of false quantities. Too discursive, too knowing, too pat:

A certain simplicity does lay hold of Ahmad in the troughs between surges of terror and then of exaltation, collapsing back into an impatience to be done with it. To have it behind him, whatever 'him' will then be. He exists as a close neighbor to the unimaginable. The world in its sunstruck details, the minute scintillations of its interlocked workings, yawns all about him, a glistening bowl of busy emptiness, while within him a sodden black certainty weighs. He cannot forget the transformation awaiting him, behind, as it were, the snapped camera's shutter, even as his senses still receive their familiar bombardment of sights and sounds, scents and tastes. The luster of Paradise leaks backward into his daily life. Things will feel big there, on a cosmic scale; in his childhood, only a few years into this life, falling asleep, he would experience a sensation of hugeness, every cell a world, and this demonstrated to his childish mind religion's truth.

Too Updikean, in a word. (His protagonist evidently thinks in the same rhythms, enjoys the same sharp perceptions as his author: Ahmad is a kind of avatar of Updike's, imperfectly severed from his creator.) It might be that the novelist simply can't countenance an approach to what must lie at the heart of the matter – the willing abandonment to nothingness, the void's kernel in the bomber's very soul. Or a certain anxiety might constrain him, about giving offense or getting it wrong. Martin Amis essays a picture of the fastidious boredom and banal arrogance of the terrorist in his short story, 'The Last Days of Muhammed Atta'. Yet we're no closer to the truth, still.

Flotillas of books on the subject have been published since 9/11, laden with theses and prescriptions. The blogosphere has heaved with articles of political faith and recantations. Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit, in their study Occidentalism, note that the suicide bomber rejects 'the utilitarian calculus of human behaviour' – they argue that to cite, rather glibly, the perpetuation of aggressive colonialism is an irrelevance at best, at worst a grave error:

To blame the barbarism of non-Western dictators or the suicidal savagery of religious revolutions on American imperialism, global capitalism, or Israeli expansionism is not only to miss the point; it is precisely an Orientalist form of condescension, as though only Westerners are adult enough to be morally responsible for what they do.

“This book,” Terry Eagleton advises us in the preface to Holy Terror, “is not intended as an addition to the mounting pile of political studies of terrorism.” It has more a 'metaphysical or theological bent': the quality a great deal of Eagleton's recent work since Sweet Violence, his rehabilitation of Tragedy, has in plenty. Eagleton wants, indeed, to place before us the innermost psychic wounds that are inflamed under pressure from external political circumstance, quite reliably through history. He elaborates a mythoscopic account of terror and terrorism, one heavily inflected by psychoanalysis; and, to some extent, the terrorist becomes the analysand. “Politically speaking,” he writes in Sweet Violence, “a perverse joy in total wrecking is either the death cult of fascism, or the extreme brand of anarchism which marks Conrad's mad professor in The Secret Agent, who really wants to blow up time and matter themselves and start history again from scratch.” (The Professor has been invoked rather a lot in recent discussions of terrorism: he's like the standby chatshow guest perennially invited on to offer predictable pieties – he crops up in Holy Terror, too.) Much of the intellectual prima materia of Holy Terror Eagleton has worked through in earlier books. His willingness to accommodate the insights of Thomist theology (yoking them to a socialist politics); as well as his liberal borrowing from Lacan, Derrida, and cultural anthropology; render his recent thought a strange bristling synthesis – self-consistent, but perhaps too hobbyhorsical to be persuasive.

Case-hardened dialectician as he is, Eagleton finds an obscure affinity between terror and the sacred. The concept of the latter “..is ambiguous because the word sacer can mean either blessed or cursed, holy or reviled; and there are kinds of terror in ancient civilization which are both creative and destructive, life-giving and death-dealing.” Such doubling forms the central strut of Eagleton's argument. (The rapid flickering between the two is an attractive behaviour to him: its arresting either-or makes it an appealing corrective to the intellectual unwieldiness of fixed categories.) The 'monstrous ambivalence' of what has, variously, been called God, Freedom, the unconscious, the Sublime and the Real, is the galvanic principle at the heart of Holy Terror. Eagleton's argument flows from it. In some sense allomorphs of each other, God, Freedom, etc., are manifestations of the terrifying mise-en-abîme lurking within subjectivity itself...

Eagleton suggests that the mythical antecedent of the terrorist was the god Dionysus: the “patron saint of life-in-death, a connoisseur of the kind of energy we reap through reckless self-abandonment ... In his mysterious rites, self-affirmation and self-dissolution are interwoven.”

Dionysus's orgiastic hootenanny emblematises, for Eagleton, the ecstatic dismemberment that accompanies the final spasm of the relinquished self. It is a lurid rehearsal for death itself. As limbs entangle and bodily fluids are exchanged, the participants give themselves over to absolute negation. Whatever disclaimers he might make, Eagleton glories in this divine debauchee and the exploits of his followers (although he quotes extensively from Euripides's Bacchae, you do rather sense that the character of the god is one that he himself feels ought to have been his own invention – the locus of a key strand of Eagleton's current thinking, embodied and articulate). Dionysus wields awesome power, not simply as a figure of devouring chaos and delectable abandon, but because in order for the psyche to thrive and flourish and the polity finally to be safeguarded, he must be given his due, acknowledged and revered. The Judeo-Christian God performs, later, much the same function. The rapturous self-undoing promised by exposure to it precedes a necessary remaking. We must discard ourselves in order to discover ourselves again.

The sublime is any power which is perilous, shattering, ravishing, traumatic, excessive, exhilarating, dwarfing, astonishing, uncontainable, overwhelming, boundless, obscure, terrifying, enthralling, and uplifting. As such, like so many modern aesthetic concepts, it is among other things a secularized version of God.

And it bears within itself the 'shadowy presence of the death drive'. This is Eagleton's 'holy terror' – love and death in cold fusion. Both the terrorist and the saintly martyr commit themselves to the self's annihilation as an earnest of their soul-deep conviction that the material universe obstructs engagement with the purity of non-being. But, in the case of the former, it's from a sense of appalled disgust at its contamination that he wills himself and the rest out of existence.

As a bright counter to this debased figure, Eagleton instances the scapegoat or pharmakos. “Like all sacred things,” he asserts, “the scapegoat is both holy and cursed, since the more polluted it becomes by absorbing the city's impurities, the more redemption it brings to it. The redemptive victim is the one who takes a general hurt into its own body, and in doing so transforms it into something rich and rare.” It is precisely in the form of the scapegoat, feared and reviled in equal measure, that the collective are compelled to find reflected their own disfigurement. A stringent psychic purgative, the pharmakos is necessary to the commonweal of the State. (Obviously something of this ancient praxis is embedded in Christian myth.) When Dionysus confronts Pentheus in the Bacchae, it's with this gambit of traumatic self-recognition: the King refuses to acknowledge that he too is a compound of blood and anima, and disaster ensues.

If you want a book that might go some way to illuminating the peculiarly modern phenomenon of terrorism – and its most spectacularly baffling proponent, the suicide bomber – then, alas, you won't find it in Holy Terror. Challenging though many of Eagleton's insights might be, they are housed in a work that reeks too much of the lamp. Eagleton exultantly pursues the thread of an argument spun out of his reading, with too little interest in what documentary evidence we do have of what makes a terrorist tick. He shies from engaging with due scepticism from the utterances of Islamic teachers; indeed, Islam and Islamism themselves are scarcely mentioned. His thesis is a strange confection: an omnium gatherum of liberation theology, Lacanian psychoanalysis and structural anthropology; too facile, too breezily unconcerned with the political and cultural realities underlying modern terror. The prose does have an alluring slickness – a crackerjack energy and pliancy; but all too often recedes from evidence-based discussion into arabesques of fleet-footed rhetoric. Eagleton has said that he regards Holy Terror as an incitement to 'new styles of thought'. Adducing in the course of your argument some kind of moral equivalence between the ashen fruits of US foreign policy and Islamic jihad is hardly new, however. And it's sometimes difficult to see quite how far Eagleton would insist that his ideas, with their demons and scapegoats, intersects at any point with the current geopolitical situation. Does the doughty shahid really reflect on Kantian sublimity at any moment before he detonates his bomb-girdle? Does he feel it? Or is there something more banal, more abject at the root of his motives? Eagleton remains silent on the matter.

the isomers of boredom

2008-04-21T16:11:00.011+01:00

Sean O'Brien – The Drowned Book

O'Brien's poetry has always been gruffly political. Larkinesque in its images of a Britain weeded over by urban neglect, in a state of imperial decline, yet with an overt satirical bite that Larkin muted into sour disaffection. From the first O'Brien bore witness to a nation grimly beset by moral sclerosis, and to lives invisibly marginalised. The bleakness was relieved by a peppery humour. The poetry itself trimly well-crafted, its music an uncluttered flow. Less thrawn, less unkempt than Peter Reading's verse, say, it appealed to a readership that still sought formal smoothness, a line that sashays untroubled along.

O'Brien's signature is detectable in every poem: dreck and sonority - “Gore and shite, crap-nebulae/And greasy bubbles...”; deft enjambments, syntactic precision. A vers de société of used condoms like bloated tapeworms and crushed beer cans. In 'The Ideology' (from Down River) we have this typical cameo:

A gang of girls is out in this.
Beneath a streetlamp by the pub
They stand with folded arms, comparing clothes,
Shouting as if expecting an echo.

The poem ages them. They go indoors.
They marry or not and bear children
And die, and are found in mid-shriek
In a different poem, still there in the cold

Wearing hardly a stitch, being happy
The way those who live with industrial parks and asbestos
Are happy, because if they weren't they would die,
On the need-to-know basis of beauty and truth.

O'Brien has in mind here Larkin's lines in 'Afternoons' - “Their beauty has thickened./Something is pushing them/To the side of their own lives.” - but sets a kind of grizzled compassion against the neutral, faintly patronising distaste of Larkin. O'Brien's anger at social injustice tolls from this poetry; yet O'Brien remains responsive to the ironies of his stance. A poem like 'Nineties' (also from Down River) is almost anthemic in its fury:

Your hundred streets, your twenty names, all gone.
A stink of burning sofas in the rain,
Of pissed-on mattresses, and poverty's
Spilt milk, its tiny airless rooms designed
To illustrate the nature of subjection
To its subjects. They tell me politics
And history are done...

The Drowned Book, however, signals (ahem) a sea-change. O'Brien writes now in altered light: an undulant submarine shimmer. Images of water predominate. Water both in its pristine form, and as managed and trained by men (“Sites of municipal vaticination,/Vents for the stench of the Underworld..” - 'Drains'). The first sheaf of poems immerse themselves in the destructive element, a loose sequence exploring its symbolic value. O'Brien's habitual tart brusquerie gives way to waterlogged reverie, as it sinks full-fathom five. 'Eating the Salmon of Knowledge' expertly evokes a childhood into which the rumour of corruption seeps - “Crime, sex, the smell that wasn't fish”; it also captures the queasy sensuousness of our early untutored perceptions:

- But by the time the city had its way
The water, if you glimpsed it, looked as thick
As jelly from a tin of Sunday ham.
A brick would shake it slowly
While the shawl of sputum-algae
Gathered up its threads again
And went on rotting from within.

- But it was water so we fished.

“River-doors are not sea-doors... They are the isomers of boredom.” - O'Brien's meditation on rivers alludes quite openly to T.S. Eliot's 'The Dry Salvages', with its sludgy adagio - “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river/Is a strong brown god – sullen, untamed, and intractable...” And more pointedly still: “It tosses up our losses, the torn seine,/The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar/And the gear of foreign dead men..” O'Brien offers a further modulation of the trope:

Barges, drowned dogs, drowned tramps, all are
Subdued to its element, worked
Into the khaki, with ropes and old staithes,

Estuarine polyps and leathery excrescences
No one has thought of a name for.
So much for childhood...

These damp clarted places afford one shelter from the peevish miseries of adulthood: “Fleeing through a river-door the adult world's critique...” O'Brien complicates the water-symbol. It's not the sea that he hymns, but the sinuous intrusion of water through the material solidity of the social world. It works also as a figure for imaginative autonomy, as in 'The Mere' – something subject to human encroachment, modest, ugly and seemingly not -to-any-purpose: “Its poplars and willows and sludge. Its gnat-clouds.... Its having been/Here all along. It is nowhere, serves nothing, lives/On your behalf when you are absent...” So apparently inutile, it nevertheless ought to be preserved as something in defiance of gratuitous 'redevelopment' - “..the aesthetics of crims from the deadlands/Whose task is to make good a landscape...” - sanctified by its obdurate refusal to be anything other than itself, and so it makes its silent, stale summoning:

...Anonymous, here with us now
In the order of things – this is what
You will find you have chosen,
If choice is the word, to defend.

As the volume progresses, O'Brien returns to his old political stomping grounds ('Song: Habeas Corpus', 'Proposal for a Monument to the Third International'). Yet The Drowned Book is distinguished also by a number of striking elegies on dead poets: Michael Donaghy, Ken Smith, Barry McSweeney, Thom Gunn. 'A Coffin-Boat' is a dark Acherontic fantasy, dourly animated by O'Brien's recent translation of Dante's Inferno: “Get used to the visible stink. It will cling/In a tissue of soot to your hair. Get used/To the silence that stares and says nothing.” The poem savours of a bitter grief. O'Brien's art has debouched into new territory. It can be by turns surreal and waspish. It glances, in the end, away from the moist fenlands of the earlier pieces, to an apocalyptic vision of a world annihilated by snow – O'Brien's account of anthropogenic climate change:

To put an end to all analogy, pure cold
That proves what it need never say,
It calls us home again, beneath a drift
In which the figure and the ground collapse -
No more redundancy, no more perhaps.

Meaning and the possibility of meaning erased, no more Arcadias.

flowers in the particled light

2008-04-16T13:09:00.009+01:00

Stephen Romer – Yellow Studio

Another poet, for reasons private and obscure, throwing over sprawl. Stephen Romer's fourth collection in twenty years shares the luminous compactness of its predecessors. The stanzas of his poems are lit as by a springtime sun. Deep philosophy lurks between the lines, and withering irony; but its presence comes in glints ingrained in the particular. A poetry of leaf-light and limpidity. A journal intime and a recurring meditation on love and loss. It courts the Absolute, yet gently, quietly. It cherishes its moment.

“You are my Prosperpine of summer,” Romer says in 'Mythologies', from Plato's Ladder; “knee-deep in the scabious and mallow//red-eyed from looking in the light,/as if there were grief or fever/in your exacting tribute/to momentary outcrops of yellow...” Art as risk, and the tautology latent in 'exacting tribute' – a 'tribute' is precisely an exaction – intimates a fraught balance between art and the world, a tight reciprocity that requires great resources to maintain.

Art cleansing the smudged pane of reality, revealing, stroke by stroke, the outlines of a vaster reality beyond. Each of Romer's poems is distinguished by the fineness of its making: lyric utterance incised on the page, cut by a laser.

A poem from the previous collection, Tribute, nicely epitomises the typical psychic attitude Romer adopts in his love poetry –

Miracle, we say, and destiny,
and joy and hope and repose,

when the one, necessary person
lends us fully to ourselves;

and when they've gone, the lengthening light
shows a vista of loss,

proving not that we were wrong -
only the recognition has ruined us.

A fair degree of obscurity, in this. The lines seem so fragile, yet surcharged with such a weight of significance – perhaps they ought to be read quickly, and the book set aside; left to do their work in our heads. Whatever the case, the verbal pointillism of much of his verse – abetted by images of light, as above, as if in this medium Romer finds the least coarsened of symbols – gives to it a corona of meaning. Romer's trademark duplets dimly shadow forth the relationship between the lovers: in the gaps between lines, in the vacancies and absences, the spiritual truth lives. “Emptiness glistens through contingency:/sunyatta is the word – it is strange comfort –/how the cherishing self might leak away/into the flinty soil...”

Yellow Studio develops Romer's interest in the Platonic idea of a hierarchy of realities, the topmost of which we're aware of yet barely capable of reaching: “..the idea of ascent,” as he puts it in an earlier poem, 'Plato's Ladder: A Dialogue', “a principle/of detachment from the local pain of love...” Yet time has darkened his perspectives a little, and Romer here is more prone to ironic self-mockery, and the poems gain a shade of wryness, of weathering. The first set of pieces are about the end of a love affair - “So this is how it ends:/at a corner table/in a stale cafe/on the boulevard of abulia..” - and the erotic ecstasies of the earlier work have given way to a bruised bewilderment - “the dreary ache/of the unrequited..” This poem is a palinode to 'Santa Maria della Vittoria', from Tribute:

Once it was the angel above Teresa
stabbing her into ecstasy

now it is the look of loving regret
as of someone who has tried hard

but must at last bring down the sword
as Caravaggio's David

brought down the sword
wistfully lopping the head

of his shaggy incorrigible
slavering devotee.

('Cut-off Point')

The memorial suite 'An Enthusiast' was written on the death of Romer's father - '..a soul uncynical/in the extreme..” - and is composed in part from extracts from his diaries – a touching selection of 'found poems'. In 'Today I must teach Voltaire' Romer records, on September 12th 2001, the mood of baffled shock and anguish, among the young, his students, after the Twin Towers attack:

Today I must teach Voltaire
to sorrowing sophomores,
I must teach the Enlightenment
in a toxic darkness

where yesterday the Infâme
flew sweet and level by Ellis Island
into Paradise...

(Voltaire's motto, of course, was 'ecrasez l'infâme'.) Elsewhere in Yellow Studio, Romer confesses his fascination with the fragility of literary reputation, its arbitrariness, and the ease with which it can be obliterated. Albert Mérat, he notes, was a member of the Vilains Bonshommes, a literary circle of angry young men to which Verlaine and Rimbaud belonged. Fantain-Latour painted a group portrait of these poetical franc-tireurs, 'Un Coin de Table'; but Mérat feared that his reputation would be tarnished by association, requesting that he be 'airbrushed' out, as it were:

Wit, wag, Zutiste à ses heures,
ladies man, gossip, poet, poseur.
Yet of Albert Mérat
who took fright
nothing is left
but a pot of flowers.

Nothing is left, not even a Wikipedia entry... Stephen Romer is a shamefully underrated poet. Contemporary of the likes of Michael Hofmann and James Lasdun, his work is no less involving, no less vibrant. He has consistently pursued and developed his themes, doubling back after a period of years, reworking them, giving them an ironic spin. No other love poetry that I can think of – perhaps you have to go to the Metaphysicals for it – offers so intense a fusion of the erotic and the spiritual. There's a very French precision in his line, a definiteness that still admits of ambiguity and multivalence. Poetry at its nakedly brilliant finest.

logos spermatikoi

2008-04-14T10:40:00.011+01:00

Harry Mulisch – The Discovery of Heaven

Extraordinary, vital, a marvel: Harry Mulisch's The Discovery of Heaven flaunts its Goethean scope wonderfully. How to describe it? A post-Christian epic? A European political frieze? Theodicy or love story? A kind of postmodern Bildungsroman? Metaphysical treatise? All of them apply, but none quite fit.

It places itself in the tradition of the great intellectual toys of the Enlightenment – 'toys' in Gabriel Josipovici's sense – Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, for example, Flaubert's Bouvard et Pecuchet, or, latterly, the work of Thomas Mann. Literature of this sort abolishes the strict barriers between lived experience and abstract intellection - life and the mind's life are indissociable.

Characters in such fiction tend to be big, cerebrotonic talkers; magpies of the mind; visionary Bedlamites energetically in quest of the Truth. Invariably it takes them on the most roundabout of routes to find it. They encounter many reversals. They are often pummeled on the anvil of history. Yet the works in which these characters figure comprehend the widest ambit of human endeavour: science, art, politics, theology: 'getting it all in'. Unembarrassed by their ambition, books of this type hum with intellectual ardour. “..[W]hat do such loose baggy monsters,” a mystified Henry James asks in the Preface to The Tragic Muse, “with their queer elements of the accidental and the arbitrary, artistically mean?” (James was a master whittler of form, a superliterary scrimshanker, yet had the magnanimity to recognise the value of work he couldn't quite understand.)

Well, what does The Discovery of Heaven 'artistically mean'?

In the first instance the novel is concerned with the friendship and varying fortunes of two men, Max Delius and Onno Quist. Max, an astronomer, whose mother perished at Auschwitz and whose father was a Nazi collaborator; Onno, the scion of a family of Dutch political grandees. (In the first instance, also, The Discovery of Heaven appears to behave like a realist novel.) Both men feel bound together by a shared destiny. Into their providential twinning comes a third element: Ada Brons, a professional cellist, first Max's lover, then Onno's. She will bear a child, to be named Quinten; will die in a car accident, leaving the infant motherless; and Max and her mother Sophia will enter an odd liaison, part formal, part erotic, raising Quinten in the absence of Onno his father, too absorbed in his political career to take the responsibility. Max establishes a radio observatory on the site of a former Nazi transit camp in Westerbork. Onno, a gifted philologist before politics waylaid him, obsesses over the conundrum of the Phaistos Disc. People argue, fall in love, die.

Thus far, from a certain angle, The Discovery of Heaven conforms to the narrative, stylistic expectations of a typical mainstream novel. Its surfaces, finely rendered and exquisitely chased, are those of literary realism. All the makings of a slightly off-centre comedy of manners. It gives itself over to the occasional thoughtful digression:

In a world full of war, famine, oppression, deceit, monotony, what – apart from the eternal innocence of animals – offers an image of hope? A mother with a newborn child in her arms? The child may end up as a murderer, or a murder victim, so that the hopeful image is a prefiguration of a pietà: a mother with a newly dead child on her lap. No, the image of hope is someone passing with a musical instrument in a case. It is not contributing to oppression, or to liberation either, but to something that continues below the surface: a boy on his bike, with a guitar in a faded mock-leather cover on his back; a girl with a dented violin case waiting for the tram...

Yet Mulisch has other designs. The novel's prologue presents a conversation between a pair of angelic beings. They discourse on the DNA helix, the 'Hermetic caduceus' which deep codes us; and the manner of the insertion of a 'Spark' – soul – into each of them. Mankind has “uncovered our profoundest concept – namely, that life is ultimately reading. They themselves are the Book of Books ... We made them much too clever, using the same code..” The angels confess that they have intervened in human history. Their purpose? To actuate one especial Spark, the Spark of Sparks - the logos spermatikoi - ensuring that it finds the right host. They engineered the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand in April 1914 – blindly entailing the subsequent massacres – merely in order to bring together, in the course of events, the grandparents of Max Delius... The boy Quinten, conceived on a political junket to Cuba in 1967, is to receive the Spark, his destiny to be a divine envoy, the vessel of the 'Boss's' last-ditch attempt to reestablish dominion on earth, before abandoning it altogether.

The realist 'casing' of the novel suddenly becomes unstable, volatile. Coincidences must now be read not as authorial slips or plot flaws but as the invisible nudges of supernal powers. “It seems so easy to influence the normal course of events,” one of the angels says, “but reality is just like water; it's liquid and mobile, but it can only be compressed a little by using a great deal of force. When someone falls onto it from a great height, it's as hard as the rock from which Moses struck water.”

Some of the novel's most touching, delicately realised sequences are those of Quinten's childhood in the castle of Groot Rechteren, its converted apartments occupied by assorted scholars. One of whom, Mr Themaat, teaches the boy about the history of architecture – deliberately chosen by Quinten, because of a dream in which he finds himself in what he calls 'the Citadel', a vast Piranesian construct:

...the universe had been transformed into a single architectural complex, without beginning or end. Nowhere is there a living being to be seen. Completely alone, but without a feeling of loneliness, he wanders around through a limitless series of rooms, colonnades, staircases, galleries, alcoves, pillars, footbridges, doorways, vaults, which extend in all directions ... all that material built, joined together, piled on top of itself, spreads out and envelops and encloses him like a bath filled with warm honey...

(Quinten tries to find some approximation of his oneiric cityscape, some clue to its source: the closest he comes is in the 'megalomaniacal fantasies of Boullee', reifying death..) Mulisch splendidly conjures the boy's sense of being in the midst of lowering secrets, his obscure significance, his goodness unmarred by cynicism and hurt. 'Beautiful', with eerily brilliant sapphire-blue eyes, Quinten is drawn as a gentle changeling, groping slowly towards unlocking his destiny.

The Discovery of Heaven teems with ideas, yet evokes the mysterium of the human situation with tenderness and delight. Astrophysics and palaeography, Dutch politics and music – Mulisch intently lards his novel with so dizzying an array of topics, never losing sight, however, of psychological truths: the novel's personnel aren't lecturers or blusterers, talk though they might on an encyclopaedic range; they embody, to an exciting degree, James Wood's 'lifeness'. This, in spite of the stellar grandeur of its themes. Mulisch dramatises our fretful bid as a species to locate ourselves in the cosmic void. (Max convinces himself that a pulsar MQ 3412 conceals the origin of the universe, a celestial doorway to Heaven.) It edges at times into territory covered by Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, with a quest to recover the tablets of the Decalogue: Candide crossed with The Da Vinci Code.

“The removal of gods from the world,” writes Milan Kundera in Testaments Betrayed, “is one of the phenomena that characterize the Modern Era.” The advent of the novel as a distinct literary genre is, for Kundera, another such phenomenon – the novel as a vehicle for free sceptical inquiry, unconstrained by precept and moral injunction; an art form that pits itself against religious dogma, against the inflexibilities of church and sect - against, in a phrase, the Literal Mind. Taking flight on its emancipatory energies, the novel arrived at the moment of the breach with God's covenant. It declared itself the bright book of Life.

True, Kundera is himself something of an evangelist on this score. His impassioned advocacy of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses seems to me honourable and right. If the novel is a 'carnival of relativity' – and Kundera echoes Lionel Trilling's notion of the novel's responsiveness to 'good-and-evil' rather than good and evil – then, by logical extension, it ought to be fitted to weave into its fabric human knowledge and experience in the round. Considered in terms of form alone, it is endlessly manipulable. Of all literary modes it is principally a shapeshifter, readjusting and reconfiguring itself to the external pressures of the time. It exists as a rebuke to fixed convention, aesthetic and moral. It freely absorbs and modifies other forms. (The bourgeois entrepreneurial mercantilist form par excellence, the Marxist critic might say, out of breath...) The novel's absolute antithesis, then, is the index expurgatorius.

The trappings of theology put to artistic ends: this isn't a novel written by a believer in any conventional sense, and its narrative apparatus – the messianic child, God's displeasure at mankind throwing in its lot with Aristotelian and Baconian science – deploys religion as a literary conceit. As in Thomas Hardy's The Dynasts, the Spirits perform a technical, philosophical function. Revisiting the old discredited trope of the omniscient author, Mulisch mischieviously ironises it - one of his angels narrates the novel, complaining that still the puppets wriggle free of his will:

We underestimated human potential, both the strength of man's intellect and the weakness of his flesh, and therefore his receptivity to satanic inspiration - but ultimately he is our creature, and so what we've really underestimated is our own creativity. So ultimately in our failure there is a compliment to us: our creativity is greater than ourselves!

Mulisch examines not only the illimitable complexity of human destinies – how impossible it is to disentangle them finally from each other, and to isolate their ultimate origin – but also the strange persistence of love on our blighted planet. A fine, wise book, indeed.

the wordless sonnet that still rhymes

2008-04-05T13:58:00.012+01:00

Anthony Burgess – ABBA ABBA

F.X. Enderby, poet laureate of the privy, squats on the jakes as he furiously scribbles his unreadable Modernist anti-poetry. Swapping the heights of Parnassus for the Cloaca Maxima, a great reckoning in a little room. A poem as a hard bolus of matter to be shat out... It's Burgess's joke, it course; but Pope and Swift, in the eighteenth century, were much obsessed with the excremental quality of literary creation, acutely sensible of the affinity between both kinds of evacuation. “Congratulations, Mr Enderby ...”

If you awaken now with one of the duodenal or pyloric twinges which are, to us, as gruesome a literature-lesson spicer as Johnson's scrofula, Swift's scatophobia, or Keats's gallop of death-warrant blood, do not fancy it is ghosts you hear sibilant and crepitant about the bed. To be a ghost one has first to die or, at least, be born... Perrrrp.

Anthony Burgess's novels have routinely dramatised the unwinnable struggle between carnality and spirit, prick and paraclete. Earthly Powers, his runaway magnum opus, portrays a Maughamesque popular novelist snagged between his cradle-Catholic conditioning and his sexual instincts – the more perilously for his homosexuality. Kenneth Toomey is creatively prolific, but, in the eyes of the Church, venally sterile. Body and soul are in bitter contention. Dying on the Spanish Steps, John Keats – tubercular, fading fast – execrates the frail uselessness of his body, as Burgess describes the scene in his novella ABBA ABBA:

I will lie here and see my body as nothing of mine. This hand I try to lift, see how cunningly fashioned, and it ploughdrove a pen once that scrawled bad hymns to beauty. But it is something now impertinently fastened to me and no longer anything of mine. I am something altogether apart from this machine ... For what you call my soul is the sparking of this machine. The brain too is the body. It is a fine and cunning trelliswork, but we may eat brain as we eat feet and flanks. But there is one thing that is not to be eaten and that is the little fire saying I am I am I am...

Burgess serves Keats's thwarted sensualism well. ABBA ABBA is textured magnificently, drawing on the wayward energies of early nineteenth century English as it threw off the prescriptivism of Augustan neo-classicism and rediscovered an Elizabethan verbal anarchy, its bawdry and voluptuous materiality.

Keats died at twenty-six in 1821. “'Tis strange the mind that very fiery particle,” Byron wrote in Don Juan anent the savaging Keats received from William Gifford in the Quarterly Review, “Should let itself be snuff'd out by an article..” Byron's sneer misses how gravely seized by the illness the young poet really was. Keats, at the recommendation of his physician, retired from the chill of London to Rome, the better to assist his recovery. Accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, he rented an apartment on the Spanish Steps; and, in the Burgess version, made the acquaintance both of the Roman poet Giuseppe Gioacchino Belli and of the vigorous vulgarity of the local dialect.

The Keats of ABBA ABBA insulates himself from death – fleetingly, imperfectly – with a raucous defiance, expressed in great flights of wordplay and reflections on the salvatory properties of poetry. His despair at its deepest provokes in him his most extraordinary verbal pyrotechnics, as when he rails against Nobodaddy or Death or the Enemy:

He is all against life, meaning the thud of the heart in venery, the savour of claret, the clamorous morsels of spring in the nest you by chance uncover, hawthorn and goldenrod, good witty lechery in the company of men, the green waving tree, tough-boled, of the body. It is not enough for him to suck blood only at once to spew it forth, he must also poison the very wells of blood. His name may be Wells for all we know, or Flibbertigibbet or Cacasona, it matters not. He is cacodemon of decay, and it is not the decay of the grass-dropped apple in autumn. For the apple dies in sweetness but I do not.

The 'chomp and honey-drop of language, made of sense and bound to sense as it is' – this is good as an epitome of Keatsian vitalism as any, poetry a ripened tongue, eroticised by want, a kind of soulful ivresse... One citron Roman evening Keats happens upon Napoleon's sister, Pauline the Princess Borghese, and he bashfully tries to charm her in stilted French; whereupon she asks in parting, “Voulez-vous profiter de mon carrosse, monsieur?” - “What was that word? Did it mean caress?” Later, Keats fantasises deliriously about fucking this apparition, the more heated his imagination, the more brilliantly inventive his language: “She instructed me in all of the modes of physical possession out of her deep learning. Marry, I cannot remember the names of them all, but there was certes the pavonian touch, the Ledan straddle too, the chthonian ditch, the I think it was termed Ceutan flight and eke the Madrilenan inter-uberal... All this I tell you is true, Severn, in poetic truth it is all true.”

Burgess gets down the feverish thrashings of a high-blooded young man, facing death, yet grasping at the fugitive moment, still planning epic poems that never will be written, still hag-ridden by sex. “But I, Severn, have had a whole manhood of fleshly longing crammed into a boy's years, and Alma Venus or Queen Mab or l'ultima principessa could give in no wise to my fancy what she she she denied to my body..” Yet Burgess's Keats is also a cormorant of words, a dictionary glutton; and this, too, Burgess conveys well – for it is Burgess himself ghosting the pages of this short book, and, at times, Keats sounds more like Burgess than the ardent letter-writer, in whose scribblings we have a near-perfect archival after-print of the young poet.

ABBA ABBA celebrates the down-and-dirty sonneteering of Belli, the uncompromising realism of his Roman dialect verse: and of this, Burgess certainly approves. Where Keats was fey, fantastical and Romantic, Belli was brawny, scatological, streetwise. But uniting the two very different men, an almost mystical accord. “'I have a clear enough image of God,'” Belli informs a scandalised prelate, “'but it is my own and perhaps heretical, perhaps too paganly platonic to be acceptable to my spiritual betters.'”:

The sonnet form must have existed in potentia from the beginning, but it was made flesh with such as Petrarch. Behind the thousands of sonnets in the world, in Tuscan, Roman, French, German, even English, shines the one ultimate perfect sonnet. It has fourteen lines that divide into an octave of a rhyme scheme ABBA ABBA and a sestet CDC DCD, really two tercets. One may vary the rhymes a little but the essential shape will remain. The wordless sonnet that still rhymes, that says nothing, having no words, but yet speaks. It says: I am this, but I am also this. In my eight lines X, in my six lines Y, but in my total fourteen ever the unity, the ultimate statement whose meaning is itself ... I talk of an ultimate reality. And through the glimmering of it I have given you, a soul may speak to a soul. A Roman writes a sonnet on the divine beauty, and an Englishman writes a sonnet on an old tomcat; and neither understands the other's language, but in the recognition of the common form they meet.

Keats, too, is possessed by this insight: “Christ pendebat from his cross and cried ABBA ABBA. Now John knew that this was the Aramaic for father father, but he knew better that it was the rhyme scheme of a Petrarchan sonnet octave. It came to him that the sonnet form might subsist above language...” His doctrine of 'negative capability', entailing the erasure of self and a blending with the things of the world, in blissful self-oblivion, clearly derived on some level from a desire to be free of the broken machinery of the body. And the pure poem adumbrated by Burgess's Keats finds its sublime figuration in the 'Ode to a Nightingale'; where, again, poetry exists somewhere in a domain beyond the diseased rancour of human life, and the shadow of death and decay... Of course, such platonising is the natural psychic defence of anyone terminally ill. Keats's sickness seems absolutely bound up with his aesthetics. One so death-haunted will inevitably seek – in the absence of the solace of formal religion – whatever narrative of mortal flight he can.

As Clive James reminds us, “The dark knowledge behind his light moments was once the background radiation behind all creative life.” The collapse of Keats's bodily integrity brought his imaginative instincts to a greater pitch of intensity. He was writing against extinction.

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed – see here it is -
I hold it towards you.

Extraordinary, that Keats here shouldn't merely address the reader, but should attempt to establish a physical connection that is somehow obscurely restorative: momentary resurrection by a touch. Anthony Burgess achieves, in ABBA ABBA, a like feat of necromantic recovery - not alone and palely loitering, his Keats bravely beards death, puns and daydreams, blasphemes and makes the English language symphonic and sensual. Thomas De Quincey, another literary Mancunian, once remarked of Keats, in an uncharacteristic fit of cruelty, “As a man ... Keats was nothing... Had there been no such thing as literature, Keats would have dwindled into a cipher.” Burgess plainly begged to differ, and restored to the young doomed poet a mournful dignity. Pathos without patronage, compassion without condescension.

Burgess throve on the challenges of literary ventriloquism. His Shakespeare novel, Nothing like the Sun, stands even now as the best introduction to the life and work of the premier dramatist: the undergrad fresher ought first to turn to Burgess, if she knows what's good for her. He tackled Marlowe in A Deadman in Deptford, and, in the short story '1889 and the Devil's Mode', Robert Browning. Burgess was professorial but not pedantic, gleefully vulgar but not coarsened. Read him, read him again.

prizes for losers

2008-04-02T17:16:00.007+01:00

Michael Hofmann – Selected Poems

A poet's parsimony usually sparks one of two responses: either his heart was never in it, and the creative dribble may as well dry up altogether; or we applaud his towering self-command, the ringing proof that the poet in question has earned his stripes, with an infinite capacity for taking pains.

Poets, then, fall into two corresponding camps – the stingy and the bountiful, misers and spendthrifts. (Scholarly meddling can turn one into the other: there is Larkin's published verse, carefully disbursed in five slim volumes; and the Collected Poems, in which his output fattened alarmingly under the husbandry of Anthony Thwaite...)

Glancing over Ian Hamilton's (spare, economical) Fifty Poems, Michael Hofmann knows exactly which of the two types merits our admiration: “Each individual poem is pruned back to an austere and beautiful knot of pain. Poetry, by his practice of it, is not craftsmanship or profession, but catastrophe. I can't, in general terms, think of any better way for a poem to be. Most poems have a hard time answering the question: 'Is this really necessary?' Not his.”

Poetry as catastrophe: a poem as a nauseous compound of despair, insight, language and hope; but, most of all, a necessary reflex. As Douglas Dunn put it, “No one can explain/Melodic mysteries written down but wrung/First from the dishrag of a poet's pain/Before a word of it gets thought or sung.”

Hofmann shows himself to be particularly interested in those poets for whom the creative drive was compromised or crippled. He writes with awed dismay of John Berryman's working life – the sheer sweated labour of grinding out the poems, the crazily dauntless way Berryman lined up project after impossible project – the edition of Lear, for instance – while beleaguered by a slew of life-problems. Berryman's life seems to have been a succession of calamities, made the more so by his intellectual restlessness, and a Promethean energy and wilfulness. Hofmann would probably insist that the Dream Songs were well worth it all.

Hoffman's Selected gathers samples from his four collections – Nights at the Iron Hotel, Acrimony, Corona, Corona, and Approximately Nowhere – Lenten fare, perhaps. But each poem earns its keep, each counts, and there's none of what Coleridge called 'by-writing', dispensable poetic padding. Hofmann's imaginative banlieue is easily identifiable – it's so recognizably his - its inner weather, its atmosphere of post-industrial entropy, the American vulgarity, the bedsit squalor, the suburban bathos, the bad sex and worse politics - Hofmann could patent it, by Joseph Brodsky out of Frank O'Hara. An ironic, hungover squint at the by-blows of Thatcher's Britain, the early poetry is coloured also by the melancholia of the Old Europe, which deepened as Hofmann's career progressed. The tone is Bluesy and pungent, and there's something of the quality you find in the early Wim Wenders – American pop culture superimposed upon a post-war European wasteland, plaster statues of Elvis Presley erected on the Potsdamerplatz.

“My own poems,” Hofmann sighed in his review of Hamilton, “go like sequences of television quiz show prizes, prizes for losers, just one darn thing after another! Even with his example before me, how materialistic I have become, even in my own brand of negative materialism! How crass and compendious!” And to be sure, Hofmann's poetry is a Wunderkammer of disposable trash. One of his prime themes is the debility of modern consumption:

The branch line is under the axe, but it still runs,
rattling and screeching, between the hospital
lit like a toy, and the castellated factory -
a folie de grandeur of late capitalism.

He can be Hopperish and deflationary, as in the vaguely Bleaneyesque:

But being a salesman was dispiriting work. I ran myself
like an organisation, held out the prospect of bonuses,
wondered which of the tiny, sad, colourful bottles
in my freezing minibar I would crack next.

But the most thrilling poems, by a country mile, are those devoted to his father, the novelist Gert Hofmann. Anger and tendresse, confessions of inadequacy and fear, Hofmann's bitter struggle to define himself as a free distinct individual – and, by Approximately Nowhere, the unasked role of his father's elegist. He lapses into a note that seems uncomfortably crude and cruel; but it's the grievance of exasperated love:

Once I thought of you virtually as a savage,
atavistic, well-aligned, without frailties.
A man of strong appetites, governed by instinct.
...
You have gone to seed like Third World dictators,
fat heads of state suffering horribly
from Western diseases whose name is Legion...

If Hofmann can sound a little too hangdog at times, and if the busy too-muchness of his poetry becomes a touch indigestible, he can more often than not redeem himself with a bright lyric blazon, minimalist and modest, such as this – 'Megrim' – quoted entire:

Corners of the linden yellow like grapes...
back in July leaves blew. Rain wounds the window,
preoccupies the drainpipes, nourishes -
after a seemly interval – the mould spots
in the cornices. Stray nooses of wisteria
toss purposefully, aimlessly, who can say.

Exhaustion, a kind of anomie observant in spite of itself... There may be a clue to the frustrating sparsity of Hofmann's work in recent years – his poetic work; he translates at an amazing clip – in the preface to his translation of Durs Grunbein's Ashes for Breakfast: “There is a formidableness, a dauntingness about Grunbein that I don't have, perhaps can't do, and find it difficult even to respond to... there is a frontality and an abundance in him – massive poems, great sequences of numbered parts – that I can only wonder at.” Grunbein is Hofmann's secret sharer – as the translator suggests – but simultaneously an inhibitor; as Hofmann's father was before him, and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Brodsky. It's rather a pity that this fine poet – and fine reader of poetry, too, as his collection of literary journalism, Behind the Lines, attests – should discover that McNeice's “World is crazier and more of it than we think,/Incorrigibly plural” was a stern caveat to the poet whose ambition was to nail it in print. And discover also that, in this late hour of the world, the big, superconfident talent of a Durs Grunbein is the one only fitted to match it.

noisy dollops

2008-03-24T15:00:00.004Z

Tom Paulin – The Secret Life of Poems

The critical labours of Tom Paulin have always invested themselves in the orality of poetry, the poem as speech-act and as a matter of soundings. As his 'Sentence Sound', from The Wind Dog, confirms:

here poems are often put together
out of fricatives labials and peachy vowels
here prose is stretched or polished
so it doesn't try imitate
the clearness of that blank windowpane

In the centre-piece of that collection, Paulin, in his patented sidelong wry-mouthed manner, edges towards an enunciation of the aesthetic:

walking the plank
we turn the bridge into a thunderbox
blocks of dead sound
drop bock bock bock
into the air
as though something formal and dreadful
is both happening and about to happen
on this wooden platform
sound is always ahead of itself
at least sound that has an echo
and a living skin of air
ambient air
around it
so sound is both Being and Becoming...

Paulin's reading is alive to the acoustic nuances of poetic language. It adapts, with an almost miraculous elasticity, to the essence of experience. It shucks off the sclerotic stiffening of print, of Standard English; not to mention that of the iambic pentameter. And, by implication, it raises the banner for certain forms of political dissidence, existing beyond the pale of State surveillance. Paulin's fascination with the unassuming subversions of, say, Emily Dickinson or Christina Rossetti is of a piece with such a coded radical politics. He scrutinises poetry for the aural vestiges of dissent, hinted at in a line break or smuggled in the priest's hole of a caesura. 'Being and Becoming' precisely figures as a process resistant to political subornation – one too slippery and intangible, like a blob of mercury, for the State to lay its hands on. If poetry 'rides on its own melting' (in Robert Frost's phrase, one greatly suggestive to Paulin), it cannot petrify into propaganda or langue de bois.

Paulin distrusts elegance and polish, favours gaucherie - “..the sentences gawky or a tad misshapen – spelt wrong or babu even...” - and the veering self-corrections of improvised speech. It streaks into our consciousness as a jazz free-form, airily untouched by the taint of public discourse, yet instinct with socio-historical forces nonetheless. Paulin's criticism takes the historicity of a poem as a given. He can unpack a modest lyric until it yields up a bounty of meaning local to its composition. "It is the acoustic adhesiveness of words and patterns of sound that fascinates me..."

From his essay collection Minotaur onwards, Paulin has assembled his own counter-canon, poets to whose work he has continually returned: Milton, Marvell, Clare, Dickinson, Rossetti, Hopkins, Bishop, inter alia. Each of these poets represents an attempt to work outside the mainstream of literary convention. Each, in their way, hymns a Non serviam through their poetry, rejecting the fixed, the lapidary, the orthodox. Paulin sees a kind of redemptive hope in their nonconformist Protestantism And detects the promise of the foundation of what Les Murray calls a 'vernacular republic' in their poetic example.

The 'critical donnée', Paulin explains in the introduction to his collection Crusoe's Secret, “..is less a piece of obscure knowledge than finding something hidden in the daylight, but that process is picky, sometimes obsessive, a matter of trusting hunches and intuitions, and weighing particular words that for reasons that aren't immediately apparent seem to stick.” A critical reading by Paulin of a poem can be an exhilarating business, as when he somehow manages to divine from a seemingly innocuous concordance of sounds a whole system of allusion. Poetry is a whispering gallery, even the briefest lyric utterance opening out to the full amplitude of history at the touch of Paulin's insistent interpretative sensibility.

'Trusting hunches and intuitions' makes for a criticism whose governing principle seems often to be the wild surmise. Yet Paulin, for all that he can exasperate, follows through, generally with more than qualified success. His sensitivity to the fine meshings of sound and meaning tends to have him pursuing a hunch almost to the point of the argument's collapse, as in his dense searching engagement with Keats's 'To Autumn': “The hedge-cricket I take to be a figure for members of the radical underground..” The sceptically-inclined will go no further. But Paulin gnaws away at these glimpsed suggestions with such brio, that you do get used to his antic swerving from one reference-point to another. The restlessness of his critical imagination dares us not to settle too easily into complacency, into an unreasoning faith that we know a poem.

The Secret Life of Poems is arranged as a series of short readings: guerilla raids on the articulate. None of the usual book-making apparatus – preface, introduction or notes – yet what Paulin might have written there is embedded in the readings themselves. “Poetry begins in speech,” he begins, “in the skipping rhymes and chants children make up in the playground and the street. It moves from there into the imagination and life of the common people – into rhymes, riddles, traditional songs – and is then sometimes collected – so that it moves from oral tradition, communal memory, into print.” Implied by this, is a narrative of cultural annexation. (Paulin may be dimly recalling Mandelstam's lines “But in books/Much loved, and in children's games I shall rise/From the dead to say the sun is shining.”) The free, metamorphic idyll of oral culture comes, in due process, to be severed from its vital roots and institutionalised: a figure for which would be the Enclosures so lamented by John Clare. The 'printed voice' (in the phrase lifted by Eric Griffiths from Browning's The Ring and the Book) is the medium through which that pristine lightsome energy of spoken poetry can be restored. (Paulin, in The Secret Life of Poems, goes even so far as to write of the 'redemptive nature of metre'.)

Edna Longley, in her Bloodaxe essays Poetry & Posterity, voiced her scepticism of Paulin's habits of mind – tournures d'esprit, if you will – and argued, with a grim persuasiveness, that their idiosyncrasies tended more often than not to show up the confusions in the 'psychological strata of Paulin's imagination'. She dismantles the 'false dichotomy' between oral and written poetry, pointing out, correctly to my mind, that “..the oral-written or vernacular-standard opposition simplifies the intricacies of rhythm, syntax and cadence.” (This latter opposition impoverishes, disastrously, a certain school of Scottish poetry that itself has an unbecoming habit of playing the class card – and now the patriotic card - to deflect any challenging critical debate.) “There are dangers in perpetual dissidence,” Longley argues; and, later, “..his criticism depends on poetic licence being infinitely renewable.”

Paulin's politics are apt to skew his readings – as Edna Longley dryly observed, “It is for Hazlitt scholars to decide whether The Day-Star of Liberty makes Hazlitt sound too much like a contemporary Northern Irish writer who founds his creative and cultural project on those Ulster Presbyterians whom the French Revolution turned into United Irishmen.” His 'ideological pigeon-holing of writers', strident as it is, strikes one as reductionist, and Paulin would do well to soft-pedal his obsessions, to complicate the fraught relationship between private inwardness and the public sphere, lest he make even the delicate wallflower of a poet like Emily Dickinson sound rather absurdly like Rosa Luxemburg.

Paulin the instinctively adversarial bruiser will always have his detractors. The flung-together messiness of his work does seem at times a little too contrived; and his curious, ad hoc, unsystematic apposition between formal and historical modes of interpretation - close reading muddled up with 'noisy dollops' of fact - succeeds only periodically. Yet we wouldn't do without him: Paulin affords a bracing corrective to the inbred phatic chunterings of the university English department. Literary criticism retains its urgency and relevance in his hands.

the high master of aloneness

2008-03-15T10:52:00.007Z

George Steiner – My Unwritten Books

Unread books nag at us silently from the shelves, but unwritten books?

Authors only reluctantly advertise their failures; and the unwritten book usually remains an itch at the back of the mind. Or else the miscarriage of an idea finds its home in the wastepaper basket and that's that... There might exist embryonic traces of it in the pages of notebooks or correspondence, or the odd dropped drunken aside. Or someone might, unwisely, release a public statement of intent: T.S. Eliot announced a trilogy exploring his ideas of classicism, royalism and Anglo-Catholicism: The School of Donne, The Outline of Royalism and The Principles of Modern Heresy, alas, for Eliot scholars at any rate, never appeared. Who knows, perhaps these works cram the stacks in some Borgesian alternate reality. Borges himself foreworded his Ficciones:

It is a laborious madness and an impoverishing one, the madness of composing vast books – setting out in five hundred pages an idea that can be perfectly related orally in five minutes. The better way to go about it is to pretend those books already exist, and offer a summary, a commentary on them ... A more reasonable, more inept, and more lazy man [than Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Butler], I have chosen to write notes on imaginary books.

'The Laborious Madness of George Steiner' might do as the title of one more unwritten book, a huge, lumbering, indexed and cross-indexed critical monograph with footnotes upon footnotes... George Steiner: the cavalier servente of high culture, the last of the Old World intellectuals, elegist of a European civilization embattled by modernity. A generalist and polymath, Steiner confronts the reader today as a paradoxically vital anachronism. Like Isaiah Berlin, he 'founded no school', initiated no new strain in Western intellectual growth. His abiding conviction of the centrality of cultural values, of a vaunted elitism of the spirit, looks awkward when set beside the levelling influences unleashed in the post-war era. His manner smacks a little uneasily of an ancien régime. His prose – its luxuriant periods, its cadenzas of eloquence – is instantly recognizable and, to many, a touch rebarbative in its casual superior assurance. (Its high-toned fruitiness borders on the camp.) Steiner ought to have been born a century or two earlier. You can imagine him enjoying the boon companionship of the Encyclopaedistes, or debating Jansenism with Montaigne in the Tower of the Chateau. Burgeoning technologies like the internet seem only to dismay and confound him.

Modern thought is distinguished from ancient by its cultivation of the 'relative' spirit in place of the 'absolute'. Ancient philosophy sought to arrest every object in an eternal outline, to fix thought in a necessary formula, and the varieties of life in a classification by 'kinds' or genera. To the modern spirit nothing is, or can be rightly known, except relatively and under conditions...

So Walter Pater, writing of Coleridge in 1889. “Now the literary life of Coleridge,” Pater goes on, “was a disinterested struggle against the relative spirit ... he is ever restlessly scheming to 'apprehend the absolute', to affirm it effectively, to get it acknowledged. It was an effort, surely, an effort of sickly thought...” To 'apprehend the absolute' is an ambition that may fairly be ascribed to Steiner; so too his sorrowing hostility towards the 'relative spirit'. Steiner's career – from The Death of Tragedy to Lessons of the Masters – thundered along in Juggernaut-fashion, each work a bold mission-statement, powered by his lust for the Absolute. And precisely because of this, his public reputation has hardened into a kind of mineral intractability, the quaintness of his attitudes open to ridicule: dare one say it, he's almost become a public monument bespattered with pigeon shit. Steiner's awareness of this lends to his later work an odd self-pitying note, regretful and valedictory. He yearns for the prestige of a vanished era. But Terry Eagleton, of all people, called him 'one of the last of the great breed of European humanists,' and the 'great hedonist of ideas'. Informing his work at the deepest levels – thrumming through it like a demonic tattoo – is the barbarism of the twentieth century, and the insoluble problem of reconciling culture and anarchy. That Europe can at one and the same time be the cradle of civilization and the Gehenna that Nazism made of it, torments Steiner. He finds himself the thanatographer of a dying world.

His seminal collection Language and Silence bears most of the thematic hallmarks found in all Steiner's work. Some insights he has worried over for decades. The ambiguous involvement of language and sex is given preliminary notice in his 1963 essay 'Night Words' (reviewing the Olympia Reader, he deplores its imaginative exhaustion, its cheapening of sex) – and what we might term this 'Steinerian problematic' recurs in My Unwritten Books, in a meditation on eros and logos that is disarmingly frank. The Shoah tutored mankind in its own appetite for nihilistic cruelty. Steiner grieves for the waste and unimaginable horror of it – and, to some degree, taunts himself for his marginality to its epicentre, having fled Europe at his father's insistence before the war. Again, the theme chimes throughout the oeuvre. Steiner broods especially on those moments – historical and personal – when language as conveyer of intelligible meaning simply fails. Always, something agonistic pulses somewhere in his work, a threat and a warning.

The memoir Errata revisits the themes, often more candidly and directly than before. With age, Steiner has become distinctly less bullish, readier to admit his vulnerabilities. My Unwritten Books continues this tendency. The great humanist reveals himself to be touchingly human.

“A book unwritten is more than a void,” Steiner begins. “It accompanies the work one has done like an active shadow, both ironic and sorrowful.” The seven chapters of My Unwritten Books are as densely argued and as ripened as anything of Steiner's hitherto. The pieces are by turns essays in admiration and perplexity. The first, 'Chinoiserie', concerns itself with the biochemist and Sinologist Joseph Needham. An extraordinary tribute, in it Steiner confesses his awe at Needham's obsessive industry, his tireless encyclopaedism and, perhaps, the depth of his knowledge of a subject about which Steiner, eurocentrically, can know little if anything. Needham's Science and Civilisation in China was written out of the tradition of the great anatomies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne, with all the crazy compendiousness of their work, Needham's intellectual forebears. Steiner seems to have been cowed into humility by the work of this strange, Casaubon-ish man.

Intellectual cowardice – as Steiner would have it – essentially spiked some of these ideas. Others were deemed too raw, with the abashed intimacy that checks, more often than not, self-revelation. Concluding one of the essays, Steiner admits the reason for being unable to write the book: “I did not have the guts.”

'Invidia' – at its mildest, professional jealousy: but in this essay Steiner tells the tale of Cecco d'Ascoli, the contemporary of Dante who tried, and failed, to give the poet of the Divina Commedia a run for his money. Cecco could charitably be described as the nearly man of Italian Renaissance poetry, but – possibly because this master astrologer made the Schoolman's error of casting a horoscope for Jesus – wound up in an inquisitorial auto-da-fé, (graphically, squeamishly contemplated by Steiner)...

The Jewish destiny comes under consideration in the essay 'Zion'. Here, Steiner courts controversy, reflecting on the perennial apartness of the Chosen People and arriving at the thought, warily, that perhaps something genetically immanent in the Jew sets him at odds with history and the world. The origins of anti-semitism are mysteriously bound up, Steiner argues, with the enormous demand made by Yahweh on mankind, to be signally better, to attain an ideal of moral perfection that we find, poor flawed things that we are, to be gratuitous and impossible. Militant Zionism failed, he suggests, because it made of the Jew an ordinary man. Like the bogus 'Philip Roth' in Roth's Operation Shylock, Steiner is a regretful Diasporist, seeing in the 'peregrine' nature of Judaism its true essence: “Nationalism, of which Israel is necessarily emblematic, tribal ingathering, seems to me not only foreign to the inward genius of Judaism and the enigma of its survival. It violates the imperative of the Baal Shem Tov, master of Hassidism: 'The truth is always in exile'. This maxim is my morning prayer.”

Much of My Unwritten Books does seem a remarkable gamble for so reticent a man as Steiner. Discussing the antinomies of the public and the private, he makes this assertion of the indecency of speaking of one's belief (or unbelief):

If there is anything entitled to final privacy, to enclosure in heart and mind, it is surely one's personal faith as it ripens towards the solipsism of death or the dismissal thereof. Publication, in the direct sense of the term, is an irremediable devaluation, a strip-tease of what we call for lack of a better name 'the soul', the quick and core of our labyrinthine being. It enacts, or so I have held, a tawdry paradox: self-violation, a rape of the self.

Steiner prefers to call himself a 'Platonic anarchist', rather than be drawn on his political leanings. The unfathomable interplay between art and religion – the imagining of god – has been a core fascination of Steiner's, and in the same essay, 'Begging the Question', he finally must admit that neither art nor theology bring us a whit nearer to proving the existence or otherwise of a deity. Indeed Steiner writes with 'scrupulous sadness' of his final estrangement from god, stating that his early hesitations and qualifications were the merest sophistry.

On the third day of the Chechen seizure of the school in Beslan, the children were dying of torturing thirst. Even their urine had ceased. For two days, they had prayed to almighty God. No reply. On the third day, they called for help to Harry Potter... This seems to me as close as one can get to the truth of the human situation. It has far greater dignity than the often repellent efforts to show the ultimate benevolence, the justice of 'God after Auschwitz'.

“What I have come to feel with compelling intensity,” Steiner all but closes his book, “is the absence of God.” My Unwritten Books is marbled through with such stark confessional turns. It is the furthering of Steiner's career-long project to attempt the examined life. But it also offers the spectacle of Steiner wrestling with titanic self-doubt, as Jacob with his angel. Often moving, always absorbing, it has all the stateliness of thought, the sheer rapturous obsession with the life of the mind, admirers of Steiner look forward to in his work.

eunuchs in a harem

2008-03-10T14:20:00.014Z

Ronan McDonald - The Death of the Critic

“'The best that has been thought and said' – Matthew Arnold's exalted old credo, long superannuated – devolved to 'Whatever'. If taste governs all, then distinctions melt away, and the jihadist's 'taste in morality' is no worse than mine or yours, and choosing life or choosing death comes down to chacun à son goût.”
-- Cynthia Ozick, 'On Discord and Desire'; The Din in the Head (2006)

The rout of criticism seemed, for a time, almost complete. The university arcanists – addled by the Chinese-box wares of Derrida, Lacan and Foucault – had retreated into self-referential blather, and the book pages of the print media dwindled, and dwindled, to an auxiliary of publishers' marketing departments. 'Bookchat', as Gore Vidal contemptuously termed it, became a white noise of logrolling and mutual self-congratulation. Or the scrape of many axes being ground. The shade of Edmund Wilson flickered and mournfully expired. The Jacobins of the blogosphere let out a whoop of triumph; and the book group metastasised through the cultural life of the land.

And why not? The critic, after all, applies his killjoy instincts to the cramping of creative freedom: he pettifogs and carps, snidely undermines the best efforts of the finest spirits, and generally comports himself as a humourless puritan fault-finder. He is an embittered second-rater, a snippy Pharisee. Of course, the critic deserves to be sidelined – no one likes a sour negativist. The pontiff of this dismal breed was F.R. Leavis, issuing his bulls from Downing College and spoiling literature for generations of undergraduates. Leavis, it was, who insisted on the high seriousness of the literary endeavour, its irrefragable moral dimension – and what fun is that?

Earth-bound, joyless, beside-the-point: so the critic stands condemned as a relic of another age, as hoarily irrelevant today as the Master of the Revels.

All this squares with the low esteem in which the 'expert' is now broadly held. The democratization of culture is held up as an a priori good; and the value-judgment has gone the way of the witch's cantrip. A poem by Charles Bukowski merits serious consideration just as much as a poem by Milton. Evaluative discrimination mocks the principles of egalitarianism; and, as Gore Vidal has it, “Don't knock, boost! was the cry of Warren Harding. To which the corollary was plain: anyone who knocks is a bad person with a grudge... to say that one English sentence might be better made than another is to be a snob, a subverter of the democracy, a Know Nothing enemy of the late arrivals to our shores and its difficult language.” Vidal, elsewhere eulogizing V.S. Pritchett, says: “...an entire generation of schoolteachers and book chatterers now believes that an inability to master English is a sign of intellectual grace, and that a writer like Pritchett is not to be taken seriously because he eschews literary velleities for literary criticism. Madame Verdurin has won the day.” (Literary velleities: as neat and elegant a description of the style and tenor of certain sections of the literary blogosphere as any...)

Certainly, the internet and the matto grosso of the blogosphere have enfranchised readers to the extent that they now can be sure that their views will have an audience, somewhere. Niche tastes are amply catered for. Google is your friend. The essential conservatism of the mainstream press reviews increasingly appears insufficient to the variety of the marketplace. And we live in a social and cultural climate in which people are disinclined to be told what to do or think. (William Skidelsky chews all this over in his piece for Prospect magazine.) The subsequent 'deregulation' of literary studies brings in its train a prickly, agitated parliament: from serious, passionate readers sharing their enthusiasms to amateur scribes seeking to showcase their talents and – maybe, just maybe – catch the eye of the literary editor of a broadsheet newspaper. Yet for every thoughtful, nuanced blog post, there must be a dozen sophomoric tirades. The extraordinarily ugly, ill-tempered response to the work of the critic James Wood shows up in the blogosphere a spleenful incontinence. Wood, for the moment, has been cast as a eunuchoid bully; and has few sympathizers in the cyber-savannah. (One honourable exception: SC of the excellent Un Arbre dans la Ville arts-blog, who has written a number of sane, temperate defenses of Wood's critical practice; identifying what he terms James Wood Neurosis – although it seems to me to tend more toward derangement.) The prevailing atmosphere is less one of Kulturkampf than of an alpha-male dick-swinging contest. All that impotent fluttering in 'mediocrity's columbarium' (Gore Vidal, again).

Ronan McDonald's study The Death of the Critic reads as a kind of retrenchment. McDonald wants to set before us an account of the history of criticism that will remind us of its value as an activity – in spite of its secondariness – and of the essential decency of the enterprise, its contribution to cultural welfare. He argues for the emergence of a 'new aestheticism', the cultivation of a broader, less partisan approach to the study of literature, “..intimate with the imagining of political possibilities at the level of form.” Post-1968, an overtly politicized theory bent itself to degutting the work of art. Literature was interrogated not as an analyzable entity in its own right, but as the vessel of ideology. The theorists forced upon literature the burden of explaining its deeply distasteful roots in reactionary politics, its blind connivance in post-colonial oppression, its devious trick of covering up its unpleasant associations with tyranny. When Edward Said suggested that Mansfield Park was a novel that bore the taint of the slave trade, the game was up for traditional close textual analysis. Never such innocence again.

So ruthless a desacralization was accompanied by an inevitable decentring. The Benjaminian 'aura' of art devolved to art as a sequence of schematics. More crucially still, we lost the notion that one must accord a novel, poem or play a measure of respect, that a certain delicacy in how we conduct ourselves among the products of the minds of men and women who once drew breath, is appropriate and seemly, at the very least. What characterizes the labours of such critics as Samuel Johnson, William Hazlitt through A.C. Bradley and William Empson – aside from their polymathy, their sheer intellectual heft – is perhaps the sense common to them that literature ought to inspire in us – as a condition of its efficacy – a feeling of responsive tact, such as a botanist might experience with the objects of his study. Something akin to what George Steiner termed 'humane literacy' is at issue here. Steiner, predictably in the current climate of mannerless snidery, today earns for himself a deal of derision from the young and not-so-young Turks. But the closing stave of his 1963 essay still seems to me to have a distinct uneasy resonance:

Because the community of traditional values is splintered, because words themselves have been twisted and cheapened, because the classic forms of statement and metaphor are yielding to complex, transitional modes, the art of reading, of true literacy, must be reconstituted. It is the task of literary criticism to help us read as total human beings, by example of precision, fear, and delight. Compared to the act of creation, that task is secondary. But it has never counted more. Without it, creation itself may fall upon silence.

Pilot-fish even the great critics might be, but they are expert navigators nonetheless.

McDonald's Death of the Critic nicely summarizes the 'fortunes of criticism', with an attractive even-handedness. His survey takes in the development of criticism from Aristotle to post-structuralism and beyond, with all points between. In the end, he urges a kind of syncretism – rather than discard the thought of former ages, each phase offers something viable, something usable. McDonald refuses to scout modern literary theory as the sterile fruit of technocracy. Unlike, say, Christopher Ricks, he holds that appreciation and evaluation aren't strictly incompatible with the insights of deconstruction or Lacanian psychoanalysis. The chasm between academe and the public sphere may yet be bridged. “[E]loquence of writing,” McDonald asserts, “accuracy of expression, and the owning of language, should be part of an education in English literature.” Critical prose itself needs to be overhauled and reinvigorated – it must be enlivened by a nearness to felt experience, be receptive to abstraction and sensuous particularity.

In his elegiac essay on Edward Said, 'The Critic as Artist', Tom Paulin observes “The style of literary critics – if we except Hazlitt – is seldom discussed.” (To which one might add, literary critics are seldom discussed, certainly among the ranks of the common readers.) What excites Paulin about Said's criticism – it shapes his own critical practice, too – is its 'performative' aspect, the way it engages bodily, as it were, with the texts under scrutiny. Expressive, wrought with urgency, the drama and textured life of it. Aesthetics and politics interlace; a prose style forged from the psychological lacerations of Palestine's tragic history. In Said's prose personal testament underwrites and energizes the discourse, making it peculiarly fascinating and absorbing. Such must our critic redux stimulate in his own efforts.

McDonald's guarded optimism breathes through his study. Almost wholly absent are the bitter biases of this faction or the other: Northrop Frye is dealt with as respectfully as Roland Barthes. The Death of the Critic proves that rarest of things, an affirmative polemic – learned, sound and an earnest of how literary criticism might prosper once again.

readings i

2008-03-05T18:24:00.005Z

W.H. Auden – 'Musėe des Beaux Arts'

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
December 1938

Simon Gray in his Smoking Diaries records that he “used to nag away at Ian [Hamilton] about it, 'About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters' – how can you be right or wrong about suffering? And as for the 'Old Masters' – well, the old masters, whoever they were, were young, or anyway alive when they painted their paintings, they weren't being old masters, or masters of anything except the palette to hand, the canvas in front of them – so I would nag away at Ian, hey, what about the horse at the end, scratching its 'innocent' behind against a tree, what would a 'guilty' behind be like?” .. and on, for another page.

Gray's choleric disdain for Auden does come across as faintly absurd, almost hysterical – yet it seems a trace-memory of the patriotic brickbats cast at the poet for leaving Britain at the outbreak of war. It also hints at the charge of dilettantism often pointed at Auden, his fondness for the bold argument-sealing rhetorical flourish, the unearned authority that enabled him to speak, for example, of that 'low, dishonest decade' as if he had greater claim than anyone else to assess it as such. Auden's shabby patrician indifference to the commonsensical reading of the times, of a work of art, appears to scandalise Gray to the point of apoplexy; until he finally harrassed Ian Hamilton into admitting, “Auden stinks!”

In any case the poem belongs loosely to the ekphrasis genre, and – at least to the readers at the time of its composition, who'd been following Auden's career – works, stylistically, on a more discursive, essayistic level than his earlier work; the former with its verbal opaqueness and air of teasing enigma, its debt to Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse, and exhortatory note. The register of 'Musée des Beaux Arts' is more that of casually learned disquisition, or something overheard in the Senior Common Room. (Donnish chit-chat, such as Philip Larkin portrays in 'Livings III': “Tonight we dine without the Master/(Nocturnal vapours do not please);/The port goes round so much the faster,/Topics are raised with no less ease...”) Far from signing up to Orwell's advocacy of political quietism for the artist in 'Inside the Whale', Auden experiments in this poem with a medium that is craftily engagé – a coded political commentary, ghosting the lines, and a considered, serious piece on the nature of art and the function of the bystander poet.

The fourth line enacts the image it conveys: scrolling out from the penfold of the stanza, it wanders off, just walks dully along, disrupting the symmetry of the poem's opening, indifferent to the prosodic requirement that it be metrically in keeping with the other lines... The thought itself, simply stated, sets forth the premise of the poem: the 'human position', which is one of incurious self-absorption, immersion in the works and days, blind to the scandal of suffering – or of 'something amazing'. (Note the terminal 'place' has no corresponding rhyme, a flaw that calls to mind the stray thread Islamic artists would leave in carpets, say, so as not blasphemously to presume to emulate God's perfection – out of this almost imperceptible 'crack' in Auden's formal framework, the aesthetic leaks into a brutally indifferent world.)

A commonplace, today, to dismiss Auden as a political naïf. His flight to the States some nine months before the declaration of war tends – not unreasonably - to be interpreted as cowardice – and, by the lights of what Milan Kundera has called 'criminography', we're at our leisure to condemn Auden for it.

The singularity of the birth of Christ and the Crucifixion – the fall of Icarus, too – are firmly lodged in the muck and mire of the material universe. Unobserved they may even be drained of meaning. Auden suggests – in a kind of tenebrous irony – that the aged who are 'reverently, passionately waiting' are themselves mortgaging their spiritual lives to a timeless instant (which may or may have not come) while those innocent of the desire to attend on 'the miraculous birth' are joyously, vitally free. (The 'waiting/skating' rhyme underscores the poem's central antithesis.) For one, paralysis and spiritual stagnation; for the others, blithe velocity and energy. The great topoi of myth and religion rely for their power on the 'reverent' and 'passionate' attention of their clients. Suffering's universality – its democratic licence – almost makes these exemplary tragic myths redundant. The ploughman will endure his own pain, and come to terms with it as he may.

Auden intimates in this poem the marginal quality of art (and religion as a symbolic act) in a period of political turmoil. Yet what Auden really means by 'suffering' seems to me to be ill-defined, perhaps evasive. That oftentimes it goes unnoticed, is true. But being unaware of something doesn't indicate indifference. The phrase “[E]verything turns away..”, enjambed so pointedly as it is, directs it moral thrust beyond the frame of the poem. The eclipse of magic can be countered by a retreat into the safely domestic; but the moral duty to tend to the suffering of others becomes proportionately the greater.

[For Alexander Nemerov's interesting art-historical study of the poem, 'The Flight of Form: Auden, Breugel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s', click here.]

the industrious biographer

2008-03-02T14:54:00.003Z

Jonathan Coe - Like a Fiery Elephant

Something worth reminding ourselves of: literary biography really doesn’t have to be the shabby exercise in academic body-snatching that has the purists and snobs grinding their teeth. Without the slightest whiff of formaldehyde and methanol to incriminate them, resurrectionists with spirits touched to finer issues have served the literary great and good to lasting acclaim. We’d be the worse off, as readers, without Holmes’s Coleridge, Holroyd’s Shaw and Ellmann’s Joyce.

It seems often to be assumed that the biographer has no more exalted a motive than prurience, some psychic kink that makes of the effort something no worthier than a stringer from the News of the Screws rifling through celebrity dustbins. If the trade-off is between perfection of the life or of the work, then it is nonetheless fairly legitimate to ask why anyone – any sane, integrated personality - should choose the latter.

Jonathan Coe is a reluctant detective in his biography of Bryan Stanley Johnson, in any case. A novelist by trade (and by instinct – the knotty problem of truth-telling is one that recurs) Coe wonders aloud at points throughout Like a Fiery Elephant: the Story of B.S. Johnson, whether, perhaps, taken all-in-all, he mightn’t have been better off writing a fictionalised account of Johnson’s life. He is also remarkably candid about these misgivings – the biography’s meta-thesis concerns itself with the essential absurdity of pinning down any life in 600 pages, and constant self-questioning accompanies Coe’s otherwise crisp annotations of the Johnson vita.

But how does he fare, our accidental biographer? Coe places great emphasis on – and an almost-allowable credence in – a supernatural encounter Johnson claimed to have had in his early twenties: delivered only obliquely in diary entries and a short story, it appears to have been a theophany of sorts, in which Johnson was in some sense bound to the White Goddess, an enslavement that was to compromise his sexual relations and, Coe suggests, displayed in the suicidal tendencies Johnson was periodically – and terminally – afflicted by. What are we to make of this? Johnson devoured and, one might say, internalised Robert Graves’ mythographical study The White Goddess, with its core conceit of the poet’s devotion to his Muse and his quasi-hieratic role as her suitor and chamberlain. Johnson’s unassailable self-belief in his literary powers clearly needed some basis. If Coe finds himself at a loss to discover it, he admits as much, at least.

I’m half-inclined to suspect that Johnson was fibbing about his brush with the Moon-goddess, the Mother of All Living. A working-class lad from Hammersmith without the bluechip sanction of an Oxbridge education, his eye would have lit on Graves’ remark, “I cannot think of any true poet from Homer onwards who has not independently recorded his experience of her.” A more authoritative imprimatur no writer could ever have asked for.

ars moriendi

2008-02-28T12:16:00.010Z

Marilynne Robinson – Gilead

In his early poem 'Mr Edwards and the Spider' Robert Lowell betrayed a precocious obsession with the fate of sinners in the hands of an angry god:

But who can plumb the sinking of that soul?
Josiah Hawley, picture yourself cast
Into a brick-kiln where the blast
Fans your quick vitals to a coal --
If measured by a glass,
How long would it seem burning! Let there pass
A minute, ten, ten trillion; but the blaze
Is infinite, eternal: this is death,
To die and know it. This is the Black Widow, death.

(Josiah [Joseph] Hawley cut his own throat after listening to Jonathan Edwards's hell-fire sermon – everyone's a critic...)

Serenity and resignation; stillness and repose – none of which qualities, or attitudes of spirit, are commended by the pitiless Calvinism explored in Lowell's poem. The grand guignol sadism in evidence here – we the fallen squirming on the spike of God's displeasure – says more about the poet's state of mind than anything about the doctrine itself. But Lowell was drawn to the punitive aspects of American Puritanism. Tant pis.

Blessedly Marilynne Robinson's novel Gilead offers us a picture of the Congregationalist communion not morbidly fixated on spiritual agonies, not at all masochistically overheated. Stillness and repose very much contribute to the emotional atmospherics of the novel. Its narrator – the Reverend John Ames – contemplates his life and imminent death with a clearsightedness and candour that breaks the heart. In his mid-seventies he writes a journal meant to be read by his 7 year-old son, a late child, offering moral instruction for when the father is no longer there.

Ames endears himself as a complex mixture of elderly fussbudget and Emersonian sage; and his remarkable voice, sustained so perfectly through the novel, utters the world and its marvels so gently and raptly. Ames's favourite theologian, it turns out, is Karl Barth; of whom John Updike, bearing as it does on the theme of the novel, has this to say: “Karl Barth's insistence upon the otherness of God seemed to free him to be exceptionally (for a theologian) appreciative and indulgent of this world, the world at hand.” And:

Granted that the situation of the world and of the individual life is as desperate as Barth paints it, and granted that the message of the Bible, and of the Pauline epistles in particular, is just as he explicates it, amid these radical truths how shall we conduct our daily lives? Does not God's absolute otherness diminish to zero the significance of our petty activity and relative morality?

“God is not a God of the dead but of the living” - Ames endorses Barth's dictum, and, page after page, demonstrates how 'appreciative and indulgent' he is 'of this world, the world at hand.' He exults in the thisness of all he observes, in a kind of sensorial gourmandise: “I saw a bubble float past my window, fat and wobbly and ripening toward that dragonfly blue they turn just before they burst... Some of the bubbles drifted up through the branches, even above the trees. You two [Ames's son and his wife] were too intent on the cat to see the celestial consequences of your worldly endeavours.... Ah, this life, this world.” A novel of keen retrospect, Gilead is shot through with such perceptual grace-notes. Ames wants to miss nothing, forget nothing. And this avidity of his, this terminal appetite, makes the prose sing.

Marilynne Robinson excuses herself from the conventional trappings of plot, of narrative progression. Ames digresses, pursues the golden clew of thought and reminiscence, moralises, reflects, holds up his conscience to the light as a jeweller might a precious stone. Robinson allows him all this, allows him the latitude to explore his soul's vagaries; signalling, perhaps, her respect for his predicament – which is ours - and for his integrity. Extraordinarily, Ames seems so present in this work, seems so magically realised, that Robinson the novelist is almost a deus absconditis – Ames absolutely fills this book with his essential self, questing, peevish, awe-struck, ruminative. The novel is a ventriloquial tour de force; by its end, you give yourself over to the almost miraculous illusion of a human being set forth on the page, settled in his ontology, with all his crotchets and sudden flaring insights and confided tendernesses. And his unresting mind! his joyful curiosity!

Set in 1957, Gilead the novel memorialises Gilead the (fictional) Iowan town, and the passing of its generations. John Ames was the son and grandson of preachers, for whom the Civil War was a living memory. Ames's grandfather, one of the novel's great portraits, took part on the Union side and fought with John Brown. He was prone to waking visions, brief audiences with the divine; and an object of baffled terror to his grandchildren. Ames observes that “..we all do live on the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.” What of the past can be meaningfully transmitted to the future, without falsifying its witness?

Ames ponders the mystery of grace, “a sort of ecstatic fire that takes things down to essentials.” His godson Jack, the adult child of his friend Boughton, appears on the scene; and Ames must weigh his mistrust of the man and his 'strange suffering' with his obligation to forgive. Convinced of his damnation Jack taunts the Reverend Ames while at the same time entreating him as one who may have a remedy: their exchanges are among the most psychologically penetrating – and enigmatic – in the novel. (Long ago Jack impregnated a young girl and abandoned her to poverty; and the scene where Ames and Jack's sister visit her, watching her and the infant play by the riverside, must stand as a masterclass of pathos and writerly control – the saddest story.) Ames expresses his gratitude, time and again, for the special providence that brought him, late in life, his second wife Lila, his son's mother; and, again, Robinson invests this with pitch-perfect emotional truth. The novel is rich with these Wordsworthian 'spots of time'; they are, finally, its fibre and nutriment:

I do enjoy remembering that morning. I was sixty-seven, to be exact, which did not seem old to me. I wish I could give you the memory I have of your mother that day. I wish I could leave you certain of the images in my mind, because they are so beautiful that I hate to think they will be extinguished when I am. Well, but again, this life has its own mortal loveliness. And memory is not strictly mortal in its nature, either. It is a strange thing, after all, to be able to return to a moment, when it can hardly be said to have any reality at all, even in its passing. A moment is such a slight thing, I mean, that its abiding is a most gracious reprieve.

Gilead – through the proxy of its narrator – impresses on us the stark imperative of reckoning fruitfully with our mortality. Rare that a contemporary novel should enter, unprejudicially, into the Christian heart, without rancorous scepticism, and depict a believer so sympathetically. Ames moves us – against our own impoverished unbelief – as one steadfast unto God; but, more, as a man of humility and principle, free of the kind of torpid Dostoyevskian spiritual violence we're accustomed to in modern fiction. Compellingly, Marilynne Robinson tenders – in the figure of the Reverend John Ames – a picture of a good man; and the novel borrows much of its lambency from his faith.

Theologians talk about a prevenient grace the precedes grace itself and allows us to accept it. I think there must be a prevenient courage that allows us to be brave – that is, to acknowledge that there is more beauty than our eyes can bear, that precious things have been put into our hands and to do nothing to honour them is to do great harm. And therefore, this courage allows us, as the old men said, to make ourselves useful. It allows us to be generous, which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. But that is the pulpit speaking. What have I to leave you but the ruins of old courage, and the lore of old gallantry and hope? Well, as I have said, it is all ember now, and the good Lord will surely someday breathe it into flame again.

Stet.

lifeness

2008-02-22T15:26:00.019Z

James Wood – How Fiction Works

I

Forty-odd years ago Iris Murdoch cast an eye over the spheres of activity termed moral philosophy and literature, and – with the unfussy authority of an ex cathedra – identified the two dominant modes in which contemporary fiction operated. “The twentieth-century novel is usually either crystalline or journalistic,” she wrote; “that is, it is either a small quasi-allegorical object portraying the human condition and not containing 'characters' in the nineteenth-century sense, or else it a large shapeless quasi-documentary object, the degenerate descendant of the nineteenth-century novel, telling, with pale conventional characters, some straightforward story enlivened with empirical facts.” Murdoch was dissatisfied with the thinness of our concept of the Self, lacking as we did a “satisfactory Liberal theory of personality, a theory of man as free and separate and related to a rich and complicated world from which, as a moral being, he has much to learn.”

Murdoch insisted that we needed to rediscover 'a respect for the contingent'; that is, the Novel, in order to attain its fullest expression as an art form, must be hospitable to imperfection, incompleteness; and discard any notion of closure, pattern, formal neatness. “We must turn our attention away from the consoling dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards the real impenetrable human person.” ('Against Dryness', 1961)

Contingency, as Murdoch understood it, finds its sublime apogee in the great Russian novelists, Tolstoy chief among them: “...since reality is incomplete, art must not be too afraid of incompleteness”; and it is the profound inaccessibility of the souls of other people, their habit of slipping free of the snares of pure behaviourism and psychologism ('motive', in the kind of fiction Murdoch approves of, being thus a chimera and delusion), that the Novel ought to be engaged with. In Tolstoy, as in Shakespeare, the characters peopling their work are ineluctably, unapologetically themselves. And we have the sense that they somehow resist the puppetry of the author...

The suspension of analysis, that would reduce a human being to a set of clearly intelligible – if fatally reductive – sigils of selfhood, and would deny the 'opacity of persons': for Murdoch, the acceptance of the otherness of the other enjoined on us by great fiction is much akin to the experience of love.

Now, as James Wood has pointed out, Murdoch's practice as a novelist herself falls short of this philosophical ideal, this 'Atlantis of the mind'. She issues a counsel of perfection that, in her own fiction, she fails to meet. (Reading her novels today, one is struck by how mannered, how weirdly stylised and theme-cramped they are: indeed, how masque-like.) Wood cites her 'excessive Platonic scrupulosity' as perhaps the cause of Murdoch's lapse and the aesthetic flaws of her work. Her characters are afflicted by a kind of histrionic diabolism – they lurch from spiritual crisis to spiritual crisis, they are afire with otherworldly mysticism or broken on the wheel of moral abjection. Her prose seems to function in the classic realist manner, its austerity almost painful; but Murdoch is less interested in examining the ordinary than in hauling her characters over the existential coals. Indeed the typical Murdochian novel thrashes about in its hyperreality, and her philosophical concerns are never far from the surface.

For Murdoch, if literature is to succeed qua art it must dispense with any consolatory pleasures; and it “..must always represent a battle between real people and images..” But, with the best will in the world, it isn't easy to find 'real' people populating her novels. Martyrs and psychopaths, hierophants and holy fools, yes – but real? Murdoch's was a deeply divided creative sensibility. Each of her novels, to some degree, was a hamstrung compromise between roman à thèse and conventional plot-driven narrative, characterful and coherent. Each seems asphyxiated by the dense wadding of philosophy. Fascinating though they are, they exist in another dimension, shying from the banalities of life. James Wood remarks that “...it is frustrating, if one cares about English fiction, to see a novelist so well-equipped artistically, skidding around on this hard philosophical ice.” Things as they are,/Are changed upon the blue guitar...

Realism – or things are they are, unmolested by programme and undistracted by philosophical inquiry. James Wood regrets Iris Murdoch's failure to grasp the distinction between aesthetic and philosophical, and there's something rather touching about that. The novels are 'hapless enactments of philosophy', and Wood means for us to regard Murdoch in the light of a thwarted idealist, one in whom the brittle deliverances of a fiction attentive to the textures of the real are stifled by the professional philosopher's bad habits. “Perhaps her novels are the aesthetic sacrifices to her stern metaphysics?” That she enrolls Tolstoy to her ethical vision, as the greatest exemplar of a process through which “an enriching and deepening of concepts ... moral progress takes place”, is instructive – Tolstoy seen in his essential religiosity, the bearded pentateuchal patriarch of his last years, and not the Tolstoy of whom Virginia Woolf can write, in her essay 'The Russian Point of View':

Nothing seems to escape him. Nothing glances off him unrecorded. Nobody, therefore, can so convey the excitement of sport, the beauty of horses, and the all the fierce desirability of the world to the senses of a strong young man. Every twig, every feather sticks to his magnet. He notices the blue or red of a child's frock; the way a horse shifts itself tail; the sound of a cough; the action of a man trying to put his hands into pockets that have been sewn up. And what his infallible eye reports of a cough or a trick of the hands his infallible brain refers to something hidden in the character, so that we know his people, not only by the way they love and their views on politics and the immortality of the soul, but also by the way they sneeze and choke.

This is exquisitely put, and James Wood, I'm sure, would very much approve. Woolf says more about Tolstoy the novelist in a paragraph than poor Iris Murdoch, feverishly flipping the Zener cards of speculative philosophy, can muster in all her critical writings. “Life dominates Tolstoy,” Woolf goes on, “as the soul dominates Dostoevsky. There is always at the centre of all the brilliant and flashing petals of the flower this scorpion, 'Why live?'” Besides Murdoch's anaemic vagueness about Tolstoy saying “that art was an expression of the religious perception of the age..”, Woolf's delight in the power of seeing, in the Conradian faith in making you see, stands as comprehensive and persuasive a reason as any to believe that literary realism isn't the dead letter some would maintain. The fierce desirability of the world to the senses...

Iris Murdoch's fiction – in spite of its peculiar dramatic intensities - feels less than fully realized to us because of the absence of specificity she grants to her worlds. Her characters are ghosts in the machine of her philosophical investigations. A.S. Byatt has written, more forgivingly, that the Murdochian novel “stands beside realism, a papery charade indicating in riddles what it is not doing, but is intensely concerned with.” The Black Prince – the work Byatt discusses - “is best read as a fable about the difficulties of realism, or truth-telling.” Perhaps Wood is wrong to reprove Murdoch for failing to settle comfortably into the realist mode, because she is too self-conscious a thinker not to grasp how troublesome that mode can be. She is a renegade realist, a fabulist at heart, straying into zones beyond the strict boundaries of the form, viewing the novel from without. Blaming her for not writing as a 'straight' realist must then be like blaming a golf ball for not being a vegetable. But, for James Wood, uncomplicatedly, the measure of aesthetic success remains the felt proximity to the world and its devices. Murdoch was simply too infected by thought and the rarefied crossmess parzel of metaphysics – the novel as donnish parlour game – to come to the mark.

II

Literary realism isn't, James Wood asserts, in cultural receivership. Rather, it supplies the ground to all the types of its contraries - be they never so ready to reject any debt, or disavow realism as 'stuffy, correct, unprogressive'. Writing of Gogol, Wood holds that “'realism' is beautifully flexible and longeval, and has always contained within it, as a single note contains its harmonics, its potential mixtures. Realism produces surrealism; it funds its own defaulters.” Wood emerged in the nineties as a critic at odds with the reigning cultural atmosphere. His two essay collections, The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self, introduced a voice that was neither mustily academic nor meretriciously 'cool': measured, serious, with a spidery intelligence that can nimbly explore the pitted surfaces of a text.

Abandoning the 'mephitic kindergarten' (Gore Vidal) of the Cambridge English Faculty, Wood instead worked for the Guardian, as literary editor of The New Republic, and, today, as staff writer for The New Yorker. Ready to accept the risks and rewards of the freelancer, he struck out with a series of deeply involved pieces that make typical newspaper reviewery seem like thin gruel. The publication of The Broken Estate suggested that, however much the naysayers might complain, literary criticism – the real deal, an activity which enhances and adds to the work it examines – still had true viability beyond the academy. (Henry James's absolutism on this score is telling: “The critical sense is so far from frequent that it is absolutely rare, and the possession of the cluster of qualities that minister to it is one of the highest distinctions ... In this light one sees the critic as the real helper of the artist, a torch-bearing outrider, the interpreter, the brother.”) Wood raised the stakes: it seemed that it had become possible once more for literary journalism to find a receptive audience and speak to it au sérieux.

Much of this rests on the gravity of Wood's themes. The Broken Estate declares itself as a study of the dialectical movement between religious belief and literary belief. At some point in the nineteenth century, Wood argues, the immemorial concordat between the message of the Gospels – as revealed truth – and an orphaned humanity was shattered. Yet the impulses animating this former 'estate' remained, and it fell to literature and art to respond to them. The Bible was reinterpreted as an anthology of fables, a verbal artifact. Flaubert elevated style to a religious obligation. Subtly aphoristic in his introduction, Wood nudges us toward an understanding of the upshot of this shift: “The gentle request to believe is what makes fiction so moving... This is surely the true secularism of fiction – why, despite its being a kind of magic, it is actually the enemy of superstition, the slayer of religions, the scrutineer of falsity... Fiction moves in the shadow of doubt...” Which is to say, there will be no glib certainties in the very best fiction, nothing doctrinaire, nothing coercive – it prosecutes its effects on us by the mildest of trickeries, by soliciting our credence, by wooing us with plausibilities, not by extorting it from us. Wood persuades, perhaps, because of this unassuming tack. Unlike an F.R. Leavis, say, there will be no bullying into compliance. We must orientate ourselves toward literature and life sceptically but openly.

Ford Madox Ford once echoed Wood's insistence that 'realism' is the enabler and final guarantor of all the other varieties of fictive art: “... Lord Dunsany imagines himself to be in revolt against realism ... He does nothing of the sort of course, since he is one of the chief realists of them all. He is so much of a realist that he produces an effect of mysticism; just as his countryman who is thinking of filling the old pig with buckshot produces an effect of thinking of the cold way of the stars. This is not a paradox; it is part of the whole scheme of art and of the way art works.”

Wood's conviction of the vital utility of fiction is bracing, if defiantly old-fashioned. His prose, while sharply precise, with a suppleness that never falters into laxity, positions itself somewhere among the belle-lettrists of an earlier age. Little wonder, then, that the blogosphere has rounded on Wood, and he has borne the brunt of such snarkishness from certain quarters that it's fairly easy to feel that a lot of the grandstanding snidery and 'masculinist anti-intellectualism' comes from those threatened, in some obscure way, by him. (Some responses so wrong-headed it's hard to know what to say in reply: "If this is the remaining legacy of the 'great tradition' of British literary criticism [or American, for that matter], better that we should refuse it." Oh, really...) In the capping section of How Fiction Works, Wood quotes two contemporary opinions on realism, Rick Moody and the litblog 'The Elegant Variation'. (Although I ought to point out that Mark Sarvas, proprietor of TEV, is an admirer of Wood.) Both are of the view that the realist novel is a limping Rosinante of a form. Both suggest that it is reactionary, moribund and basically irrelevant. “This,” Wood replies, “is more or less nonsense.”

III

Wood's latest, How Fiction Works, is a handbook of practical criticism - “casting a critic's eye over the business of creation”. Ten chapters, each composed of short numbered paragraphs; it forms, also, something of an appendix to the earlier books, in that much of its matter will be familiar to readers of Wood (I'd almost written 'fans'), and many of the interpretative moves can be found more expansively in his criticism proper. Wood asks us to think of it as a contemporary revision of E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel. (Ford Madox Ford spluttered over the 'tea cup clattering disquisitions' that Forster indulges himself in: “He cites an immense number of second-rate English novelists and jests over them for all the world like a contributor to Punch making fun of his own children for the benefit of the public.”) Wood, mercifully, isn't quite as niminy-piminy as Forster. His faith in literary realism's capacity for most meaningfully engaging with human experience carries over from the essays. To educate a reader in the 'forms of attention' (Frank Kermode) through which we deepen our maiden apprehension of literature as connected to the world, to our experience of it, as the preeminent means of understanding it: this is Wood's project.

Familiarise yourself with Wood's criticism and you come soon enough to recognise his touchstones: Flaubert, Tolstoy, Italo Svevo, Knut Hamsen, Henry Green, among others. They reappear in How Fiction Works, as those novelists best able to give verbal definition to the textures of real life, to the 'mind's creases', and who acknowledge the final unknowability of the self.

Technically it has been through the development of the Free Indirect Style – and the artful deployment thereof – that the novel emerged as the bel wether of literary forms: it “brings us closer to the characters,” says Wood, “letting us, if only for a minute, inhabit the wilderness of their souls.” He sets the greatest store by writers who make use of it most adroitly, without obtruding their own voices. The reader eavesdrops but does not quite fully occupy a character's mind as one might stream-of-consciousness. The shuttling perceptions and observations of the character blend with the récit. The effect, thus, is that of intermitted intimacy: truer to our oblique, imperfect experience of other people; less self-consciously written than Joycean monologue intérieur. For such subtlety Wood cherishes high realism. Its being comfortable with lacunae, too, as Wood illustrates in his discussions, here and elsewhere, of Chekhov, who spells nothing out, who liberated fiction from authorial tinkering and let it breathe. Wood further argues that the great novelist is a 'first-class noticer', skilled at plucking from the shapelessness of the phenomenal world details which illumine and are themselves promissory notes for the authenticity of the fiction. Now, at first blush none of this seems exceptionable. Close reading is the means by which the reader proves his mettle, after all. And Wood wants to school us in attentiveness to the wrinkles and purls of a narrative, of style and characterisation. The feverish busyness of what he's called 'hysterical realism' – with its promiscuously inventive energy and bustle – really only distracts from the matter in hand. For Wood to read a novel is a kind of secular sacrament; and the spectral traces of the devotional habit are everywhere in his criticism.

Yet How Fiction Works – read alongside the earlier works – feels thinner, less engaged, written left-handedly. This by no means slights Wood's commitment to the business of criticism. (There's been a suspicious rash of such slender 'how-to' manuals of late, from Terry Eagleton's How to Read Poetry to Tom Paulin's Secret Life of Poems.) It may simply be that by far the better instances of his practice are to be found in The Broken Estate and The Irresponsible Self: we've been spoilt. His publisher left a certain hostage to fortune by billing it Wood's 'first full-length critical study'. It is nothing of the sort, which isn't to say that How Fiction Works somehow bombs... The same delight in mastery radiates from the page, the same joyous thrill over the excellences to be discovered in the most accomplished fiction. But it's a minor matter of regret that Wood hadn't quite the nerve to stray far from territory covered before, and more thoroughly and interestingly, at that.

Fiction – the most maturely realised, the most exemplary – transacts between artifice and verisimilitude. The novelist shapes his fiction principally by selection of detail, regulation of tempo, and so on. The proposition, however, seems drably obvious, the merest truism. Might it be a cause for concern, that our instincts for decoding the strategies of narrative writing have become so attenuated, that Wood needs to point it out? (I myself first came across the Free Indirect Style at sixteen, reading Stephen King – I hadn't the term for the technique, but I identified it as such...)

In his much-debated essay 'Hysterical Realism' Wood invokes what he calls the 'Sun King principle': “An excess of storytelling has become the contemporary way of shrouding, in majesty, a lack.” The hyperactive carnivalesque of such writers as Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie and Zadie Smith – Wood believes – conceals an essential nullity in the heart of their enterprise. To be 'merely' human doesn't seem quite enough for their characters, they are to be vivid rushes of vacant self-display. “The big contemporary novel,” Wood goes on, “is a perpetual motion machine that appears to have been embarrassed into velocity. It seems to want to abolish stillness, as if ashamed of silence.” He bids us to reflect on the work of fiction with the same untroubled calm as one might contemplate the light in a Vermeer interior. And it is in the finely-graded parity between technique and the actual, the infinitely subtle approximations of reality as we experience it, that Wood finds the measure of the novelist's artistry. Hysterical realism hurries us away from actuality - indeed, it throws a bag over our heads and bundles us into the boot of a car...

Against the rogue energies of hysterical realism Wood places his own gold standard: “life on the page, life brought to different life...” Nor 'lifelikeness', but lifeness. It tutors us to sharpen and enrich our responses to the world of which we are tenants, responses otherwise dulled by habit. How Fiction Works honours this, but cagily. 'Life' assumes the transcendental authority accorded, in former ages, to the Godhead; and, in a sense, resists inquiry. “He found the world to be as deeply evasive as he was himself,” Wood notes in 'What Chekhov Meant By Life', “ - life as a tree of separate hanging stories, of dangling privacies. For him a story did not merely begin in enigma, but ended in enigma too.” ('Knowable unknowability', as Morgan Meis neatly puts it.) Wood is attracted to a kind of aesthetic reticence, above all else. 'Lifeness' exacts from us patience, attention and imaginative pliancy.

götterdämmerung v2.0

2008-02-12T16:54:00.002Z

Neil Gaiman – American Gods

[Available free online at HarperCollins.com through the month of March]

So richly imagined, so moving, so awesome in conception yet so intimate: Neil Gaiman's American Gods confirms the man in his brilliance, and the 'New Weird' tag - China Mieville? Jeff Vandermeer? - as something to prize and take very seriously, indeed.

Anticipated, perhaps, by Hermes in Paris by Peter Vansittart, and, earlier still, Heine's 'Gods in Exile', American Gods is a tale of deities hors de combat. This, from Heine:

They found themselves in the alarming and dire need which they had suffered in the primevally early time, at that revolutionary epoch when the Titans, bursting the bounds of Orcus and piling Pelion on Ossa, stormed Olympus. The unfortunate gods were compelled to take to ignominous fight, and hid themselves in all disguises among us here on earth... Yes, under that shabby overcoat, and in that sober shopman's form, the most brilliant and youthful of the heathen deities, the craft son of Maia, is disguised. On that three-cornered hat there is not the least sign of a feather which could recall the wings of his divine head-covering, and the heavy shoes with steel buckles do not at all suggest pinioned sandals' this heavy Dutch lead is different from the mobile quicksilver to which the god gave a name, but the very contrast betrays the identity, and the god chose this disguise to be the more securely concealed.

The novel's hero – Shadow, whose real name, though significant, is never explicitly given in the book – finds himself propelled from the get-go into a miasma of mysteries. An ex-con and cuckold, adrift in the rootlessness of modern American life, Shadow falls under the spell of Mr Wednesday, a grifter and flim-flam man – grinning “like a fox eating shit from a barbed wire fence” - with great things on his mind. He retains Shadow as a fixer and scout, dispatching him across America on obscure errands. A storm is coming, Wednesday finally confides. A battle between the Old Gods and the New. Shadow must assist him in rounding up the refugees of the divine diaspora: emigrants in the minds of those who travelled to America from the old world, now lost in the vastness of the land, ignored and diminished. Shadow discovers he is more deeply implicated in all this than he could ever have known. Myth and magic are threatened with extinction by the vanguards of modernity – technology, the media. A 21st century Ragnarok is in the offing.

Mythology and memetics: in Gaiman's 'meta-mythos', the Gods' existence is contingent on humanity's willingness to entertain them, and to worship them. In transit from the old world they lurked in the deep memories of men, as small prayers and nursery rhymes. Most of those who crossed the ocean are hidden, like Heine's Mercury, among an indifferent populace. They make their way as panhandlers and prostitutes. In such reduced circumstances, they're humiliated and sapped of their power. (Gaiman, in a series of inset pieces throughout the book, marvellously tells of their former potency.) The sequence toward the end of the novel, where the gods assemble at the designated 'place of power' – Rock City, Georgia – an ill-assorted bunch of vagrants, is especially impressive.

Gaiman's work is marked generally by its charm and ingenuity: he is a storyteller of almost boundless imaginative resourcefulness. (His short story collection Fragile Things is a handy primer, opening with a wonderful synthesis – a mash-up, if you will - of Conan Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft; and concluding with a novella sequel to American Gods.)

Finally, Gaiman understands the luminous provisionality of myth and religion, its close binding kinship with the subjunctive mood:

None of this can actually be happening. If it makes you more comfortable, you could simply think of it as metaphor. Religions are, by definition, metaphors, after all: God is a dream, a hope, a woman, an ironist, a father, a city, a house of many rooms, a watchmaker who left his prize chronometer in the desert, someone who loves you – even, perhaps, against all evidence, a celestial being whose only interest is to make sure your football team, army, business, or marriage thrives, prospers and triumphs over all opposition.

the age of vanished normalcy

2008-02-07T18:39:00.002Z

Martin Amis – The Second Plane

James Wood, coolly disparaging Jonathan Franzen's ambition to write the Great American Novel, suggests “..that whatever the novel gets up to, the 'culture' can always get up to something bigger. Ashes defeat garlands.” After September 11th, 2001, a claim such as Franzen makes in The Corrections that “..current affairs in general were more muted or insipid nowadays... But disasters of this magnitude [the Great Depression] no longer seem to befall the United States..”, is, for Wood, 'sadly archival'.

In this assembly of essays prompted by the 9/11 attacks, Martin Amis riffs on much the same theme passim. He has been on the receiving end of a great deal of invective in recent months – Terry Eagleton and Ronan Bennett weighing-in early, followed by other, lesser lights – and much of it has savoured of the kind of ill-natured resentment against one who refuses to stay ideologically on-message. Amis's departure from the broadly left-liberal consensus (more with regard to Islamism and the War on Terror, than Iraq or Palestine) has left him vulnerable to the charge of racism from old stagers like Eagleton and of Islamophobia from the likes of Safraz Mansoor.

Setting aside this particular quarrel for a moment: Amis argues, much in the vein of James Wood, than contemporary fiction – by which we might as well mean the Novel – has been roundly hobbled by the September massacre. A leitmotiv of The Second Plane is precisely the way in which the novelist has been unmanned, his thematic resources suddenly punctured and bled dry: “The so-called work-in-progress had been reduced, overnight, to a blue streak of autistic babble.” Amis the Nabokovian aesthete – for whom the leaden phrase is anathema – now must reexamine the entire bias of his creative life. Pointedly, mournfully he notes that his 'By the Same Author' page “..as an additional belittlement, ended with a book called The War Against Cliché. I thought: actually we can live with 'bitter cold' and 'searing heat' and the rest of them. We can live with cliché. What we have to do now, more testingly, is live with war.” An extraordinary reorientation, for a writer so immaculately devoted to stylistic felicity, to the cleansing of the lexis.

Amis implies that the aborted novella – 'The Unknown Known' – withered under the circumambient pressure current events had brought to bear on us. Perhaps so. He further hints at a deeper existential crisis, one evidenced by this creative arrest. The dark matter of essential human impotence coalesces around much of Amis's recent writing. He is foundering – languidly, maybe – on the realisation that he could, once, with assurance, insist that literature offered “something tangible to venerate: something boundless, beautiful, and divinely bright.” - yet no longer, not with the same utopian confidence. The 'moral crash' entrained by 9/11 may yet have fatally undermined this blithe position; and Amis has increasingly struggled to countenance this possibility. Don DeLillo's (oft-quoted) remark in Mao II enshrines an insight that seems to have rattled Amis:

There's a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence.... Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.

This should not be so, Amis hisses from every page of this book; this is a category error, a deviancy on which we should bend our fullest attention.

Drawing on Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, Amis mocks the architect of modern Islamism, Sayyid Qutb: a demented mediocrity who, in common with other demagogues and venomous cranks, considered himself something of an homme de lettres. The implication, never so openly stated but there nonetheless, is that bad writing begets tyranny and murder... Literary hackwork and totalitarian thought are kissing cousins. Qutb's masterpiece, the Islamist's Mein Kampf and titled – rather blandly – Milestones, is a compendium of paranoia, misogyny, sexual loathing, and megalomania; and it handily supplied the emotional dynamic of political Islam as we have it today. Amis the literary maximalist no doubt balks at the fact that such a dingy tome should exert such global influence. The finest of fine writing might receive critical plaudits in the book pages, perhaps the odd award: the most dismally execrable reactionary boilerplate sets the tone of geopolitics in the new century.

The Second Plane will bait Amis's detractors even further than his utterances have already. They will sneer at his presumption, they will denounce him as a metropolitan dilettante. They will call foul on his ironic 'flirtation' with Tony Blair in one of the pieces here... But Amis's is a considered position, without doubt deeply held. If he is to be respected and admired for it at all, it must be for his candour and the honesty of his conviction that literature, as a distinct humanising force, as a vehicle for the better understanding of our predicament, matters, and that there are agencies at work in the world which would, if they could, dismantle – no, annihilate – all that the principles of culture and freedom rest upon.

shakespeare's skeleton-key fable

2008-02-06T16:59:00.003Z

Ted Hughes - Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being

Something unheimlich, something obscurely offensive to the sentinels of the British literary establishment, about Ted Hughes... Academic managerialism with its Gradgrindian literal-mindedness gibs at this shaman-poet, as the broad response to his critical epic Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being illustrates. A batch of letters fired off by Hughes after the first reviews appeared in the spring of 1992 insist on his anger at the obtuseness of the response: the Cambridge don Eric Griffiths (a 'taught starling', 'straightjacketted in the English Tripos') is swatted aside, John Carey snubbed for the rest of Hughes's life. The 'scholarly howl of indignation' now seems to reflect worse on the reviewers.

Hughes had had the effrontery to stray into their kitchen garden and do something indelicate among the kohlrabi. Perhaps only in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria do we have a work of sustained criticism that succeeds in beating the bounds of discourse and in augmenting its subject. The critical endeavour is so much more than the sum of its footnotes. And perhaps only a poet could have written Hughes's Shakespearean study. It incarnates an intuition central to his work as a whole: that the creative imagination can be engaged with only as something untameable, unsocialised, as a bodily imperative than leaps beyond fashion and taste; that it somehow actuates the deepest – preverbal – impulses of the human.

Hughes was fascinated by dispatches from the outer reaches of psychology and anthropology; he was a student of Frazerian mythography, and it was in Robert Graves's The White Goddess that he found his first sacred book. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being invites its reader to undertake a thought experiment – to read against the grain, counter-intuitively, even – and allow, for a while, that the plays and poems share a common psychic germ-cell, one that can be lain bare and sketched out in a kind of extended metaphysical écorché: an ur-narrative, a 'skeleton-key fable'. Hughes wrote elsewhere (in the long essay 'Myths, Metres, Rhythms') of the “gulfs of emptiness that [can] open up beneath very slight frowns of bafflement”, as two conceptual systems (think Stephen Jay Gould's 'nonoverlapping magisteria') graze their flanks against one another, generating only mutual friction and discomfort.

Hughes's Shakespeare gestated over a period of decades, emerging, as the Letters show, from discussions with the director Donya Feuer, and later still, in the Introduction to a Faber selection of the poetry. The fable – the Great Theme – of Shakespeare's drama is “a perfect example of the ancient Universal shamanistic dream of the call to the poetic or holy life”; and little wonder that the academic lictors have no time for it. Hughes trespasses and expropriates Heritage Shakespeare, transforming him, electrifyingly, into the high priest of a blood cult and witness to the apocalyptic rupture of the Reformation. History, for Hughes, is not a chronicle of diplomacy and statecraft, but a cockpit in which deep, autochthonous forces struggle to the death. At the heart of Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being burns the 'seismic response in suppressed Catholicism .. to the Elizabethan nightmare'. Hughes vigorously points up Shakespeare's peculiar sensitivity to the religio-political climate. Quite aside from the constant quest for preferment and professional recognition, catching the eye of a powerful patron, another impulse is at work, shaping and energizing the central nervous system that runs beneath the mere dramatic apparatus, the equipage of plot and character.

Shakespeare's entrepreneurial brilliance – in both the creative and practical sense – extends, for Hughes, into the wholesale plundering of the myth-kitty, not simply for decorative purposes, but for the deeper spiritual matrix it opens up. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being proves a frightening book, massy and dense and obsessive: a 'sort of musical adaptation, a song', with the plays 'a single titanic work, like an Indian epic, the same gods battling through their reincarnations, in a vast, cyclic Tragedy of Divine Love'. It takes a certain magnificent brazenness to suggest that Shakespeare's Complete Works operates on the scale and complexity of the Mahabarata. Hughes was an eagle among the dovecots, indeed.

nemesis of faith

2007-06-26T14:28:00.000+01:00

Christopher Hitchens – God is not Great

If religion were a necessary element of human life – a hard-wired neurological epiphenomenon that brought with it order, psychic hygiene and social cohesion, private comfort and public benefit – then perhaps we could simply accept it as such, enjoy the advantages it confers on us, and ignore its flamboyant absurdities.

The spiritually-inclined will insist that it has been for us a source of precept and succour; enables us to box the moral compass, and satisfies a need to be reassured that our sublunary flounderings aren't wholly meaningless. If we all could live peaceably in a Betjemanian fantasy of gentle rites and hymnals, a flowery harmless Anglicanism (or regional variants thereof – Sufism, on the face of it, being equally attractive), mightn't we be rid finally of poverty and cruelty? So far, so via media.

By this reckoning organized religion serves at once as psychological poultice and societal solvent: useful, perhaps indispensable. A delusion it may be – a peculiarly robust one – yet still it functions as a benign form of spiritual welfarism. “Humankind cannot bear,” T.S. Eliot whispered from the depths of his own flight from experience, “very much reality.” We aren't so configured – as limited biological entities – to grasp the immensity of the universe. Each of us is a poor, bare, forked creature impaled on our finitude. Where does grandeur reside, save in contemplation of something bigger than ourselves?

Thus runs the broadly theistic line. By such imaginative shifts humanity ennobles itself, raises itself from the weariness, the fever and the fret of being in the world. Again this seems on the face of it pretty unexceptionable: a mechanism of evolutionary psychology, if you want to be rigorously positivistic about it.

Christopher Hitchens begs to differ. His barnstorming polemic God is not Great is written – dare I say it? - out of an apostolic fury, an upwelling of frustration at the persistence of the religious mentality (which Hitchens exposes as no more than a reflex of power-obsession). Salman Rushdie's knighthood this week re-ignited calls from the Muslim world for his execution as blasphemer and apostate. The argument initiated with such spittle-flecked rage and mob histrionics on the publication of The Satanic Verses in 1989 hasn't really been won or lost in the intervening years. The murderous fatwa issued by the Ayatollah Khomenei has proved, further, not to have been merely some 'black swan event' (as the meme of the moment would have it). It signaled, in fact, a permanent revolution, processing slowly but steadily across the turn of the century. Religion poisons everything, Hitchens epigrammatizes the theme of his book. That's about the sum total of it. L'affaire Rushdie hasn't simply wound down and disappeared, and still provokes so chilling a response – orchestrated, largely for political ends, by the mullahs, who command congregations of thousands – that it mightn't be too much to suggest a certain timeliness in Hitchen's effort. With the disintegration of the Communist bloc, the forces of Counter-Enlightenment have retrenched and rearmed. Death cults and supremacist creeds are back on the agenda.

Not merely Voltairean anti-clericalism, then: but a root and branch rejection of the very claim of the truth of religion. Hitchens presses home the fatuity of faith; he doesn't simply rail against the fraudulence of priestcraft, for example (a soft target), but against the case for any metaphysical warrant to human activity. We can marvel that, after the labours of nineteenth century biblical scholars such as David Strauss and Ernest Renan – who settled the question once and for all of the historicity of the Bible and its time-bound, man-made nature – there are many millions of literalists who still credit the reality of the Fall. Tartuffisme remains as much a staple for today's satirists as for Moliere; and we know how venal Chaucer's Pardoner was. But Hitchens, the scourge of the credulous, seems to accept Freud's insight that religion will endure for as long as we are afraid of death. (Freud, some would suggest, was as much a juju-man as any priest; his philosophy as questionable as that of any of the Church Fathers...)

I can well imagine a believer bridling at his condescension here. A member of an educated cosmopolitan elite sneering at the lackwit naivety of those not so well-favoured by circumstance. Recall H.L. Mencken's reporting from Dayton, Tennessee, where 'they tried the infidel Scopes': “In the big cities of the Republic, despite the endless efforts of consecrated men, [evangelical Christianity] is laid up with a wasting disease.” Hitchens might appropriately have attached these remarks of Mencken's to the flyleaf of God is not Great:

Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of faith and hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him, or, I may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable. Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the end he may even come to sympathize with God. The old idea of fatherhood here submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well, is it any less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, yet failing?

This, quoted in its entirety, Mencken calls the Doubter's Reward. (A far saner, more honest counter to Pascal's wager.) Hitchens goes about elaborating on it, illustrating its rightness: a mild and reasonable disposition setting itself in contrast to the intolerance and vulgarity of the religiose. Religion is totalitarian in a sense easily overlooked by those hypnotized by its apparent benignity and specious solace; and Hitchens time and again returns to this awkward datum.

Mencken wrote his article 'The Hills of Zion' (about his sojourn among 'the Dayton illuminati' during the Scopes trial) “on a roaring hot Sunday afternoon in a Chattanooga hotel room, naked above the waist and with only a pair of BVDs below.” (Hard to visualize C.S. Lewis composing one of his stale humourless apologetics in a similar condition.) The point, I suppose, is that the Doubters and secularists, in their acceptance of our creaturely nature, seem more congenial than the bloodless ascetics – invariably repressed, frigid, humanly stunted – ever could be.

Hitchens and Mencken are brothers-in-arms, both in their impassioned advocacy of secularism and in the way their prose rises to a furor loquendi when targeting the pious frauds of modern theocracy. Indeed, Hitchens retreads certain of Mencken's broadsides, as when the latter, in an article of 1924, 'The Cosmic Secretariat', demolishes in a paragraph the concept of Argument from Design, '..once the bulwark of Christian apologetics', now once more on the scene in the guise of Intelligent Design and 'irreducible complexity':

The more, indeed, the theologian seeks to prove the wisdom and omnipotence of God by His works, the more he is dashed by the evidences of divine incompetence and stupidity that the advance of science is constantly turning up. The world is not actually well run; it is very badly run, and no Huxley was needed to labor the obvious fact. The human body, very cunningly designed in some details, is cruelly and senselessly bungled in other details, and every reflective first-year medical student must notice a hundred ways to improve it...

Mencken's impatience with 'high and ghostly matters' sounds throughout his writings on American religion; and it is an exuberant contempt that animates them; as much for the duncery of red-neck Holy Rollers of the Midwest as for those who encourage them. Hitchens tends to be rather more measured, his reasoning forensic. Yet dismantling the scholastic conceit of the Argument from Design is merely busywork for him – a demonstration that he has the intellectual acuity to meet the religious on each and every point. God is not Great becomes something altogether more powerful, something operating on another plane of regard, when Hitchens comes to reflect on the ethical deformities wrought, more often than not on the vulnerable, by the religious mindset.

To wit, religion is the cruellest instrument of tyranny devised by mankind, and every sacred text a sadist's charter. “To 'choose' dogma and faith over doubt and experiment,” Hitchens says, “is to throw out the ripening vintage and to reach greedily for the Kool-Aid.” (The allusion to Jonestown echoes faintly but definitely through the book: church fetes and ritualistic suicide lie on the same continuum.) Hitchens bangs away at the point – religion and its various impedimenta, from the Book of Common Prayer to the putative bones of saints, are inarguably human inventions. Organized religion is an elaborate contrivance; an imposture set in train by those intent on acquiring and maintaining power. It embeds servility and self-hatred, enslaves people by the millions. The moreso in the 21st century. (Nazism was shot through with pagan myth; Stalinism, ostensibly expunging superstition from society, was nonetheless a political religion – complete with votaries and its god-king).

Hitchens can barely conceal his bewilderment that it should still exert any kind of authority. Astronomy and cosmology have given us intelligible pictures of the universe of far greater magnificence than any hopespun creation myth. Yet the intellectual affront represented by religion rankles with Hitchens most steadily throughout the book: true, the scandal of female genital mutilation and the appalling waste of grindingly corrosive sectarian conflict engage him, and with total conviction; but Hitchens seems most exercised by the deep, unreflecting idiocy of it, perhaps as much as anything else.

“Above all,” Hitchens perorates, “we are in need a of renewed Enlightenment, which will base itself on the proposition that the proper study of mankind is man, and woman.” John Gray, in his Straw Dogs, dismisses the form of humanism here described by Hitchens as a 'secular inversion of Christianity'. But religion simply hasn't a monopoly on human decency. Hitchens regards past, present and future conflicts between free inquiry and religious dogma as essentially a collision between the literal and the ironic mind. In this regard he essentially proposes a syncretic lumping-together of Comtean positivism and Socratic intellectual freewheeling. In God is Not Great Christopher Hitchens mounts “..a defence of secular pluralism and of the right not to believe or be compelled to believe.” It is, he concludes, “..an urgent and inescapable responsibility: a matter of survival.”

the mind at serious play

2007-06-10T12:03:00.004+01:00

Clive James – Cultural Amnesia

Even a glancing, sidewise acquaintance with Clive James's earlier collections – from The Meaning of Recognition to Even as We Speak, and further back still, In the Land of Shadows and The Metropolitan Critic – won't quite prepare you for this.

The aficianado will already have sensed that James was a closet aspirant to high seriousness: the critic-at-large as snapper-up of unconsidered trifles on the one hand – or perhaps dasher-off of populist bagatelles (James, until his retirement from mainstream broadcasting a few years ago, introduced us to 'Endurance' and Margarita Pracatan) – and, on the other, the admirer of Montale and Pushkin, Grub Street's most egregious, unembarrassed polymath manning the watchtower even as the tabloidisation of British culture proceeded apace. Inevitably – yet not without a certain defensive stiffening - James insists that these distinct writerly selves do indeed finally embrace on some deeper level. “..I was often criticized in my turn for talking about the construction of a poem and of a Grand Prix racing car, or of treating gymnasts and high divers ... as if they were practising the art of sculpture. It was a sore point, and often the sore point reveals where the real point is.”

Humanism was a particularized but unconfined concern with all the high-quality products of the creative impulse, which could be distinguished from the destructive one by its propensity to increase the variety of the created world rather than reduce it.

James has always been intellectually peregrine. The excursions into TV-land - the realm of (financial) necessity – have always been offset by cautiously rationed furloughs into the kingdom of freedom – the Arts, creativity, Studia humanitatis. But he has consistently sought to allow dignity to both. In Cultural Amnesia James offers thoughtful, penetrating observations on Paul Celan and Dick Cavett, Thomas Mann and the director Michael Mann – all are accorded respect, and the overdone binarism of high versus low culture made to seem beside the point. James has written elsewhere of his admiration for The West Wing and The Sopranos, arguing that excellence needn't be dependent on the exaltedness of the medium. (Orwell, it will be remembered, was a fan of Donald McGill.) 'High-quality products of the creative impulse' sounds almost like the coinage of an advertising copywriter; but James means that we take it literally, and that even the humblest of created things contributes, in a very real sense, to moral enlargement, human flourishing and, finally, hope.

An abecedarium of forbidding scope, Cultural Amnesia is formatted straightforwardly: from Anna Akhmatova to Stefan Zweig, we have short essays arranged alphabetically by subject, each prefaced by a capsule biography. James doesn't limit himself to discussing the lives and works of these figures. In many instances they serve as a speculative wicket-gate into musings on other matters: the piece on Lichtenberg becomes an occasion for James's meditations on pornography; Sir Thomas Browne gifts him with a pretext to discuss book titles. Cultural Amnesia – with its air of summary, of being a retrospective on the growth of a critic's mind – might suggest to us an implicit relation to Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, but James nominates its principal model as Egon Friedell's Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit: “A fabulous effort of style and concentration, a prestidigitator's trick box packed with epigrammatic summaries of all the creativity in every field of art and science since the Renaissance, a prose epic raised to the level of poetry.” Hypertrophied commonplace-book or the product of a lifetime's earnest application?

Your opinion possibly depends on whether you take James at his own estimation. He reaches for the modesty topos often enough to prompt a suspicion that only the most considerable of egotists could even have conceived of this book. It could so easily have been 'Western Civ for Dummies', a Cook's tour for the professional too hard pressed to do the cerebral grunt work: the essential dinner party bluffer's guide. It's to James's credit, then – no mean thing – that in each of these hundred-plus essays he doesn't stint on the hard thinking, assuming on his reader's part at least the barest stirrings of intellectual curiosity.

In his poem 'Egon Friedell's Heroic Death' James reflects, as so often he does in Cultural Amnesia, on the murderous collision between political tyranny and those 'enchanted spirits' who set the tone of an intellectual era:

The civilized are most so as they die.
He called a warning even as he fell
In case his body hit a passer-by
As innocent as was Egon Friedell.

The Audenesque quatrains, with their clipped jog-trot, conceal an almost unbearable anguish, and an ethical crux. “Would you have had the nerve to do the same?” James asks of Friedell's suicide; and this question appears to have bitten James to the marrow. He worries at it more in the essay on Friedell here collected. “[A] triumph for the human mind,' he reckons, perhaps glibly, in the poem. A 'wisely chosen suicide', he describes it in Cultural Amnesia; and in three words we have, like an impacted tooth, ultimacies of heartbreak and (for James) regret, and prescience (Friedell knew what the Anschluss would bring): if suicide for this gentle, dignified, scholarly man were the best available option, he must have had a shrewd, terrifying idea of what the alternative was to be. European cafe society entre deux guerres clearly emblematizes for James a world of the mind set free. (“In a city stiff with polymaths,' James admiringly notes, “he [Friedell] was the polymath's polymath.”) The Nazis set about turning it all to ash, and James would have us remember that so many of the alumni of the public sphere that Habermas chronicled were exterminated as much for their intellectual Freiheit as for their ethnicity. Impatient as James is with ideologies of whichever hue, he thus feels compelled to set up as a potent counter-instance the vibrant talk of the coffee-house habitues, in all its fleet-footed nimbleness, its gaiety and severity. In contrast to the sanguinary flensing of language performed by the demagogues, these men made it dance.

Friedell 'looms large in this book' – little known and little read, he shared a similar fate with another figure from the cultural life of twentieth-century Europe, one feted today yet perhaps more often read than understood.

Unexpectedly James gives short shrift to Walter Benjamin, type of the tragic Luftmensch and displaced intellectual. It takes a moment to grasp, when we finish the essay, just how extraordinary James's dismissal of Benjamin actually is. Academic theorists have been almost wholly uncritical of Benjamin's work. Its canonicity has gone unchallenged. Commentators have trembled in reverential awe before its 'multiplex cultural scope'; and if we were to single out a sacred text in our postmodern era, Illuminations would be it. Benjamin's Kabbalo-Marxism excites us with its world-historical sweep and the audacity of its formulations. Here is the real thing, the critic-as-sage, a visionary among the clerks. Of Benjamin's end James – with a hint of impatient snarkery – observes: “ He had devoted his career to pieces of paper with writing on them, but he didn't have the right one.” - the visa with which he might have escaped from Nazi territory. James takes issue with Benjamin's obscurantism: the 'velvet fog' of his prose. Reading between the lines it seems evident that James's problem with Benjamin is only tangentially related to the philosophy.

Benjamin enjoys a posthumous fame denied to others who, in James's view, were significantly more deserving. Egon Friedell, for one. James clearly agonizes over why he can impart the bays to Friedell, yet deny them to Benjamin. Both men were caught in the gearwork of homicidal history; both committed suicide when the only other course available to them was unimaginable. Both were steeped in the habitus (in Pierre Bourdieu's phrase) of a cosmopolitan, free-thinking Mitteleuropa that was the confirmed antitype of the totalitarian project: humanism as a precondition of survival.

One clue lies in James's stated contempt for the system-builders; and Benjamin was a systematizer, with too great a fondness for the programmatic. His work, as James has it, is a 'synopticon', simplifying, falsifying whatever is the case in the service of a theory. James responds to the whiff of fraudulence that hangs around Benjamin by arguing that there isn't 'a progressivist, humanitarian license for talking through a high hat.' Benjamin's perceptions may or may not have borne the stamp of authentic genius, but his prolixity and his instinct for over-elaboration succeeded only in robbing them of their point and specific density. In this regard James prefers the direct address of those, like Alfred Polgar, who wrote for a broader readership. Critics have been too readily beguiled by Benjamin's story. “As a critic devoted to the real, however,” James says, “Benjamin deserves the courtesy of not being treated as a hero in a melodrama.”

Fakery and charlatanism stand in this book as the incubi against which James directs his scorn. They squat over the Benjamin piece, and over, too, the brief essay on Jean-Paul Sartre: there, James's uncharacteristic contempt for Sartre's dissimulations and posturing takes fire. Sartre continued to vaunt the Soviet regime, even in the face of evidence that it annihilated dissenters by the million. Once more James chides one of his subjects for the 'blethery bathos' (as Gerard Manley Hopkins described the poetry of Swinburne) of his public pronouncements, the meaningless rhetorical blazon, gesture politics of the crassest kind. Sartre, in order to have fully realized his gifts, needed a reality check. Instead he brought the mandragora of popular celebrity to his lips and deadened his capacity to think ethically, to think honestly. Nor does James spare Robert Brasillach – a minor journalistic talent who prostituted himself to Nazi power, a craven anti-Semitic hack who, with Celine, connived in mass murder with his pen. All such figures, James insists, ought to have been beset – at least dimly, naggingly – by a bad conscience: none of them, on the face of it, did. Their reputations have been condignly marred.

In The Meaning of Recognition James was anxious to stress the distinction between unearned celebrity and genuine accomplishment. Or – if not stress it, to hammer it emphatically home, to make it plain. The “..mass-psychotic passion for celebrity .. is one of the luxurious diseases that Western liberal democracy will have to find a cure for in the long run...” James favours the obscure, and the obscurely heroic: and in a significant regard Cultural Amnesia is an act of retrieval, in which the vanished reputations of certain paladins of civilization – Gianfranco Contini, Marcel Reich-Ranicki – are granted a deserved reprieve from the dark backward and abysm of Time. Others – Nadezhda Mandelstam, Sophie Scholl – bore courageous witness to totalitarian nightmares. Might it be fair to suspect that James rather envies these people? Envies the scholarly brilliance and virtuosity of some, of course; but envies also the destinies of those exterminated by the regimes? Perhaps not. But their suffering lends a kind of legitimacy to their work, James implies, setting the seal on whatever moral authority they might lay claim to.

The book's sheer heft encourages slow reading. But its format makes for dippability. Nothing of its import would be lost were you to read it in haphazard order: if you were feeling a tad unresponsive to exquisitely refined aperçus on Proust, you'd still have the book in your hands in any case – glance over the essay on W.C. Fields instead. Themes shimmy centripetally; alarming yet plausible connections leap across time and context. For, in the final analysis, James is proposing no less than a cultural Unified Field Theory; and it must be common humanity and the 'rule of decency' that sustain us in our advance through our benighted times.

Fear not, though: the homme d'esprit of old still flits through these pages – James has the nous, when the mood calls for it, to forego the rise, the roll, the carol, the creation in favour of the snap, crackle and pop of the coolest wit in town. (He nails the longeurs of Gibbon's prose style thus: “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a Grand National with a fence every ten yards, each to be jumped backwards as well as forwards; and you have to carry your horse.” A balm in the Gilead of any failed attempt to yomp through Gibbon's epic.) James occupies a niche somewhere between Jacques Barzun and Peter Ustinov (Or maybe Jakob Burckhardt and Charles Lamb?). The high and low stylistic registers delightfully tangle: T.S. Eliot, after all, wrote a fan letter to Groucho Marks.

the philosopher of human possibility

2007-04-27T14:35:00.000+01:00

A.D. Nuttall – Shakespeare the Thinker

Language most shows a man: speak that I may see thee. - Ben Jonson

Shakespeare the thinker? Better say, Shakespeare the Bandersnatch. Nuttall's title is mischievous – Puckish, if you will – but lodged within it is a profound, unexpected idea. No suggestion that Shakespeare was a 'thinker' in the sense that Francis Bacon was a thinker, or Sir Thomas More. Root around for a systematic programme of 'thought' in the plays and you'll return empty-handed: this much is a truism. Rather, the late A.D. Nuttall, in this, his last study of the playwright, contends that the Shakespearean corpus can be read as an extended essay on the essential peculiarity of our being in the world.

Ted Hughes believed that the plays formed a coherent, mythopoeic whole: Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being – gloriously crackpot, unacademic, a rattle bag of unorthodox insight – unlocked the psycholinguistic genome buried within the poetry and plays, the Tragic Equation (as Hughes termed it) out of which the work sprang. Shakespeare's drama feels at times so inexhaustibly various, so prodigal, that it seems a natural response to want to codify and contain it. (Coleridge spoke of Shakespeare's 'myriad-mindedness'.) For Hughes, in spite of the boundlessness of Shakespeare's creative resources, a single unitary impulse was at work in them. The plays could be read as one poem, one narrative, ramifying endlessly from a kind of internalised creation myth. A.D. Nuttall would quite possibly have objected to this reductionism, for much the reason that he objected to the reductive procedures of the New Historicism. He stresses the thought-in-motion aspect of the plays: like Donne's poetry, Shakespeare's work – play by play, scene by scene, line by line - is the time-lapse record of a thinking mind, in all its exploratory fluidity and dynamic restlessness. He might not have set down a final, definitive summa of his ideas on art, politics, history – as had Ben Jonson in his 'Timber: or Discoveries' and the 'Conversations with William Drummond' - but Shakespeare can be caught thinking, consistently and subtly, throughout. “His thought,” Nuttall puts it, “is never still.”

Poignantly – he died in January of this year – Nuttall relates a chat with an acquaintance, met in the street, in the preface to Shakespeare the Thinker: “I said, 'I'm writing an unforgivably long book on Shakespeare,' and then added, 'You know how there's a tradition whereby formerly lively minds produce in old age unduly mellow books on Shakespeare.' This was his cue to say, 'Oh, yours won't be like that.' Instead, he looked gravely at me and said, 'When you find yourself writing about his essential Englishness, you must stop.'” Frank Kermode likewise produced an 'unduly mellow book' in his Shakespeare's Language: with no axes to grind, no tenure to negotiate, no one to impress and nothing to prove, Kermode gave us one of the most uncomplicatedly valuable books of Shakespearean criticism we yet have. How does Nuttall fare?

Shunning the Grand Narrative gambit so favoured by the New Historicists, Nuttall primes the critical pump with a series of lightsome readings of the earlier plays – lightsome, but not superficial. He possessed the deepest acquaintance with the work. He understood, too, that Shakespeare was learning his craft on the hoof. Examining the progression from Shakespeare's apprentice work – the early chronicle plays are a kind of point d'appui, because they show the playwright to be trying to balance formal with imaginative claims most simply – Nuttall traces filaments of growth binding the first suite of plays together, and nudges us towards a notion that, even in the first flush of creativity, they 'speak' to one another. Themes that will preoccupy Shakespeare through his career begin to emerge, fold around one another and fade. Nuttall is also very good on what he describes as the 'scandal.. of Shakespeare's disorderly plenitude.' Yet Shakespeare's intellectual substance remains elusive. Nuttall starts off – with seeming arbitrariness – by looking at a critical moment in a critical scene: 1 Henry IV, II-iv, the rose-choice in the Temple Garden. Nuttall demonstrates an extraordinary degree of political sophistication in the tyro playwright. Shakespeare “...makes reality succeed and transcend any formal description of that reality.” Of a piece with Nuttall's rejection of the manifold -isms whose proponents have hijacked Shakespeare, this unfashionable stance seems borne out by the depthless variability of human motive presented through the work. “Shakespeare, the supreme dramatist, is strong both on what would happen and on what could happen. He is the philosopher of human possibility.” Implicitly, one question posed by the body of work, with gentle insistence, is that of the nature of self: not merely the subjecthood of the dramatis personae, but of Shakespeare himself, of any and all of us. The impulse to locate and isolate a core of being in the plays somehow chimes with our natural predisposition to regard the self as a closed system, internally consistent and intelligible. Shakespeare teaches us that much of what governs our worldly existence is obscure, unavailable even to the deepest introspection. Human agency is an inexhaustible paradox. Being is improvisatory, ad hoc, flawed; more properly described as an endlessly postponed coming-to-being: for Nuttall, Shakespeare's intelligence hinges on this insight, and, by extension, his supremacy.

John Berryman, in one of his astonishing Shakespearean lectures, observes:

...not unnaturally Shakespeare is hard to believe in, either as an author or as a man ... Our incredulity, to tell you the truth, does us small credit. It savours of what Kierkegaard called “playing the game of marvelling at world history.” It betokens inexperience, and perhaps it is a little unmanly.... [b]efore not only the grand mass of this creation but before some detailed triumph of imaginative design within the play, we do reasonably pause with astonishment. Sometimes, without warning, in a short speech, the soul of a man seems indeed to surface, for an instant, before it returns forever to the depths. Sometimes a series of this poet's phrases will drag at our profoundest thought as if, truly, we overheard the soul of the world murmuring truths to herself.

After a lifetime studying Shakespeare, reckoning with Shakespeare, A.D. Nuttall would restore the numinous to these plays, reminding us of their singularity, and that, in spite of our ingrained scepticism, our unfoolable knowingness, something of a miracle can be found in Shakespeare. There are still mysteries.

diversion

2007-04-26T11:33:00.000+01:00

"Choice word and measured phrase above the reach/Of ordinary men." - Wordsworth, 'Resolution and Independence'.

vulture complacencies

2007-04-16T19:30:00.000+01:00

Craig Raine - T.S. Eliot

In his fierce, extraordinary, essentially wrong-headed study T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form (CUP, 1995), Anthony Julius considers a fourfold 'aesthetic speculation', the second element of which

...is the conviction that art has an ethical dimension. One aspect of this conviction is the belief that the poet is a superior human being because, by the fruits of his creativity, he enhances freely the quality of human life. The writing of poetry is an act of supererogatory goodness for which the poet should be honoured.

Over ten years have passed since the publication of his book, and Julius's attainder of the poet T.S. Eliot still bites, and still the scandal of Eliot's evident unwillingness to subscribe to such a redemptive ethic – principally in his earlier work – gibes and scolds critics into asking questions about what literary criticism is for. The Pope of Russell Square was perhaps ripe for de-throning: Eliot was a reactionary with suspect political leanings, he urged an extinction of personality when egoism and unfettered self-expression have become our chief psychological mechanisms, he championed, in his prose, royalism, Catholicism and tradition – very much the kind of concepts to make liberal academics foam at the mouth. Critics who make a thing of attempting 'adversarial' readings of canonical authors probably do so from many motives. (While I don't wish to question Julius's integrity or the depth of feeling involved – T.S. Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form began life as a PhD thesis - it's fair to say that a dissertation on floral imagery in the verse of William Collins wouldn't have had quite the same career-forging impact...)

The soundest of replies to Julius's work, it seems to me, comes from the critic James Wood in a review reprinted in The Broken Estate: “His book is tendentious, misleading, and unremittingly hostile. He has written an unstable book about an unstable subject; reading it is like watching a maniac trying to calm a hysteric.” Wood argues that Eliot's anti-semitism is, in fact, dogmatic Christianity's anti-semitism; and stems more from doctrinal conflict between the two traditions than from private psychopathology. He also takes Julius to task as a critic 'inattentive to language ... [who] will not seem trustworthy,' and for the 'bullied readings' that strew the work. Julius invests so much in his thesis that the poetry itself must be 'evidence', and evidence contaminated not only by the putative anti-semitism but, at another remove, by the will-to-indict that grimly animates the book. Wood suggests that the poems most compromised – those most often cited as proof of Eliot's anti-Semitism: 'Gerontion', 'Burbank with a Baedecker: Bleistein with a Cigar' – are minor works, maimed by their moral ugliness. Light verse, then, pitched by the emigré Eliot at what he imagined were the standard attitudes of his cultured English readership: Eliot's adoption of a fashionable salon anti-semitism is of a piece with his chameleonic mimicry, as a displaced American incomer on the make. By comparison with his masterpieces – and Wood singles out The Waste Land as chief among them – these lesser poems are excrescences, and to a certain extent, irrelevances. As for the poetry 'enhanc[ing] freely the quality of human life', Wood has this to say, of what can be found in Eliot's finest, most searching work: “It is the knowledge that far from the public rooms, far from the forms of life ('not to be found in our obituaries'), far from society itself with its cruelties, is a loneliness whose brutality is stronger than our powers, and which enforces on us gentleness, sympathy, and control... Give. Sympathize. Control. Eliot's anti-Semitic verse obeys only the last command of that austere triad.” Broadly correct, Wood's argument appears as much a call for clear-headedness and some degree of perspective as anything else. Notwithstanding Tom Paulin's aggressively denunciatory take on Eliot's thinking, Notes towards a Definition of Culture is by no manner of means The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In her 1988 centenary essay, Cynthia Ozick describes, for a young, Jewish admirer of Eliot in the Forties and Fifties, the sublimity of the poetry's effect :

What was Eliot to me? He was not the crack about 'Money in furs,' or 'Spawned in some estaminet in Antwerp.' No, Eliot was “The Lady is withdrawn/In a white gown, to contemplation, in a white gown” and “Then spoke the thunder/DA/Datta: what have we given?” and “Afternoon grey and smoky, evening yellow and rose”; he was incantation, mournfulness, elegance; he was liquescence, he was staccato, he was quickstep and oar, the hushed moan and the sudden clap. He was lyric shudder and roseburst. He was, in brief, poetry incarnate; and poetry was what one lived for.

Poetry as a kind of mana, perhaps. But this is Ozick's account of her younger self and the germinal encounter with Eliot's work. She adds the rider - “..it is now our unsparing obligation to disclaim the reactionary Eliot.”

Literary Modernism itself nowadays stands revealed as a thoroughly unpalatable tissue of elitism, right-wing intolerance and fascist-fancying; and, whereas the philo-semitic, cosmopolitan Joyce currently enjoys heroic status among the academic Left, his contemporaries, from Virginia Woolf to Lawrence to Pound and Eliot, are all in bad odour. With the likes of Tom Paulin on the case, who shall 'scape whipping? The 'supererogatory goodness' Julius instances seems incompatible with the ill-humoured, petit bourgois snobbery of the Bloomsbury set. Its critics meanwhile plume themselves as virtuous souls; while failing singularly to appraise the work in toto. This is a tributary to Craig Raine's oft-stated frustration at the “desire to arraign artists on exclusively moral grounds, the desire to annihilate rather than administer complicated justice, the desire to consider only the faults and ignore the virtues and the achievements.” The impulse clearly is political, and with their hullooing cry of 'ecrasez l'infâme!', the proponents of this school of criticism risk throwing the poetry out with the bathwater.

In a review of Peter Ackroyd's 'benign life' of Eliot, Christopher Ricks refers to the 'malignity visited on Eliot,' adding, “Fair-minded, broad-minded and assiduous, here is a thoroughly decent book.” No inconsiderable thing. Ricks offers a delicate caveat in the conclusion of his remarks on Eliot's anti-semitism in T.S. Eliot and Prejudice: “It is unimaginable that anyone could ever judge these matters exactly right, or speak of them without a single failure of tone, or be alive fully to justice and mercy. The minefield stretches on all sides, and being innocent – or not particularly guilty – will not save any commentator (and certainly not any commentator on T.S. Eliot) from being blown up.” Raine would say, in the final analysis, we simply do not know. There are the marred poems, quoted to rags, there are the passages in Notes towards the Definition of Culture, there are anecdotes and personal witness; innuendo about Eliot's first marriage, dark grousings about the sexual content of unpublished juvenilia (the King Bolo poems). The matter has been thoroughly canvassed.

At a guess, I'd hazard that Raine's new monograph on Eliot was to some degree inspired, provoked by a need to retrieve Eliot from the slanderers and scholarly Dogberries, and restore the best poetry – beautiful, enigmatic – to a kind of critical justice. Those who thrive on eye-catching ad hominem slights (Larkin has come in for much the same treatment in recent years), equally slight the poetry. Indifferent to the thematic core of the work – Raine attempts to identify it as 'the buried life' – and their judgement skewed by a distaste for its essential religiosity, Eliot's high-minded detractors have lost sight of the fact that a lifetime intervenes between Prufrock and other Observations and Four Quartets. Those with the great good fortune always to enjoy sunny mental health, to espouse impeccably liberal opinions, who adore their wives and have never behaved spitefully – even-handed and magnanimous in their dealings with everyone they've ever known – might well find the psychic writhings set forth in Eliot's satires distasteful. An early prose-poem like 'Hysteria' will indeed get hackles rising: “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill... lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat...” Misogyny! Sexual disgust! From the crooked timber of humanity, baby, nothing straight was ever made..

“In the end,” Raine writes, “we are left with the poetry. It speaks to any attentive reader... It is for [the] verbal gifts that we read Eliot's poetry. This is the light, the radiance cast by the poetry itself.” Elsewhere he makes scratch-notes for an aesthetic: “Good writing is criticism of life: it describes, selects, contemplates defining features, beauties, flaws; it puts reality on pause; it searches the freeze-frame; it is an act of measured consideration, of accurate re-presentation.” Raine always insisted that Poetry would be radically impoverished if only those parts of experience that are somehow edifying – that we find positive and affirming - were included. (Anthony Julius – 'the ferret of all forms of prejudice', as James Wood calls him - has a chapter titled 'The Aesthetics of Ugliness', and you can well imagine Raine using the phrase to quite contrary ends. For Raine, 'ugliness' – banality, the grubby, the deformed – has as great a claim to poetic legitimacy as Apollonian perfection.) Raine's critical practice encourages a retreat from the biographical, from the historical – the words on the page should be our first consideration; the penumbra of ideological associations set aside. Two earlier collections of prose – Haydn and the Valve Trumpet and In Defense of T.S. Eliot – show Raine to be most comfortable with the short range essay-review. As a poet, Raine is a miniaturist, and conjures into language the bristling particularity of the phenomenal world, Nabokovian transparent things. As a critic, he reserves his most unqualified praise for those poets who do much the same, abolishing the gulf between word and thing.

T.S. Eliot, by comparison with studies by Ricks, David Moody, Denis Donoghue inter alia, suffers an interpretative thinness; as a critical performance, it feels weary and perfunctory, an academic commission written with the left hand. Conceivably so flimsy because it scants the deeper issues manifest in Eliot's work, Raine's book appears to have been intended as a 'reader's guide', for undergraduate consumption, sketchily gesturing towards the possibility of large contentious themes while withdrawing – albeit suavely – from them. It's rather touching that Raine – affected by the 'vulture complacencies' – believes that Eliot's achievement can be raised from the muddy plimsoll-line of his ill-wishers' assaults, that we can return, after the labours of Julius, to a state of readerly innocence. My best self wishes it were so...

the invention of pain

2007-04-12T12:47:00.003+01:00

Martin Amis – House of Meetings

Might Amis have been stung by the criticisms of his Koba the Dread into writing this book? Johann Hari suggested that “the only human response is to pity poor, preposterous Martin Amis”, for Koba is a 'chilling book', in which its author has 'revealed his own deformed personality'. Hari writes out of a fury at Amis's egoism; at the complacent subordination of suffering (most dubiously, the suffering of other people) to style and literary dazzlement. The shaping impulse, the writerly instinct to cast attractive verbal toys from the stuff of experience – this seems fairly unexceptionable; yet Amis stands charged with doing so without due regard for the magnitude of sorrow, he is guilty of so much posturing, and, damningly, of having conducted no original research of his own. The fate of the twenty million is a pretext for paronomasia. By this account Koba the Dread arises from an almost bottomless self-regard, a work wrong-headed and misconceived in every way. Tibor Fischer's infamous attack on Yellow Dog seems pretty mild by comparison.

But what exactly is the burden of the complaint? The historians weighed in, predictably – Orlando Figes found Amis's effort inexcusable in its amateurism; as if, when Amis turns his gaze on the topic, he undoes the Gordian knot: “The true subject of his book,” Figes concludes his Telegraph review, “is not Stalin, nor even his victims, but Amis the would-be historian, Amis brooding on the suffering of the world from the safety of his home.” Koba is in one respect an hommage to the Sovietologist Robert Conquest, its dedicatee – and Amis makes explicit his debt to his fathers's friend. But reviewers were scandalized more by the autobiographical insertions than by the bad history: the two letters, one to Kingsley Amis, the other to Christopher Hitchens; but the critics' patience expired the moment when Amis bestowed the nickname 'Butyrki' on his distressed daughter: “'The sounds she was making,' I said unsmilingly to my wife on her return, 'would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror...'” Unsmilingly – something trivially high-minded about it, its earnestness and the weirdness of the association.. The confessional mode so exhaustively mined in Amis's memoir Experience leaks into this book, and we look back on the earlier work hospitable to suspicion. Koba the Dread, its critics insist, is a book disfigured by Amis's superbia – like any egotist, he takes history personally, not least because it happened without his involvement.

In House of Meetings, then, Amis returns to the scene of the crime. His prose has undergone a fair degree of streamlining, the manner become more disciplined, cleaner. The epileptoid metaphorizing of Yellow Dog gives place here to a chill exactitude of phrasing. There are fewer false quantities in this writing; it no longer feels hamstrung by its unmoored, unchecked inventiveness. The Information and Yellow Dog felt more like style-sheets than fully realized fiction – their language, superabundantly aerobic as it was, somehow masked a void. Progression d'effet tended more to be governed by spasms of virtuosity than by fidelity to felt experience. Amis allowed his art to become fattened on facility. The Comic Spirit, as George Meredith described it, morphed into a flailing, diabolic Urizen. House of Meetings marks a new sobriety, a reckoning with larger responsibilities.

Amis's literary coordinates are freely declared: Conrad, Dostoyevsky. But his narrator's cultural tastes show him up as an Anglophile, radically Westernized – he is more apt to quote Coleridge than Pushkin or Lermontov. Indeed the effect is stereophonic, with the narrative voice proceeding in the coolest of mandarin styles to speak of eye-watering scenes of human degradation: “..telling my story in English, and in old-style English English, what's more. My story would be even worse in Russian. For it is truly a tale of gutturals and whistling sibilants.” (Remember that Nabokov's White Russian exiles and renegadoes were impeccably articulate, too.) Amis seems to be trying for a kind of inverted ostranenye. Decorum announces itself in this proposed stylistic asepsis; and it must be through a formidably controlled language that – in a phrase Amis mints in Koba – the 'beginnings of the search for decorum' can be found. What does Amis himself understand by this? The English literary tradition has always been read as the vehicle for a liberal humanism that was at once unemphatic and benign, decent and tolerant. The catastrophes of the twentieth century - the 'carnival of bestiality', in George Steiner's phrase – dealt a blow to such pretensions; and, as the class origins of the Novel were exposed, the moral cleanliness came further to be corroded. Any claim to universality on behalf of the tradition has equally been cast to the winds. Amis's own fiction dramatizes the absurdities of our fallenness – the grotesque amoral acquisitiveness of the Thatcher era, the 'moronic inferno' hothousing beneath the nuclear umbrella. With Time's Arrow he deployed techniques loosely borrowed from magic realism (although inspired more directly by the Dresden bombing in Slaughterhouse Five) to take us into territory that even the most industrious of Holocaust historians would find inaccessible. Amis has long understood that realism can only carry you so far – that the culture, the world itself will always outstrip it; and certain modes of being, certain experiences can only be caught expressionistically: in the sense that Otto Dix shows us Weimar with a lethal authenticity quite beyond the powers of journalism or historical record.

Amis has remarked that, in House of Meetings, tragedy is the dominant chord. Much of his work to date has been a scabrous comédie humaine, brimful of modernity's by-blows and bogeymen. He seemed at his most agitatedly assured when setting in motion the squads of hopeless monsters – the Keith Talents, the Clint Smokers – who garrison the chapters of London Fields and Yellow Dog. This was James Wood's hysterical realism in a cyclotron, a snarling fusion of Hogarth and Ballard. Yet for all the gravity of Amis's stated themes – male violence, millenial terror - his characters always felt thinly realized, more allegorical figures from the baroque Trauerspiel than flesh-and-blood selves.

ii

Daniel Soar's bitterly tendentious piece in the London Review of Books – in which the essentially uninteresting business of reading House of Meetings is disposed of in a couple of paragraphs – excuses itself from the side issue of critical appraisal and quickly slides into an attack on Amis's recent stance on the War on Terror and Islamism. Amis's long essay 'The Age of Horrorism' has been taken as a significant public statement: drawing heavily on the thesis propounded in Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, it seeks to pathologize Islamist motivation, and suggests, among other things, that from unresolved psychosexual aberration arise the doctrines of modern radical Islamism's ideologues. Berman carefully examines the career and thought of Sayyid al-Qutb: Amis glosses Berman's text, imparts to it a novelist's finesse and imaginative license. (It forms the basis of an aborted short story.) The LRB write-up finds in House of Meetings the occasion for a bit of timely Amis bashing; Soar might well identify hatred as a governing principle in Amis's work, but Soar's own contempt for a reading of the contemporary scene at odds with his own (and the liberal elites who form the LRB's natural constituency) blazes through. In a similar spirit Ziauddin Sardar recently coined the term 'Blitcon' to identify and arraign Amis, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie for their apparent apostasy: throwing in their lots with America – and so with neoconservatism and the New Imperialism – each of these writers have so decisively chosen to ally themselves with the meretricious glamour of power, silently condoning acts of imperialist aggression, that they've passed on any claim to moral authority. They've become state-sponsored hirelings, the Southey and Wordsworth de nos jours. Aside from its paranoia and exaggeration, Sardar's was a fairly redundant polemical sally; not least because the politics of the trio is actually more nuanced and ambiguous – shot through with self-doubt – than Sardar seems prepared to admit. If Amis is so exercised by Islamic theocracy, it's rather because he recognizes it as a threat – not just to the civitas of literary art – but to the hallowed covenant between artist and humanity as a whole, to liberty of conscience and free agency. Soar's rhetorical jugglery, with Amis is portrayed as spoilt haut bourgeois with a distempered ego, and the delightful al-Qutb a noble figure sinisterly traduced by his enemies, takes question-begging to another level. (It also seems the merest silliness to complain of Rushdie's attitude to Islamism when for a decade he was at the sticky end of one of its representative's murderous bans.)

The liberal left distrust Amis. They distrust him for his unpredictability, his literary fideism – the spooky art, as Norman Mailer calls it, won't let itself be suborned by any political programme. His work refuses the saving pieties that survive as the long tail of the radical tradition. Sardar and others balk at his willingness to take America seriously (as does Rushdie); and they find distasteful his ready acceptance of the master narrative entrained since 9/11 – the Manichean struggle between the forces of enlightenment and the myrmidons of reaction; and yet wouldn't it be proper to interpret House of Meetings parabolically, as a work engaged with the eternal recurrence that would warn us against reenacting the miseries and tyrannies of the twentieth century? Its narrator sourly, impotently observes as the Beslan massacre unfolds: the pitiless slaughter of innocents in a national liberation struggle, underwritten by Muslim humiliation and nihilism. (The very 'necessary murder' predicated by Frantz Fanon's programme of violent decolonization.)

eagleton's great tradition

2006-12-08T12:46:00.000Z

Terry Eagleton, The English Novel: an Introduction

It was over a decade ago that Terry Eagleton published Literary Theory: an Introduction and brought the arcana of Foucault and Lacan to a lay audience - students, but not only students - for whom these figures and their work had always seemed as grotesquely inhuman as the alien gods of H.P. Lovecraft. Eagleton wrote as demystifier and impresario, and his guide, a revised, updated edition issued in 1996, has long since earned its reputation as the portal into a world inimical to common sense and clarity. Eagleton entitled his recent memoir The Gatekeeper - and it's precisely in this role that, with Literary Theory, he very successfully cast himself.

Of late Eagleton has produced a substantial critical rehabilitation of Tragedy (Sweet Violence) and a 'sequel' of sorts to Literary Theory. Less systematic exposition than, and certainly no repudiation of its predecessor, After Theory (2003) foregoes the marxisante stridencies of all those middle-aged political thinkers vexed to distraction by the refusal of the twenty-first century world to fit their ideas. Indeed, Eagleton has significantly modified his critical stance, which has become infinitely more hospitable to categories of experience - the numinous, chiefly, but compassion and joy too - he'd have dismissed two decades ago as symptoms of false consciousness. He finds the retrograde inflexibility of his confreres troubling and downright unhelpful; as Eagleton intimates at the close of Sweet Violence:

...Lacan's 'Do not give up on your desire!' becomes a political injunction. It means 'Be steadfast for death': don't be fulled by 'life' as we have it, refuse to make do with the bogus and the second-best, don't settle for that set of shabby fantasies known as reality, but cling to your faith that the deathly emptiness of dispossessed is the only source from which a more jubilant, self-delighting existence can ultimately spring. And for that, the left needs a discourse rather more searching than pluralism or pragmatism. There can be no falling back on metaphysical dogmatism or foundationalist complacency. But if the language of critique is to match the depth and urgency of our political situation, neither can the left be content to remain caught within the repetitive round of its present cultural concerns.

At times Eagleton, in After Theory, appears more the inheritor of the Ruskin of Fors Clavigera than the scion of a tradition springing from Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson: Ruskin, a visionary socialist where the other two were career academics first and foremost. Eagleton is keenly conscious of writing in a state of cultural emergency, and it is the permeability of the barrier between critical study (Sweet Violence) and moral philosophy (After Theory) that makes it worth regarding the two books in terms of a revisionist portmanteau. We can no longer afford, he seems to be saying, to waste another word on inconsequential blather.

The English Novel: an Introduction, by comparison, is a rather low intensity affair - but loses nothing in charm for it. Indeed, it's almost cosily unprovocative - not least in Eagleton's restricting himself to the Canon - an abstraction, chiefly invented by bored Cambridge dons to pass the time at high table (novelists and poets sharply divided between U and non-U, as though Nancy Mitford had a hand in forming the native literary tradition), and a concept long since thought to have discredited itself. F.R. Leavis would have found its contents, superficially at least, uncontroversial. But he might have raised a patrician eyebrow at the ideas that Eagleton sneaks into the gaps between plot summaries; for the peculiar cast of the earlier two books remains - softened, but implacably there. The novel is "one of the great revolutionary cultural forms of human history" - an artefact than enacts freedom itself. "As the novelist conjures a new world into existence, in a profane parody of God's creation, so each individual shapes his or her inimitable life-history." Eagleton admires and exalts this quality of the novel, it resourcefulness in pinning down 'the Real' even while licensing novelist and reader jointly to interrogate the very notion of reality. Historically a cultural offspring of the ascendant middle-classes, under the hands of such socially heterodox figures as Swift, Sterne and Joyce, it became by far the most capacious medium for the scrutiny of fact and value, freedom and necessity.

Admittedly Eagleton plays it straight through most of this book, after the polemical alarums of the earlier two. The old contention between formalism and historicism is duly played out. Only in the afterword does Eagleton finally begin to betray his exasperation at the failure of the postwar novel - and, indeed, the post-Cold War novel - to fashion itself into a literary form primed to cope with the convulsions of modern geopolitics. As he has it, "the contemporary English novel is doing dismally little to disturb the reigning orthodoxies." The baroque fantasias of an A.S. Byatt seem scarcely bothered by the advent on the global scene of a political death cult.

As an ordnance survey of the English novel Eagleton's latest work is more than adequate. The cross-grained forthrightness of the Marxist firebrand of old still adheres to his prose. The high-mindedness survives intact, as does the tart wit and severe moral urgency. The undergraduate will find it indispensable for its comprehensiveness, and will perhaps even thank Eagleton for goading her into uncharacteristically original thought. The non-academic non-specialist will simply enjoy the assurance and seasoned authority with which Eagleton dispenses his readings of familiar novels. In some ways a slight work, The English Novel: an Introduction could quite profitably be read alongside its recent stable-mates, as Eagleton amplifies further the critical programme he began to elaborate in Sweet Violence. Whatever their apparent subject-matter, each of these books urge us to march into the near-future under the banner: Allons travailler.

lessons of the master

2006-12-05T14:41:00.000Z

Colm Toibin - The Master

Leon Edel's magisterial 5-volume biography brought the literary lion to book. After the Life, Henry James could no longer be slighted as the scowling patrician of the Sargent portrait, the waistcoated Great Pretender who conjured from society gossip the unreadable late novels with their stylistic density and spiritual listlessness. The high seriousness seemed always a soft target for lampoon. Now, we know of Henry James Senior the Swedenborgian visionary, the suicide of Constance Fenimore Woolson, the cultural transit conducted by the son between the Old and the New Worlds, even James's tussle with 'the distinguished thing'. Cynthia Ozick, with her customary absolutist ardour, is downright on the subject of James's relevance: “As the years accumulate, James becomes, more and more compellingly, our contemporary, our urgency.” Literary taste has tended of late toward the glib, the meretricious, the flagrantly clever; by rights, pace Ozick, the Jamesian aesthetic should long have been eclipsed.

But seeded in James's fiction – the figure in the carpet, indeed – are precisely those ethical issues that still solicit our attention at the outset of the 21st century: the corrosive agonies of solitude and loneliness, what it means to live the virtuous life, the competing claims of self-fulfillment and self-renunciation, the semaphore of the self adrift in society. Edel's biography, on a rather grander scale than Auden's 'shilling life', certainly gave us all the facts. But it has taken another novelist to reimagine James with penetration and sympathy, to permit us to take the measure of the leviathan.

Colm Toibin is drawn to that in James which obdurately resists simple paraphrase. But it's difficult to avoid a sense, standing in its portico, that the book is no more than a paraphrase of the last volume of Edel's biography, itself entitled 'The Master'. With the fiction itself, James's notebooks and letters, the suspicion of redundancy clings somewhat to Toibin's enterprise. It isn't so much that realising such intense inwardness, or the unapproachable semi-divinity of genius, should pose significant problems to a novelist of such accredited literary power. Rather, we intuit a certain risk in any bid to decode the charged ellipses and psychological ambiguities of James's work. It might savour of sprezzatura on Toibin's part, it might even seem brazen. A literary game, another instance of which perhaps we don't really need. Yet it becomes clear that Toibin understands how necessarily he must defer to authority and precedent. He absents himself with discretion, and acquits himself on the score of literary tact, working faithfully, in John Keats's phrase, in 'the shadow of a magnitude'. (The silent, humourless Scots amanuensis engaged by James – who received dictation of his final works – stands, in this respect, as an apt figure of the role Toibin himself adopts: spectral representative of the Celtic fringe, watchful, recording all.)

The keynote moments of James's life and career are patiently revisited in The Master, chapter by chapter, year by year. The novel's first set-piece is a public humiliation the author endured on the opening night of his play Guy Domville, that creative experimentum crucis that brought James - by its fatal misjudgement of the mood of an audience then feasting on the languid sorceries of Oscar Wilde - to his knees and forever damaged his reputation. Toibin gives us the catcalls from the galleries as James was ushered onto the stage, “the crescendo of loud, rude disapproval which came from the people who had never read his books.” And this at a moment when James was preoccupied by his waning powers, by the perishability of his renown:

He also felt that as a novelist he had fallen upon evil times, any indication of his being hugely wanted by any editor or publisher was declining. A new generation, writers he did not know and did not prize, had taken universal possession. The sense of being almost finished weighed him down; he had been producing little, and publication in periodicals, once so lucrative and useful, was becoming closed to him.

Toibin concerns himself with the years of professional unsuccess that James was compelled by changing fashions to live through, and the surrender of public celebrity to the private consolations of retrospect. (Yet it was in this period that he composed his great tales - 'The Turn of the Screw', 'The Altar of the Dead', 'The Beast in the Jungle', not to mention the trinity of masterpieces, The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove, and The Golden Bowl. We might take from this the claustral nature of creativity.)

In The Master we become James's secret sharer, an intimate silent confederate. (As his letters finely illustrate, he had a gift for friendship – the correspondence is almost symphonic in its solicitude for young writers and acquaintances in need.) The muffled ecstatic shivers of homoerotic desire – James's sexuality has always been a closed matter – raise Toibin's fiction to a rare, saddened delicacy. We are party to the yearning, just as to the fearful insomniac vigils, but Toibin doesn't coarsen proceedings by resort to crass psychologism. Nor will he libel James by too great an emphasis on this or that psychic freak in the shaping of his gift. Toibin confers on him the dignity of final elusiveness as a human being. Edel's Life told us of the Napoleonic delusions and ravings occasioned by a stroke – Toibin concludes his novel before these last ugly scenes; in the pages of The Master at least, Henry James does not die.

James committed to print, in book after book, tale after tale, a deep, exacting study into the hydraulics of human interaction. Colm Toibin, in a prose as still and spare as James's could be luxuriant and exorbitant, brings to bear on the figure of James the same steady regard. The novelist, James had it, was one on whom nothing is lost; and in Toibin's rendering, James exercises a perceptual avidity, a hyperaesthesia that seizes hungrily on the merest emotional shifts and cues. For that is precisely what lay at the heart of his creativity: a famished craving for Life, Life! And yet, in spite of this affirmative credo, Toibin's James is quite literally death-haunted - “Sometimes in the night he dreamed about the dead..” (a first sentence that seems to shadow suggestively and curiously that of a book equally obsessed with the debatable lands of the past : “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure...”). Each progressive novel was a memento mori, even when they affected to be unflappably urbane. Toibin cites death as the elephant in James's plush, musty parlour. That James's characters step around it as if around some vulgar social betîse somehow intensifies its omnipresence in so much of his work.

But whatever the terminal struggles, the art remains. Monolithic, forbidding – each novel seems to announce another raid on the inarticulate, another few furlongs of the field of human experience painstakingly mapped. 'Master of nuance and scruple,' Auden called him. The novelist Henry St George, in James's story 'The Lesson of the Master', has the honorific qualified to 'the pardonable master', and this might have stood as the title of Toibin's book. Lovable, perhaps not – almost certainly pardonable. Mastery of life itself – and the attainment thereof – is the thing, and the heresy of making death meaningless by living in fullness of spirit right now. James achieved this, Toibin seems to be saying, through the steel glass of literature – by showing us how the past could be 'remembered and captured and held.' That, and a sublime reticence and exemplary self-discipline that could distinguish any of our lives.

alienating ecstasies

2006-12-05T14:40:00.000Z

Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee

In his last novel, Youth, J.M. Coetzee annihilated the pretensions to high literary art of a South African émigré in 60s London. It is a peculiarly desolating book, its narrator unsympathetic, a bland egoist who has made a fetish of chill perfection as only the truly mediocre can: “What more is required than a kind of stupid, insensitive doggedness, as lover, as writer, together with a readiness to fail and fail again?” He rejects even this, as he gives himself over to the joylessness and pointlessness of life. (The narrator 'John' is the John Coetzee who exists in the antiterra of the fiction, who didn't remain in South Africa and joined the northward diaspora of a generation of his peers.) Youth baffled critics when it first appeared – but the novel is at least comprehensible as a novel, even as the sensibility it portrays bores and dismays us. Elizabeth Costello is bound to mystify for quite different reasons.

Costello/Coetzee – a near-homonym, but it'd be unwise to identify this book's central figure too swiftly as the Nobel laureate en travesti. On the face of it, one might be inclined to suspect that the distinction between what happens when a writer jack-knifes into meta-fiction and simple exhaustion is a hard one to call. When novelists depart so decisively from the broad realist modes they once found so workable – even if, as with Coetzee, they have distressed the form with cold vigour – and begin slimming down, breaking up, modulating into the essay or the sermon, readerly patience risks a forfeit. Of course we're fairly accustomed by now to the enormous biddability of 'the novel', how freely it welcomes all sorts of formal abuse. It was always, at its historical high water mark, a polymorphous entity, bending itself to the urgencies of the moment. But what is Coetzee up to now?

Elizabeth Costello, author of The House on Eccles Street among other, unnamed works, is on the circuit. An Australian writer d'un certain age, she has surrendered herself to the half-light of late literary celebrity – the public lecture, the academic conference, the 'instructional' leisure cruise. She has become mere subject matter. A thousand and one doctoral dissertations probe her oeuvre. From the Ancrene Wisse to the Sunday supplements, she has given up the isolation, the essential detachment, of her craft, for the sphere of public argument and, most importantly, self-justification. Elizabeth Costello, the book, is framed as a series of lectures, delivered variously in Africa and Amsterdam. Coetzee calmly refuses us the consolations of 'plot', therefore such development as there is coheres in the person of Costello herself. Catechised by interviewers and audiences, she must lay bare the foundations of all that she has believed.

The first chapter slyly prods the principle of 'realism' itself, with a brief episode in which Costello attends an awards ceremony at an American college. The account interleaved with authorial self-questioning, this is Coetzee flirting with the playful instabilities of post-modernism. The old Barthesian chestnut is literalised, ironically: the Death of the Author melts into the possible imminence of Costello's death. The post-structuralists missed a trick, by never factoring in the Bone-Weariness of the Author, or the Author's Desire simply to be Left Alone. On this occasion she is accompanied by her son John and we see her, in the episode alone, through his eyes. He is appalled by and pities her frailty and bewilderment. He bridles bitterly at the difference between how she, the great post-colonial writer, is regarded by the world and how, uniquely placed as he was, he couldn't assent to the ideal. “What is the truth of his mother? He does not know, and at the deepest level does not want to know.”

Had this been a manifesto pure and simple, and not refracted through the consciousness of a fictional character, nothing of Costello's incoherence as a thinker, her spasms of doubt, would have quite the 'truth-value' they actually possess. Had Coetzee sat down and straightforwardly executed a piece of discursive prose, nothing of the drama of Costello's self-exposition – the vulnerability of it – would have transmitted itself to the page.

One of the most arresting of these 'eight lessons' begins with a raw, involuntary act of practical criticism – Elizabeth Costello has read Paul West's novel The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg (a real book, by a real author, as it happens..) and experiences what can least inadequately be described as a negative epiphany:

Obscene! she wanted to cry but did not cry because she did not know at whom the word should be flung: at herself, at West, at the committee of angels that watches impassively over all that passes. Obscene because such things ought not to take place, and then obscene again because having taken place they ought not to be brought into the light but covered up and hidden for ever in the bowels of the earth, like what goes on in the slaughterhouses of the world, if one wishes to save one's sanity.

Her outrage defies articulation. Indeed, though the tenor of the book is very much in a 'confessional' mode, it is as much concerned with the moment in a reflective person's life when their ideas finally no longer admit of expression in a familiar conceptual framework. Received wisdom has its uses, not least in realm of social interaction – it can grease the wheels, makes us intelligible to one another. But Costello has no need of such hedging anymore. Much of Coetzee's book is precisely about the failure to communicate spiritual emergencies, the inadequacy of any but a closed private language to convey the ethical pulse that flows along the heart and in the blood. How can one address such matters as are set forth in West's novel, without taint? How does a writer enter the abattoir, describe what he finds there, without some stealthy contamination, ruinous to the soul? Denying ourselves the concept of Original Sin, how account for human depravity?
On each of her speaking appointments Costello encounters hostility or indifference. Her eccentric passion bears her into a terra incognita through which her audiences are unwilling to be led. Voiced, her opinions lend her a crankish air. What convictions burn within her, when spoken become leaden and dim. She approaches Paul West at the Amsterdam conference on the Problem of Evil, declares that she will not apologize for the fact that her talk would be addressed directly to him – she hadn't known West would be present when she wrote the piece. West stares past her into the distance as she speaks. He does not reply. Again, Costello receives the rebuff of incomprehension. She must always retire to her own unmanageable thoughts, to an unending conversation with the self. “There ought to be an arrangement such that she bumps into someone in the corridor, perhaps Paul West himself; something should pass between them, sudden as lightning, that will illuminate the landscape for her, even if afterwards it returns to its native darkness. But the corridor, it seems, is empty.” Faintly outlined in her fractured discussions of literary art is an aesthetics of decency – one grossly flouted by Paul West, when he ventured into the cellar where the Stauffenberg conspirators were tortured and put to death. Elizabeth Costello, reflecting on the cruelty in the world around her, wonders if perhaps the novelist might do better to draw back from atrocity.

This tortured farrago of argument concludes oddly, with a strange non sequitur that doesn't quite succeed as a capstone to all that has come before. Coetzee has added a postscript, authored by an Elizabeth not the one known to us through the pages of this book. A brief letter by Elizabeth, Lady Chandos to Francis Bacon – its prose quivers and quails with the anxiety of missaying, and the breaking of the estate, in James Wood's terms, between language and being. “Drowning, we [both Lord and Lady Chandos, corresponding with Bacon] write out of our separate fates. Save us.” They turned, each in their alienating ecstasies, to the great essayist and statesman, philosopher of scientific empiricism, for whom the universe can be known. An eloquent but finally defeated rapturist, Lady Chandos ends with the subscription and the, to us, talismanic date: “Your Obedient Servant/Elizabeth C./This 11 September, AD 1603.”

Coetzee has produced a novel of ideas, a sly, profound roman à thèse which nevertheless is thrillingly self-subverting: the 'ideas' are themselves deformed, contradictory or unpalatable. To believe, to cleave to principle, is a matter of absolute risk. To engage utterly with a moral universe that played host to Auschwitz and Kolyma might after all be to imperil one's soul. Elizabeth Costello dramatises the radical problem of liberal humanism in the 20th century – how far must we reconstitute the suffering of others before we can justly speak of it and act upon it? And where does it end?

sudden flurries of enthusiasm

2006-12-05T14:01:00.000Z

The Power of Delight – John Bayley

It's some cause for regret that John Bayley has become, in recent years, better known as the relict of Iris Murdoch than as a critic of awesome sharpness of insight and matchless breadth of learning. That more people – and people who consider themselves cultured and serious, to boot - will have read his scenes from a marriage and seen Richard Eyre's adaptation than will have even a glancing familiarity with The Characters of Love, decidedly reflects a general state of things. The long day of dedicated literary criticism wanes, the Bookbiz rumbles on.

Few book reviewers can boast the sheer joyful catholicity of Bayley's reading. It'd be fair to say that he knows more about nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian literature than the average professor of Slavic Studies; he engages as surefootedly with American poetry (Ashbery, Merrill) as with Anthony Powell and Evelyn Waugh – attentive, with a wit that is apt to be sly but never less than generous. Something of the 'gentleman-amateur', or the old-style don: baggily rumpled in person, yet possessed of a fierce critical intelligence; an affable tweedy oddity who for all that can apply himself to the business of Appreciation. F.R. Leavis may never have contributed much to the gaiety of nations – moralists and ideologues rarely ever do. Bayley, on the other hand, meshes the blithe jauntiness of a Pickwick with the earnestness au fond of the Grand Cham himself...

The Power of Delight will be enough of a restorative, perhaps, to the eclipse of criticism - at least for those prepared to fork out for it and spend time among its 660 pages.

Bayley's civility is such that he generally restrains himself from critical snarking and sniping – but he can deliver barbs with the best of them. Examining two books on Balzac – V.S. Pritchett's biography and Barthes's S/Z, noting that “both are trying to reanimate Balzac's image for the modern reader, Pritchett by British empirical methods, Barthes by the latest style of Gallic formalistic analysis” – he dryly observes of the latter:

The results are certainly illuminating, but they will afford most profit to that numerous class of persons who have no instinctive enjoyment of literature and yet feel they ought to get something out of it.

It can certainly be a great relief, to turn to a literary critic who is a reader first and theoretician not at all – and who can extend courtesies to the work of the poets and novelists he discusses so fine and of such fair-minded tact that it makes the Stakhanovite efforts of the theory-mongers seem clumsy, coarse and misconceived:

The inculcation of a critical system is no substitute for the free play of Jamesian intelligence which, like taste itself, cannot be taught. For professionals, everything a literature course can and must be taught.

In the same review of Edward Said's The World, the Text and the Critic, Bayley reflects on this professionalisation of criticism, which by the eighties had become the speciality of the systematisers, and comes round to outing Said as the kind of essentially Arnoldian man of letters he himself approves of – at heart, more Sainte-Beuve than Foucault:

In a sense there is a real book inside Mr Said's official one, and the real book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written. It is essentially a book of essays, Victorian essays (perhaps we may soon revive that admirable Victorian critic, E.S. Dallas, who spoke of criticism, God help him, as 'the gay science'') that slip easily and illuminatingly from one thing to another...

Bayley is often twinkly and naughty in this way. And, for the most part, his observations are buttressed by the kind of assurance that comes of having nothing to prove. If he seems impatient at times – with Graham Greene, with Robert Lowell – it's in spite of himself. He makes for good company.
Update: You'll find a rather better account of Bayley's work here... :)

hiding in the light

2006-12-05T12:47:00.000Z

Tom McCarthy – Tintin and the Secret of Literature

Make no mistake: this is a serious book. True, the sceptical lay-reader will already have made up her mind about the overwrought niaiseries of the Cultural Studies racket – a project whose ingenuity is broadly on a par with its brazenness; whose earnestness is often outstripped only by its silliness – and Tintin and the Secret of Literature was clearly always going to be a hard sell to anyone who can't quite muster the enthusiasm for another game of 'Spot the Aporia'. The dustjacket of this Granta hardback reproduces a work by Jochen Gerner, one of a number of postwar artists who, as McCarthy tells us, made a 'détournement' of Hergé's work – an illicit annexation, a 'meme hack' of the kind flourishing now on the Internet (fan fiction and, more edgily, slash fiction). This procedure isn't so far removed from the critical enterprise itself – while Gerner's inspired vandalism seeks to isolate the emblems of Late Capitalism in the frames of 'Tintin in America', McCarthy performs a similar intervention, writing a high-toned kind of slash fiction of his own: Hergé/Bataille, Hergé/Barthes, Hergé/Derrida, all of them copulating merrily between the Acknowledgements page and the Index.

Lively, shrewd and utterly, gloriously pointless, Tintin and the Secret of Literature stands at once as a bibliographic acte gratuite – a critical study as elaborate toy – and as the record of an enchantment. McCarthy lavishes on the Tintin albums a full-bore fixity of attention that you might expect from a specialist in, say, algebraic topology. Our sceptic may well suspect that this is as frivolously self-defeating as extracting sunlight from cucumbers. Plausibility was never of prime concern to the originators of Theory in the first place; but those who have chiselled out careers from it depend more on its opacity to the average punter than ever before. Leaf through Tintin and the Secret of Literature, and your eye will be delighted by the usual stylistic plague-spots: “Gravity, like repetition, opens up the dimension of time, by testifying to the 'temporal reality of death'.” Uh-huh. McCarthy's prose can be as sluggishly bathetic as it is overladen with detail. His commitment to divining symbolic matrices in the cartoons – and issuing affidavits to the likes of Derrida and Mauss - draws him perilously close to losing the reader's good will altogether. But McCarthy possesses in spades what for many a pastor of High Theory is unimaginable, unattainable: a brilliance and zesty charm, the underrated capacity for self-irony.

Seven chapters, thematically organized: certain interpretative gambits are raised, submerge and reappear later. Fascism and friendship, forgery, ownership and inheritance and dispossession, the thwarting illegibility of the signs and symbols that invest our world with meaning – McCarthy tosses all of these into a bubbling macedoine of conjecture and analysis. Indeed so much is packed into this slender book, and much of it suggestive, that it's hard not to marvel at McCarthy's powers of compression. After we stop marvelling at his chutzpah.

Crucial to the working-through of his thesis, is that he takes Herge seriously (unusual in the world of Anglophone letters, but there have been a number of weighty tomes published in French). If there were no fully realized aesthetic system at work in the Tintin oeuvre, all the evidence on the page would certainly suggest otherwise. If Herge hadn't in fact brought into play allusions to Balzac and Baudelaire, even the most cheese-paringly scrupulous critic would be forgiven for believing that he had – again, on textual evidence alone. What's so cheering about McCarthy's midrashic labours, is that Herge's draughtsmanship and plotting – wholly à la page – actually encourage the wilder critical assertions.

So, McCarthy points out the omnipresence of tobacco in the books – we double-check ourselves – and, yes, he appears to be right. He notices how often counterfeiters and copyists - stand-ins for the function of the artist – figure in these stories, how regularly Tintin is entombed and released, and how fatally the characters misread the clues strewn around them. Any doubts we might have about whether these ripping yarns can really sustain such close reading do tend to evaporate the further along we get into McCarthy's book. He sets forth his argument without undue violence to the source text. Cryptanalysis pays dividends – but it's fair to wonder to what extent Herge teases his reader into it.

In any case McCarthy knows his subject matter. His favourite among the twenty-five 'The Castafiore Emerald'. Your average Tintinophile will raise an eyebrow – it's a choice – unintelligible to the casual fan, maybe - that suggests McCarthy is hardcore, a Pharisee among readers, a fanatical purist. In this story nothing happens, repeatedly. But McCarthy's approach needs to uncover the genome, the deep creative incubator, traces of which are seeded throughout the Tintin stories. Herge offered up a unitary creative system, after all, something comprehensive and internally coherent; and his critic is a code-breaker if he is nothing else. Truffling for the 'themes and anxieties active in the Tintin books', McCarthy tosses up one stirring insight after another – rather niftily tying up his thesis with biographical details – yet, for all that, he is a notably coy about the nature of the 'secret' around which Herge's colourful world is constellated. McCarthy nudges us toward, but steers us away, from it, in what amounts to a rhetorical bait-and-switch. “Tintin both offers and withholds,” he says – and so too does McCarthy, and when he turns his attention to the quiffed boy-journalist himself, the book is at its most riddling. Tintin is 'the enabler of all economies', he's also, loftily, absurdly, the 'Guardian of silence at the heart of noise'; but, to his credit, McCarthy shies from suggesting that there's any hint of the Christ-like about him...

Interestingly, among the cenacle of theorists McCarthy calls on, one of the usual suspects appears to be missing. Jacques Lacan is – mysteriously, perhaps – absent, even as Snowy the dog (Milou), Tintin's faithful companion, generally goes unmentioned (Snowy, l'objet petit a?). We might idly wonder – why so? The exigencies of book-making, lack of space, or some other, complex reason? A critic so fond of paradox as McCarthy would surely have seized on the totalizing psychoanalytic interpretation. Impossible to fault him for the thoroughness of his readings, either – it's the evasiveness, however, that frustrates more than the welter of data and the obsessive reliance on the notion that the cartoons set up an infinite regress of lisibilité. Anyone with more than a passing acquaintance with Theory at its high watermark knows the drill immediately. Something to do with death, something to do with the Subject, something to do with the limitlessly recursive nature of écriture itself: a nod to de Manian blindness and insight, and, hey presto!, a critical stance, an attitude. The problem remains, for the reader at least. How are we to take such cadenzas as these of McCarthy's, how can we rid ourselves of the suspicion that he's hoaxing us with such inflated as these?:

Beautiful, seductive, he is, like Balzac's castrato, the vanishing point of all
desire. The black dots of his eyes are the opposite of every sun, his skin the
antitype of any colour. Tintin is pure negative, the whiteness of the whale, the
sexlessness of the unconsummated marriage, the radical erasure of the
Khamsin...

McCarthy risks taking his argument ad absurdum with flights like these – but one senses that he does on some level recognize how daft it is, that the critic is permitted his follies and hobbyhorses, and capering antically like a Shakespearean fool, may indeed light upon truths inaccessible to the more sober-sided of us. He must be entitled to hypothesize freely, to construct interpretative models, to make gambits that seem on the face of it unpromising. When McCarthy cites Barthes's S/Z all our readerly instincts are in revolt – yet it illustrates something of significance in the Tintin books, and can therefore be allowed to stand. It seems that Herge does in fact allude directly to Sarrasine, and it isn't improper of McCarthy to point it out. Quite why Herge does so, is another matter – whether unconsciously prompted, in the heat of creation rummaging in the lumber-room of memory, or whether he wanted to give his art that lustrous sheen of aesthetic legitimacy, is perhaps something to which there can be no answer.