SPRING 2011
THE USE OF ENGLISH
VOLUME 62.2
CONTENTS
Passing It On: Teaching and Learning Larkin: Carol Atherton
99
Transition from Year 6 to Year 7 in the English Department:
Gill Parker
109
Why I Like Teaching KS3 Students About Robin Hood, King
Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Beowulf and the
Heroes of Classical Myth: Vanessa Vasey
116
Kentish Town: James Wilson
Analysing
Spoken ‗Disentangle
Language: Carol
Atherton
Great
Expectations:
the nets
of being‘: Ian Brinton
22
120
30
134
Antonym V: The Artist ['muŋk] Tries to Speak: Anthony
Barnett
144
Language Notes 8 and 9: John Haddon
147
Reviews
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s Feuds,
by Lyndall Gordon; Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries,
by Helen Vendler, reviewed by John Constable
155
Visiting Exile, by John Welch, reviewed by Nigel Wheale
159
Soul Keeping Company, by Lucie Brock-Broido, reviewed by
David Cooke
163
A Midsummer Night’s Dream: a Reader’s Guide to the Essential
Criticism, by Nicolas Tredell, reviewed by John Haddon
169
Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, by Lisa Shahriari and Gina Potts;
A Reader’s Guide to To the Lighthouse, by Janet Winston,
reviewed by Margaret Weldhen
172
Standard Midland, by Roy Fisher, reviewed by Derek Slade
181
Silent Letters of the Alphabet, by Ruth Padel; Fortinbras at the
Fishouses, by George Szirtes, reviewed by Andrew Carter
189
Short Notes
192
Addresses of Publishers Cited
195
About the Contributors
196
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Printed in Great Britain
Passing It On:Teaching and
Learning Larkin
Carol Atherton
E
nglish teachers, we are told, often end up teaching the texts that
they themselves were taught at school. There might be changes of
specification and differences in approach, but the texts
themselves stay the same, handed on from one generation to the next like
an English-teaching version of Radio 4‘s Inheritance Tracks. It‘s certainly
true in my case. In my fourteen years as an English teacher, I‘ve taught a
whole host of texts that I first encountered at GCSE or A-level: The
Merchant of Venice, Browning‘s dramatic monologues, To Kill a Mockingbird.
And my students are doing their best to continue the tradition: one of
them, now a secondary English teacher herself, is using the same
hotseating exercise on Henry V that I did with her class nearly ten years
ago.
It sometimes feels like a bit of a guilty secret, this falling-back on the triedand-tested, this failure to branch out. (Other subjects, with their more
linear sense of curricular progression, don‘t have this problem: when did
you last hear any Biology teachers castigating themselves for teaching
photosynthesis?) If I had to justify it, I‘d say that the texts we study at
school are, of course, the ones we know best: the ones we‘ve studied
inside-out, through a slow, systematic building-up of knowledge in which
we‘ve had the chance to reflect and ponder and let our understanding
grow. The frantic rush of degree level study seems superficial in
comparison. But maybe there‘s another reason too: the sense that some
texts are eminently suited to the late adolescent mind; that the years
between sixteen and eighteen are, quite simply, the best time to experience
particular authors. If I were asked to nominate one writer for inclusion in
this category, it would be Philip Larkin.
I first encountered Philip Larkin in the early spring of 1990, when we did
The Whitsun Weddings for A-level, sandwiched in between Wordsworth and
Coleridge‘s Lyrical Ballads and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.
I was in the Lower Sixth and in that stage that I always alert my own
students to at the beginning of sixth form: that fragile point when you‘ve
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developed what Larkin described in ‗Church Going‘ as ‗a hunger ... to be
more serious‘, when you‘ve realised that you‘ve fallen in love with a
particular subject but are still a bit too scared to admit it. You weren‘t
supposed to like reading, at my school: confessing that I actually enjoyed
one of my A-level subjects would have been positively dangerous. I also
wasn‘t sure, at that point, whether I was any good at English. There was
still something about it that was a bit of a mystery; a sense that beyond the
words on the page there were meanings that kept on eluding me. Then we
started to do Larkin, and everything fell into place.
The twenty-fifth anniversary of Larkin‘s death has occasioned a number
of revaluations of his work. For me, it‘s been a time to reflect on the
centrality of Larkin to my own relationship with the study and teaching of
English. I teach Larkin whenever I get the chance; and I‘ve also spoken a
number of times about teaching Larkin, using his poems to illustrate the
ways in which students can be introduced to various aspects of literary
analysis (the study of social and historical contexts, for instance, or the
evaluation of different critical interpretations). But the importance of
Larkin, for me, goes well beyond this. I‘ve spent a long time trying to
work out why this is.
I‘m not alone in recognising the power of Larkin as a set author. He has
long been a popular choice for A-level study. The copy of The Whitsun
Weddings that I was issued with at school in 1990 had been in constant use
since 1986, its pages bearing the annotations of five successive years‘
worth of students. Larkin was around for the advent of Curriculum 2000,
ten years later: Ian Stewart, former principal examiner for AQA
Specification A, reported that when examiners were choosing set texts for
the new AS-level specifications, The Whitsun Weddings was ‗an immediate
and unanimous choice‘.1 And Larkin‘s poetry is still a significant presence
in the post-2008 A-levels: ‗MCMXIV‘ is included in AQA Specification
A‘s anthology of writing about World War I; AQA Specification B‘s
collection of post-1945 pastoral poetry contains three of Larkin‘s poems
(‗Going, Going‘, ‗Show Saturday‘ and ‗Church Going‘); and Edexcel uses
his work in three of its themed collections of set poems, grouped under
the headings of Work, Home and War. The Whitsun Weddings is a set text
for WJEC at AS level, to be studied alongside Dannie Abse‘s Welsh
Retrospective as part of a unit on poetry post-1900. Larkin‘s work can also,
of course, be studied for coursework, and could even be used as part of
AQA Specification A‘s unit on Love Through the Ages: it‘s an intriguing
idea.
Naturally, Larkin himself would have had misgivings about this. He was
less than enthusiastic about the prospect of writing solely for ‗the dutiful
TEACHING AND LEARNING LARKIN
101
mob that signs on every September‘, seeing a student readership as no
substitute for a genuinely pleasure-seeking audience, and commented that
he would hate anyone to read his work simply because they had to.2 Many
readers will also be aware of the range of objections that have been raised
to Larkin as a subject of study – especially since the publication of the
Selected Letters in 1992 and Andrew Motion‘s biography the following year.
Chief among these is Lisa Jardine‘s oft-quoted statement that ‗we don't
tend to teach Larkin much now in my department of English‘, citing his
‗Little Englandism‘, habitual racism and easy misogyny,3 but there have
been hosts of other detractors. Bryan Appleyard asked in the Independent
why ‗this provincial grotesque‘, whose poetry exuded such ‗a repellent,
smelly, inadequate masculinity‘, is ‗so adored, edited, biographied and
generally elevated to the highest ranks of Eng Lit‘.4 In his discussion of
Curriculum 2000, Ian Stewart notes that the now-defunct Qualifications
and Curriculum Authority questioned whether The Whitsun Weddings was
of sufficient weight and merit to make it worthy of inclusion in the new A
-level specifications.5 The tutor who took me for my twentieth-century
paper in my second term at university announced to my tutorial group
that he was prepared to teach any twentieth-century poet – as long as it
wasn‘t Larkin.
Yet Larkin also has an array of supporters; and it is interesting to me – as
someone who has written widely on the increasing distance between
schools and universities, and the difficulty of ‗bridging the gap‘ between
post-16 and degree-level study – that there is a notable strand of writing
about Larkin that has been produced by schoolteachers. Andrew
Swarbrick, author of Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin (1997), taught
English at Radley College; Jonathan Smith, who included an essay about
‗That Poem‘ (‗This Be The Verse‘) in his book The Learning Game (2000),
was a teacher of English at Tonbridge School. Richard Palmer, author of a
number of studies of Larkin and editor of Larkin’s Jazz Writings for
Continuum, teaches English at Bedford School and attributes his
awareness of Larkin‘s ‗notably dense and precisely detailed account of the
social history of [his] time‘ to his years as a teacher, to the process of
glossing and explaining social and cultural references that are becoming
increasingly opaque to today‘s teenagers.6 Palmer reports, nevertheless,
that students often experience a ‗kind of instant rapport‘ with Larkin‘s
poetry, and comments that he knows ‗of no writer who engenders more
fun – including outright laughter‘. In Palmer‘s view, there are only two
writers who ‗can be productively used across the whole secondary
spectrum: Shakespeare and Larkin‘.7 For Swarbrick, Larkin‘s accessibility
gives him an immediate appeal for sixth-formers: to the uninitiated, his
perceived conservatism is also an attraction, making him ‗unlikely to
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inflame rebellious teenagers‘.8
I am fascinated by these accounts, because I always am fascinated by
English teachers writing and talking about their experiences of teaching
particular texts and authors – especially when these experiences are
rooted, as they are for Palmer, Smith and Swarbrick, in a deeply personal
sense of engagement with the texts and authors in question. I am also
fascinated because of the distance between their experience of Larkin and
mine. All three of these writers are based in the independent sector, in
single-sex schools; and all three write of having encountered Larkin‘s
poetry at the time it was first published. I was just thirteen when Larkin
died, in December 1985: I was aware of his death, but on reflection, this
was probably because I remembered the reference to The Whitsun Weddings
in Sue Townsend‘s The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole, required reading for
all self-respecting teenagers in the mid-1980s. So my early experience of
Larkin‘s work took place in a very different era from that of other
teachers who have written about him. It also happened in a very different
place: a small town in the north-west of England, in the no-man‘s-land
between Liverpool and Manchester that‘s criss-crossed with motorways
and where everyone seems perpetually on the way to somewhere else. In
many ways it was a town ripe for Larkinesque experience. The most
famous thing that ever happened there was the world‘s first fatal railway
accident, when the MP William Huskisson was killed by Stevenson‘s
Rocket at the Rainhill Trials in 1830. It was small and self-contained when I
was a child, but by the time I was in the Sixth Form it had begun to
expand, its mortgaged half-built edges encroaching on the surrounding
fields. I had spent all my life there, but I was starting to outgrow the place
and become impatient with its familiarities. Even though Larkin was
writing about Hull – a city I‘d never been to, and would not visit until
many years later – his images resonated with me miles away at the other
end of the M62: the ordinary scenes from ordinary towns; the dismantled
cars and advertising hoardings; the desire for something beyond. Larkin
wrote that ‗Nothing, like something, happens anywhere‘; but at seventeen
there‘s a particular kind of nothing that always seems to be wherever you
are, stuck in a place that somebody else chose for you and waiting for the
rest of life to come along. That was me when I was in the Lower Sixth;
and whenever I read The Whitsun Weddings now it‘s my sixth-form English
room that it conjures up, Miss Nevin‘s room on the first floor at the end
of the English block, with its pale blue walls and view over the playing
fields to another place entirely.
It didn‘t take us long to familiarise ourselves with the stereotype of Larkin:
the Hermit of Hull with his inch-thick specs, the curmudgeon
permanently stuck in middle age. We used to conspire to wear black to
TEACHING AND LEARNING LARKIN
103
our Larkin lessons, and delighted in finding yet more evidence of his
misanthropy and gloom. Yet we actually quite liked him; and whenever
I‘ve taught Larkin I find students feeling the same sense of affection for
the social inadequate contemplating his own mortality from the vantage
point of Mr Bleaney‘s fusty bed. Part of it, I‘m sure, is because of the
accessibility of his poetry: part of it is undoubtedly due to his confiding,
colloquial narrative voice. But there‘s something else about his verse that‘s
important; something that seems particularly attuned to the moods of late
adolescence. Perhaps it‘s the persistent sense of ambivalence: the push and
pull of divergent attitudes, captured by Andrew Motion in a list of
opposites that I remember discussing in an A-level essay: ‗sociability and
singleness, work and idleness, resolution and despair.‘9 Perhaps it‘s the
trying-on of different identities, a way of keeping the self at a defensive
arm‘s length. Swarbrick has written of the self-protective irony that
distinguishes much of Larkin‘s work, commenting that this is an attitude
that students ‗almost instinctively know about ... as a mode of discourse
and, in their case, almost as a way of life‘.10 Perhaps it‘s the fact that its
narrative voice is prepared to confront its own shortcomings, owning up
to the sense of ridiculousness that we all feel but flinch away from looking
at directly. But also, crucially, there‘s the sense of a search for an
ungraspable ideal, summed up by Larkin himself in an interview with John
Haffenden as a ‗long[ing] for infinity and absence, the beauty of
somewhere you‘re not.‘11 For me, at seventeen, this was represented most
vividly by the ‗unfenced existence‘ of the ending of ‗Here‘; but I was also
intrigued by ‗The Importance of Elsewhere‘ and its focus on the desire for
separateness and self-definition. Larkin‘s poem, written three months after
his move from Belfast to Hull in March 1955, gave a voice to my
frustration at being in a world that was starting to feel much too small,
hemmed in by the ‗customs and establishments‘ of people who‘d known
me all my life but didn‘t really know me at all any more. Years later, I was
struck by Swarbrick‘s description of beginning a scheme of work on Larkin
with the poem ‗Wires‘, a poem that ‗stealthily performs its theme of
enclosure‘. Swarbrick focuses on the same feelings of constriction and the
desire for escape that formed a counterpoint to my own early experience
of Larkin, commenting that ‗Larkin‘s poems are to me expressions of a self
not only thwarted in its desires, but in terms of knowing its own identity‘.12
This is, surely, a profoundly adolescent state. I couldn‘t have identified it as
such at seventeen, but there was something in Larkin‘s poems that told me
I wasn‘t the only person who felt like this.
Crucially, however, Larkin not only articulated the mood that I was so
often in at the time I was studying The Whitsun Weddings, but also offered
glimpses of a way out. There was the sheer intellectual pleasure I felt at
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being able to spot what he meant by ‗word after sprawling hyphenated
word‘ and ‗ships up streets‘. There was also the sense of being made to
look at things anew. Palmer has summed up the transmutational power of
Larkin‘s verse, saying that ‗he will take something ordinary – a journey, a
glass of gin and tonic, a cocktail-party invitation, a room to let – and
endow it with extraordinary definition, resonance, and power‘.13 There are
visions of immense clarity in Larkin‘s poems that describe the apparently
unremarkable or unnoticed with a precision that I‘d never encountered
before: the postal districts of London ‗packed like squares of wheat‘ in
‗The Whitsun Weddings‘; the undated snow that marks the passage of
time in ‗An Arundel Tomb‘; the vision of ‗those new, slightly-outmoded
shoes‘ in ‗Broadcast‘. And there are others, of course, in the poems I‘ve
read since then: ‗the uncertain children, frilled in white / And grasping at
enormous air‘ in ‗To the Sea‘; the ‗close-ribbed streets‘ in ‗The Building‘,
that ‗rise and fall / Like a great sigh out of the last century‘. Roman
Jakobson described literature as ‗organised violence committed on
ordinary speech‘, but Larkin is rather different: it‘s not so much ordinary
speech that he makes us perceive in a different way, as the ordinary itself.14
Even if I couldn‘t escape from all the everyday stuff, I could at least look
at it as something that was potentially poetic. There was another way out
that Larkin offered me, too. It was in studying Larkin that the whole
business of ‗doing English‘ started to make sense: when something clicked
and literary criticism began to feel like a joyful intellectual game. And then
I went to Oxford for an Open Day and saw someone sitting on a bench in
St. Giles reading a book – something you definitely couldn‘t have done
back home – and decided that if this was a place where you could sit in
the middle of the street and read books then this was where I wanted to
be.
Earlier, I referred to Richard Palmer‘s observation that it was only
through teaching Larkin‘s poetry to secondary school students that he
became fully aware of its detailed account of the social history of the midtwentieth century. Often, we notice different aspects of texts when we
teach them: we read them more closely and experience them through
different eyes. In the years that I‘ve been teaching Larkin – both for the
old AQA Specification A course, and latterly as part of AQA B‘s unit on
Aspects of the Pastoral – I‘ve been struck again and again by what a
brilliant craftsman he is. He‘s one of those writers whose work is not just
an object of study in itself, but a lesson in how to study literature. It‘s like
being told, look: this is what you can do with metonymy; this is what halfrhyme does; these are the effects that you can create by playing around
with a poem‘s rhythmic structure. (Arthur Miller is another writer I‘d place
in this category: here‘s how you take classical tragedy and make it modern.
TEACHING AND LEARNING LARKIN
105
Or Walt Whitman, with his poem ‗Patrolling Barnegat‘, taught by English
teachers up and down the country as part of the AQA GCSE English
Literature anthology: look at what you can do with the sonnet form if you
push against its boundaries). When students find out that ‗MCMXIV‘
consists of only one sentence, they‘re intrigued: when they discover that
it‘s not a complete sentence – that it lacks a main verb – and that this is the
source of the poem‘s restlessness and sense of uncertainty, they‘re instantly
made aware of how important it is to have a grasp of the underlying
grammatical structures of poetry in order to describe the effects they
create. This is reinforced when they study ‗Here‘, and look at the contrast
between the long opening sentence – spanning the first three verses,
describing the bustle and chaos of urban life – and its successor, the
strikingly brief ‗Here silence stands / Like heat‘. Similarly, if students can
identify stressed and unstressed syllables, and analyse the effects of some
common metrical and rhyming patterns, then they will be able to articulate
very precisely how Larkin creates the gnomic voice of ‗This Be The Verse‘,
with its regular iambic tetrameter and alternating rhyme; the restiveness of
‗Wires‘, with its arch-rhyme and hypermetric lines; and the sense of
unfulfilment and defeat in ‗Afternoons‘, with its persistently shifting
stresses.15 Perhaps most important, however, is the fact that in studying
Larkin, students receive an important grounding in tact: in reading with
care and looking beyond the surface. It takes sensitivity and patience, and a
willingness to dwell on subtle nuances of meaning, to articulate what is
meant by ‗Not untrue and not unkind‘, by the endings of ‗An Arundel
Tomb‘ and ‗High Windows‘, or by the narrator‘s feelings about solitude in
poems such as ‗Self‘s the Man‘ and ‗Vers de Société‘. (And, indeed, to
appreciate that the narrator is not necessarily Larkin, that the narrative
persona in one poem might differ from that in another, and that the stance
that this persona espouses at the beginning of a poem is often very
different to that reached at the end). Clearly, though, students enjoy the
challenge. It is heartening to read Ian Stewart‘s comments that Larkin‘s
work ‗consistently produces some of the most interesting responses‘ from
A-level candidates, who write about it ‗in a fresh and immediate manner‘.16
My own students, over the years, have often started by mistrusting Larkin
for his superficial cynicism, but then reach a point where they can
sympathise with what he‘s saying, where on some level he just makes
sense. And I‘ve seen students who‘ve struggled to engage with other texts
and authors suddenly become switched on by Larkin, in a way that is often
remarkable.
*
*
*
*
*
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Life occasionally throws up odd connections. In November 2005 my
husband and I were approved as adoptive parents: six months later we
had a phone call from our social worker to say that she‘d been approached
about a little boy, currently in foster care, who needed a new mum and
dad. Where was he from? Hull, of course. And so it was that I made my
first journey to Hull, for the endless meetings and interrogations that
accompany the adoption process. We went for a walk along the Humber
foreshore the evening before we met our son for the first time, and I
remembered Larkin‘s statement that ‗Always it is by bridges that we live‘,
thinking about the oddness of two bits of my life coming together. (One
social worker asked us how we planned to make our son aware of his
‗Hull heritage‘, and of course my immediate thought was of Larkin,
though I think it‘ll be a while before we read him That Poem).
I went back to Hull last August, lured by the Larkin 25 events organised
to mark the quarter-century since Larkin‘s death. I went by train, naturally,
although I changed at Doncaster, not Sheffield. I didn‘t eat an awful pie,
either. I‘m not sure you can buy them, now: just panini, and muffins, and
multiple kinds of coffee about which Larkin would no doubt have had
something scathing to say. I took my copy of The Whitsun Weddings with
me, and as the train pulled out of Doncaster and headed east, the
landscape seemed remarkably familiar. There were wheatfields and
poplars, occasional haystacks, and a low, louring sky with grey, striated
cloud. There were harsh-named halts – Gilberdyke, Crabley Creek,
Brough – and then the wide expanse of river with its graceful arch of
bridge.
One of Larkin 25‘s main attractions was the series of multi-coloured
fibreglass toads, decorated by various artists and community groups, that
were dotted around Hull and its environs. The first toad I saw – the
Teletoad, painted to look like one of
Hull‘s distinctive white telephone boxes
– was squatting outside a mobile coffee
stall just opposite Paragon Station: the
second, decorated with primary-school
handprints, was outside Waterstones.
Two women asked me if I would take a
photograph of them with the Hidden
Toad, outside City Hall. They were
photographing the toads for an old
schoolfriend of theirs who had emigrated from Hull to Australia a couple
of years previously: she‘d read about Larkin 25 on the internet and didn‘t
want to miss out. The toads were bright splashes of colour, some fittingly
placed – like the punk toad outside Hull Truck Theatre – and others more
TEACHING AND LEARNING LARKIN
107
incongruous, such as the orange Tequila Toad sitting outside the
Jobcentre on a slightly threatening road junction. There were lots of
people looking for toads: mainly families with small children and lists to
tick off, but some solo travellers, trying not to look too conspicuous with
their cameras and maps.
The Georgian Houses Museum, in the restored Museums Quarter, was
hosting ‗Larkinalia‘, an exhibition of objects that once belonged to Larkin.
I‘m not generally a fan of authorial relics, but Larkin is such a poet of
details – the precise objects that conjure up a life – that it was fascinating
to see the minutiae of his own domestic space: a pair of enormous leather
slippers, a collection of Beatrix Potter figurines, two plates bearing the
slogan ‗Prepare to Meet Thy God.‘ There were cigarette cards, a
flamboyant handkerchief, a pair of Monica Jones‘s flashy sunglasses and
an entirely predictable saucer-souvenir. Bizarrely, there was also the
lawnmower that featured in the poem ‗The Mower‘, with a cuddly toy
hedgehog poised for illustrative purposes beneath its blades. The
explanatory notes were in Comic Sans, which Larkin would have either
loathed or appreciated in an ironic way, I‘m not sure which.
I finished my day at the Hull History Centre, a lovely light airy building
with an atmosphere of quiet purposefulness. Its display included an early
draft of ‗Love Songs in Age‘, some of Larkin‘s letters, and journals from
holidays he took with Monica Jones in the 1960s and 70s. (On the day I
visited, the page on display bore Monica‘s waspish comments about their
fellow guests, whom she pronounced ‗incredibly common‘). As I made
notes, one of the centre staff was leading a workshop on researching
family history. A woman was showing her son faded photographs of longdead relatives from copies of old local newspapers; people were sharing
discoveries and giving advice, passing things on. I thought of the line in
‗Ambulances‘ about ‗the unique random blend / Of families and fashions‘,
of the connections between the generations in ‗To the Sea‘, and about the
sense of unity in variety that Larkin‘s greatest poems call to mind: a feeling
that beyond the curmudgeonly stereotype, his writing bears witness to the
uniqueness of individuals, their sorest insecurities and the fragility of their
hopes. It seemed appropriate, somehow.
Notes
1. Ian Stewart, ‗Philip Larkin: An Examiner‘s Perspective‘, About Larkin, 21
(Summer 2006), 5-8, p. 5.
2. Philip Larkin, ‗The Pleasure Principle‘, in Required Writing: Miscellaneous
Pieces 1955-1982 (London: Faber and Faber, 1983), 80-82, pp. 80-81.
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3. Lisa Jardine, ‗Saxon Violence‘, Guardian, 8 December 1992, section 2, p. 4
4. Bryan Appleyard, ‗The Dreary Laureate of our Provincialism‘, Independent,
18 March 1993, p. 27. Appleyard referred to Larkin in a recent article as
‗superbly second rank‘ (‗Poetry and the English Imagination‘, The Liberal, 8
August 2010, available online at http://www.theliberal.co.uk/issue_11/
artsandculture/poetry_appleyard_11.html).
5. Stewart, ‗Philip Larkin: An Examiner‘s Perspective‘, p. 5.
6. Richard Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises: The Art of Philip Larkin (London:
Continuum, 2008), xviii.
7. Richard Palmer, ‗Helping the Old, Too, As They Ought‘, About Larkin, 21
(Summer 2006), 18-21, p. 21.
8. Andrew Swarbrick, ‗Larkin in the Sixth Form‘, in Larkin with Poetry, ed. by
Michael Baron (Leicester: English Association, 1997), 71-6, p. 72.
9. Andrew Motion, ‗Philip Larkin and Symbolism‘, in New Casebooks: Philip
Larkin, ed. by Stephen Regan (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1997), 32-54, p. 52.
This essay originally appeared in Motion‘s book Philip Larkin (London
and New York: Methuen, 1982).
10. Swarbrick, ‗Larkin in the Sixth Form‘, p. 72.
11. ‗An Interview with John Haffenden‘, in Philip Larkin, Further Requirements:
Interviews, Broadcasts, Statements and Book Reviews, 1952-1985, ed. by Anthony
Thwaite (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), 47-61, p. 59.
12. Swarbrick, ‗Larkin in the Sixth Form‘, pp. 72, 75.
13. Palmer, Such Deliberate Disguises, p. 72.
14. Roman Jakobson, quoted in Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), p. 2.
15. Andrew Swarbrick offers a detailed analysis of the structure of ‗Wires‘ in
Out of Reach: The Poetry of Philip Larkin (London: Macmillan, 1995), pp. 924.
16. Stewart, ‗Philip Larkin: An Examiner‘s Perspective‘, p. 5.
109
Transition from Year 6 to Year 7 in
the English Department
Gill Parker
W
arning: this article does not pretend to take the place of any
published research, nor does it pretend to be in any way
‗learned‘. It is more an anecdotal and observational look at the
Year 7 response to English lessons during the first half term of secondary
school, particularly focussing on how pupils‘ expectations have been
realised (or not) and how these pupils have coped with the transition from
primary to secondary school (with regard to English lessons).
It may be useful to understand some of the background to the school in
which I am Head of English. The Ofsted inspection of February 2010
sums up the school‘s profile as follows:
The school is smaller than average. Just under half of the
students come from minority ethnic backgrounds and most
of these speak English as an additional language. Students of
Bangladeshi and Indian background form the largest groups.
The proportion of students with special educational needs
and/or disabilities is above average. The most common
needs are moderate learning difficulties and behavioural,
emotional and social.1
The September 2010 intake is fairly typical of the above. In English, 33%
achieved Level 5 at Key Stage 2 SATs, with 39% at Level 4, 21% at Level
3 and 7% with ‗No level or below‘ the level for testing. 28% of pupils are
eligible for free school meals. This information may, or may not have a
bearing on what follows.
Research took place in the early years of the new millennium to examine
the impact of transition; in particular, research led by Cambridge
University.2 The National Strategy used many of its findings to write
Transition Units (2004)3 and the document Curriculum Continuity - effective
transfer between primary and secondary schools (2004).4
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THE USE OF ENGLISH
In this article, I hope to examine the reaction of pupils to the transition
between primary and secondary school between Years 6 and 7 with regard
to English, and relate their experience to previous research.
Year 7 pupils joined us from twelve different primary schools in 2010.
While the Curriculum Continuity document suggested that:
Curriculum continuity refers to:
knowing which topics and, in English, which texts have already
been covered;
knowing what skills and understandings have been well
established;
knowing the pace and style of previous lessons in the subject;
using this knowledge to launch pupils‘ secondary education in a
way that will reassure them, challenge them and take them
forward rapidly.5
Many Heads of English may find this to be a daunting, if not Herculean
task! With the best will in the world, the everyday teaching load of many
teachers precludes the suggested ‗twilight sessions‘ with primary
colleagues, let alone the suggestions of visits to question Year 6 staff to
ask them details of their English lessons or ask them to comment on your
own Year 7 curriculum. I am sure many readers may be engaged in such
worthy activities but, mea culpa, I am not one of them!
So this begs the question of whether our Year 7 pupils have been done a
disservice. We do, of course have information from Teacher Assessments
and details of any special educational needs, plus other relevant
information from the class teachers which is given in the transfer process.
Nevertheless, as the introduction to the Transition Units states:
… it is often difficult for Year 7 teachers to gauge the
curricular strengths and weaknesses of pupils who are new to
their schools.6
I did use the English Bridging Units when they were first published, as I
am sure other schools did, but I found, in common with research that:
there can be problems if the transfer school receives pupils
from a large number of feeder schools, where the units have
been handled in different ways, and if pupils regard them as
‗last year‘s work‘.7
TRANSITION FROM YEAR 6 TO YEAR 7
111
When the pupils first arrived, we kept them in form groups to allow them
to make friends and for us to assess them before grouping them for
ability. We devised a ‗Transition‘ unit of sorts, which was basically a series
of revision lessons with ‗mini assessments‘ to check understanding. I was
aware of research that noted:
…pupils revisit topics they have already covered. On
occasion, it can be illuminating to visit old territory and see it
in a new light. But mostly, pupils find it dull.8
However, it has been my experience that many pupils ‗regress‘ during the
long summer holiday and need to refresh their knowledge if they are to
get off to a flying start.
I decided to allow Year 7 pupils a half term ‗settling in‘ period before I
asked them any questions about their experiences of transition. Of the
125 pupils questioned, there were sixty girls and sixty five boys. As might
be expected, there were some differences in the responses from girls and
boys. If I think it is of interest, then I will mention it.
When asked about their experience of English lessons at primary school, I
asked the pupils if their lessons were known as ‗English‘ or ‗Literacy‘.
Only eight pupils answered that they had been taught ‗English‘ lessons.
Indeed, for some pupils, it took several lessons at secondary school before
they used the words ‗English lessons‘, tending to refer to ‗Literacy time‘.
There did not seem to be any misunderstanding about the content of
English lessons, for when asked what they thought secondary school
English lessons would be about they replied with fairly predictable topics:
writing, Shakespeare, punctuation, plays, spelling, developing existing
skills, grammar, poetry and essay writing. Unfortunately, some pupils
mentioned that they thought the work would be much harder (more girls)
and/or boring. 13% mentioned that they thought that the work would be
the same. (They did not explain if this was a good or bad thing!) I had
decided that finding out what pupils had enjoyed at primary school might
help us develop our Year 7 schemes of work. As research showed:
Transfer schools still have difficulty in striking a balance
between the need to provide new and exciting challenges in
the work they set Y7 pupils while at the same time ensuring
a smooth progression between primary and secondary
school and meeting KS3 targets.9
There was quite a variety of responses, as you might imagine. Many cited
writing stories (26% girls but 9% boys), poetry, drama, games and one
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unusual answer of ‗tests‘. Sadly, a number of pupils stated that they had
enjoyed ‗nothing‘ of their primary school English/Literacy lessons: 30%
of boys and 8% of girls. I had wondered what the impact of Key Stage 2
tests would have had on pupils‘ perception of English/Literacy in Year 6
and I asked the question about what they had not enjoyed. Not
surprisingly, some pupils had mentioned the very things that their peers
had enjoyed. However, 28% of boys stated: ‗everything‘/‘lots‘ while 10%
of girls expressed similar thoughts. 10% of the girls mentioned ‗tests‘
while the boys presumably included their feelings under ‗lots/everything‘.
10% of girls used the word ‗boring‘ which may reflect the lead up to the
tests. Garton‘s research indicated that:
Heads acknowledged the existence of a ‗push‘ during Year 6.
Two strategies dominated heads‘ approaches to Year 6:
regular use of ‗practice tests‘ (reported by 82%) and the
provision of ‗booster‘ classes (74%). A majority concentrated
their more experienced teaching staff in Y6 classes, reduced
the scope of the curriculum taught during Y6 and focused
the efforts of any support staff here (around 60% in each
case).10
This may help explain some of the more negative attitudes from these
pupils, especially as Garton remarks:
The reality is that for many pupils much of Y6, in the run up
to the tests, consists largely of revision with an emphasis on
whole class direct instruction. This squeeze on the
curriculum and the restricted range of pedagogy employed in
Y6 has implications for teaching at the lower end of the
secondary school. 11
The findings may also reflect the pupils who thought that secondary
school English would be ‗harder‘, ‗boring‘ or ‗the same‘.
The next question, which still addressed pupils‘ expectations, asked if Year
6 teachers had told them anything about English lessons at secondary
school. The vast majority claimed ‗no‘. Only nine pupils answered ‗yes‘,
with some of these giving information such as being told that: ‗you‘ll have
to work harder‘; ‗there‘s lots of homework‘; ‗you won‘t get as much help‘
– hardly the positive message we would hope.
Having read that:
Pupils stated that in Y7 there was more variety in English
and that it was more interesting.12
TRANSITION FROM YEAR 6 TO YEAR 7
113
I raised the question of what might be good about secondary school
English lessons. Again, there was a wide variety ranging from topics such
as Drama, films, writing stories and reading books to experiences such as
‗more challenge‘, ‗fun‘ and being in ability groups.
The final question about pupils‘ expectations was, unremarkably, about
pupils‘ worries about secondary school English. There were a lot. Thirty
eight pupils thought that the work would be too hard, fourteen were
worried about homework, ten pupils thought that they might not
understand the lessons, three boys worried about ‗getting things wrong‘,
six boys mentioned ‗writing‘ but did not elaborate, only two mentioned
spelling as an issue, and a few included ‗teachers‘ (meant in a negative way,
presumably), and ‗tests‘.
As regards the ability of the Year 7 pupils to cope with the move to
secondary school and for some, the discrete subject of ‗English‘, how did
they cope? After reading their answers to the questions about their
expectations, I was rather worried. However, Galton had found that:
The dominant assumption has been that continuities in pupils‘
learning need to be strengthened. But when we tuned in to
what Y6 and Y7 pupils were saying it became clear that while
continuity matters for some aspects of transfer, discontinuity is
also important – especially for pupils.13
I asked the Year 7 pupils three questions about their experiences during
the first half term. The first question was a straightforward one: So far,
what have you enjoyed in English lessons at secondary school? I hoped
that they would mention some of the special activities we had devised but
their answers were more surprising. Ten boys, but no girls, stated that
they had enjoyed ‗nothing‘, while eight boys and no girls stated
‗everything‘. 10% of the cohort stated that they had enjoyed the
assessments we had given them (which really surprised me). 10% also
mentioned that doing longer pieces of writing had been enjoyable. Other
pupils mentioned spelling activities, punctuation revision, and three pupils
mentioned homework. Other responses from individuals included ‗the
teachers don‘t talk too much‘ and ‗we are left alone to get on with our
work‘. (I don‘t know if they came from the same primary school.) It does
not seem that revisiting Year 6 topics briefly was too much of an issue for
our Year 7 pupils. Not one pupil mentioned the trip to see ‗Farm Boy‘ at a
local theatre! Perhaps they did not regard this as English?
The ‗million dollar question‘ was: What have you not enjoyed about
English lessons at secondary school? Rather like the earlier question, there
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THE USE OF ENGLISH
were complete opposites to some responses. 10% of all pupils stated that
they had not liked the tests/assessments, 5% did not like homework, six
boys stated ‗everything‘, seven girls did not like the revision of skills
lessons. Other responses included ‗using exercise books‘, ‗hard work‘ and
‗writing‘. I do not think that any of these responses told me anything that
I would have not expected from an average eleven year old.
The final question was: If a Year 6 pupil told you that he/she was worried
about English lessons at secondary school, what would you say to them? I
hoped that the responses would tell me if the Year 7 pupils had settled in
without too many real problems. There were only two areas of concern
for some pupils: homework and hard work. Without knowing who the
pupils were, it is hard to tell if they were weaker ability pupils, but I would
suspect so.
The ‗advice‘ fell under these broad headings: ‗you can ask for help if you
need it‘, ‗the work is the same/not much different to Year 6‘, ‗it‘s a
different name for Literacy‘. Many pupils provided ‗advice‘ like: ‗you‘ll
enjoy it‘, ‗it‘s good fun‘, which indicated to me that all was well.
To conclude, it seems that our Year 7 pupils have adjusted to their
English lessons at our secondary school and there are no major concerns
about their being able to cope. I think that there will always be some
moans and groans from children, no matter what you provide. However,
it becomes quite clear, that Year 6 pupils need more information about
what the Year 7 curriculum entails and that the early weeks at secondary
school need to be fun and dynamic. Reassurances must also be made to
address the concerns of some pupils.
I also think that I need to look again at pupils‘ expectations, as while some
were pretty accurate, there was a lack of knowledge and understanding
which, if addressed, could help to improve attitude and motivation. In
order to provide the Year 6 pupils with more information, I shall certainly
try to visit the main feeder primary schools and talk to pupils about
‗English‘ as a subject. I am still not sure that a transition project (of the
original model) will work, owing to the number of feeder schools and the
fact that some pupils will have classmates who are going to a different
secondary school. It might be possible to relaunch some activities which
pupils can attempt over the summer holidays; I tried this three years ago
but only half the pupils brought it back. Perhaps the answer is some
exciting and dynamic initial activities so that no pupil, being asked what
they had not enjoyed about English, will answer ‗everything‘.
TRANSITION FROM YEAR 6 TO YEAR 7
115
References
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Inspection Report, Ofsted, 2010.
The Impact of School Transitions and Transfers on Pupil Progress and
Attainment , Maurice Galton, DFEE 1999, Research Report 131.
English Transition Units for Year 6 and 7, The National Strategies,
Department for Education, 2004.
Curriculum Continuity – effective transfer between primary and secondary schools
(2004), Department for Education and Skills, Ref: DfES 0116-2004.
ibid.
English Transition Units for Year 6 and 7.
Middle Years of Schooling: (7-14) Continuities and Discontinuities in Learning,
Department for Education and Skills, Research Report RR443, 2003.
Curriculum Continuity – effective transfer between primary and secondary schools.
Middle Years of Schooling: (7-14) Continuities and Discontinuities in Learning.
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
ibid.
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THE USE OF ENGLISH
Why I Like Teaching KS3
Students about Robin Hood, King
Arthur, Sir Gawain and the Green
Knight, Beowulf and the Heroes
of Classical Myth
Vanessa Vasey
… one day he’ll come along - the man I love …
Y
es, well! I‘m possibly not the only aging spinster still waiting for
her knight on a white charger. Like the secretary, the librarian or
the nurse in an old-school Mills and Boon-style romance, like
Rapunzel in her tower or Cinderella at her hearth, we await his coming.
‗Clipperty-clop,‘ go Mr Rochester‘s horse‘s hooves as he gallops towards
his frozen Jane Eyre;1 ‗Swoosh!‘ as Perseus swoops to save Andromeda
chained to the rock. And Patient Griselda sits like a monument, smiling at
grief.2
Yes! He will come and we shall all go to the ball and live happily ever
after. Sorry, boys, I don‘t quite know what the male equivalent is.
Possibly that for every Jack there is, somewhere, somehow, some way, his
Jill who will gaze adoringly up at him, reflecting his image back at twice
the natural size3 .... and he will have found what he has been searching for:
the hero inside himself! You‘ve gotta love it!
Of course, a sounder interpretation of these beguiling fairy tales goes
along these lines: we are all, men and women, both Cinderella and the
Prince, both Andromeda and Perseus; we can and must be the agents of
our own liberation. What we must search for is the reunion of these sadly
polarised psychological elements. Once that is accomplished, we‘ll really
have a ball.
In the meantime we‘re still searching for the hero inside ourselves. And
TEACHING KS3
117
the good news is that now we can all be heroes; in fact we are exhorted to
strive for our place in the sun, our fifteen minutes of fame, because we’re
worth it. We can all be on the telly, hanging out our soiled linen, mouthing
off and selling our crummy secrets. We can set up our webcams for
voyeurs to slaver over, or blog or tweet like preening bird-brains. We can
and, by Jove, an inordinate number of us do!
When I show my A level students Arthur Miller‘s Death of a Salesman,
showing the sad futility of a life devoted to achieving that moment in the
sunshine of success, it‘s not immediately clear to the young consumerist
where Willy Loman has gone wrong: he worked hard for his house, his
fridge, his car. Now it‘s time to retire, to sit down and survey the fruits of
labour. Ah! now we see the problem: the car has crashed, the fridge is
obsolete, the house has been hemmed in by ugly developments. Finally,
and far too late, we turn to the earth - perhaps that should be the Earth.
We try too late to set the seed for some more worthy, more lasting
harvest. Too late! We are worth more dead than alive; and, as the voice of
reason whispers in our ear, ‗No one‘s worth anything dead!‘ So what‘s a
man‘s life worth? Answers on a postcard, please.
You sit down to read the newspaper and what strikes home is not the ugly
bully who has wrecked someone else‘s dreams, but the doddery old bloke
or the quiet young dad or the feisty mum-of-four or the school-kid or the
foreign tourist … the deus ex machina who stepped into the drama and
did something wonderful, because something wonderful was needed.
What I want to know is - who are these people—these ‗aid workers‘ and
‗doctors sans frontier‘ and Save the Children and Christian Aid and Red
Cross operatives who go places no one should have to go and see what no
one should have to see, and will not give up - gracefully or otherwise - in
the face of those overwhelming odds we could have told them about, if
they‘d bothered to ask the likes of us; which they never do.
Are these heroes? From where I‘m sitting, quietly at home with my cat
and my cocoa, they look as if they might be; how would we know?
There are other aspects of the hero, of course. Heroes are the stuff of
legend: we tell their stories; they guide our aspirations; they invade our
dreams; they shape our moral conscience. To know a society, ask who its
heroes are. Oh Lordy! Must we answer: the latest X Factor or BGT or
Strictly contender? I‘m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Big Brother
psycho porn star transvestite? Beam me up, Scotty! Even our sporting
heroes are becoming more ‗celeb‘ than square-jawed adventurer; more
Posh ‘n‘ Becks, Coleen ‘n‘ Wayne than Spock ‘n‘ Kirk.
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My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair!4
At least for Ozymandias some small vestige of glory remained:
Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
What will persist of our society‘s paparazzi fodder? Not a jot or tittle, I‘ll
warrant! With a sigh of relief we turn to Robin Hood, to Camelot, even
(who‘d have thought it!) to Beowulf. Not to mention Odysseus and
chums of Troy fame, and Clash of the Titans 2010. And I haven‘t even
mentioned Superman and Batman and Spiderman, who in their revised
and updated forms are all heroes in the time-honoured mould.
Last week I was reading Tennyson‘s Ulysses5 with my year elevens.
(‗Which one‘s he?‘ ‗Sean Bean.‘ ‗Oh! Brad Pitt was better!‘). Ulysses may
be eligible for his freedom pass and the winter fuel allowance but he‘s by
no means ready to settle down to rule Ithaca; he wants one last, great
adventure; and, with any luck, he‘ll be sailing to the Happy Isles and never
have to come back to his pipe and slippers and Her Indoors. His son
Telemachus is an unimaginative, plodding sort of guy; he can do the biz
back at home while Dad and his old mates sail off into the sunset. It‘s like
Just William6 has done a Freaky Friday7 manoeuvre on his father. Heroes
seek out adventure; they are restless; danger is meat-and-drink to them.
Not for them the nine-to-five, the stake-holder pension, the ISA, the
mortgage.
But then there‘s Arthur! Arthur is a hero of a different colour: he stuck it
out, learning to govern, to be a leader of men, to be a champion of his
people. And when he was gone, how his people mourned and longed for
his return. O for leaders with Arthur‘s nobility, who surround themselves
with knights of stainless honour. Look at the lick-spittle self-servers
around today - ah me! The flower of Camelot hazarded all in search of
spiritual riches; the holy grail for modern politicians is Personal
Aggrandisement. Very sad!
A hero knows what‘s Right. If in doubt, he has a trusty Merlin to point
him in the right direction, or the touchstone of his honour, nurtured in
chivalry, to guide his steps. Sir Gawain withstands the Green Knight‘s axe
because his heart is pure; there is just that tiny nick in his neck, because he
accepted the Lady‘s girdle of invulnerability; and who wouldn‘t, in his
position!
TEACHING KS3
119
Heroes, after all, are not gods. They may be closely related to gods, on
one side of the family at least, but human they are, with our human
failings. Whilst godhead is far beyond our ken, we can aspire to know
heroism, in its richness and variety. Sometimes heroism is about standing
back from corruption and heckling from the sidelines. The barb of wit
can sting as sharply as the arrow, and to smile and snap the fingers in the
tyrant‘s face may be heroic in its way: the raspberry of ridicule versus the
sword of tyranny. Bold Robin Hood‘s resistance to oppression lies in the
notion of Merry England and the good-fellowship of the Greenwood.
The carousing of Friar Tuck and the ballads of Alan-a-Dale are as
significant as the strong right arm of Little John in holding out against Bad
King John and his henchmen. Sherwood Forest is a pastoral refuge of
right-thinking and right-living from a court and country laid waste by
avarice and base ambition. We know instinctively that the Sheriff of
Nottingham never cracks a smile or enjoys a few bevies and a bit of
karaoke with his acolytes. If Arthur is our responsible leader, wrestling
with his conscience and striving to preserve the realm, Robin is our Merry
Monarch-Manqué, fighting oppression with a jest and a well-placed arrow.
Which of them would best serve our present times, I wonder.
Perhaps our present dark times call for a new St. George to slay the
Dragon of Ignorance and Spiritual Impoverishment. Or a Beowulf to rid
us of the Monster and the Monster‘s Mum. Personally I‘m waiting for the
Monster‘s Nan to show up; then there‘ll be trouble!
Of course, heroes are not really about ridding us of our Grendels; heroes
do what they do because, well, because that‘s what being a hero is about.
A world without threat, without conflict, without misery and suffering
would hardly be a ‗world fit for heroes‘; that was Ulysses‘ problem on
Ithaca in Tennyson‘s poem. On the plus side, the world at present shows
no sign of perfecting itself to the pitch of making heroes like them
redundant.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte.
Twelfth Night, by William Shakespeare
Reflecting Men At Twice Their Natural Size, by Sally Cline and Dale Spender.
Ozymandias, by P. B. Shelley.
Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
Just William, by Richmal Crompton.
7. Freaky Friday, by Mary Rodgers.
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Kentish Town
James Wilson
W
hen we think of images of grief we often think of hysteria, the
rending of clothes perhaps, a sobbing or heaving all too often
described as uncontrollable, which may be the mot juste, but
which also fails to take into account the way such fits of lamentation often
end abruptly, and surely with some degree of volition. Only later do we
think of the silence, the withdrawal of the grieving, their pain expressed
not so much through any particular action, but through the general
superficiality of all their actions, or even the lack of an action, an
unspecified action, of which the inability to be performed has led to the
development of such customs as wearing mourning or covering mirrors
for certain amounts of time.
Grief manifests itself in countless ways all dependent on the individual
and perhaps in this sense it can be compared to water which will take on
the shape of the container that holds it. The forms of grief are
innumerable because ultimately it falls into the broader discourse of life
and is, as such, as inexpressible as any feeling or emotion. When Camus,
in his Le Mythe de Sisyphe, said of love ‗I know only that blend of desire,
tenderness and intelligence that ties me to such-and-such a being. That
compound is not the same for another. I do not have the right to conceal
all these experiences with the same name‘, he reminds us that the inability
to express emotions isn‘t just a problem of language and the failure of
Saussure‘s damn signs to signify, but is moreover a problem resulting
from the impossibility of a common experience.
Sometime after the death of my paternal grandmother, many years ago
now, I took a train ride on the Thameslink line that cuts through the
centre of London, linking Bedford and Luton Airport in the north with
Brighton and Gatwick Airport in the south. I had no destination in mind
but was limited to the zones 1-4 capacity of my travelcard. As the train
rolled through the South London landscape towards Elephant & Castle, I
felt the consolation of travelling by rail—that desensitization afforded by
gazing out the windows at an ever-changing vista and being able to almost
think of nothing save the images outside of the pane of glass. In this case
the landscapes were all too familiar and would only become more familiar
KENTISH TOWN
121
in time, comfortable and faded with use like a favourite jumper, so
familiar that using the word ‗landscape‘ sounds absurd. A landscape is
something you step back from and admire. These buildings and cars and
trees are something you step into, part of the backdrop to the world of
someone else that you form. Chugging on past the now defunct King‘s
Cross Thameslink as though into forbidden territory, I alighted at the next
stop, Kentish Town. I had never been there before and was only familiar
with it because I would so often come across the venue names of the
Kentish Town Forum and the Kentish Town Bull & Gate in the pages of
the New Musical Express and Melody Maker.
I soon found the Bull & Gate and the Forum was almost next door. Both
places were closed and their lifeless façades showed no signs of all the
nights out they had seen. I hadn‘t been aware of having any expectations,
but I was disappointed, perhaps wanting to hear ripples of applause
emanating from somewhere inside, perhaps suffering pangs of teenage
frustration at not yet being old enough to go to places like these at night,
when they were open and full of possibilities. So many people had given
birth to memories in these places that, in a fashion, they had become
sacred spaces harbouring the past and gone. In this way the buildings
differed little from cemeteries and burial grounds and should perhaps be
likewise consecrated. I am reminded of Angelo, a character in Nicholas
Royle‘s novel The Director’s Cut, and his cataloguing of the locations of
former cinemas. Angelo would have been aware that the Forum opened
late in 1934 and was built by the art deco cinema architect John Stanley
Beard, with the interior being designed by his partner Walter R Bennett.
Angelo would also have known that the Forum and its sister cinemas in
Ealing and Fulham Road were taken over by Associated British Cinemas
in March 1935, although it wouldn‘t be until 1963 that the theatre in
Kentish Town would be known as the ABC. The ABC closed in 1970
going on to become a bingo hall and a dance hall before turning to its
current trade as a music venue, first as the Town and Country Club and
then in 1992 reverting to its original name of the Forum. What Angelo
might not have known was the conspiracy theory posited by one
anonymous Internet poster that the Forum had a darker connection than
its one to heavy metal music or black and white thrillers: that it had
intimate connections with Fascism, being built—and here the poster loses
him or herself in the language of music journalism that so often surrounds
the namedropping of such a place as the Forum—‗as the final destination
of Adolf Hitler‘s tour‘. At this stage we expect the post to be a wind-up.
Tour? What tour? With the full band, or just an acoustic set? And if this is
not in jest, then just what is implied by the word ‗tour‘—is this an
invitation, guest speaker-style tour, or is it an allusion to the ‗touring‘ of
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the armies of the Third Reich into Austria, the Sudetenland and beyond?
The poster continues, in sentences full of an almost childlike rapture, to
explain that the interior décor consists of ‗huge eagles which the Nazis
liked and the depiction of Roman battle scenes which were associated
with the third reich‘ and that ‗it wasn‘t that long ago that the swastikas that
lined the walls either side of the stage were removed‘. The Internet theory
goes on to associate the building with Oswald Mosley and, later, the IRA.
Perhaps the most intriguing part of this Internet posting is the plea for
further information which is so worded as to make the author sound
genuine (even if deluded), or to make the author into an intelligent person
capable enough of manipulating language and sowing the first seeds of the
very urban myth they say they want to prevent: ‗If anyone has anymore
information on this subject please post it on this site and stop them from
turning this valuable information into an urban myth and making people
believe it was originally built as a cinema.‘ The unidentified them flavours
the piece with a sense of paranoia that seems to be so prevalent on the
Net, the information superhighway offering solutions, but at unspoken
prices, the full cost of which you might never find out. What is curious is
that, send-up or no send-up, the poster is more knowledgeable than most
about the Forum, knowing that it had sister buildings elsewhere in
London—the Forum in Ealing was almost identical in appearance to the
one in Kentish Town, the only difference in their façades being the
imperious black columns set against white backgrounds, both buildings
having them, but whilst Kentish Town has six columns, Ealing, now torn
down to be replaced by a multiplex, had eight. And strictly speaking, the
claim that the building was not intended as a cinema has some merit. The
Forum was certainly built to show films, but with its first floor tea room
and dance hall, a special ladies cosmetics room and six dressing rooms,
not to mention its specially installed Compton Organ, five-ton safety
curtain, and a proscenium thirty-five feet wide with a stage twenty-five
feet deep, the Forum was more than just a cinema. At its grand unveiling
on Monday the 17th December, 1934, the Forum boasted a programme
that included an ‗Opening Ceremony‘ by the actor Sydney Howard; ‗A
Musical Cocktail‘ with H A Dowson at the Compton Organ; a
performance by the intriguingly named Alfredo and his Famous Gypsy
Orchestra; the National Anthem sung by the operatic contralto, Olive
Gilbert (famous for her roles in Ivor Novello musicals); before finishing
with a film, the ‗delightful comedy drama‘ The Church Mouse (Cert. A),
starring Laura La Plante and Ian Hunter. It would have been a long and
eventful day, kicking off with a ‗Fanfare of Trumpets‘ by the trumpeters
of His Majesty‘s Coldstream Guards at two thirty in the afternoon. A
variety of music, newsreels, singing, documentaries and public speaking
were served up, but it was still a film that grabbed the headline slot, whilst
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movie star and actor, Sydney Howard, was the major attraction. Howard is
pictured in the programme looking quite irate, casting an admonishing
glare at someone just to the left of the camera, the kind of scornful look a
middle-aged man reserves for someone younger indulging in a habit they
choose to brand as antisocial, simply because whilst their tastes have
stayed the same, society has moved on, leaving them unable to understand
the attraction for that stut-un-duh-duh music they listen to too noisily
through their headphones, or their need to constantly fiddle with mobile
phones. What might add credence to the more outlandish theories alleged
by our Internet poster is the scarcity of information that can be found
upon the proprietor Herbert A Yapp who commissioned the Forum
cinemas only to sell them on some three months after their opening. It
seems as though Yapp had a great enthusiasm for the project, keen to be
personally involved and not just the one who stumps up the capital: he
and his architect spoke at the Opening Ceremony, and Yapp also showed
a documentary about the making of the Forum. So what prompted him to
get shot of his investment so quickly? In the brochure for the premier
performance, Yapp exclaimed ‗You will never leave this theatre without
feeling that you have had your money‘s worth‘, and perhaps after that first
night Yapp had had his money‘s worth and needed to recoup, or maybe
his enthusiasm dwindled as he realized that it couldn‘t be opening night
every night—the disappointment every entrepreneur must feel for his
venture at some stage—or could Yapp have sold up because his dreams of
seeing a Fascist England were fading? It seems scurrilous to speculate, but
in a way that‘s all any of us can ever do when we try to work out what
went on before…before…
Before Angelo started cataloguing disused and destroyed cinemas across
London as part of his quest to track down the mythical building of his
imagination, the Museum of Lost Cinema Spaces, he learnt about the
importance of venue and buildings as containers of spent emotion from
cinema projectionist, Iain Burns. Burns is one of the few people that
Angelo—almost autistic in his privacy—allows to get anywhere near his
vulnerable existence, perhaps because Burns is dying and anything he
might glean about Angelo will vanish into the ether with his decease, or
perhaps because Angelo sees in Burns a possible father figure or mentor
who shares a similar taste in films. Angelo, enraptured by film locations,
mutedly points out to his older acquaintance a house on Powis Square,
West London ‗Where they filmed Performance‘. But the teacher doesn‘t pat
the boy on the head or award any gold stars. Burns informs Angelo that
only the exterior shots were filmed there, and that the interior shoots were
done in Belgravia. Angelo becomes disconsolate and feels betrayed, his
childlike naïvité being poisoned by an alien logic. As the pair walk on
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down the Portobello Road, Burns gestures towards the Electric cinema
and says: ‗This is more important. This place will never lose its
significance. It‘ll never lose its ghosts. As long as it‘s standing, even if they
close it down at some point in the future, it‘ll always be a special place…
So many films have been shown here to so many audiences—you can‘t
underestimate the effect of that kind of concentrated exposure to human
emotion. The walls and ceiling of the place will be dripping with it. The
screen may appear two-dimensional, but in fact it‘s like one of those
billboards with countless posters pasted one on top of another. Peel one
off and there‘s another one underneath… This place. This is where the
love affair is consummated. Between you and what‘s on the screen and in
all the air around you. Believe me, this place and others like it—they‘re the
one‘s that have the power. They‘ll never die.‘ It is a poignant speech by
Burns, who has been condemned to death by illness. We may, perhaps,
wonder whether Burns‘s imminent death is not in fact down to the
syphilis diagnosed by a Harley Street doctor, but instead due to his overexposure as a cinema projectionist to an air heavy with something so
much more long-lasting than himself, a miasma of memories surviving
even their owners, and that his life has seeped out of him in a process akin
to osmosis.
Burns dies, but his words live on in Angelo, their echo reverberating ever
louder as they become an obsession to find the Museum of Lost Cinema
Spaces, a building where ‗Every film that has ever been shown on every
London cinema screen that has since been torn down plays there
constantly and continuously and simultaneously. Each scene is played out
at the same time as the next. And each film is reacted to by every audience
it has ever had within this city. Every tear that has been shed, every laugh
that has echoed around the walls of any London cinema that has ever
existed—they are shed over and over and they resound endlessly within
the walls of a single building.‘ At times I feel that each and every person is
like this building, just an empty receptacle in which the ghosts of others
circulate: their influences, their words, their images, their faces, their
mannerisms, all swimming about and being forever diluted by time, but
their strength never diminishing, like a homeopathic remedy: one
molecule of memory to a thousand parts nothingness, still having the
power to haunt us all our lives.
Angelo‘s museum is limited to preserving memories only from screens
now torn down and only those from the London area, and in this respect
is, perhaps, testament to the notions that we can only regard what‘s gone
as sacrosanct and that the elsewhere has little relevance to us. Can you
really care about Mexico without having been there? And if you have been
there, do you only care about it because you‘re no longer there, and in a
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way it is gone, become a memory, not an actuality? The unvisited
elsewhere may well only have a latent relevance to us, but that can never
justify callousness and greed. Rastignac and Bianchon, in Balzac‘s Le Père
Goriot, discuss something similar: If by nodding your head and by some
force of will you could kill a Chinaman and as a consequence at the same
time make yourself rich without leaving your armchair, would you do it?
Angelo restricts his museum to London because, not in spite of, it being a
fantasy. It is an achievable, if time-consuming, task to locate all the
capital‘s former cinema buildings, or the places where they once stood,
and for over fifteen years since Burns‘s death, Angelo has not only been
doing this but has also been capturing the atmospheres of London‘s (at
the time active) cinemas in empty video cassette boxes, forming his own
private collection of London cinema memories. The museum justifies
Angelo, perhaps almost becoming a Nirvana, by only covering London in
its remit. If the museum covered any other areas it would become
incomprehensible and impersonal to Angelo, the Palace in Haverfordwest
or Roses Theatre in Tewkesbury being as meaningless to him as whether
Wisbech Town gain promotion from the Ridgeons Premier League or not.
The fantasy would be lost were the boundaries expanded.
I remember sitting in the High Walk gardens near the Barbican Centre
reading Royle‘s The Director’s Cut, whilst waiting for a friend. I had arrived
earlier than the appointed meeting time for our trip to the cinema, partly
because my anxiety at arriving late generally tends to make me early, and
partly because I wanted to make the most of what was a beautiful
summer‘s day, bright and clear, marred only, perhaps, by an
overenthusiastic breeze. In that strange Barbican environment of potted
foliage and concrete—man patronizing a Nature that will always be the
victor—I surfaced at the end of a chapter from my utter absorption in The
Director’s Cut and tried to remember where I had heard Nicholas Royle‘s
name before. I glanced again at the brief author biography on the first
signature, but nothing rang any bells. Eventually it came to me: another
Nicholas Royle was the co-author with Andrew Bennett of Introduction to
Literature, Criticism and Theory, the second edition (1999) of which was the
first textbook I ever bought, during an ill-fated spell at Warwick
University, whose isolated campus of red-bricked buildings often left me
feeling trapped in an homogenized youthful population, dreaming of
escape.
I would spend my free time walking in the countryside away from the
campus to villages like Stoneleigh and Kenilworth. I felt displaced and
alone, and on the streets of these villages I would watch the locals, trying
hard to glean some sense of comfort and home from them as they went
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about their business with unthinking familiarity.
One of my favourite haunts was the area around the ruins of the
Augustinian Priory. The Kenilworth Priory of St Mary the Virgin, built
c.1123-9, was founded by Geoffrey de Clinton, Chamberlain to Henry I.
In the modern world of spin doctors and PR, Clinton‘s founding of the
Priory would be viewed as a cynical exercise to divert from the nearby
fortress he was building at the same time, a castle that would become one
of the most magnificent in England. Clinton was granted substantial lands
by the king, yet aside from Kenilworth Castle and the grounds
immediately around it which contained gardens through which he loved to
walk, or perhaps even saunter, Clinton ceded all the land to the Priory.
Such generosity in modern times would foster distrust and suspicion,
especially to the land held back for personal use, viz., the Castle, but it
seems as though Clinton was making a genuinely pious offering, a spiritual
counterbalance in gratitude for the more temporal wealth and comforts
that had visited his family since the Norman Conquest. Whatever his
reasons, the bargain seemed to please Providence and both Castle and
Priory prospered. In 1447 the Priory had its status raised to an abbey and
by the sixteenth century it was one of the wealthiest in England holding
17 churches in its dominions, meanwhile the Castle too continued to grow
as it passed into the hands of a succession of royalty and über magnates:
towers were added by King John; the Great Hall by John of Gaunt; and
the magnificent Gatehouse was built by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester,
to provide a suitably grand entrance for Elizabeth I on her visits. With
Henry VIII‘s dissolution of the monasteries in 1538, the Abbey closed and
much of its stonework was demolished, some being used in the building
of nearby churches and some being incorporated into ongoing work at
Kenilworth Castle. Perhaps it was the transfer of these clerical bricks and
stones to the Castle that enabled it to survive longer than its sister
building, nevertheless the balance that had been created by Clinton was
broken and a little over a century later the Castle that had hosted lakeside
firework displays and waterborne pageants, put on by Dudley for his
darling Majesty, lay in ruins.
The lake, today sitting in the bowl of the Abbey Fields, was once one of
the largest artificial lakes in the land, stretching a mile up to the Castle,
after a stream had been dammed. I would wander around the lake, often
deserted during autumnal weekdays, sometimes a mother and toddlers
feeding a hardy collection of ducks, a pair of swans occasionally deigning
to join in, like the boss and his wife sharing a drink with the workers to
show that a divide in status can be breached, then I would pick my way
through the ruins of the Abbey, going through the gatehouse and then
past the cemetery of St Nicholas‘ Church, on sunlit days enjoying the
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dappled patches of light and shade that would cover the floor and flicker
over my skin, filtering through the rusting leaves of tall oaks and elms and
past fragments of masonry—the ruins that have you contemplating a
distant past and leave you with a sense of loss for something you have
never had or known. I would look at the remains of a building nearly a
thousand years old and feel almost vertiginous faced with this chasm of
time. And yet this thought and wonder at relics of the past is almost as old
as creation. Over a century before Clinton commenced his great building
projects, some beautiful Anglo-Saxon elegies were transcribed into what is
now known as the Exeter Book, the poems having been in oral circulation
for centuries before. The authors of such poems as ‗The Wanderer‘, ‗The
Seafarer‘, and ‗The Wife‘s Lament‘ are unknown, which is perhaps apt, as
their haunting themes of isolation, loss and the passing of better times
seem more powerful when we are unable to pin the words to any kind of
identity. The poet is lost but the voice remains, like the spectre of bygone
ages that often forms the subject of the poetry itself, none more so than in
the poem which is commonly known as ‗The Ruin‘. As the narrator muses
upon the remnants of a past civilization (possibly the ruins of the Roman
city of Bath) and conjectures upon the lives of those who lived there,
knowing only the certainty of their deaths and feeling a frisson that the
crumbling wall he looks at was also once gazed upon by their perished
eyes, we as readers slip into a strange eddying current which forever whirls
around a plughole yet never disappears, for the mysterious wyrd, or fate,
that is an important concept of the poem, has seemingly been freed from
those characters and curlicues that concretize its abstract nature in
language, and has made the leap from theme to form, for ‗The Ruin‘ is
itself a ruin, the manuscript having been damaged with only fragments
now extant. Nothing lasts forever, the poem suggests, something to which
its own tattered and self-fulfilling pages bear witness.
Wondrous is this wall; the fates crashed,
collapsed the city; the works of the giants crumble.
The roofs are ruptured, the towers in ruins,
the frozen gate is destroyed, there is frost upon the mortar,
the buildings are battered, brought down, demolished,
eaten away by old age. The earth holds tightly
in its resolute grip the masterful builders,
perished, departed, a hundred generations
have been and gone since. This wall stained red
and made grey with lichen has experienced kingdom after
kingdom
withstanding the storms; high and broad, it fell.
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Yet the stonework remains, hewn by wind and rain
on many………………………………………
grimly ground………………………………...
………………shone………………………….
……………….with skill an ancient work…….
…………………………...covered over in mud,
mind…………………….swiftly conceived
a design in chain mail, one brave in thoughts bound
wall braces together wonderfully with wires.
Bright were the buildings, the bathhouses many,
plenty high gables, a great martial clamour,
many meadhalls full of festivity
until mighty fate made way with it all.
The slain slumped far and wide, days of carnage came,
death took away all the sword-valiant men;
their sanctuaries became wastelands,
the city subsided. Both tenders and idols
fell to the floor. And so these buildings grow desolate,
and this red-curved ceiling vault
is rent of tiles on its roof. Ruins fall to the ground
in shattered mounds of rubble and stone, where, of old,
many a man
glad of heart and bright with gold, in splendour bedecked,
wine-flushed and correct, shone in his war trappings;
he gazed upon his wealth and possessions, precious stones,
silver, jewellery and plenty of treasures,
and he gazed upon this bright city in its broad kingdom.
Stone buildings stood here, the river strew out
a wealth of warmth; a wall enclosed it all
in its bright bosom, there the baths were,
hot to the core. That was convenient.
Then they let pour…………………………
hot streams over grey stone
…………………………………………….
until the circular pool, hot………………...
…………………………there the baths were.
Then is……………………………………….
………………………….that is a noble thing,
house……………………….city…………….
The ravaged verse tales off with mention of a city which is what I was
missing the most. The city incorporates so much of its rubble (human or
otherwise, living or dead) like arcana: the, or should I say, The London
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Stone now lies in a niche behind an iron grille set into the former offices
of the Oversea-Chinese Banking Corporation at 111 Cannon Street, a
building, somewhat portentously, earmarked for demolition. It is lit up,
but overlooked, millennia of significance bypassed routinely with nary a
glance and, as Peter Ackroyd, the biographer of London (Chatto &
Windus, 2000), laments ‗It sits now, blackened and disregarded, by the
side of a busy thoroughfare; over and around it have flowed wooden carts,
carriages, sedan chairs, hansom cabs, cabriolets, hackney cabs, omnibuses,
bicycles, trams and cars. It was once London‘s guardian spirit, and
perhaps it is still.‘ Perhaps, indeed, perhaps. After I had had my fill of
dūstcēawung, or ‗contemplation of the dust‘, as the Anglo-Saxons called it, I
would walk up to the top of the Abbey Fields and maybe go and have a
cup of tea in some pensioner-filled café or sit on a bench and smoke a
cigarette. I was engaged in the latter activity on a sunny October morn
when a young woman asked me if the seat next to me was taken. We sat in
silence for three or four minutes staring down at St Nicholas‘ Church and
the Abbey ruins, me flicking ash on the floor between my feet. I ground
out my cigarette beneath my heel and was about to leave when she spoke.
‗It‘s haunted you know‘, she said nodding at the former Abbey grounds.
‗They call it the de Clinton curse‘. I turned slightly towards her, the
conventions of conversations, even undesired ones, usually requiring
some element of eye contact or facial response to the words passed to and
fro between interlocutors like foreign coins for which we have no use. She
looked somewhat haunted herself, her pale skin accentuated by her black
hair, tied back in a bun. She did not look at me, but stared resolutely in
front of her, I shifted back to my former position. ‗Really?‘ I said, ‗There
are ghosts?‘
‗No, there aren‘t figures, phantasms as such, although I did think that I
had once seen a monk wearing a hooded cassock disappear down by
where the little museum building is, the barn, but that could just as easily
have been some kid in a hoodie going to smoke some blow down there or
something. It‘s the land that‘s haunted.‘ She now turned towards me and
stared as resolutely at me as she had done into open space beforehand, as
she told me about Geoffrey de Clinton‘s founding of the Priory. ‗Sorry‘,
she broke off, ‗I don‘t mean to bore you, but I thought you might be
interested… I saw you traipsing around down there, writing things in a
notebook.‘ I said that I was trying to make sense of how everything seems
to decay, yet nothing seems to disappear entirely, how there are
gravestones down there belonging to bones unknown to anyone now
living, how you can scratch away at the moss and the verdigris and
uncover a name and what does it mean. ‗Oh‘, she said, dropping her eyes
to her hands, pinned between her knees. She looked hurt. I apologized for
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going off at a tangent and tried to assure her that I was interested in what
she was saying. And although I had instinctively wanted to flee as soon as
her first words had penetrated my quiet contemplation, it was true, I was
now genuinely interested in what she was saying.
She continued, her delivery more stilted, as though she was now
somewhat wary and suspicious of who she was talking to, throwing out
details one by one—like a fisherman throwing out chum, waiting for the
shark to bite—and constantly looking up to check that no mockery or
derision had crept into my face. She told me how since the dissolution of
the monasteries many attempts had been made to redevelop the land
where the Abbey had once stood, yet all had failed, often with tragic
consequences. There was the case of the lawyer, Thomas Scot, in the mid
seventeenth century, who bought land upon which to build a country
house, however, before any work was commenced he was stabbed by one
of his own clients, shortly before a trial, because the defendant ‗didn‘t like
the thoughts in his eyes‘, as the court rolls describe it, and so his dreams
of a rural retreat were dashed. Because he died. No work was done, his
widow perhaps preferring to grieve in the city, where she drew solace
from her late husband‘s brother, who she duly married. More recently
there had been numerous attempts to develop some of the Abbey Fields
land into a leisure complex. Twice the companies proposing development
had fallen into bankruptcy, scuppering their plans at an early stage. Just
two years ago, the woman told me, a property firm based in Coventry had
agreed a deal to extend the grounds of the open-air swimming pool in
Kenilworth in a project that would resurrect the idea of a leisure complex,
the plan being to build an accompanying indoors pool and gymnasium.
The council and National Heritage agreed to the proposal, but there was
much protestation from archaeologists who claimed such development
would concrete over the buried foundations of the Abbey‘s granary. There
were several stormy meetings and even a hate mail campaign, but the
Coventry firm eventually received the go ahead. After a preliminary
inspection of the site, the father and son partners of the Coventry
property development corporation were driving back home when their car
slid out of control on the Kenilworth Road, crashing into a tree and killing
both occupants. No other vehicles were involved. The driver, the son, had
no alcohol in his bloodstream, and their deaths remain something of a
mystery. The land has not been touched since. The woman fell silent.
‗And you think this is all connected to the curse?‘ I said, turning to find
her crying. ‗It was my dad. My brother was driving‘, she said. I didn‘t
know what to do. I thought I should put my arms around her, some kind
of bodily contact to show sympathy. But it was only now that I realized I
was in some way strangely attracted to her, and not wanting this
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impropriety to impinge upon her grief, I just stayed sat where I was. ‗Are
you ok?‘ I feebly mustered at length. She said she was fine, wiped her tears
on her sleeves, got up and left. I should have followed… I didn‘t. Instead
I returned periodically to Kenilworth hoping to bump into her, trying to
find the one person who had interested me in months, the one person
who had distracted me from my self-imposed alienation. I never even
knew her name. At the ends of our lives I daresay that it is for such people
that we long, the could‘ve been, should‘ve beens that slipped past. We
love our friends and family, but it is the minor characters we mourn for as
we never know the might‘ve beens. Ronnie O‘Sullivan once said ‗There
are no ifs and coulds in my game‘, but such a nervous nervous soul as he
would still probably limit such magnificent quotations to the parameters
of snooker. To go through life without wondering is to go through life
without thinking.
Time heals, they say, it would be more accurate to say it scars. Back at the
Barbican I tried to resume The Director’s Cut, but to little avail, the tranquil
pools of memories in my mind had been muddied by someone poking
around at the bed with a stick, trying to dig up fossils from among the
kelp and the coral, hoping to provide evidence of some kind of sense of
purpose, but instead the stirring up of the silt only flushed out previously
camouflaged pains which shot across the sand and cowered beneath rocks
and ledges, concealing themselves once more, having left a foul-tasting ink
in their wake.
I got up, gravitating towards the sound of flowing water in the distance.
There is a serenity at the Barbican that belies its concrete housing estate
meets failing shopping centre appearance. The hanging flower baskets and
window boxes on the balconies, full of pansies, busy lizzies, petunias and
lavender, not only added colour, but, coupled with the plant troughs and
potted dwarf palms on the High Walk, seemed to somehow block out the
sound of the traffic which was inevitably circulating just yards away. In
place of engines shifting into different gears and horns being sounded in
frustration, the cackle of a magpie or the squealing of swifts could be
heard; and the background trickle wasn‘t one of cars edging their way
through traffic lights, but was that of cascading water.
The Lakeside Terrace is pleasant—I was going to say beautiful, but it so
obviously isn‘t. Too much concrete, too many right angles. The water
flows down three levels by the Guildhall School of Music where I sat
down, taking in the piano refrains that emerged lackadaisically from the
practice rooms behind me, the player flitting from note to note as a
butterfly might move from flower to flower, and I cast my eye over the
aquatic plantlife in which a mallard with her three ducklings was paddling,
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the drake sitting on the concrete beside the pond, relaxed and
proprietorial. An arbour covered with a trellis and complete with creepers
has been built, cutting into the lake like a hollow peninsular, the floor
below water level; a pair of lovers embrace in one of the enclaves, arms
and lips entwined, statuesque, their love never-ending when in the present
tense of a clinch that shuts out all but each other. I want to leave the
thought there, but it‘s too late, I‘ve pulled myself up for overromanticizing; I write out the penalty ticket as Camus reminds me that she
is probably thinking about when she can break up with him and he is
probably thinking about trying to catch the next train. We grow up with
ideals of love passed on through art and literature, ideals which can rarely
be lived up to. But if no experience is common, there is still the thrill of all
experience being uncommon. A grey wagtail sits briefly besides the lovers,
tail bobbing in the eponymous fashion, then it darts off in one direction,
performs an abrupt 180º mid-air turn and returns to its previous position
on the wall, a mayfly in its beak. My friend arrived and as we made our
way to the cinema exchanging salutations and platitudes, the wagtail flew
off again over the water lilies towards the church of St Giles without
Cripplegate. It was here that Oliver Cromwell was married and where
what is left of John Milton is buried. His coffin was exhumed in 1790
when repairs to the church were being made. A verger opened the casket
and charged admission to this impromptu exhibition: teeth, bones and
hair were stolen as souvenirs. On a more recent visit to the church I
discovered that one of the stained glass windows was a portrait of Edward
Alleyn, paid for in part by the Dulwich Estate, owners of my old school
and much of the land around my childhood home. Such unwanted
connections in my fugue made me feel uneasy and I quickly went back to
the tube station.
When you are not comfortable, you need to change position. Physical
discomfort can sometimes be alleviated by mental diversion and, vice
versa, one can distract from mental discomfort through physical activity
or displacement, and so it was that I would walk away from campus life or
from St Giles, and so it was, also, that I found myself, all those years ago,
in Kentish Town, black as black as black on the Northern Line map.
Outside of the music venues there was little to be found in Kentish Town,
it had a grim high street which looked as though it was suffering the
effects of the morning after the night before—its tongue coated with a
foul-tasting film, its hair unkempt, and its limbs covered with mysterious
bruises. There were a few pubs and fast food joints, a public library that
had the atmosphere and appearance of a glorified vagrants‘ urinal, and the
accessory every truly dingy area needs: an amusements palace, i.e., a shop
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devoted to fruit machines, the attractions of which I have never been able
to understand.
I walked up and down the Kentish Town Road not knowing what I was
looking for and not finding it. I think after ten or fifteen minutes I had
seen all the sights and so I bought a can of Coke and returned to the
station, the overground British Rail part of which was deserted. I had
twenty-five minutes to wait for a train and as I sat on platform four
sipping my carbonated soft drink I wondered why I had come here of all
the places in London that my travelcard permitted me to visit. I realized
explicitly for the first time that my pointless journey to Kentish Town was
in some way tied up with my grief over the recent passing of my
grandmother. The train I had boarded earlier that day ran on, after
Kentish Town, to St Albans and Bedford, where my gran had lived. My
alighting at Kentish Town was an acknowledgment that trips to Bedford
were now as irrelevant or relevant as trips to Kentish Town, and therefore
my brief sojourn at Kentish Town was, in some respect, my first real
acceptance of death.
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Great Expectations: ‘Disentangle
the nets of being’
Ian Brinton
A
long time ago when a boy or girl was being bullied at school there
must have been some considerable relief for that young person
going home in the late afternoon. There would have been some
sense of safety and security upon arriving back at the parental home and
upon going up to one‘s own bedroom surrounded by the familiar objects
which accrue to make up the whole personality one possesses. The door is
shut, parents are downstairs and the fear of the bullies can be deferred for
at least a while before tomorrow. And then the mobile phone starts into
life with its signal that a text message has arrived: ‗See you tomorrow!
We‘ll be there at the gates waiting for you!‘
The home has been invaded and those downstairs didn‘t even see the
invader! Well, Charles Dickens recorded that moment a long time before
the invention of the mobile. In the opening chapter of Great Expectations a
boy is out on the North Kent marshes. He is looking at the gravestones
that indicate the resting-place of his parents and siblings; it is Christmas
Eve and the afternoon is waning fast. In the words of Macbeth, ‗light
thickens‘. Just as that boy starts to shiver and cry a dreadful figure starts
up from the graves and shouts ‗Hold your noise! Keep still, you little devil,
or I‘ll cut your throat!‘:
A fearful man, all in coarse grey, with a great iron on his leg.
A man with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old
rag tied round his head. A man who had been soaked in
water, and smothered in mud, and lamed by stones, and cut
by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by briars; who
limped and shivered, and glared and growled; and whose
teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.
The convict, Magwitch, the second syllable of whose name conjures up
the sinister and supernatural, forces the little boy, whose name is Pip as a
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135
suggestion of how the little seed will grow according to its soil, to steal
and lie. He will steal food from home and lie about it; he will steal a file
from the blacksmith, Joe, his only friend in this lonely world. And if he is
tempted to denounce the bully or fails to honour his obligations the threat
of that mobile phone call is made very clear to him:
‗You bring me, tomorrow morning early, that file and them
wittles. You bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over
yonder. You do it, and you never dare to say a word or dare
to make a sign concerning your having seen such a person as
me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to live. You
fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter
how small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore
out, roasted and ate. Now, I ain‘t alone, as you may think I
am. There‘s a young man hid with me, in comparison with
which young man I am a Angel. That young man hears the
words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar to
himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver.
It is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that
young man. A boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed,
may tuck himself up, may draw the clothes over his head,
may think himself comfortable and safe, but that young man
will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him open.
I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the
present moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to
hold that young man off of your inside. Now, what do you
say?‘
The weekly publication of Great Expectations in All The Year Round between
December 1860 and August 1861 was not illustrated, and neither was the
first edition. There is an illustration of that churchyard scene by F.W.
Pailthorpe (1885) in which he presents us with the figure of the convict,
giant-like, as it appears from behind a tombstone engraved with the word
SACRED. With one hand outstretched it appears to lay hold on the
terrified boy who has raised his right arm partly to ward off the figure and
partly as if to wish to place it in front of his eyes, blocking out the
apparition. Pailthorpe captures the childhood world of nightmare and it is
worth comparing it with the phantasmagoric world created by Charles
Keeping for The Folio Edition in 1981 where the figure of the convict is
terrifying as it ‗started‘ from behind a gravestone. The face is manic and
the right arm clutches the lower part of Pip‘s face in a grip which is almost
tangible. The overwhelming sense of fear in the scene is further explored
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by having Magwitch‘s left hand clutching the top of the gravestone as if
blocking out any chance of escape. Keeping‘s slashed lines and eerie
merging of vegetation and human arteries add to the deeply
uncomfortable nature of this shocking experience. After this experience
on Christmas Eve there will be for Pip no real going home any more.
Home! Even the word has itself a pleasing sound with that gentle ‗m‘. It
isn‘t the same as ‗house‘ or ‗accommodation‘; it conveys a feeling of
warmth and safety, those aspects of a young life from which Pip will be
barred.
When the young Charles Dickens was living in Chatham and going to
school there he came across a place that held a mysterious sense of home
for him, Gad‘s Hill Place. In a letter to John Forster from 1857 he
commented that the house ‗had always had a curious interest for me,
because, when I was a small boy down in these parts, I thought it the most
beautiful house…ever seen. And my poor father used to bring me to look
at it, and used to say that if I ever grew up to be a clever man, perhaps I
might own that house, or such another house. In remembrance of which,
I have always in passing, looked to see if it was to be sold or let; and it has
never been to me like any other house, and it has never changed at all.‘
The immense importance of this house to the young Dickens was
registered later in an article he wrote for All The Year Round in April 1860,
some eight months before the opening chapter of Great Expectations,
‗Travelling Abroad‘:
So smooth was the old high road, and so fresh were the
horses, and so fast went I, that it was midway between
Gravesend and Rochester, and the widening river was
bearing the ships, white-sailed or black-smoked, out to sea,
when I noticed by the wayside a very queer small boy.
‗Halloa!‘, said I to the very queer small boy, ‗where do you
live?‘
‗At Chatham,‘ says he.
‗What do you do there?‘ says I.
‗I go to school,‘ says he.
I took him up in a moment, and we went on. Presently, the
very queer small boy says, ‗This is Gadshill we are coming to,
where Falstaff went out to rob those travellers, and ran
away.‘
‗You know something about Falstaff, eh?‘ said I.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
137
‗All about him,‘ said the very queer small boy. ‗I am old (I
am nine), and I read all sorts of books. But do let us stop at
the top of the hill, and look at the house there, if you please!‘
‗You admire that house?‘ said I.
‗Bless you, sir,‘ said the very queer small boy, ‗when I was
not more than half as old as nine, it used to be a treat for me
to be brought to look at it. And now, I am nine, I come by
myself to look at it. And ever since I can recollect, my father,
seeing me so fond of it, has often said to me, ―If you were to
be very persevering and to work hard, you might some day
come to live in it.‖ Though that‘s impossible!‘ said the very
queer small boy, drawing a low breath, and now staring at
the house out of window with all his might.
I was rather amazed to be told this by the very queer small
boy; for that house happens to be my house, and I have
reason to believe that what he said was true.
When Dickens was nine years old his father‘s financial difficulties,
aggravated by profligacy, which were to plague his life prompted a change
of house in Chatham in 1821. One year later the family moved to more
narrow accommodation in Camden Town. The schooling which Dickens
had begun was discontinued and in a letter to Forster he made clear the
significance of the loss: ‗As I thought in the little back garret in Bayham
Street, of all I had lost in losing Chatham, what would I have given, if I
had had anything to give, to be sent back to any other school, to have
been taught anything anywhere!‘ A further move in 1823 to Gower Street
was swiftly followed by Dickens being sent to work in Warren‘s Blacking
Warehouse at Hungerford Stairs in order to ease the financial burdens of
the household, and the lasting stain of this experience is registered in his
manuscript fragments of autobiography, which he sent to Forster in 1847.
The nostalgic quality which haunts the opening pages of Great Expectations,
accompanied by a sense of both fear and loss, registers the way in which
Dickens felt about his early life before the shattering experience of
imprisonment in the Blacking Warehouse. The deeply felt nature of the
shame of loss lay beneath the secrecy Dickens felt about the incident:
‗That I suffered in secret, and that I suffered exquisitely, no one ever knew
but I‘. This secrecy and sense of shabby shame recur in Pip‘s feelings
upon his first visit to Satis House in chapter 8 of the novel, when he is ‗so
humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry‘ and those fragments of
personal reminiscence remained unpublished until some years after the
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novelist‘s death in 1870. It is worth recalling here that whilst Dickens was
working for Warren‘s the premises moved to Covent Garden and the
exposure of the young boy‘s shame was more immediately in the public
eye. It is no wonder that so much of his work is haunted by the image of
imprisonment.
Let us return now to that memorable raw afternoon in Cooling
churchyard on Christmas Eve. Pip has received his instructions and he is
‗bound‘ to fulfil his dishonest obligations which are based initially upon
fear although they become associated a little later with charity. As the faint
daylight disappears the unearthly figure of the escaped convict also begins
to dissolve:
At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
arms—clasping himself, as if to hold himself together—and
limped towards the lw church wall. As I saw him go, picking
his way among the nettles, and among the brambles that
bound the green mounds, he looked in my young eyes as if
he were eluding the hands of the dead people, stretching up
cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle
and pull him in.
When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a
man whose legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned
round to look for me. When I saw him turning, I set my face
towards home, and made the best use of my legs. But
presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms,
and picking his way with his sore feet among the great stones
dropped into the marshes here and there, for stepping-places
when the rains were heavy, or the tide was in.
The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I
stopped to look after him; and the river was just another
horizontal line, not nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the
sky was just a row of long angry red lines and dense black
lines intermixed. On the edge of the river I could faintly
make out the only two black things in all the prospect that
seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon
by which the sailors steered—like an unhooped cask upon a
pole—an ugly thing when you were near it; the other a
gibbet, with some chains hanging to it which had once held a
pirate. The man was limping on towards this latter, as if he
were the pirate come to life, and come down, and going back
to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible turn when I
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139
thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to gaze
after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked
all round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs
of him. But now I was frightened again, and ran home
without stopping.
Pip‘s associations between himself and the convict are heightened by the
fears felt by a vulnerable boy who feels himself isolated. As the convict
‗limped‘ towards the wall, we are given a foretaste of Pip‘s difficulties as
he keeps the hidden piece of bread down his trouser leg and the ‗hands of
the dead people‘ act as a reminder of the conscience which strains to pull
him down: the dead preying upon him. As opposed to limping, Pip ‗made
the best use of his legs‘ in getting home, but here again there is a
contrasting association with the convict: in chapter 5 he recalls being
associated with a ‗fierce young hound‘ if he joins the hunt for the convict.
The use of the word ‗bound‘ in terms of the nettles and brambles echoes
what becomes for Pip a restriction upon his future aspirations which is
also associated with crime. In chapter 3, as he searches in the cold
morning for the escaped convict so that he can fulfil his obligations he
says ‗I couldn‘t warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as
the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet‘ and he
knows his way to the Battery because he had been there with Joe, who
had told him that when he was apprenticed he would be ‗regularly bound‘.
This criminal emphasis associated with ‗bound‘ is further explored in
chapter 13 when Pumblechook announces that ‗This boy must be bound
out of hand‘. That odious figure of adult authority goes on to say, with a
sense of glee, ‗A pleasure‘s a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you
know; we must have him bound.‘ When he is taken to the Town Hall to
be ‗bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial presence‘, he feels ‗exactly
as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick.‘ Pumblechook
holds him ‗all the while as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold‘.
Further associations between Pip and the criminal world are hinted at in
the reference to the executed pirate who appears to have come down and
is now returning to ‗hook himself up again.‘ After the prisoners have been
retaken and Pip and Joe have returned to the Forge in chapter 6, Mrs Joe
takes Pip to bed in such a manner as to suggest his being hauled up the
gallows: she ‗assisted me up to bed with such a strong hand that I seemed
to have fifty boots on and to be dangling them all against the edges of the
stairs.‘ Given these associations it is a matter of little surprise that Pip
should feel a sense of guilt about his sister being struck down. The
implement used was a convict‘s leg-iron and as he returns to the marshes
for her funeral he ‗had now the strangest idea that she was coming
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towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door.‘
You may be wondering at this moment why I titled this talk ‗Disentangle
the nets of being‘. The line comes from a poem written by the
Postmodernist American poet, Charles Olson, and it refers to the
impossibility of our escaping from the past. We are made up of the tangled
threads of our ancestors both distant and immediate and our striving for
individuality is a struggle to disentangle those nets, those webs, so that we
can take charge of our lives. However, as Pip discovers, we can never rid
ourselves of those subtle strands which go to make up who we are. Pip
knows, in a sense, that his life is doomed from the moment his sister tells
him that felons always begin their careers by robbing, forging and asking
questions and he felt ‗fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the
Hulks were handy for me.‘ Even the promise of becoming a gentleman
with great expectations is itself tainted by the words used by Magwitch as
he clutches onto Compeyson in the mud of the marshes: ‗He‘s a
gentleman, if you please, this villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman
again, through me.‘ Prophetic words indeed! When awful things happen to
us in childhood we hold on to the thought that maybe we can grow away
from them as we get older and the chapter where the convicts are
recaptured closes with the torches of the soldiers being ‗flung hissing into
the water‘ and going out ‗as if it were all over with him.‘ However, the
hands of the dead people in that opening chapter which seem to stretch
‗out of their graves, to get a twist upon his ankle and pull him in‘ warn us
that the past will haunt Pip like an irremovable stain.
Whilst Pip waits to meet Estella from the coach that will have brought her
from Rochester to London he agrees to be shown around Newgate by
Wemmick and it is only when that tour is over and he is left with three
hours still to wait that he contemplates his connection with the stink of
prison:
I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it was
that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and
crime; that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a
winter evening I should have first encountered it; that, it
should have reappeared on two occasions, starting out like a
stain that was faded but not gone; that, it should in this new
way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my mind
was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella,
proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with
absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her.
I wished that Wemmick had not met me, or that I had not
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141
yielded to him and gone with him, so that, of all days in the
year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in my breath
and on my clothes.
This feeling that other people can see inside you and can recognise the
criminal beneath the gentleman‘s exterior, that clothes like Lear‘s ‗robes
and furred gowns‘ do not hide all, is central to the morbid self-awareness
that haunts William Dorrit as he leaves the Marshalsea and it is central to
the whole idea of the new prison system based upon Jeremy Bentham‘s
Panopticon where visibility is a trap.
When Magwitch returns the past comes alive because, like a stain, it has
remained barely below the surface for years and the nets of being become
webs of claustrophobic menace. Chapter 39 opens with Pip alone in a top
room of the Temple:
It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet;
mud, mud, mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast
heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and
it drove still, as if in the East there were an eternity of cloud
and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings
in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs; and in the
country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills
carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the
coast, of shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had
accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I
sat down to read had been the worst of all.
Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since
that time, and it has not now so lonely a character as it had
then, nor is it so exposed to the river. We lived at the top of
the last house, and the wind rushing up the river shook the
house that night, like discharges of cannon, or breakings of a
sea. When the rain came with it and dashed against the
windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they rocked,
that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse. Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the
chimney as though it could not bear to go out into such a
night; and when I set the doors open and looked down the
staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when I
shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black
windows (opening them, ever so little, was out of the
question in the teeth of such wind and rain) I saw that the
lamps in the court were blown out, and that the lamps on the
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bridges and the shore were shuddering, and that the coal
fires in barges on the river were being carried away before
the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.
I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book at
eleven o‘clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul‘s, and all the many church
clocks in the City—some leading, some accompanying, some
following—struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by
the wind; and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed
and tore it, when I heard a footstep on the stair.
What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment
and I listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
Remembering then that the staircase lights were blown out, I took
up my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was
below had stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.
‗There is someone down there, is there not?‘ I called out, looking
down.
‗Yes,‘ said a voice from the darkness beneath.
‗What floor do you want?‘
‗The top. Mr Pip.‘
‗That is my name—There is nothing the matter?‘
‗Nothing the matter,‘ returned the voice. And the man came on.
Now the setting here of the Temple is important since it was the only Inn
of Court which had gardens running down to the Thames, hence
providing the first of many comparisons with the opening chapter of the
novel with Pip on those marshes which lie between Cooling churchyard
and the Thames estuary. We had found Pip alone in a graveyard ‗on a
memorable raw afternoon towards evening‘, and the landscape was like a
‗distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing‘. In this later scene
we find Pip again alone since Herbert has gone to Marseilles on business
and he is already feeling the absence of ‗the cheerful face and ready
response of my friend‘. The action here also takes place as the day ‗just
closed‘, and the weather is suggestive of the portentous storm which will
herald the ceiling falling in on Pip‘s ‗expectations‘. The rushing wind of
the first chapter finds a counterpart here with the ‗wind rushing up the
river‘, and the reference to the ‗discharges of cannon‘ brings to mind the
cannons firing their warning of convicts having escaped from the Hulks.
GREAT EXPECTATIONS
143
Whereas the marshes of the opening were a ‗flat dark wilderness‘ here the
‗staircase lamps‘ are blown out and Pip looks through ‗the black windows‘,
his isolation emphasized by the reference to fancying himself being ‗in a
storm-beaten lighthouse‘. The haunting adventure surrounding the pursuit
of the convicts closed with ‗the ends of the torches‘ being ‗flung hissing in
the water‘ extinguishing the episode, ‗as if it were all over with him‘. By
comparison, here Pip sees that ‗the coal fires in barges on the river were
being carried away before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.‘ The
dramatic elements of the description contain echoes of the night of
Duncan‘s murder in Macbeth where Lennox describes how
The night has been unruly. Where we lay
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i‘ th‘ air, strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events
New-hatched to th‘ woeful time.
When Pip hears the footstep on the stair his immediate thought is to
associate it with his dead sister whilst at the same moment recognising this
as nervous folly. An awareness that any visitor must be in need of a light
prompts Pip to take up his reading-lamp and go to the stair-head. Just as
Magwitch rose up from behind the graves in the opening chapter he rises
again, as if from the dead, ‗from the darkness beneath.‘ Like the ghost of
Hamlet‘s murdered father, he is ‗this fellow in the cellarage‘ and his
inevitable, unstoppable, arrival at the top is guided by the beacon of light
in Pip‘s hand: ‗And the man came on.‘ In Pailthorpe‘s illustration, ‗On the
Stairs‘, the figure from the past, from the other side of the world, has its
foot on the stair with both arms outstretched: a figure from the mind‘s
cellarage coming to claim its own. The light in Pip‘s hand seems almost to
beam the intruding figure up, past the door with SHARP written on it, as
though he has stared into the abyss and conjured up the true benefactor
from whom he can never separate himself. The nets of being cannot be
untangled!
Note
This article is extracted from a talk given at the British Library in November 2010
for the Dickens Conference organised by The English Association in conjunction
with the British Library and the Dickens Fellowship.
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Antonym V:The Artist ['muŋk]
Tries to Speak
Anthony Barnett
T
he publication of a magnificent six-volume illustrated edition of
Vincent van Gogh: The Letters (London, Thames & Hudson, 2009),
brilliantly annotated and contextualized, reminds that the writings
of another painter, also translated into English, have not fared so well.
The Story of Edward Munch (London, Arcadia, 2001) by Norwegian novelist
and romantic pianist Ketil Bjørnstad, the original published in 1993,
fictionalizes in 386 monstrous pages the artist‘s life through an injudicious
extracting from the letters and notebooks, his own and his
contemporaries‘, interspersed with recast press reports and the author‘s
clod-hopping present-tense interference. The supposed reality (I suppose)
of the narrating does nothing to dispel the myths, which are in dire need
of being dispelled. Why, why, why, cannot Munch be left to speak for
himself? All that is needed, all that is wanted, is the mass of Munch‘s own
writings. Annotated, yes. Messed with, no.
Very few artists have left such a legacy of literacy so it is better to settle
for Poul Erik Tøjner‘s Munch: In His Own Words (Munich, London, New
York, Prestel, [apparently 2001]). At least this delightfully presented
largish format book places the selections from Munch‘s writings in
sensible and relevant contexts, among photos and colour reproductions.
Tøjner‘s at times overstressed, at times naïve, commentary is easily
forgiven because of his perceptions: ‗There is one constant element that is
more significant than all others in Munch‘s work and that is the glance—
the eye. If one wants to see people looking, one need go no further than
the work of Munch. Few other painters have painted the eye, painted
sight, painted the glance, painted the gaze, or the look, to the same
degree.‘ The facing page reproduction of Portrait of the Artist’s Sister Inger
illustrates, in its full-frontal intensity, one aspect of Tøjner‘s observation.
So, it was with eager anticipation that, while preparing this piece, I
chanced upon what I did not know: The Private Journals of Edward Munch:
We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth (Madison, University of
ANTONYM V
145
Wisconsin Press, 2005). Here, surely, I would find a substantial
presentation of Munch‘s writings, even if doubtless again just a selection
of them, left to speak for themselves. I needn‘t have bothered and, I
suppose (that suppose again), I might have been forewarned by the choice
of an only seemingly appropriate quotation for the subtitle. The book is a
scrappy editing job—and this despite the, as so often, fulsome grant and
other assistance acknowledgements—though, I have no reason to doubt,
more or less adequately translated. ‗Left to speak for themselves‘, I wrote
a moment ago. I should say so, though not quite in the way I was
envisioning.
‗I have not tried to follow any chronological order in organizing the
sections‘, editor and translator J. Gill Holland writes. But there are no
delineated sections unless a few black and white plates of lithographs and
drypoints somewhere over halfway through are supposed to divide things
in two. I don‘t think so. What the editor presents are sequentially
numbered texts, all of which look like poems. Except that many of them
are nothing to do with poems or any other kind of imaginative writing but
are, for example, concerned with the everyday, and the numbering bears
no relation to anything in Munch or the Munch archive. There is no
context, no annotation, only a generalized discursive introduction. The
reader new to these, by turns, reasoned and impassioned writings will find
no indication whether the poem-look is Munch‘s—deliberate or simply
tracking the shape of the space available on the page on which he wrote—
or the editor‘s interpretation or intervention. The game is given away by
Frank Høifødt‘s perfunctory foreword: ‗A complete and scholarly
presentation belongs to the future.‘ Why? Why the future? Why not now?
Why not before now?
It is to Tøjner‘s work, not referenced by Holland, that one must turn for
answers and insights through reproductions of some of the manuscripts,
often in variously coloured crayons and childlike caps. The typography,
here in Jennifer Lloyd‘s translation, mostly respects the uppercase of the
painterly poems and imaginings as opposed to the more normal writing of
the prosaic journal entries, quotidian, verging on the philosophical,
contemplating painting and loving. There are inconsistencies in this but
where there are I can see why and doubtless they were a designer‘s choice.
Valuable literature of one sort or another is to be found among only a
handful of painters close to our times. Van Gogh for one. Munch for
another. The new edition, however welcomed, of Van Gogh‘s writings is
the latest of several. But of Munch‘s, until that long overdue ‗complete
and scholarly presentation‘, or simply a trustworthy reading edition,
materializes, we continue to have, both in the original and in translation,
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only a glimpse and if one picks up the wrong book a befuddled one at
that.
THE TREE OF KNOWLEDGE
FOR
BETTER OR WORSE
147
LANGUAGE NOTES
John Haddon
N
8. Still
owadays the adverb still suggests the continuance of something
in spite of an element that might or should make against its
continuance. We find this in an expression such as ‗Are you still
here?‘ which depending on the situation might mean ‗Why haven‘t you
gone?‘ or ‗Hasn‘t the train come yet?‘ Or in ‗I still love her‘ – that is, in
spite of all the actions and circumstances which make it entirely
reasonable for me no longer to do so. (Or maybe as an expression of
pleased surprise – ‗Time has not staled or reduced my feelings for her‘ or
even ‗I am not as shallow as I thought.‘) And when we assure somebody ‗I
will still be here‘, our meaning is that we are not going to change our mind
and not wait for them; we don‘t mean that we will be there for ever.
In older texts still does not usually work in this way: the sense of potential
obstruction to continued existence or activity isn‘t there; instead the word
means ‗continually, without ceasing‘. So in the King James Version Psalm
84 verse 4 reads ‗Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will still be
praising thee.‘ The New International Version has ‗they are ever praising
you‘, which, with its slightly old-fashioned ring, highlights the meaning
successfully. A somewhat pleonastic example from Philemon Holland‘s
1603 translation of Plutarch‘s Moralia shows the older usage very clearly:
‗... a man may give a guess and conjecture of his proceeding and going
forward, namely, what he gain by continual marching on still, without stay or
intermission ...‘ (italics added).
The emphasis that this older sense is used to make varies from context to
context:
1.
Sometimes what is referred to is a continually changing activity, as
quite often in Spenser:
a.
Ne is the water in more constant case,
Whether those same on high or those below.
For th‘ocean moueth stil from place to place,
And euery riuer still doth ebbe and flowe ...
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b.
Ne haue the watry foules a certain grange
Wherein to rest, ne in one stead do tarry,
But flitting still do flie, and still their places vary.
(Both from The Mutabilitie Cantos, first published posthumously in
1609, Canto VII)
2.
Sometimes still is used to suggest an inexorable process:
a.
Golding‘s Ovid (1565-7):
Our bodies also ay
Doo alter still from tyme to tyme, and never stand at stay.
Wee shall not bee the same wee were to day or yisterday.
b.
3.
4.
From Francis Quarles‘ Hieroglyphikes of Man’s Life (1638):
Tost too and fro, our frighted thoughts are driv‘n
With ev‘ry puffe, with every Tide
Of self-consuming Care:
Our peacefull flame, that would point up to heav‘n,
Is still disturb‘d, and turnd aside;
And ev‘ry blast of Ayre
Commits such wast as man, as man can not repaire.
Sometimes it is used to describe a persistence in action, welcome
or, as in these examples from Dryden, unwelcome:
a.
On stage poets, from the Prologue to The Conquest of Granada
(1672): ‗Still they write on, and like great Authors show.‘
b.
From Absalom and Achitophel Part 2 (1682):
Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
Made still a blund‘ring kind of Melody
c.
The Sixth Book of the Aeneid (1697):
Still for growing Liver digg‘d his Breast;
The growing Liver still supplied the Feast.
Still are his entrails fruitful to their pains:
Th‘ immortal Hunger lasts, th‘ immortal Food remains.
Sometimes still is used to suggest a constant conjunction of
elements as part of the way things are:
a.
Spenser The Faerie Queene Book IV Canto V (1596):
It hath been thro‘ all ages ever seen,
That, with the praise of arms and chivalry,
The prize of beauty still hath joined been ...
LANGUAGE NOTES
b.
5.
6.
7.
149
Goldsmith, Threnodia Augustalis (1772):
Pain met thee like a friend to set thee free,
Affliction still is virtue‘s opportunity!
Sometimes the emphasis is on habit or persistence:
a.
Erasmus, ‗The Religious Treat‘, tr, Roger L‘Estrange, Twenty
Select Colloquies (1680): ‗Here are the Epistles of St Paul,
which I still carry about me, as my beloved Entertainment ...‘
b.
From Swift‘s ‗Epistle to a Lady‘ (1733)
I, as all the Parish knows,
Hardly can be grave in Prose:
Still to lash, and lashing Smile,
Ill befits a lofty Stile.
Sometimes still is used in recommending or ordering a particular
course of habitual action or thought:
a.
‗In all the incidents of life we ought still to preserve our
scepticism.‘ – Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739)
b.
In Erasmus‘s colloquy ‗The False Knight‘ as translated by
L‘Estrange, Nestorius is advising Harpalus on how to pass as
a knight. ‗You must engage these People [writers and
printers] to make honourable mention of your Quality, and
Fortune in your own Country, in the Pamphlets and your
name to be still set in CAPITALS. ... You must be sure to
keep them in Handsome Liveries, and be still sending ‘em
with Counterfiet Letters, to This Prince or That Count.‘
c.
‗Leat the wydowe remember, and have styll before hir eyes in
hyr minde, that our soules dooe not perish together with the
body.‘ – Juan Luis Vives, A very fruteful and pleasant booke called
the Instruction of a christen woman, tr. R. Hyrde (1577)
Sometimes the adverb still is brought into deliberate play with the
adjective:
a.
Two examples from Spenser:
Next is the ayre; which who feeles not by sense
(For of all sense it is the middle meane)
To flit still, and with subtill influence
Of his thin spirit, all creatures to maintaine
In state of life?
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Onely the starrie skie doth still remaine;
Yet do the starres and signes therein still moue ...
b.
Goldsmith, Threnodia Augustalis :
While, sweetly blending, still are seen
The wavy lawn, the sleeping green ...
c.
And most famously, Florizel‘s speech to Perdita in The
Winter’s Tale:
What you do
Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet.
I‘ld have you do it ever: when you sing,
I‘ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms‘
Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,
To sing them too: when you do dance, I wish you
A wave o’ the sea, that you might ever do
Nothing but that; move still, still so;
And own no other function: each your doing,
So singular in each particular,
Crowns what you are doing in the present deed,
That all your acts are queens.
The word that used to do the work of our modern adverb still was, for the
most part, yet:
a.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
Henry Peacham in The Compleat Gentleman (1634) refers to
‗those admirable wits, yet living and so well knowne‘ and also
writes: ‗There is yet a Crucifixe of his [Ambrosio
Lorenzetti‘s] yet to be seene at Arezzo ...‘
In Hamlet, Polonius chides his son: ‗Yet here, Laertes!
aboard, aboard, for shame!‘
Milton in Comus (1634) tells us that Courtesy
is sooner found in lonely sheds
With smoaky rafters, than in tap‘stry halls
And courts of princes, where it first was nam‘d,
And yet is most pretended.
In Dryden‘s Tyrrannick Love (1670) Valeria appeals to
Maximin ‗Save him I love, and be my Father yet.‘
In ‗The Pearl‘ George Herbert in successive stanzas outlines
the value of knowledge, honour and pleasure, concluding
each time ‗yet I love thee,‘ yet meaning ‗nevertheless‘.
When Leontes asks Hermione in The Winter’s Tale ‗Is he won
LANGUAGE NOTES
151
yet?‘ he has heard the part of the conversation in which
Hermione persuaded Polixenes to stay longer. He isn‘t
asking whether she‘s succeeded, but whether Polixenes
hasn‘t gone on to change his mind. This has a bearing on
what we make of his subsequent outburst of deluded
jealousy.
There are, however, occasions over a wide period of time on which it isn‘t
fully clear that our modern meaning isn’t present in some earlier uses of
still:
a.
In one of the Merie Tales of the Mad Men of Gotam by A.B. of
Phisike Doctour (c. 1565) the priest says to his parishioners
on Ash Wednesday: ‗As for fasting, you fast styll: for you
haue not a good meales meat through the whole yeare.‘
b.
In another of his Hieroglyphikes Quarles questions the
assiduous self-improver (whether by cosmetics or medicine)
represented by the figure of a candle:
Alwaies pruning? alwaies cropping?
Is her brightnesse still obscur‘d?
Ever dressing? ever topping?
Alwaies curing? never cur‘d?1
Here ‗alwaies‘ and ‗ever‘ are synonyms, perhaps included for
variation of sound. Is ‗still‘ a third synonym? i.e. do all three
mean ‗continually‘? Or is the modern sense of ‗still‘ partially
present, implying that in spite of all the activity, her candle‘s
light is ‗still obscured‘? Should it be?
c.
‗... a pretty speech of Diogenes unto a certain yonker, who
perceiving that Diogenes had an eye on him within a tavern
or tippling-house, withdrew himself quickly more inward, for
to be out of his sight: Never do so (quoth he), for the farther
thou fliest backward the more shalt thou be still in the
tavern ...‘ – Plutarch, Moralia, tr. Philemon Holland (1603)
d.
In his Life of Margaret Godolphin John Evelyn quotes her as
saying ‗God knows, the more one sees of their church, the
more one finds to dislike in it; I did not imagine a tenth part
of the superstition I find in it, yet could still approve of their
Orders. Their Nunneries seen to be holy Institutions; if they
are abused, it is not their fault: what is not perverted?‘
e.
Clarendon wrote of William Herbert: ‗He was exceedingly
beloved in the court, because he never desired to get that for
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THE USE OF ENGLISH
himself, which others laboured for, but was still ready to
promote the pretences of worthy men.‘ We are probably
inclined to read the sense ‗but even so he was ready‘, but
should we read ‗but he was always ready‘?
f.
When John Tillotson writes ‗I am still of the old Opinion
that moderation is a Virtue ...‘ is it clear whether he means that
this is what he always thinks or what he thinks in spite of
reasons for thinking otherwise? Is his tone defiant or
relaxedly ironic? (I have to admit that I don‘t know the
context of the sentence, which would make it easier to
answer these questions.)
g.
In this exchange from Swift‘s Compleat Collection of Genteel and
Ingenious Conversation (1738) the ‗yet‘ in the last line works like
our still – but doesn‘t the ‗still‘ also do so, redundantly?
Ld. Sparkish. Lady Smart, does not your Ladyship think,
Mrs.Fade is mightily alter'd since her Marriage?
Lady Answ. Why, my Lord, she was handsome in her
Time; but she cannot eat her Cake, and have her Cake: I
hear she's grown a mere Otomy.
Lady Smart. Poor Creature ! the Black has set his Foot
upon her already.
Miss. Ay; she has quite lost the Blue on the Plumb.
Lady Smart. And yet, they say, her Husband is very fond
of her still.
h.
I‘m not sure what bearing any of the forgoing has on
Webster‘s celebrated line, ‗I am Duchess of Malfi still.‘ Does
she mean that despite what has happened to her she is still
Duchess of Malfi, or that as she is always Duchess of Malfi,
her fate has no essential effect upon her? Both? We might
bring as a comparison this exchange from Dryden’s
Tyrrannick Love, in which it‘s possible that Dryden had
Webster‘s line in mind:
Pophyrius: Yet you did once accept those vows I paid.
Berenice:
Those vows were then to Berenice made;
But cannot now be heard without sin,
When offr‘d to the wife of Maximin.
Pophyrius: Has, then, the change of Fortune chang‘d
your will?
Are you not Berenice still?
LANGUAGE NOTES
i.
153
Finally, there may be an ambiguity in some lines by Charles
Wesley, the effect of which Donald Davie says is ‗brought
about by a sudden and calculated descent from a relatively
elaborate level of language .... The piercing directness of that
last line is an achievement of literary form.‘2
Sinners, believe the gospel word,
Jesus is come your souls to save!
Jesus is come, your common Lord;
Pardon ye all through Him may have,
May now be saved, whoever will;
This Man receiveth sinners still.
The directness of that last couplet, especially the last line, is indeed
striking. But what is its precise import? Is it that the days of grace
are not yet over, that there is still (in our sense) time for repentance,
that it is not too late for us? Or that the gracious reception of
sinners goes on continually? Or is there something of both? I don‘t
know that this is an answerable question;3 in the meantime, the
existential force of the lines remains undimmed.
9. An Exercise in the Historical Imagination
This is just a suggestion for something that might work with an A Level
group. The aim of the exercise should be clear enough. The students work
in pairs, each with a carefully chosen text, preferably in a format that can
be edited on screen, and some photocopies from various edited versions
of texts written before, say, 1800, and these instructions:
You have been given an early 21st Century text and some
examples of scholarly editions of old texts, using different
approaches and layouts.
Imagine that you are a literary scholar in the year 2211. Your
task is to produce a scholarly edition of your text with
appropriate annotations for readers of your period.
You will have to make some conjectures about how life and
language may be different in two hundred years‘ time. What
changes may have taken place?
Work through this sequence:
1.
Study your text carefully and identify words and
phrases that you think will need explanation in two
hundred years‘ time. These may include:
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words that may have become obsolete;
words that may have changed in meaning;
slang expressions;
grammatically awkward expressions, or expressions
whose grammar will not be the same as in two
hundred years‘ time;
contemporary and historical references (including
names) which will no longer be part of common
knowledge;
cultural references.
2.
Then concoct an explanatory note for each. Each note
should be as succinct as possible. Think carefully about
what knowledge you can assume in your readers.
3.
Edit the text on screen, adding your annotations
appropriately. (Will you use footnotes? marginal notes?
end notes? a combination? Look at the samples for some
possibilities.)
If there is a variety of texts (playscript, prose fiction, political column,
poem, film review, etc.) which will require different kinds of editorial
decisions to be taken, there should be possibilities of fruitful discussions
at class level. It might be worth a try, anyway.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
The full poem makes an interesting comparison, in terms of tone, with
Ben Jonson‘s ‗Still to be neat, still to be drest‘.
‗The Classicism of Charles Wesley‘, Purity of Diction in English Verse
(Penguin), pp.62-3
Compare ‗Still Thou journeyest where I am,/And still thy bowels
move.‘ In these lines (quoted in G.H. Vallins, The Wesleys and the English
Language (1957), p. 71) the meaning of still seems to be ‗continually‘,
the emphasis being on God‘s constancy. Curiously, the older use of
still appears in some modern hymns, as in this 2003 example (words by
Richard Simpkin): ‗Fear not, I am with thee,/Oh, be not dismayed,/
For I am your God/And will still give you aid ...‘
155
Reviews
Lives Like Loaded Guns: Emily Dickinson and Her Family’s
Feuds, by Lyndall Gordon. Virago Press (£20.00).
Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, by Helen
Vendler. Harvard University Press (£25.95).
‗Tell all the Truth but tell it slant‘, said Emily Dickinson, ‗Success in
Circuit lies‘. Lyndall Gordon takes the hint, opening Lives Like Loaded
Guns not with Dickinson but with Mabel Loomis Todd, the interloper
who descended on Amherst in 1881, corresponded with but never met the
poet, and produced the first, posthumous editions of her work. She is in
fact the protagonist of this study, eclipsing Dickinson in what the blurb
describes as ‗a hothouse drama of adultery and devastating betrayal‘ – a
shamelessly sensational account of Todd‘s twelve-year involvement with
‗the squire‘, the local name for the poet‘s brother Austin. The best comes
last, a demonstration of the ways in which the ensuing family feud has
prejudiced or compromised virtually every biographer, scholar or editor
granted access to the treasure-chest – the mass of Dickinson manuscripts
and papers.
‗Emily Dickinson is now recognised as one of the greatest poets who ever
lived‘, writes Lyndall Gordon, ‗yet her life is a mystery‘. Who was the
‗Master‘ addressed in three extraordinary letters (in which Dickinson tries
out what Gordon tartly refers to as her ‗Little Me role‘) found with the
poems after her death? Was there an unhappy love-affair? What exactly
did she mean when she told Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in a cryptic
letter of April 1862, ‗I had a terror since September, I could tell to none,
and so I sing, as the boy does by the burying-ground, because I am
afraid‘? And why did she withdraw from social contact, confining herself
first to the house and grounds, then to the house? There is little hope of
an answer to these questions (and in the case of the last no obvious need),
but no shortage of implausible suggestions. Rebecca Patterson, in The
Riddle of Emily Dickinson (1951), maintained that the poet fell for a woman,
Kate Scott Anthon – founding her entire theory, a three-storey house of
cards, on a few letters, one of which she invented for the purpose.
Martha Nell Smith holds that the ‗Master‘ was Sue Gilbert (married to
Austin), not quite accounting for the Master‘s beard; and Craig Raine,
explaining why Dickinson shut the door, diagnoses her as agoraphobic.
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A problem for the responsible biographer, as Richard Sewell says in his
two-volume Life of Emily Dickinson (1974), is the near impossibility of
ruling out any but the wildest speculation – ‗and even the wildest may
have a grain of truth in it.‘ ‗All men say ―What‖ to me‘, she wrote, and
they had reason. She cultivated an enigmatic air (some of the letters beg
the services not so much of an editor as a code-breaker), and appears to
have enjoyed both creating and frustrating curiosity. ‗Seemingly with
willful cunning and surely with an artist‘s skill‘, writes Sewall, ‗she avoided
direct answers to the major questions that anyone interested in her as poet
or person might have been moved to ask...She avoided specifics, dodged
direct confrontation, reserved commitments.‘ It is hardly surprising that
many of the interested – in every sense of that word – have concluded
that she had something to hide.
She was of course discreet, even secretive, in the letters; and she left
instructions (putting paid to the prospects of biographers) that any
correspondence in her possession should be destroyed after her death.
Yet is there really any reason to question the findings of Mabel Todd, who
insisted from the outset that Dickinson ‗was not an invalid, and lived in
seclusion from no love-disappointment‘? That she had simply ‗tried
society and the world and found them lacking‘, her withdrawal being ‗the
normal blossoming of a nature introspective to a high degree, whose best
thought could not exist in pretence‘?1 She may have avoided specifics, but
when asked directly, she could offer a solid defence of her position. ‗Of
―shunning men and women‖‘, she told Higginson, ‗they talk of hallowed
things, aloud, and embarrass my dog.‘ ‗He and I don‘t object to them‘,
she went on, developing the joke as well as the point, ‗if they’ll exist their
side‘.2 Marianne Moore, a sociable solitary herself, went so far as to say
that Dickinson ‗was not a recluse‘. ‗One resents the cavil‘, she protested,
‗that makes idiosyncrasy out of individuality.‘3
‗Only the poet herself can tell‘, says Lyndall Gordon, promising at the
start of Lives Like Loaded Guns to avoid the pitfalls of her predecessors.
But what can the poems tell us about the life? Dickinson politely
reminded Higginson, in another letter, that ‗When I state myself, as the
representative of the verse, it does not mean me, but a supposed person.‘
The speaker is a convenient fiction; and it is on this point, traditionally,
that critic and biographer find themselves at odds. Gordon – who set out
in her first book, the admirably detailed Eliot’s Early Years, to ‗show the
work and life as complementary parts of one design‘ – would like to be
both; but she is more biographer than critic, and the good intentions of
the present study (‗It‘s a mistake to spot Dickinson in all her poems; the
real challenge is to find ourselves‘) count for nothing. She has an idée fixe
– that Dickinson was epileptic – and she pursues it through the poems,
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157
declaring them ‗replete with information about dysfunction‘. Using the
method pioneered in Caroline Spurgeon‘s Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It
Tells Us (‗it is chiefly through his imagery that he, to some extent, ‗gives
himself away‘‘), but with none of that critic‘s thoroughness, she asks, on
the basis of a dozen pieces: ‗Allowing for the poet‘s resolve to ‗tell it
slant‘, through metaphor, are we not looking at epilepsy?‘ ‗Collectively, in
her poems‘, Gordon goes on, ‗there‘s a history of a mechanism breaking
down‘. The trouble is that we don‘t read poems collectively, but one at a
time, and this hands us an immediate advantage. 241 is an obvious
candidate:
I like a look of agony,
Because I know it‘s true,
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe...
The agony that rewards the sufferer here (the ‗homely anguish‘ of line 6) is
mental or spiritual, not physical; the idea that a grand mal seizure might do
one good is unlikely to convince. She tries again with 280, ‗I felt a funeral
in my brain‘, but almost the same objection can be made: we are shown a
mind, not a mechanism, breaking down. And her suggestion, apropos one
of the most successful poems (‗Presentiment – is that long shadow on the
Lawn – /Indicative that Suns go down‘), that ‗Presentiment‘ is
Dickinson‘s word for the aura, or the onset of a seizure, is not much more
than free association.
If Gordon, as critic, is something of a sleuth, Helen Vendler is a friend
and advocate. ‗You speak from inside the poem‘, she has said,
characterising herself as ‗someone who enters a room and describes the
architecture...Where are the crossbeams that hold it up, and...the windows
that let light through?‘4 In Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries,
offered modestly enough as ‗a book to be browsed in‘, Vendler is
prodigiously perceptive. Who else has noted the play on a and one, along
with its function, in ‗To make a prairie it takes a prairie and one bee‘? Or
the transition in 303 from generality (‗The Soul selects her own Society‘)
to personal confession, when at the close, ‗to our surprise, we...encounter
a speaking ―I‖‘? Attention to detail pays off again and again, as when she
suggests that commas instead of dashes at the climax of ‗I cannot live with
You‘ (You there – I – here – ) ‗would not produce the same effect of painful
distance‘, or brings out the disparity, in ‗Because I could not stop for
Death‘, between Immortality in the first stanza and Eternity in the last:
―Immortality‖ is glorious; ―Eternity‖ (as Andrew Marvell
knew, writing of ―deserts of vast Eternity‖), chilling.
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Not all her commentaries are so well judged. In ‗A light exists in Spring‘,
Dickinson describes the unique light of early March (‗A Color stands
abroad/On Solitary Fields...‘) and her sense of loss when it passes – ‗As
Trade had suddenly encroached/Upon a Sacrament‘. Seizing on sacrament,
Vendler buries the poem in Christian or ‗paradisal‘ associations, relating
the solitary fields to the ‗solitary way‘ taken by our first parents at the end
of Paradise Lost,5 the light to Wordsworth‘s ‗light that never was on sea or
land‘, and introducing, for no good reason, ‗In the Days of Prismatic
Color‘ – Marianne Moore‘s impeccably secular poem about Eden. She
does the same to 129, ‗Our Lives are Swiss‘, reducing its suggestive scope
by comparing the Alps to ‗the Decalogue, which ―intervenes‖ between
ourselves and our desires‘ and to ‗the fearful ―Cherubims‖ of Genesis at
Eden‘s gate‘. And she insists, with Cleanth Brooks and Austin Warren,
that ‗He‘ in ‗After great pain, a formal feeling comes‘ (‗The stiff heart
questions was it He, that bore,/And Yesterday, or Centuries before?‘)
must refer to Christ, not the heart, since this particular word is capitalised,
forgetting that Dickinson capitalises almost everything.
‗I dwell in Possibility – /A fairer House than Prose‘, wrote Dickinson, a
principle she seems to have applied as much to her work – her work-inprogress – as to the conduct of her life. She kept her options open,
resisting publication (‗the Auction of the Mind‘) and, at her death in 1886,
leaving nearly 1800 poems, many in alternative versions, to look after
themselves.
The result, as Gordon says, is ‗the extraordinary
phenomenon of an entire oeuvre without the finalisations of print‘. The
tidied-up text of Todd and Higginson, still widely used, now competes
with the ‗authentic‘ editions of T.H. Johnson and R.W. Franklin. More
recently, in defiance of ‗print culture‘, a group of editorial Luddites have
argued that reproduction of the manuscript itself (Martha Nell Smith is at
work on an internet scan) is the only legitimate form of publication.
The story of the manuscript, the battle over its ownership and its
precarious survival, is well told by Lyndall Gordon. Yet the closer we
come to what Dickinson intended, the words she actually used, the more
mysteriously elusive she appears. It is perhaps significant that the classic
evaluations of the poems, notably that of Yvor Winters in Maule’s Curse
(1938), all pre-date Johnson‘s unexpurgated edition of 1955. What
Winters thought of that we know.6 ‗There are poems of varying
achievement here‘, says Helen Vendler, introducing her selection of 150,
‗the lesser ones included to show the conventional or occasional
Dickinson, the greater ones to sustain her right to fame.‘ I should have
liked to see her name the greater poems. But Dickinson escapes, as she
often does, and one recalls an anecdote of her early life. One Sunday, her
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159
father had assembled the family for church attendance, but ‗Emily begged
off until both were weary. Suddenly she disappeared and the family had
to go without her. On their return they searched for her with increasing
alarm. At last she was found rocking in a chair in the cellar.‘
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
Mabel Loomis Todd, Preface to Poems, Second Series (1891), in
Millicent Todd Bingham, Ancestors’ Brocades: The Literary Discovery of
Emily Dickinson, Dover Publications Ltd. 1967, p. 419.
My italics. Quotations from Dickinson‘s letters are taken from T.W.
Higginson‘s memoir of the poet (Atlantic Monthly, October 1891.)
Quotations from the poems (and their numbers) are from T.H.
Johnson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Faber and Faber 1970.
Marianne Moore, ‗Emily Dickinson‘ (1933), in Patricia C. Willis (ed.),
The Complete Prose of Marianne Moore, Faber and Faber 1967, p. 291.
Helen Vendler, interviewed in Paris Review, No. 141, Winter 1996.
The analogy doesn‘t hold: Dickinson‘s ‗solitary fields‘ belong to the
light of early Spring, Milton‘s ‗solitary way‘ to the desolation after the
Fall.
‗The result has been the destruction of a poet.‘ Yvor Winters, Forms of
Discovery, Alan Swallow 1967, p. 265.
John Constable
Visiting Exile, by John Welch. (Shearsman Books, £8.95)
John Welch can relish absurd, mordant detail. A mass-provision housing
development next to Tower Hamlets in East London is named ‗British
Estate‘, which in lower case becomes the title for Visiting Exile‘s first
poem, ‗Low rise, an off-white colour, / The walls a sort of scumbled
finish‘ (p.12). Some of the flats were built over a Victorian cemetery, ‗In
1966 … Relevant parts were freed / From the effects of
consecration‘ (‗british estate‘, p.12). It‘s tempting to take this as a kind of
self-description for the poet‘s life and commitment to writing, son of the
manse and several generations in service of the Anglican church, amid our
scumbled, off-white times. But freed for what, deconsecrated into what
kinds of freedom?
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In 1961, immediately after leaving Marlborough College, and during what
would now be called his ‗gap year‘ before going on to Cambridge, John
Welch travelled to Lahore, Pakistan, on a British Council scheme, where
he was to teach for a year in a boys‘ school, because ‗interesting things
were what I was supposed, as a public school boy about to go to
university, to be doing‘ (Dreaming Arrival, p.28). During the school
vacations, Welch toured sites and localities in northern Pakistan that are
now strictly out of bounds to casual visitors, including the Afghan border
and the Swat valley. It was during this last expedition that he experienced
a crisis which became the first phase of a severe breakdown; tellingly, this
manic episode was intimately connected with writing, ‗a sequence of
poems about the days of the week, related to their etymology, their
connection with Norse deities … everything was weighted with significance,
there was too much and I was in a state of troubled exaltation‘ (p.33).
Dreaming Arrival (Shearsman, 2008) is a remarkable memoir of the poet‘s
childhood and development, the history of a long-term analysis (with a
dramatic, near-fatal episode towards the end of the treatment) and much
more besides. As such, Dreaming Arrival is a rich social and literary history,
and a kind of ‗psychogenesis‘ that provides a fascinating perspective
through which to consider Welch‘s poetry – though in no sense as a
means of analytic ‗reduction‘ of writing to symptom.
His traumatic experience in northern Pakistan, as well as other aspects of
his biography, seem to have given John Welch a particular interest in, and
sympathy for lives affected by colonial and post-colonial history. The
exiled, the refuge seekers, those whom an earlier generation labelled
(literally) ‗DP‘, haunt the London of John Welch‘s writing. As a teacher of
ESL in East London schools he heard many stories from newly arrived
children – he once talked of making a collection of these broken
narratives, which would surely still be a worthwhile project. One small
quotation shows the poignancy of some of these childish accounts:
a boy who had come from Lahore wrote this: One day I was
watching my best pigeon flying over the sky, here and there in the
evening. My father came to me and called my name, but I was only
aware of the evening, therefore I didn’t hear anything. Then he shouted
‘Jimi’ – that was my nickname – ‘Listen, I am going to take you to
London tomorrow.’ (‗lyrical cities‘, p.33).
These dislocated voices and fragmented histories create another
opportunity for the poet to explore his preoccupation with ‗The distance
we carry inside us‘ (‗Ode‘ p.19). The collection‘s title poem is precisely this
thought, ‗‖They are like us‖ / But are we like us?‘ (‗Visiting Exile‘, p.29).
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The poem juxtaposes prose sections ‗YOU‘ and ‗HIM‘, negotiating a
complicity between migrant and ‗host‘ experience. The exiled at least have
a legitimate sense of their exteriority, lost to any originary self and
homeless among new speech: ‗Meanwhile you sit outside and watch the
language they have‘ (p.29). ‗HIM‘ (who is ‗I‘) is naturally not ‗at home‘ in
the receiving culture, but caught midway between languages and places: ‗It
was I who helped him make this translation. Stranded halfway over a
bridge each looked for himself in a different language‘ (p.30). This may be
describing two persons, but it is just as likely to be about the only one,
persistently afflicted with ‗all the horrors of an emptied-out sign‘ (p.9).
If you wanted to fake a sort of haiku that expressed some of the central
qualities of this poetry, then it might be three lines sliced together from ‗at
home‘:
Out walking early was the best of it
Walking through London
At home in my strangeness. (pp.58-9, lines 15, 16, 34)
Out Walking was a 1984 collection from Anvil, and is now the title of the
first section of Welch‘s substantial Collected Poems (Shearsman, 2008), and it
makes clear that he is one of the noble company of ‗walking-poets‘,
composing to the pace of footfalls, notations made en route, though
‗flaneur‘ doesn‘t seem to be the right word for the collator of these East
London fragments, and the results are utterly different from Ian Sinclair‘s
sondages of London landscapes. The Eliot of ‗Prufrock‘ and the four
‗Preludes‘ haunts these cadences, somehow (for which, see Dreaming
Arrival, p.51). Yet John Welch is a remorselessly unshapely poet, no
sonnet echoes, pentameter angst, ghost couplets, lamentable Shropshire
ladism, just the needed words and spaces, which are mostly not at all the
apparent randomness of merely modern poetry. Sometimes the poems are
more shaken loose, notebook perceptions that may or may not speak to
each other, and any promise of meaning hangs between lines. The poem
‗on ―murder mile‖‘ is successful in this way, where a nameless, deictic
subject is summoned in the opening lines: ‗from where / In a voice of
great purity it / sometimes descends‘ (p.22). This anonymous intuition
may be ‗That feeling of an overpowering strangeness / It was like a
perverse gift‘ (p.23), an estranging perspective which is striven for
throughout the poems, though it is also this poetic‘s central affliction.
Words in Welch‘s poetry are mysteriously given and mysteriously meant;
afternoons seem to be a problem, a space for blank moments of rapt
possession, ‗In the anxiety of afternoon … a felt answer -- / You who are
always near me / Making ―door music‖‘ (‗Struck Cup‘, p.28), or more
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promising, ‗And a sense of afternoon / This sober ecstasy of
clouds‘ (p.42). Sometimes the gifting is remarkable and gracious, ‗But
radiance of the ordinary / Is something like a veil‘ (p.40); in other poems
the ‗open weave‘ nature of Welch‘s writing makes it more of a challenge to
join the dots, or to appreciate his effects of disaggregation; ‗lyrical cities‘ is
this kind of poem, for me, where the annotation is sometimes more
striking than the poem itself, in this case a note about the mid-nineteenth
century Urdu poet Ghalib, whose ‗Dastanbuy‘ (‗A Posy of Flowers‘)
includes a shocking account of the sack of Dehli by British troops in 1857,
and then a crass rejoinder from two decades later by Sir Alfred Lyall,
Governor of the Punjab.
John Welch has an impressive knowledge of, and engagement with writing
from several different regions, including the Middle East, and he edited a
rewarding anthology, Stories from South East Asia (Oxford 1984). His poem
‗the wedding party‘ is once again enigmatic, but cites what has sometimes
been taken to be the earliest reference to a specific performance of Hamlet,
which, strikingly, is found on an East India Company vessel, the Red
Dragon, forced to take shelter off the coast of Sierra Leone in September
1607. Captain William Keeling wrote in his log, ‗I invited Captain
Hawkins to a ffishe dinner and had Hamlet acted abord me w[hi]ch I p[er]
mit to keepe my people from idleness and unlawful games or
sleepe‘ (Hamlet: The Texts of 1603 and 1623, Anne Thompson and Neil
Taylor (eds) (Arden, 2006) p.54). Welch‘s poem connects the moment of
this performance to the larger project of Empire, for which the East India
Company was an early and rapacious agency: ‗The shape of a language /
The poop deck a theatre / Carried it all that way / And Empire a sort of
confidence trick / A thing of shadows, half-selves‘ (p.37). ‗Postcolonial
studies‘ now routinely focus on Shakespeare as an imperial resource, so it
is worth pointing out that some scholars have cast doubt on the
authenticity of the ‗Captain Keeling‘ entries – very little is certain in the
murky world of Hamlet textual research and performance history. But
Welch‘s poetry would no doubt relish such a potential inauthenticity.
This strong sense of the weight of Britain‘s imperial past and its
contemporary, inescapable consequences pervade John Welch‘s poetry,
not a ‗politics‘ as such, but an informed concern:
A globe set spinning in an empty classroom
Half the surface bruised with red –
As if the mistake still dogs our steps. (‗british estate‘, p.12)
The History of Empire, its vast migrations and spurious nation projects,
therefore becomes another source of ontological displacement, the dis-
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eased subject of the writing, and which gives John Welch‘s poetry its very
particular focus and value:
‗Empire‘ was the wound
It was dealt from such a distance
It crosses an uncertain border
Between sense and estrangement. ‗Struck Cup‘, pp.26-7)
Nigel Wheale
Soul Keeping Company, by Lucie Brock-Broido.
(Carcanet £9.95)
Soul Keeping Company is the first UK publication of work by Lucie BrockBroido, an American poet who was born in 1956 in Pittsburgh. It contains
a generous sampling of poetry taken in more or less equal measure from
her three collections, A Hunger (1988), The Master Letters (1995) and Trouble
In Mind (2004). Having held various academic positions in American
universities, she is now Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at
Columbia University. She has also been the recipient of major awards
from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment
for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This new
selected edition opens with the intriguingly titled, ‗Domestic Mysticism‘.
It is a dazzling tour de force which, on first reading, seems both weirdly
impressive and bewildering. However, as with many of her poems, BrockBroido has supplied an explanatory note which gives the reader a helpful
insight into her ways of ‗making strange‘. The footnoting of poems may
be a contentious issue, but it must be admitted that her brief references to
Herodotus, Empedocles and the cycles of reincarnation do at least enable
the reader to make some sense of a poem which might otherwise remain
impenetrable:
In thrice 10,000 seasons, I will come back to this world
In a white cotton dress. Kingdom of After My Own Heart.
Kingdom of Fragile. Kingdom of Dwarves. When I come home,
Teacups will quiver in their Dresden saucers, pentatonic chimes
Will move in wind. A covey of alley cats will swarm on the side
Porch & perch there, portents with quickened heartbeats
You will feel against your ankles as you pass through.
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From the outset one sees that Brock-Broido has no qualms in using
language that is highly wrought. There is the wilful archaism of ‗thrice
10,000 seasons‘ and the artful rhetoric of her list of ‗Kingdoms‘, whilst at
the same time she can also be precise and objective in her delightful
description of teacups. Although her tendency towards mannerist
extravagance may not be to everyone‘s taste, it cannot be denied that she
does also have a good instinct for the musicality of language as evidenced
in the stanza‘s closing sentence, where syntax twists and turns as lithely as
the cats she evokes. Through the poem‘s seven massive stanzas her
Whitmanesque flow is ‗refracted‘ (to use one of her favoured terms)
through the elegance and the preciosity of Wallace Stevens, one of her
avowed influences. With little interest in the merely quotidian, she would
seem to be placing herself in the Orphic tradition of poets such as
Rimbaud, Dylan Thomas or Allen Ginsberg, all of whom in their different
ways assume, sometimes rather self-consciously, the mantle of le voyant.
Combining the role of poet with that of a seeress, Brock-Broido creates a
haunted, feverish world which might well appeal to those countless
readers of Tolkien-inspired fantasy or the gothic novels of Anne Rice and
Stephenie Meyer. It is a world of ‗dyed velvet‘, ‗orchids‘, ‗minstrels‘,
‗wizards‘, ‗owls‘, ‗the queer light left when a room snuffs out‘.
Defining her poetic terrain and setting the tone for much of the work that
follows, ‗Domestic Mysticism‘ is also, like many of the poems in her first
book, a dramatic monologue. In some ways reminiscent of the early work
of that brilliant, but now largely forgotten figure, George McBeth, they are
poems in which enigmatic characters find themselves in extreme
situations, and which would often be inaccessible were it not for the
poets‘ notes. In ‗Domestic Mysticism‘ the protagonist refers to him/
herself as ‗a witness & a small thing altogether‘. This is a phrase which
could be applied to several of Brock-Broido‘s alter egos. ‗Birdie Africa‘ is
about a real child, Oyewulffe Momar Puim, who from the age of two was
brought up in a religious cult and was one of only two people who
survived when the cult‘s headquarters were firebombed by the police:
My father calls me Wolf.
He says that I will see things other people will not see
at night. When he holds me, heat comes out
of his big arms & I belong to him.
In the cold of Christmastime he rocks
me in his deep lap in the great shadow of a comforter.
An analogous figure appears in ‗Edward VI on the Seventh Day‘, where
the sickly and introspective boy prince is, by way of contrast, in awe of his
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overbearing father: ‗I am, by far, too fair for him. / He is dark & brilliant
with a temper, fire / I am airy, scampering.‘ ‗Jesssica, from the Well‘ is
based on the story of Jessica McClure, an eighteen-month-old girl, who
fell into a well and survived for 58 hours until she was rescued.
Apparently she had no ‗psychological scarring, no memory of the event.‘
However, the five pages of her soliloquy do seem an improbable
outpouring for so young a child. The theatricality of Brock-Broido‘s work
may usefully be highlighted by comparing ‗And So Long, I‘ve Had You
Fame‘, her poem about the death of Marilyn Monroe, with Sharon Olds‘
poem on the same subject, where ‗ The ambulance men touched her
cold / body, lifted it, heavy as iron, / onto the stretcher […].‘ Olds‘
evocation of the stark actuality of a dead body could not be further
removed from Brock-Broido‘s more idealised vision:
How odd that she would die into an August
night, I would have thought
she would have gone out in a pale clear
night of autumn, covered to the shoulder
in an ivory sheet, hair
fanned out across the pillow perfectly.
Largely written while she was in her twenties, A Hunger is by any standard
an astonishingly precocious debut and one which seems to have left the
poet exhausted. In an interview with Carole Maso for BOMB Magazine in
1995 she recounts how, shortly after its publication, she visited her
‗prophet-teacher‘, Stanley Kunitz, confessing to him: ‗That‘s it for me. I
have nothing left.‘ It would be seven years before her second collection,
The Master Letters, was to appear. In ‗A Preamble to The Master Letters‘ she
explains how the genesis of this collection is to be found in three
mysterious letters that turned up amongst Emily Dickinson‘s papers after
her death. Two of the letters are addressed to a ‗Dear Master’. The third is
addressed to ‗a Recipient Unknown‘. It is not clear whether they were
drafts of letters which Dickinson ever sent or intended to send, or
whether they were simply literary creations. The ‗Master‘ may have been
one of her known correspondents, a lover, or maybe even God. In Brock
-Broido‘s words these letters are ‗gracious, sometimes nearly erotic,
worshipful documents, full of Dickinson‘s dramas of entreaty & intimacy
[…].‘ Her own poems, which are written either in prose or in loose
couplets, she describes as ‗a series of latter-day Master Letters‘ which
‗echo formal & rhetorical devices from Dickinson‘s work.‘ In BrockBroido‘s reworkings ‗the Master […] began as a Fixed star‘ who ‗took on
the fractured countenance of a composite portrait […].‘ The ‗Speaker‘
became ‗a brood of voice – a flock of women with Dickinson as mistress
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of the skein, the spinning wheel, the Queen Domestic, composed and
composing, as she did, from her looms & room & seclusion.‘ She explains
finally how the ‗Speaker‘, like the ‗Master‘, also became for her a
composite figure as ‗Raids on other work began – Sappho, Bradsheet,
Brontë, Akhmatova, Plath. Then, a lustrum into the composition, I signed
a poem –L.‘
Brock-Broido waxes lyrical to such a degree in her enthusiasm for these
letters that one might hesitate to enquire what all this really amounts to,
lest it should seem bad manners. Nevertheless, there is something
unsettling and even irksome in the poet‘s use of that highly charged
classical term ‗lustrum‘, which implies a too complacent assumption of the
role of visionary, when really all she means is ‗some time later‘. More
worryingly, one has to wonder why she needs to ‗raid‘ the work of so
many others before she tentatively signs one of the letters in her own
name. Her poem ‗Also, None Among Us Has Seen God‘ is fairly
representative of the collection:
My Most Courteous Lord –
The Teutons have their word for keeping Quiet which our blessing
Language does not have. To say nothing of – Agone, to say nothing
Of the monk who set himself ablaze, in autumn hair & all, the ravish
& wool of him, the mourning & the sweetest smell of him – Alive –
How did you teach the learning of this Holding & the holding
Back – To say nothing of Ago, obedience, the hiding in
The feral peace of speaking Not, the root & oath of it –
Old as a prehistoric furrow horse abed in awe & sediment,
Curled on his runic side, in the shape of an O, broken. Wake
Is agape, an outskirt of agony, blouse-white and bad – To say
Nothing of the nook of sleep – which is the ravage in the chamois nightSweat of your raff & shames, the fevers of a minor fire, the rage
Or punishment, the Agapé, the kerosene & bone-red rag.
That was the best moment of his life. The burning down.
As we have now come to expect, this poem has an explanatory note.
However, like most of the notes to The Master Letters, it merely indicates a
source, so that we learn that the title of this poem derives from a line in
Archibald McLeish‘s poem ‗Epistle to Be Left in the Earth‘. BrockBroido‘s use of it as her title promises a great deal and it does seem fairly
clear that the poem is about the self-immolation of a monk and the
‗Speaker‘s‘ identification with him. However, where does the poet stand in
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all this, or does it matter? The poem‘s salutation seems little more than a
literary game, as is the hit and miss capitalization, the disjointed syntax,
both of which derive from Dickinson. The opening lines are portentous
but don‘t really make any obvious sense, while the ‗Teutons‘ seem dragged
in to give that medieval gloss that the poet is so keen on. ‗Runic‘ is used
later in the poem to the same end. The wordplay between ‗Agone’ and
‗Ago’, ‘agape‘ and ‗Agapé‘ is laboured, whilst the repetition of the phrase
‗To say nothing of‘ runs the risk of bringing the whole house of cards
tumbling down. Death and transcendence, the prospect of union with a
supreme being – these are hugely ambitious themes. Unfortunately, one is
not convinced that the poet has the means at her disposal to deal
adequately with them.
Brock-Broido‘s most recent collection, Trouble in Mind, appeared in 2004,
nine years after its predecessor. Its sombre, bluesy title refers to the fact
that in the interim she had lost both her parents. However, her uneasy
coming to terms with mortality and the ravages of time had already been
hinted at in lines from that signature poem ‗Domestic Mysticism‘, which
she had published by the time she was barely thirty: ‗In the next
millennium, I will be middle aged. I do not do well / In the marrow of
things. Kingdom of Trick. Kingdom of Drug.‘ In ‗After Raphael‘ we
sense that the poet is making a conscious attempt to restrain some of the
effusiveness of her previous work and to adopt a more sober style
appropriate to the expression of grief:
Perhaps it isn‘t possible to say these things
Out loud without the noir
Of ardor and its plain-spoken elegance.
First, my father died. Then my mother
Did. My father died again.
After the strange storm they were ruined down
From the boughs.
There were apples everywhere.
Even here one has doubts and has to question her use of ‗noir‘, which
inescapably suggests a certain style of cinematic thriller. Why is it coupled
with ‗ardor‘, which seems a strange word to use in the context of
mourning? Again one feels that the writer may be striking a pose. After a
brief perusal of her ubiquitous notes, one is struck by something even
more disconcerting. The titles of several of these poems are ‗titles‘ which
our poet has ‗adapted‘ from a list of several hundred which she found in
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Pieces of Paper, a private notebook in which Wallace Stevens concocted a
list of titles for poems he never wrote. This is a surprisingly circuitous way
for a mature poet to deal with personal angst and grief. One such poem is
‗Still Life with Aspirin‘ in which the poet seems to be coming to terms
with the possibility of an afterlife, a notion which her more rational self
has been taught to consider improbable:
There she was, the mother of me, like a lit plinth,
Heavenly, though I was reared to find this kind
Of visitation impractical; she was an unbearable detail
Of the supreme celestial map,
Of which I had been taught that there
was no such thing.
One has no reason to question the emotion that informs these lines.
Regrettably, however, it is almost immediately diffused by the donnish
tone and the condescension of those that follow:
Stevens wrote that
For a poem to be true, it must ―come from an Ever.‖
If you don‘t fathom that, then you should not be reading this.
Brock-Broido is not a poet to whom one can easily remain indifferent. In
her interview with Carole Maso she quotes Zbigniew Herbert, in making a
distinction between two types of poet. There is ‗the ox‘ who ‗is plodding
and deliberate‘ and ‗the cat – who‘s sleek and nocturnal […].‘ BrockBroido, unsurprisingly, assigns herself to the latter category. In a further
comparison between herself, Frank Bidart and Seamus Heaney, the Nobel
laureate is left to pursue his honest labours amongst the lumbering oxen.
In her own way, Brock-Broido is of course merely reiterating a longestablished dichotomy between Classicism and Romanticism, or
Nietzsche‘s distinction between the ‗Apollonian‘ and the ‗Dionysian‘.
Fearless and ambitious, Ms Brock-Broido‘s poetry is a high wire act in
which she pushes language to its limits. It will be seen by some as inspired,
whilst others may dismiss it as incoherent.
David Cooke
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A reader’s guide to the
essential criticism, by Nicolas Tredell.
(Palgrave, £12.99)
The ‗reader‘s guide‘ series is a reissue and extension of what was formerly
the Icon Critical Guides. The older books were chunkier and gold, the new
are slimmer and blue; otherwise the approach and format continues just as
before (with, in the present case, one exception, which I‘ll come to
below). Each volume offers a chronological summary of the criticism
from the earliest comments or reviews up to the time of compiling – in
this case, from Pepys (‗the most insipid ridiculous play that ever I saw in
my life‘) to Helen Hackett. After a brief and useful account of the play‘s
date, sources and text (there‘s a paragraph on Egeus and speech
attributions which could be used as a basis for productive class
discussion), Tredell works through chronologically, summarising concisely
and quoting effectively, giving a comprehensive account of the full range
of criticism. Each account of a critic is self-contained, but sections are
stitched together at chapter endings and there is some comparison and
cross-referencing. There is some evaluation and commentary on the
various critical views, but the overall aim is to give an overview of what
has been written about the play. This is done with clear summaries and
plenty of quotation, bringing out trends of development, changes of
fashion and of emphasis.
The first two chapters concern the periods 1662-1898 and 1900-1949.
After these the chapters are arranged in decades: Tredell conducts us from
1950s nostalgia for the organic community and ideas of nature through
1960s awareness of darker and more deeply sexual elements (Jan Kott,
inevitably; although we learn that Georg Brandes in the 1890s had already
made an ‗explicit statement of an erotic element in the Dream‘), through
the 1970s when ‗established approaches took on a defensive aspect, while,
alternative approaches struggled to emerge‘ and Marxist criticism of the
play made a first appearance, to the ‗provocative, stimulating, insightful,
and controversial readings‘ of the 1980s, with their emphasis on ideology,
patriarchy, heterosexism, sexual and class politics. In the 1990s we
encounter colonial readings, approaches via wordplay, and in the
noughties we encounter reading against the grain, sodomy, infantile
sexuality, and aesthetics. Among others: this list is partial; the book really
is very comprehensive.
I feel, though, that this very thoroughness makes for some dull reading;
and it does implicitly raise the question of which of these critical accounts
can really be considered ‗essential‘. (It‘s a pity, perhaps, that the new series
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has been given this new title.) I even caught myself wondering if there is
any essential criticism of the Dream. But the book is certainly a very useful
resource for anyone wanting to get an overview of Dream criticism and to
teachers whose students are going to have to show some awareness of the
variety of critical opinion and ways of thinking about the play. This will
require some work from the teacher, however: selecting, excerpting,
summarising and augmenting.
The book can be particularly useful for considering the various kinds of
unity and harmony that have been looked for or found in the play
(balancing and reconciling opposites, musical, pictorial, patterns of
imagery, etc.) or the ways in which the notion of unity has been
questioned or subverted; also for investigating the kind of criticism that
looks for (and ‗finds‘) a single element (or detail) to be the clue to the
whole play – the votatress and the Indian boy, for instance, or the idea of
joining and repairing suggested by the mechanicals‘ names and trades
(Patricia Parker), or even in a single word (Terence Hawkes on ‗or‘).
The book might also be used to provide some materials (more would be
needed) for investigating to what extent cultural memories of Theseus and
Hippolyta and other mythological figures have a bearing on the meaning
of the Dream. Are, as Kermode argues, the allegorical Renaissance
interpretations of the episodes of Cupid and Psyche and Apuleius‘s vision
of Isis ‗part of the living texture of The Dream‘? Is it the case that
‗Seductive and destructive women, rape and marital breakdown, are
crucial in the legends of Theseus and they still figure, at some level, in the
Dream‘? Do we just take Hippolyta as we find her in the play (not a
straightforward task in itself) or, drawing on the mythology, consider her
‗an Amazon and a huntress ... androgynous, mixing masculine and
feminine traits ... an all-in-one figure who gratifies Theseus‘s desire for the
exclusive love of one woman and his homoerotic inclinations‘? Students
might be given a digest (or asked to prepare one) of the ‗background‘ of
these characters and asked to consider what bearing, if any, they have on
our reading of the play. What difference would it make if Theseus were
Boris or Clarence?
Materials can be excerpted to allow students to consider different ideas
and assessments of Bottom (self-made man, great comic creation,
blockhead, the lucky man, Everyman, the hero of the play, a natural
genius, ‗the enthusiast, the romantic, the artist‘ (J.B. Priestley)), and to
explore such ‗thematic‘ qualities as imagination and love (‗the idea that
Shakespeare‘s comedies ultimately affirmed marriage began to be regarded
in a more sceptical light‘).
Single quotations could be excerpted for discussion/essay writing. These
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might be selected for their shock value, as for instance Kott‘s claims that
‗The slender and lyrical Titania longs for animal love‘ (How does he know
that she‘s slender? Need she be? Is there a case for a tubby Titania?) and
that ‗the monstrous ass is being raped by the poetic Titania, while she still
keeps on chattering about flowers‘. (It‘s not clear to me how this sentence
can be considered a product of literary criticism. Does the quality, the
movement of Titania‘s lines allow for anything so orgasmic? A memory of
an actress trying to make it work as theatre is still fairly vivid.) Students
could compare Kott‘s view with the quotation from David Bevington on
page 83 and then consider Tredell‘s subsequent comment.
And so on.
Less useful to students and teachers is the exception to the general format,
a chapter on film, which I feel doesn‘t really doesn‘t come off. Tredell
explains that actual stage performances have never been considered in
previous Guides in the series because the performance, once gone, is gone
– it is not available as a stable text for criticism. Film, being fixed and
repeatable, is in a different case. Well, OK; but nonetheless a considerable
body of performance criticism has grown up over the years and many
details of performance are well documented. And surely it‘s the films
themselves, rather than critical discussions of them, that should be
considered as the interpretative accounts of the plays? The appropriate
focus, then, would be on their cutting and rearranging of the text, the use
of visual elements to represent or replace elements in the text, and so
forth. Tredell seems to work, though, on the assumption that his proper
material is the critical accounts. Except that he never gets this consistently
into focus. There‘s a tendency to describe the films rather than to discuss
what‘s involved in them – or critical accounts of them – as understandings
of Shakespeare‘s play. And not enough is done to bring this chapter into
relation with those previous to it. Nevertheless, there is some interesting
information to be gleaned, and at least one reader was made curious to see
the 1935 film of the Dream.
In his final chapter Tredell considers the possible future of Dream
criticism. Future accounts might focus on green criticism, the
phenomenon of re-enchantment, and parallels with our contemporary
world (‗To suggest this is not to endow the Dream with a quasi-magical
power of prophecy but to analyse how the play‘s attunement to its cultural
moment enabled it to pick up intimations of what such a cultural moment
might develop into‘). The perspectives of the 1950s, he assures us, will not
be altogether discarded; the radical critics highlighted overlooked elements
but did not demolish earlier insights. Earlier in the book Tredell had made
the telling remark:
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Those challenges ... however, no longer seemed quite so
innovative and radical; they had become well established,
their original practitioners were growing older and were, for
the most part, more institutionally and personally settled
(where they had not retired or passed on); and students
encountered ideas and approaches which had once seemed
subversive as a corpus of concepts which they were required
to assimilate rather than rebel against.
Just so. There is, apparently, still plenty to be done; the critical machine
has not run down yet, the academy continues to perpetuate itself.
This can seem rather a dreary prospect. By far the most striking comment
in the book is from G.K. Chesterton: we ‗cannot have A Midsummer
Night’s Dream if our one object in life is to keep ourselves awake with the
black coffee of criticism.‘
John Haddon
Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury, by Lisa Shahriari and Gina
Potts. (Palgrave Macmillan, £90.00)
In these two volumes a wide range of matters are discussed, not only
concerning Woolf herself, but some of the ideas of her Bloomsbury
contemporaries. It is therefore a very ambitious book, and unless the
reader can find some contemporary focus, a bit daunting. To begin at the
beginning and steadily work one‘s way through paper after paper is clearly
not the way. The focus will probably depend on one‘s own interest in the
various aspects of the Bloomsbury phenomenon, so it is a case of taking a
deep plunge from one‘s own particular interests, and ‗strike out‘ from
there.
I seem to have plunged in at Suzanne Raitt‘s paper in volume one whose
title is Aesthetic Theory and Literary Practice, in a paper called ‗The Voyage
Back: Woolf‘s Revisions and Returns‘. In this paper Suzanne Raitt
explores what she calls ‗the poetics of return‘ – ‗seeing things again‘ as
Virginia put it, taking as the first example the ill-fated 1905 trip to St Ives,
to see again Talland House which had once been the summer house for
the family before the death of Virginia‘s mother, Julia Stephens.
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This visit did not bring about a feeling of joy at revealing a happy
childhood for the young Stephens, but it did reveal Virginia‘s inner
thoughts on how she felt about her past life and how much her
relationship with her own past had moved into her present mind, and also
what had remained stuck in the past.
As more and more of her work was discovered by literary critics, this
relationship between past and present plays a very significant part in her
life and writing. She found out that words can change and they can be
replaced by new examples. When you return to your past in your mind it
may be painful. When Virginia returns to memories of the past she found
that something which was perfect in the imagination may be reconstructed
in a damaged form, for example the failed attempt to return to the
childhood happiness of Talland House – the past was too difficult and too
dangerous.
In the process of trying to remember the thing you seek, it may turn out
never to have existed; memory may be unmasked as fantasy; perfection
can be exposed as a lucky guess. Hence the intensity and complexity of
Virginia‘s struggle with her own past.
Suzanne Raitt speaks of one ‗curative return‘ for Virginia, that is, the
writing of To the Lighthouse. To quote Raitt:In returning in her imagination to Talland House she
mastered her dead parents‘ power over her.
Virginia wrote in her diary for November 1928 that she used to think of
her father and mother daily but ‗writing The Lighthouse laid them in my
mind‘. Raitt‘s paper ‗The Voyage Back: Woolf‘s Revisions and Returns‘
seemed to me to speak of something which is latent in the two volumes of
this book. It helped me to find a ‗way in‘ within a great number of papers
which seemed to be rather overwhelming. Raitt points out what a
significant experience the 1905 visit to Talland House was, in the failure
of the attempt to recapture the happiness of the earlier summers spent
there. That experience was something Virginia would repeat all her life.
‗Seeing things again‘ became a dominant theme in both her life and her
work. Also seeing ‗how things change‘, and how such changes affect your
life are all expressed within both her life and work. The relationship
between outer and inner also feature throughout her work. Raitt‘s
comment here is interesting. She points out that this is not merely an
aesthetic experience but it is also political in the widest sense.
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The link between the aesthetic and the political is the subject of the paper
by Elizabeth Willson Gordon in volume two. The paper is entitled ‗How
Should One Sell a Book? Production methods, Material Objects and
Marketing at the Hogarth Press‘. In this paper there is a discussion about
the part that the Hogarth Press played in Virginia‘s life. I see that this
forms the link between the political and the aesthetic in Virginia‘s life.
Elizabeth Gordon‘s paper discusses the importance in Virginia‘s life of
both the practical affair of running the Press, and the effects it would have
in the political sphere which would include the wider cultural sphere and
of course, the literary one.
So this paper of Gordon‘s is the next paper I plunged into to pursue this
important link between the aesthetic and the political. The title ‗How
Should One Sell a Book?‘ encapsulates very well this link. I feel able to
discuss the importance in her life of both the practical affair of running
the Press and the effects this had in the ‗business sphere‘ where the
Hogarth Press was embedded. How did she reconcile her cultural and her
‗business‘ interests? What effects did this have on Virginia as a person?
Elizabeth Gordon found it ‗almost miraculous‘ that the Hogarth Press
became a successful business. She suggests that the reasons for this were
very special in that they varied according to the needs of both Virginia and
Leonard at a particular time – for example the need for Virginia to be free
of Gerald Duckworth as a publisher, also Virginia‘s need at various times
for recreation and therapy, and thirdly to publish works which other
publishers were rather afraid to do. Since these included the works of
Freud, T. S. Eliot ‗Of the Wasteland‘ sometimes too scandalous for many
publishers, but suiting the ‗advanced‘ outlook of Virginia who wanted the
Press to be open to the discussion of new ideas. With all these mixed
purposes and goals probably, as Gordon says, its success can only be
viewed as ‗miraculous‘.
There existed of course a general interest in what the Woolfs were doing –
an ‗aura‘ around everything they dealt with. That it was successful as a
‗business enterprise‘ allows us, Gordon comments, to see Virginia as
having some power in the world of commerce.
She knew from first-hand experience about ‗production methods‘, and
marketing because she took charge of such matters, liked the job and did
it well down to dirtying her hands around the Press itself. I think it was
because she was in charge of many or most of the decisions to publish or
not and this allowed another aspect of her personality to flourish. Above
all, she would be aware that the general prestige of the Press ensured that
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her political ideas would be made public, for example, radical books like A
Room of One’s Own. She wouldn‘t be a lady novelist who found it quite
amusing to go and tinker in the Press for a little light relief when things
weren‘t going well with her current novel.
But Elizabeth Gordon makes it clear that the Hogarth Press wasn‘t just a
successful commercial enterprise, as both Virginia and Leonard made it
clear by a system of advanced publicity of a very exclusive kind, sent to a
limited number of people, creating a feeling of distinction if you were one
of the select few, and this aura stayed round the Press for many years.
It was, Elizabeth Gordon states, very uncharacteristic at that time for
literary journals to be sold as if entering the field of commercial
production. However, this was ignored by the Hogarth Press and their
journal put on the market. The first advertised price was very moderate,
one and tuppence, but the price soon rose. To advertise a price was very
unusual for the small presses, which on the whole, were delivered freely as
gifts. So what Elizabeth Gordon is saying is that Virginia herself was as
successful in a commercial enterprise as in a literary one. And she did
publish in the Hogarth Press some of her own books as well as books
which were ‗advanced‘, and which other publishers kept clear of, for
example some of the works of Freud, and some of T. S. Eliot – namely
The Wasteland and even her own experimental novel The Waves. The
comment made by Elizabeth Gordon is very significant:The multiple roles that Virginia Woolf had in the production
of books, and of her own books in particular, are central to
the understanding of her work. She produced books as well
as texts.
Gordon also quotes from Virginia‘s diary here: ‗I am the only woman in
England free to write what she likes‘. But, however, Gordon thinks that
this does not do justice to the complexity of the situation, for she says,
often in the production of books the artisanal labour is segregated from
the artistic, but in the case of the Woolfs at the beginning of the Press
they not only wrote books, but printed and published them, advertised
and even ‗travelled‘ them. The multiple roles were in fact what made the
case of the Hogarth press such a remarkable instance of ‗cultural
production‘.
Margaret Weldhen
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A Reader’s Guide to Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, by Janet
Winston. (Continuum, £55.00)
The quotation which introduces this book is taken from one of Virginia
Woolf‘s essays: ‗How Should One Read a Book?‘ dated 1932. In this she
asks ‗How far we must ask ourselves, is a book influenced by its writer‘s
life?‘ But in complete contrast to this is another quotation from one of
Virginia Woolf‘s letters to her publisher, Harcourt Brace. She writes:I received the copies of the Modern edition of To The
Lighthouse. I could wish that the introducer did not think it
necessary to drag in my private life. (1937)
We know that she had a very ambivalent attitude towards biography
which has been fully discussed by Michael Benton in his recent book
entitled Literary Biography: An Introduction, 2009. Benton uses Virginia
Woolf as the prime example of the problem of the relation between
biography and fiction. And in her book on Virginia Woolf, Hermione Lee
shows how ‗fiction is often her version of biography‘. We shall see how
this is particularly true in her novel To The Lighthouse.
Julia Briggs in her book Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life (2005) writes:Woolf‘s fiction is essentially concerned with the inner life,
and finding ways of re-creating that life in narrative.
and further:In recreating the interiority of others, Woolf drew, as she
had to, on what she knew of her own. She remained a
fascinated observer of her own thoughts, and also of her
own creative process, recording both in her diaries and
letters.
Further, she set herself, states Julia Briggs, the difficult task of re-creating
the constant changes of feeling that pass through human beings ‗are
rapidly as clouds or notes of music,‘ changes which are ‗ironed out‘ in
most conventional fiction. Woolf herself was fascinated, states Julia
Briggs by her own rapidly changing impulses towards and away from
other people as well as the artistic problem of how to convey an
individual‘s experience of a shared event. Julia Briggs feels that she solved
it triumphantly in the dinner party that ends the first half of To The
Lighthouse.
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Despite the wish of Virginia Woolf that her published work and her
private life should be kept separate, Janet Winston takes the view that one
cannot fully understand her creative work without some knowledge of her
family and original home life, her education and her mature life. That is
why the subject of Janet Winston‘s book is To The Lighthouse which she
sees as Virginia Woolf‘s most autobiographical novel.
Early in the book Janet Winston deals with Virginia Woolf‘s early life in
an upper middle class Victorian family. She points out that her parents
had family ties to noted literary figures. Sir Leslie Stephen her father, was
a very prestigious man of letters, an essayist, editor and literary critic and
counted Thomas Hardy and Henry James among his friends. He is best
remembered for editing the first twenty-six volumes of the Dictionary of
National Biography. Her mother, Julia Stephen had to manage a household
of a demanding father and eight children (one or two came from previous
marriages of the two parents.)
What was very significant for Virginia Woolf‘s life and the future writing
of To The Lighthouse was the fact that the family moved for the summer
months to their house, Talland House, in St. Ives. From the house there
was a view of Godrevy Lighthouse to which Leslie and the children could
sail. On returning years later Virginia called Godrevy ‗my
lighthouse‘ (Letters 4: 165). The whole experience had an immense effect
on Virginia Woolf for the rest of her life, as well as being the main
inspiration for her writing of To The Lighthouse (1927). Janet Winston
quotes Virginia Woolf as describing the sea at St. Ives as ‗a miracle - more
congenial to me than any human being‘ (Letters 1: 326).
In a ‗Sketch of the Past‘ Virginia gives an example of one particular
memory from childhood when waking up in the Talland House nursery
listening to the waves crashing on the shore, and the blind flapping in the
breeze, and Janet Winston quotes her:If life has a base that it stands upon, if it is a bowl that one
fills, and fills, and fills – then my bowl without a doubt
stands upon this memory. (Sketch 64)
What Janet Winston emphasises is how young Virginia was during all
these experiences. For Virginia was only thirteen when Julia Stephen died,
and Talland House summers, and also her happy home life came to an
end for Leslie took the event very badly and ‗his domineering presence
now overshadowed everything‘ and for decades Virginia Woolf was
‗haunted by her mother‘. For, as Janet Winston says,
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She eventually wrote To The Lighthouse to lay the memory of
her mother and Leslie Stephen to rest.
I appreciate the importance that Janet attaches to the whole Talland
experience, and am glad she does it in some detail.
Of some significance also in laying the foundations for Virginia Woolf
becoming a writer was the fact that she had to educate herself, as distinct
from being able to develop her talent without the help of a university
education. Her brothers went to Cambridge and Virginia remained at
home under governesses and tutors. But it was entirely by her own
initiative that she read a vast number of books in her father‘s library, and
in a way gave herself a ‗good education‘. Once again by her own initiative
she went to Greek and Latin classes at Kings College, London. In her
book A Room of One’s Own, she expressed her resentment at this inequitable difference between the education of herself as a woman, and her
brothers‘ privileged experience.
Janet Winston warns the reader that if he or she looks for the usual ‗plot‘
or story in this book they may be disappointed. But all the same, she says,
there is a fairly simple story ‗underpinning‘, she writes:It centres on two days, separated by ten years, in the life of
the Ramsey Family, their servants, and guests at their
summer house on the Isle of Skye …… The first and
longest section of the novel, ‗The Window‘ takes place
during the middle of September 1909 at ‗past six in the
evening, the narrative tension hinges on whether young
James Ramsey will be able to sail to the lighthouse.
Although disappointed at age six he fulfils his desire at
sixteen, accompanied by his sister Cam and his father, Mr.
Ramsey. Simultaneously, Lily Briscoe, unmarried middleaged artist, completes her painting of Mrs. Ramsey after a
ten-year hiatus. The narrative climax coming at the end of
the ‗window‘ section is Mrs. Ramsey‘s dinner party, during
which a marriage proposal is announced, artistic problems
are resolved and much soup and Boeuf en Daube are
consumed.
Janet Winston then looks at the middle section of the book, ‗Time Passes‘
where the narrative focus is shifted from family life to the ‗elements of
nature and the life of a nation engaged in its first world war.‘ Mrs.
Ramsey dies as do two of the children, Andrew in war-time battle, and
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Prue after giving birth. Their abandoned summer house
languishes in disrepair only to be resuscitated years later my
Mrs. NcNab and Mrs. Bast, two industrious elderly women
hired to prepare it for the family‘s return in the final section.
And so Janet Winston gives a very lucid ‗underpinning‘ to the book, but I
think that some readers would find this a daunting task coming to the
book for the first time and would find it very difficult to see any ‗story‘ or
‗plot‘.
There is an interesting short section in Janet Winston‘s book which she
entitles ‗The Metaphysics of the Novel.‘ She is revealing what she calls
‗the philosophical axis‘ on which To The Lighthouse rests.‘ She considers
that the novel asks the question ‗Are human character and human life
enduring or fleeting‘. She quotes a passage from Virginia Woolf‘s diary in
which V. Woolf asks these questions:
Now is life very solid or very shifting? I am haunted by the
contradictions …….. Perhaps it may be that though we
change, we are somehow successive and continuous – we
human beings and show the light through. But what is the
light? (Diary 3, 1929)
Janet Winston comments on this:The intricacies of To The Lighthouse – its method of character
development, the stream of consciousness style, the
prominent imagery of waves, lighthouse and horizon, the
organisation into three uneven sections representing
extremes of time before and after World War 1, and the
focus on childhood and memory – combine to underscore a
central paradox: life is at once eternal and momentary, made
up of opposing forces of stasis and flow.
Yet, Janet Winston points out, that despite this philosophical
underpinning, To The Lighthouse can be interpreted in myriad ways, as is
clear from about eight decades of review and literary criticism. She
discusses four ‗interpretative schemes‘ which highlight different aspects of
the novel. The first of these is ‗the marriage of opposites‘ which
concentrates on the differences of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey‘s way of looking
at the world, Mr. Ramsey‘s more rational and abstract, based on scientific
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evidence, and by contrast Mrs. Ramsey‘s more personal, based on
constantly changing feelings and the perceptions of the beauty of the
world, the importance of the quotidian, and the concrete as opposed to
the abstract and unchanging.
Another interpretation, Janet Winston suggests, would be to see the novel
as ‗the Portrait of the artist as a middle-aged woman.‘ This interpretation
would focus on what challenges women artists have to face, in a
traditionally masculine controlled area. The example of such a character,
of course is Lily Briscoe.
Janet Winston points out that a year after publishing To The Lighthouse
(1927) Virginia Woolf gave some lectures which would become A Room of
One’s Own which would explore in detail the obstacles women writers have
faced historically. In this novel the reader catches a glimpse of some of
their obstacles in society‘s attitudes to women artists, for example, Mr.
Ramsey talks of ‗the folly of women‘s minds‘ and his guest the research
student Charles Tansley‘s chant of ‗women can‘t paint, women can‘t write‘
which was undermining to women artists like Lily Briscoe who is seen as
very important to this interpretation, just as the rather unbalanced
relationships between the minds of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsey would be very
important to the interpretation ‗The Marriage of Opportunities‘. Janet
Winston includes other ‗readings‘ of To The Lighthouse. However she
thinks the dominant theme of the novel in all the ‗readings‘ is death, and
we know that Virginia Woolf wrote this book ‗to put to rest the memory
of her parents‘.
In chapter 4 Janet Winston discusses the critical reception and publishing
history of the book. She points out that the novel‘s critical history from
the mid-thirties to Virginia Woolf‘s death in 1941 was ‗fraught with heated
disagreement.‘ Even Wyndham Lewis agreed that as a ‗symbolic landmark
she has some significance‘, surely a very patronising remark about
someone who was rapidly becoming one of the great English novelists of
the day. E. M. Forster remarked on its beauty. Julia Briggs in her book
Virginia Woolf, an Inner Life (2005) points out an interesting fact that ‗from
the outset certain French critics seemed to recognise exactly what she was
doing‘. I feel that this is not too surprising given the very different literary
history, and actually the book was awarded the Femina Vie Heureuse prize
in 1928.
However, an interesting contrast after Virginia Woolf‘s death in 1941,
where F. R. Leavis dominated the British critical scene, Virginia Woolf‘s
work began to be denigrated, and her work labelled ‗minor‘.
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Other ‗readings‘ or ‗interpretations‘ discussed by Janet Winston vary from
the political, the Freudian and the post-structural, responding to some
extent to general cultural changes. In all, it is a very stimulating book
which should encourage both the new reader and the reader who has been
puzzled by some of the difficulties.
Margaret Weldhen
Standard Midland, by Roy Fisher.
(Bloodaxe Books, £7.95)
On the occasion of Roy Fisher‘s 80th birthday last year, his readers could
have treated themselves to three presents: An Unofficial Roy Fisher
(Shearsman Books), a festschrift of poems and prose writing for and
about him, with the considerable bonus of twenty-one previously
uncollected Fisher poems, some very early; a Radio Three interview with
the poet; and Standard Midland, the first collection of wholly new poems
since Birmingham River (1994).
In the radio interview, Fisher chose to represent Standard Midland by
reading ‗The Skyline in the Wall Mirror‘, which occurs almost exactly
halfway through the new book. It‘s a poem that presents both a
characteristic Fisher strategy and a theme and tone picked up throughout
the collection.
Cold, and half a mile off behind me
the skyline in the wall mirror,
pasture when last looked at,
juts dark, its dip and sag
as good as lamp-black
and the right not to know what it‘s made of
revives. I guess clinker
cinders and slag: dense, dead
unstable. I always
had cinders ready. I have ashes.
It is typical of Fisher that when he writes a poem about looking in a
mirror, he does so not to meditate on his own appearance but to think
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about what‘s over his shoulder. In this case, it‘s the moorland hill rearing
above his house, composed, he surmises, of
clinker
cinders and slag: dense, dead
unstable.
Those who have followed Fisher‘s career till now will call to mind
previous uses of ‗unstable‘, perhaps especially ‗The trails of light all start /
from unstable origins‘ (‗In the Wall‘) and, from Section III of A Furnace,
the depiction of the city as mutating: ‗unstable, dividing, grouping again /
differently.‘ It‘s a word that speaks to Fisher‘s fascination with change,
behaviour, metamorphosis (‗I seem to have been born swimming in
Mutability‘, he once told John Kerrigan).1 What is notable here, though, is
a darkness of tone created by the starkly monosyllabic ‗slag: dense, dead‘
and feeding into the terseness of the last lines:
I always
had cinders ready. I have ashes.
In Fisher‘s declaration that ‗In my poems there‘s seldom / any I or you‘ (‗If
I Didn‘t‘) ‗seldom‘ is just about accurate, though even in poems written
before 1975 (the year ‗If I Didn‘t‘ was composed) it would not have been
difficult to find instances of first and second person pronouns. But it is
certainly true that more recently the poet has been readier to speak out in
his own person, often wittily, sometimes argumentatively, here very
movingly. The movement from past to present enacts a narrative of loss,
the emptying-out of potential, which is the more powerful for being so
briefly conveyed. Any reader will immediately grasp the connotations of
‗ashes‘, but again those familiar with Fisher‘s work are likely to think of
‗They Come Home‘ (Birmingham River), his account of bringing home from
the crematorium his parents-in-laws‘ ashes. But in that poem Fisher can
take the longer view, developed in A Furnace (of which ‗They Come
Home‘ was originally a part), of death as part of life: the ashes are ‗By no
means separate / from anything at all.‘ Here the ashes are indeed separate,
left out at the end of the poem‘s last line.
Such dark matter colours, without overwhelming, Standard Midland. There
are frank expressions of age and solitariness, done without casting around
for consolation, unless it‘s found in loyalty to Fisher‘s native speech. In
the poem that gives the book its title day-to-day activities, carried out
alone, are accompanied by a monologue that is
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so stupid
I do it in farting Mockney
or worse, mincing
Estaurian: none of it worth
the touch of my own Standard Midland.
A note by Fisher explains that the term comes from his son Joe: ‗his
coinage for the plain way of talking we people of central England like to
believe we have.‘
But the darkest matter, as ‗The Skyline in the Mirror‘ suggests, is death,
which is present from the start. In the book‘s opening poem Fisher
returns to a long preoccupation with the rituals surrounding death and
what these show about the living. ‗The Afterlife‘ sets side by side rites
performed by the prehistoric valley people who lived not far from Fisher‘s
home and those still carried out by the Malagasy, inhabitants of
Madagascar. What these share is a form of sociability: the valley people
would not bury their dead and forget about them but ‗take them out
again, / walk them around.‘ And the Malagasy hold festive ceremonies for
and with the dead: ‗we hold our cherished ones / in our arms … They / bless our
lives with their happiness.‘ In each case, ‗The afterlife / would come to the
party‘. There‘s a benignity here that contrasts with the starkness of ‗The
Skyline in the Wall Mirror‘.
Death is present, in one way or another, in many of these poems. And for
Fisher, this is as it should be. In an interview with Peter Robinson he
talked about the ‗proper work‘ of poets ‗puzzling together about death
and the way it lives with us‘,2 and in a rewarding essay Robinson has
shown how death has been a thematic concern for Fisher from the
beginning.3 A firmly established genre in Fisher is the commemorative
poem, usually memorialising a poet or jazz musician. Standard Midland
continues this tradition, with poems on Roy Eldridge and Ken Smith,
both of whom are celebrated for a doggedness of personality that would
not be denied. Eldridge: ‗Even when no sound came out / you could still
tell what he meant.‘ Ken Smith, waking aphasic after weeks in a coma:
One day the old exasperation
won through. Wearily: ‗What‘s
the word for CHAIR?‘
There are also poems on the deaths of Fisher‘s younger son and his first
wife (the book is dedicated to their memory). Such closeness to home of
the subject may explain why, in a recent prose appreciation of the work of
artist David Prentice, Fisher‘s mind is running so much on mortality and
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its representation in art. Thinking about ‗the suggestion of mortality‘ not
just in Prentice‘s new work but in visual art generally and in writing and
music, he says ‗It is of course possible to make this suggestion in all three
forms of art too easily and too cheaply by the manipulation of readily
available stage props.‘4 The poems on Ben Fisher and Barbara Venables
Fisher sidestep the need for any such props by, as in the Eldridge and
Smith pieces, looking at the relationship of the subject to expressiveness
and language. ‗On Hearing I‘d Outlived My Son the Linguist‘ is as direct
and affecting as anything in Fisher. The last four of its six lines:
hour by hour today with no whole word all
the emptied patterns of your talk come crowding
into my brain for shelter:
bustling, warm, exact. You‘d be interested.
The ‗patterns‘ of Ben‘s talk have been ‗emptied‘ but remain ‗bustling,
warm, exact.‘ In a variant of the ‗pass-and-return valve between the
worlds‘ (A Furnace, Section II), language has gone, but not gone. No
wonder a linguist would be interested. A reader new to Fisher might be
interested to learn that some at least of his early poems were prompted by
his first wife, in ‗a light trance‘, chancing upon certain phrases in a
newspaper, thus providing him with starter material that by-passed or
peeled off regular habits of mind. ‗Peeling‘ is an affectionate tribute to this
collaboration. It discloses some of the phrases that were used and some
that weren‘t (as far as I know):
The Glasgow
Depot at Gushetfaulds/ ‘Neighbours,
We’ll not part tonight!’/ on our way
up the Nile to the first cataract/
the entertainment of war/ short growths
known as dards/ magic was once/ why
they stopped singing.
Fisher once claimed of himself with humorous exaggeration that ‗he‘s
happiest at the extremes of duration: the three-or-four line fragment or
the forty-page long haul.‘5 The longest haul in Standard Midland is the
sequence of texts written for Ronald King‘s ‗intricate artwork in the form
of a cabinet‘ (Fisher‘s notes). In ‗Hole, Horse and Hellbox: the Tabernacle
Poems‘ he has great fun tracing King‘s genetic inheritance (the DNA of
seven generations of printers, publishers and artists) against a backdrop of
social change. Parts of it read like a more genial version of passages from
A Furnace though occasionally asperity breaks through:
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till everybody
reads print by force of law. Deviate,
develop – hardly.
But the majority of poems tend to brevity, sometimes epigrammatic. In
‗Jumping the Gun‘ Vivaldi gets skewered in four lines for taking the easy
route to pleasuring his audience. Perhaps the most intriguing of the
shorter poems is one I‘m going to risk making heavy weather of:
March. The cat
with eyes askew
rubs her great head hard
against the last stalk of kale
left standing in the mud
till it breaks
and the green juice gleams.
(‗Syntax‘)
This occurs in a cluster of poems that may be worked-up journal entries.
If so, the working-up here has been done beautifully: the management of
hard consonants, leading to the open vowels of the last line, offers a
masterclass to poets just starting out. So does the careful plotting of the
second sentence that finally delivers the gleaming green juice, and it may
be this that gives the poem its title. But is there more? Is this a statement
of poetics, akin to Pound‘s ‗to break the pentameter, that was the first
heave‘, whereby the green juice of expressive meaning can only be had by
breaking the stalky kale of normative syntax? Well, hardly. In the first
place, Fisher has talked about his ‗deference to the enslavement of the
English language to a word-order syntax, which I‘m never much inclined
to try to kick‘6 (though he has also said he‘s ‗obviously a writer who tugs
at the seams of his syntax to see if they hold‘).7 And conclusively, the
poem itself obeys the principles of English word-order. But if not offering
an allegorical statement of poetics, the poem may be tipping its hat to two
poets important to Fisher, one who has often been recognised as such, the
other less so. William Carlos Williams‘ ‗Poem‘ (‗As the cat…‘) presents a
cat in purposeful movement, and the poem‘s delicately poised movement
was deftly analysed by Hugh Kenner in the ‗Syntax in Rutherford‘ section
of The Pound Era. Perhaps here we have ‗Syntax [in Buxton].‘ Fisher‘s first
ever poem, by his own account, was an imitation of Dylan Thomas, and
although ‗every word of it was false‘ nevertheless ‗to be able to write it at
all gave me a sense of exultant power.‘8 Thomas‘s most famous
expression of creative power is of course ‗The Force that Through the
Green Fuse Drives the Flower‘, which is not so far from ‗the green juice
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gleams.‘9 Such a double acknowledgement of early influences would not
be out of place in a collection often concerned with ancestors and
descendants.
A common mode of composition in Fisher is the sequence of texts,
sometimes numbered, sometimes not. Constructing a poem in this
manner allows him to bring in materials from disparate sources, which can
relate to each other without being tied to a chronological narrative or
argument. An excellent example from Standard Midland is ‗On the
Wellingtonias at Pilleth.‘ The poem takes its title from a stand of trees
planted in the 19th century to mark the graves of the war-dead from the
Battle of Bryn Glâs in 1402, when Owain Glyndŵr‘s army defeated
English forces led by Mortimer. Another account, however, places the site
of the battle on the left bank of the river Lugg near Bleddfa. The poem
sees the trees (‗alien‘, in any event, as they were only introduced to Britain
in the mid-19th century) as being planted to establish the primacy of Bryn
Glâs‘s claim:
planted low down, late and pictorially
as if hoping to settle the matter.
More important to Fisher is the way in which the trees are like art in the
presence of death. They are thus alien in another sense: an attempt to
transform the hillside tastefully, ‗pictorially‘, by arranging the scene to
‗make us a view‘ from which the ‗hundreds of corpses‘ have been erased.
This is where the poem ends. But the Wellingtonias and the graves feature
only in the last two of eight un-numbered sections, and in those that go
before we have been taken apparently far from Bryn Glâs, to: totem
dancers in British Columbia, dressed as sea-eagle, raven, salmon and
bear;10 an unsettling encounter in the Peak District with three horses that
at first appeared a single thing, ‗maybe a public sculpture giant in rusted
sheet metal‘; a frieze in Hardwick Hall depicting ‗beasts and tall women‘;
chests packed with the bones of kings; a market scene plus aquarium; and
a quotation from a church notice-board in Levenshulme:
‗Sunday 6.30 Rev. Handel Broadbent
IF I BE LIFTED UP‘.
For all that it can‘t avoid being read chronologically (at least on a first
reading), ‗On the Wellingtonias at Pilleth‘ wants to work in a non-linear
manner. The sections take up and echo each other and comment on each
other. Creatures criss-cross the sequence. The Reverend‘s desire for
ascension is quickly punctured by Fisher (‗Indeed. If so he be‘) but has
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already been answered by the ‗brown old thigh-bones‘ and ‗promiscuous
teeth‘ of the bone-chests, and will be again by the ‗hundreds of corpses‘,
some of them squatted on by the church. The courtly frieze showing highborn ladies strolling peaceably with beasts looks back to the stamping,
snapping totem-creatures ‗making / common cause at the people‘ and
forwards to the aquarium where ‗skirts / swish through the murk and
sharks / ride up and pass.‘ And so on. Holding it all together is an
extraordinary armature of vertical references including, but far from
limited to: ‗the clear / air under them‘, ‗to rain down‘, ‗reared on a crag‘,
‗above it all‘, ‗high stone rails‘, ‗ranged above‘, ‗floor up to roof‘, ‗driven
down by the rain.‘ These are the poem‘s equivalent to chi, invoked in the
opening section: the life-force, linking everything together.
‗On the Wellingtonias at Pilleth‘ seems to aspire to the condition of the
Ivon Hitchens painting shown on the cover of Standard Midland and
reflected on in ‗Somewhere along the Pool.‘ There‘s ‗no [single] vista, no /
[single] viewpoint.‘ It‘s made of images that ‗at one time or another‘ have
compelled Fisher‘s mind. And it achieves a ‗unity‘ that nevertheless
‗bargains for‘ more than one reading.
Are there any new types of Fisher-poem in the new book? I think so.
There‘s the question-and-answer poem, ‗Dancing Neanderthal‘,11 where
through a series of interrogations he teases out various only partly-ironic
suggestions that the beings with whom we once shared the world may
have had certain advantages over us:
Traffic in symbols? Paint on rocks?
Couldn‘t?
Didn‘t. May have been foresight and hard taboo
to stop themselves inventing
religion, football or flags.
The question he leaves hanging is
Hard wired to diatonic?
where the implication is that the Neanderthals though lacking our forms
of gang-loyalty had a richer sense of musicality than ours. Both matters of
moment for Fisher.
Lee Harwood wrote that in Fisher‘s poetry we find
a world with many locations and something always
happening around the corner that we can‘t see but are made
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very much aware of. A living and shifting world. A world in
depth.12
The publication of Standard Midland is a matter of moment for all Roy
Fisher‘s readers, and the book will serve as a fine introduction to his work
for those yet to encounter one of our finest poets.
Notes
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
‗Come to Think of it, the Imagination’: Roy Fisher in Conversation with
John Kerrigan, in News for the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (2000) ed. P.
Robinson and R. Sheppard (Exeter, Stride Publications), p.99.
Interview with Peter Robinson in Interviews Through Time and Selected
Prose (2000), ed. T. Frazer (Kentisbeare: Shearsman Books), p.112.
Robinson, P. (2000) Last Things in The Thing about Roy Fisher, ed. J.
Kerrigan and P. Robinson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press),
pp.275-311. Also published in Robinson, P. (2005) Twentieth Century
Poetry: Selves and Situations (Oxford: Oxford University Press), ch.12.
Fisher, R. (2010) David Prentice: An Appreciation by the Poet Roy
Fisher, in David Prentice: ‘The Green Fuse’‘ (Moreton-in-Marsh: The John
Davies Gallery), pp.7-8.
Fisher, R. (2000) Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher, in Interviews Through Time
and Selected Prose (op. cit.), p.131.
Interview with Peter Robinson in Interviews Through Time and Selected
Prose (op. cit.), p.116.
Fisher, R. (2000) Roy Fisher on Roy Fisher, in Interviews Through Time
and Selected Prose (op. cit.), p.132.
Fisher, R. (2000) Antebiography, in Interviews Through Time and Selected
Prose (op. cit.), p.29.
In the appreciation of David Prentice, cited above (note 4), Fisher
quotes the opening lines of Thomas‘s poem and relates them to
Prentice‘s new work (which itself had been exhibited under the title
‗The Green Fuse‘), p.7
I‘m indebted to Roy Fisher for providing this information about the
provenance of the figures in the first section of ‗On the Wellingtonias
at Pilleth‘.
The title is possibly a play on The Singing Neanderthals (2005) by Steven
Mithen. An on-line review by Ellen Dissonayake of this book contains
the sentence: ‗Mithen thinks that modern humans are relatively limited
in musical abilities compared to Neanderthals‘, an idea similar to that
at the end of Fisher‘s poem. The review is available at http://
www.epjournal.net/filestore/ep03375380.pdf. Thank you, Google.
Harwood, L. (2000) Admiring Mr Fisher‘s Patent Cabinet, in News for
the Ear: A Homage to Roy Fisher (op. cit.), p.54.
Derek Slade
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189
Silent Letters of the Alphabet, by Ruth Padel.
Fortinbras at the Fishhouses, by George Szirtes.
(Bloodaxe Poetry Series 8 and 9: £8.95; £7.95)
Pound, imagining Odysseus, sailed after knowledge. What kind of
knowledge is poetry? For Pound there were two parallel journeys: The
Cantos were to be a poem containing history, illustrated by the ‗luminous
details‘, in which he charted, with increasing confusion and despair,
mankind‘s efforts to build ‗the palpable/Elysium, though it were in the
halls of hell‘. At the same time he changed, and went on changing,
everything there was to know about the techniques of poetry itself,
rejecting metaphor for direct image (‗the natural object is always the
adequate symbol‘), breaking up the pentameter into the new energy of free
verse, and creating a vast, exact music capable of harmonising pretty much
anything.
Near the start of her lectures, Ruth Padel acknowledges Pound‘s
contribution to the development of poetry in the modernist revolution,
pointing out that it was he who laid the foundation for Eliot‘s ‗objective
correlative‘ and for much of today‘s poetic practice – and, it should be
added, for her own brilliant explorations here of how poetry works, in
incisive and revelatory readings of individual poems. (Wittily, and there is
humour alongside the insight in these talks, she caricatures Eliot as ‗Mr
Establishment‘ and Pound as poetry‘s ‗rough trade‘). George Szirtes on
the other hand takes a much broader view of poetry in relation to history,
reminding us (and check on the contemporary verse in GCSE anthologies
and you will see it‘s a necessary reminder) that good poems are ‗informed
by more than the personal or the local or the immediate present‘. For
both poets, poetry is an essential form of knowledge, knowledge of
language itself and of the experience of living in a world shaped by
historical forces.
These latest two publications from the annual lecture series at Newcastle
University (in conjunction with the ever-innovative Bloodaxe Books)
make for fascinating and complementary reading. Particularly valuable
from a teaching point of view are Padel‘s energetic and original readings
of a range of poems, from Tennyson and Emily Dickinson to WS
Graham and Jo Shapcott, as she discusses the ways poems don‘t always
say what they mean. Close reading is what she does best and has already
done to exciting effect in her two collections 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem
and The Poem and the Journey, which ought to be on the shelves of every
English department. Padel brings her own eclectic personality to the
lectures, especially in her enthusiasm for the classics: she explores the
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stories of Orpheus and of Echo in their relationship to poets, as well as
the Greek and Latin etymology of words, and in the second lecture does
so in relation to music (she was once a professional viola player). She
discusses, for example, John Cage‘s radical composition 4’33” which
forces the audience to attend to (four minutes and thirty-three seconds‘
worth of) silence:
This too involves tautness. ‗Attention‘, like tone, is ‗a
stretching‘. The word comes from Latin tendere, ‗to stretch‘,
and attendere, ‗to stretch towards‘. The music, the poem, is
offered to the audience‘s tense attention.
It is her own close attention to the currents of language within a poem,
the effects of words, of register, the layering of sounds, what hides
between the lines (there is a discussion of ‗erotically charged space‘ in a
poem by Elizabeth Bishop and of Dickinson ‗dropping dashes‘ into her
poems ‗like marks put on the window to stop birds flying into the glass‘)
as well as to the poem‘s shape (with the shrewd aside, ‗Keats said we all
mistrust poems that have a palpable design upon us, but though we hate
designs upon us we do enjoy design‘) that enables her to speak with
authority about the relationship between poem and reader, about the
knowledge that travels via the letters of the alphabet, as she does in a
perceptive reading of Graham‘s ‗The Beast in Space‘.
The knowledge that Szirtes deals with is of a different order though he
too starts with discussion of a poem by the ubiquitous Elizabeth Bishop.
In her early 20s, Bishop bought a clavichord and justified the expense to a
friend by quoting Pound: ‗the further poetry departs from music the more
decadent it gets‘, which suggests that his strictures on a poet‘s use of
language were an influence, but her relationship with the ‗crazy old poet‘
himself was uneasy. She visited him in the asylum as a duty, taking him
eau de cologne (with which, he told her, he washed his hair) but was not a
follower of his grandiose vision of the Poem. She did however write, on
request, ‗Visits to St Elizabeths‘, in which Pound is sometimes the ‗tragic
man‘ in Bedlam, sometimes ‗the old, brave man‘, but also ‗cranky … cruel
… tedious‘ and in the last verse, ambivalently (compassionately?),
‗wretched‘. There is the same quiet ambivalence in ‗At the Fishhouses‘, the
poem Szirtes uses as his starting point for these searching lectures, the
first of which is subtitled ‗poetic knowledge as uncertainty‘. He focuses
on, and in the last lecture returns to, the final mysterious image of
knowledge like the sea ‗drawn from the cold hard mouth/of the world,
derived from the rocky breasts/forever, flowing and drawn, and since/our
knowledge is historical, flowing and flown.‘
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191
I am a fan of Bishop but have never really understood these lines (she said
they came to her in a dream); given her strict Baptist upbringing (she jokes
about the seal who appears in the poem that he was ‗like me a believer in
total immersion,/so I used to sing him Baptist hymns‘) I have wondered if
there isn‘t a wistful echo somewhere of Isaiah‘s vision of the messianic
future when knowledge of God will fill the world like the sea (a belief that
had certainly flown by the time she wrote the poem). I am not much
clearer after reading Szirtes, but where he takes off to from here becomes
for the reader an educative journey through poetry in political/historical
contexts mostly unfamiliar to English readers. Szirtes discusses the
political responsibility of poems, whether or not there is, or should be,
one; he takes ironic but authoritative issue with Tom Paulin in his
introduction to the 1986 Faber Book of Political Verse, identifying, from
the perspective of his own family‘s experience in Stalinist Europe,
distinctly illiberal assumptions in Paulin‘s definitions of the political in the
poem. He raise the ‗ancient difficulty‘ of weighing the balance of aesthetic
and moral value in a poem (a difficulty frequently encountered in reading
Pound), while at the same time mercilessly pinning down ‗the insularity,
self-importance, sentimentality, sheer commercial noise of a good deal of
the art of … western democratic society‘.
The problem, Szirtes seems to suggest, is that ‗western‘ poets suffered
(suffer?) from having none of the pressures of external historical
circumstances shaping Eastern European poetry, against which to write:
‗the lack of a public and moral role is tied in with the perceived lack of
common public risk.‘ He goes on to say however that what reader and
poet have in common in this situation is ‗a more subtle stake in the world
of language‘, which is very much Padel‘s ground, though Szirtes doesn‘t
really explore that idea. What he does do is open up some significant
poems by Hungarian poets, particularly Gyula Illyés and György Petri,
both writing during the totalitarian regimes of the mid 20th century but
responding in different ways, Illyés directly, dangerously attacking tyranny,
‗head-on‘ because the poem remained hidden, Petri publishing in samizdat,
his poems coded with irony. The dark sexual metaphors of a poem like
‗Gratitude‘, which Szirtes quotes in full and comments on (how in the
totalitarian world the political penetrates and corrupts the personal)
reminded me of the Polish, Nobel poet Szymborska‘s ‗A Contribution of
Pornography‘, which I first encountered in Daniel Weissbort‘s important
anthology of poems from Central and Easter Europe, ―The Poetry of
Survival‖ (Penguin 1991). Szirtes doesn‘t mention this but its rich
selection of post-war poets including Brecht, Miłosz, Celan, Herbert (who
Szirtes also discusses) Vasko Popa and many others, is a revelation of
what poetry is in conditions very different to our own, and which Szirtes‘
lectures help to illuminate further.
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The third and last of these brings us almost home and focuses on some
key poems of Derek Mahon, a poet from a part of our northern isles
where the pressures of history have perhaps been greatest; Szirtes
emphasises Mahon‘s broad range of cultural reference, particularly in the
epigraphs to his poems, the way the poems access ‗a field of reference
beyond the immediate sufferings of the immediate tribe.‘ Post-1989,
Szirtes seems to suggest in a rather elegiac passage, the poetry of his own
native Hungary has lost its edge; he quotes in full the prose poem of a
young contemporary (full of hip references to Michael Jackson, the new
Renault Mégane, credit machines etc etc), describing it as a vigorous attack
on ‗a feral consumerism whose razor teeth are firmly clamped around the
imagination‘, but lacking in political danger. He comments that ‗the new
generation is often formal, playing with rhyme and metre‘, the note of
disapproval evident in that ‗playing‘. Poetry is about more than games
with language, the poet more than an entertainer; at its most intelligent,
poetry, as Pound knew, is a means of knowledge and these two sets of
lectures take us by complementary routes on a serious and revitalising
journey.
Andrew Carter
Short Notes
Some Do Not, by Ford Madox Ford (Carcanet £18.95)—In his
introduction to this outstanding edition of Ford‘s Some Do Not, the first in
Carcanet‘s reprinting of the marvelous tetralogy written in the 1920s, Max
Saunders quotes from Margaret Atwood:
…all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is
motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with
mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld,
and to bring something or someone back from the dead.
One thing that Ford brings back from this journey into the Hell of the
First World War is a sense of genuine loss: the loss of memory that
Christopher Tietjens undergoes as a result of shell-shock is mirrored in
the loss of values, cultured and humane, that had been seen as an
irremovable hall-mark of the Edwardian era. The novel records the
passing away of an old order, one in which ‗Principles are like a skeleton
map of a country—you know whether you‘re going east or north‘. The
infuriating and uplifting character of Tietjens was based upon Ford‘s
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193
friend Arthur Marwood whose sense of ‗principle‘ is seen in Ford‘s
reminiscence from 1931:
If I had personal problems I would go and talk to him about
anything else. Then the clarity of the working of his mind had an
effect on mine that made me see, if not what was best to do then,
what would be most true to myself.
One of the absolutely compelling aspects of Ford‘s work is his handling of
time, something which is central to the earlier success The Good Soldier and
which is also closely bound up with his collaboration with Joseph Conrad.
In his ‗personal remembrance‘ of Conrad he raised the issue of how a
novelist presents a complex character:
For it became very early evident to us that what was the matter
with the Novel, and the British novel in particular, was that it went
straight forward, whereas in your gradual making acquaintanceship
with your fellows you never do go straight forward. You meet an
English gentleman at your golf club. He is beefy, full of health, the
moral of the boy from an English Public School of the finest type.
You discover, gradually, that he is hopelessly neurasthenic,
dishonest in matters of small change, but unexpectedly selfsacrificing, a dreadful liar, but a most painfully careful student of
Lepidoptera and, finally, from the public prints, a bigamist who
was once, under another name, hammered on the Stock
Exchange….Still, there he is, the beefy, full-fed fellow, moral of an
English Public School product. To get such a man in fiction you
could not begin at his beginning and work his life chronologically
to the end. You must first get him in with a strong impression, and
then work backwards and forwards over his past…That theory at
least we gradually evolved.
Some Do Not is a deeply moving novel and this edition, textually annotated
and accompanied by a reconstruction of the novel‘s original ending, is a
publication that finally does it justice.
A Simple Story, by Leonardo Sciscia (Hesperus £8.99)—Paul Bailey‘s
Foreword to this little volume sets the world of Leonardo Sciascia clearly
before us:
Leonardo Sciascia‘s greatest, and most abiding, work is
concerned with his native Sicily, the sulphurous island whose
people he loved and loathed throughout his life.
Sciascia is a master of the mordant: his expression of gullibility and deceit
is invariably tinged with a dark wisdom. The opening of the first of the
two stories in this volume sets the scene which we come to recognize so
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quickly:
The telephone call came in at 7.30 on the evening of March 18 th, a
Saturday, the eve of the noisy, colourful festival that the town held
in honour of Saint Joseph the carpenter—and it was indeed the
carpenter who seemed to have inspired the bonfires of old
furniture which were lit in the working-class neighbourhoods
almost as a promise to the few carpenters still in business that
there would be no lack of work for them. The offices were almost
deserted, even more so than on other evenings at that hour, but
they were still lit, the way the offices of the police were usually kept
lit in the evening and during the night, by tacit agreement, to give
the townspeople the impression that the police were ever alert to
the safety of the public.
And there you have it! The seemingly innocuous prose which tells us in its
matter-of-fact way that the police are not to be relied on and that
appearances are quite sufficient. I have found that Sciascia reads aloud
superbly to Year 11 classes where that love of irony and duplicity finds a
home close to the heart of humour.
Poems 2006-2009 by Christopher Middleton (Shearsman £12.95)—
In his eighties Middleton is one of the true grandfathers of contemporary
British poetry. Whereas he had written ‗The Thousand Things‘ in 1962
celebrating the particularities which accrue to make us fully and humanly
open to the world, he now writes from a position of age. The following
little poem has an air of D.H. Lawrence‘s ‗Shadows‘ celebrating the ‗odd
wintry flowers‘:
The Shorter Breath
Comes with age, the stroke,
When swimming, is labored,
The poem in its pea-shooter
A pellet, waits for weeks;
Finally fired
It falls short. No matter
Nothing is resolved. Time—
The concertina at full stretch.
Ian Brinton
195
Addresses of Publishers Cited
Bloodaxe Books:
Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland NE48 1RP
(www.bloodaxebooks.com)
Carcanet Press Limited:
4th Floor, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
(www.carcanet.co.uk)
Continuum International Publishing Group:
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
(www.continuumbooks.com)
Harvard University Press:
(www.hup.harvard.edu)
Hesperus Press:
4 Rickett Street, London, SW6 1RU
([email protected])
Palgrave Macmillan:
Brunel Road, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6HX
(www.palgrave.com)
Shearsman Books:
58 Velwell Road, Exeter, EX4 4LD
(www.shearsman.com)
Virago Press:
100 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DY
( [email protected])
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About the Contributors
Carol Atherton
is Lead Teacher for Able Students at Bourne
Grammar School, Lincolnshire.
Anthony Barnett
has poems from his ‗Seventeen Poems of
Defenselessness‘ forthcoming in Tears in the Fence
and Notre Dame Review.
John Haddon
is a regular reviewer for The Use of English. His book
Teaching Reading Shakespeare was published ic 2009 by
Routledge.
Gill Parker
is Head of English at a Leicestershire school and is
a member of the English Association‘s Secondary
Education committee.
Vanessa Vasey
is Head of English at St Lawrence College.
James Wilson
is Assistant Editor at the Swedenborg Society.
About the Reviewers
Andrew Carter
is Head of English and Director of Arts at
Ampleforth College.
John Constable
is a regular reviewer for The Use of English.
David Cooke
won a Gregory Award in 1977 and
published
Brueghel’s Dancers in 1984. A new
collection, In the Distance, will be forthcoming in
2011 from Night Publishing.
Derek Slade‘s
comprehensive bibliography of works by and about
Roy Fisher was published in The Sure Thing about Roy
Fisher, ed. John Kerrigan and Peter Robinson
(Liverpool University Press, 2000). A follow-up
bibliography for 2000-2010 may be found in an
Unofficial Roy Fisher, ed. Peter Robinson (Shearsman
Books, 2010).
Margaret Weldhen
was a tutor in Humanities and Social Studies at the
University of Bath School of Education.
Nigel Wheale
is a poet, Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems his most
recent collection.
About the Editor
Ian Brinton taught at Dulwich College, London and is a member of the
English Association‘s Secondary Education Committee.