Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978 Part 8

Shouldered out of his island on to 'The Mainland' and knowing that if he sails back he will 'find it rich in all but what he sought', he is evolving into a man without a mask. The verse has become free, the statements grope towards something irreducible: Hand over hand eagerly I crawl back to uncertainty.

That is the kind of authority without dogma that poets stand for and John Hewitt's collection will be cherished for what has been familiar to us-poems like 'The Owl' and 'Hedgehog'-and for those other accurate, painful quests towards self-knowledge that at once rebuke and reward us.

Threshold, 1972

The Mixed Marriage

Paul Muldoon1 Paul Muldoon's first book was aptly t.i.tled New Weather: it introduced us to a distinctive sensibility, a supple inward music, a poetry that insisted on its proper life as words before it conceded the claims of that other life we all live before and after words. Mules continues and develops this hermetic direction and is a strange, rich second collection, reminding one sometimes of the sophisticated repose of poesie pure, and sometimes bringing one down to earth in the simple piety of the local ballad. It is as if the poems spring from some mixed imaginative marriage, as if their genesis is mule-like, and indeed one excellent entry-point into the book is a poem called 'The Mixed Marriage'. I quote it in full, because I feel that with this poet it is essential to hear the delicate tone, half-way between cajolement and disdain, and the deft transitions, half-way between the playful and the poignant: My father was a servant-boy.

When he left school at eight or nine He took up billhook and loy To win the ground he would never own.

My mother was the school-mistress, The world of Castor and Pollux.

There were twins in her own cla.s.s.

She could never tell which was which.

She had read one volume of Proust, He knew the cure for farcy.

I flitted between a hole in the hedge And a room in the Latin Quarter.

When she had cleared the supper-table She opened The Acts of the Apostles, Aesop's Fables, Gulliver's Travels.

Then my mother went on upstairs And my father further dimmed the light To get back to hunting with ferrets Or the factions of the faction-fights, The Ribbon Boys, the Caravats.

Of course, the first thing there is the melody, the play on the octosyllabic metronome, a music that by its deliberation and technical self-a.s.surance belies the naif wording. There is a connoisseur's savouring of the dialect and of the arcane in farcy, Caravats, billhook and loy, ferrets and faction-fights, all of which invite us to indulge a version of Ulster pastoral. But that indulgence is just disallowed by Proust and the Latin Quarter, not to mention Castor and Pollux and Gulliver's Travels. It is as if the imagination is fathered by the local subculture on the mothering literate culture of the schools. Muldoon's is a sceptical, playful imagination, capable of allegory and parable, in poems like 'How to Play Championship Tennis' and 'At Martha's Deli', in love with riddles and hints and half-disclosures in poems like 'Cheesecake', 'Boon', 'The Country Club' and 'Duffy's Circus', but finally at its richest when it dwells and broods over one suggestive image-'The Merman', for example-until that image slowly and richly begins a series of metamorphoses and the poem is finally and simply the process of the image's life-history. Here is a poem called 'Centaurs' which clearly shows this process in action. It is as if the centaur notion is the larva from which the b.u.t.terfly gorgeousness of the poem's movement emerges naturally: I can think of William of Orange, Prince of gasworks-wall and gable-end.

A plodding, snow-white charger On the green, gra.s.sy slopes of the Boyne, The milk-cart swimming against the current Of our own backstreet. Hernan Cortes Is mustering his cavalcade on the pavement, Lifting his shield like the lid of a garbage-can.

His eyes are fixed on a river of Aztec silver, He whinnies and paws the earth For our amazement. And Saul of Tarsus, The stone he picked up once has grown into a hoof.

He slings the saddle-bags over his haunches, Lengthening his reins, loosening his girth, To thunder down the long road to Damascus.

I think the wrong question here is 'What's it about?', the wrong quest the quest for the poem's relationship to the world outside it. Fundamentally, the poem displays the imagination's confidence and pleasure in re-ordering the facts of place and time, of history and myth. The milkman in the milkcart heading into a backstreet under the figure of William of Orange flourishes and blooms into voluptuous conceptions of Cortez and Saul of Tarsus. If we miss the opulence of the music, the overspill of the creative joy, we miss the poem. The life of the thing is in the language's potential for generating new meanings out of itself, and it is this sense of buoyancy, this delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of, that is the distinguishing mark of the volume as a whole.

I think this is where reviewers of Muldoon's earlier book missed the point when, after praising the technique, they asked what he had to say. What he has to say is constantly in disguise, and what is disguised is some conviction like this: the imagination is arbitrary and contrary, it delights in its own fictions and has a right to them; or we might quote Wallace Stevens: 'Poetry creates a fict.i.tious existence on an exquisite plane.' In Muldoon, the plane varies from sequences like 'Armageddon, Armageddon', from a parable like 'Lunch with Pancho Villa' to a beautiful direct meditation like 'Paris'.

The hermetic tendency has its drawbacks, however, and leads him into puzzles rather than poems-at least, that's my response to some work here such as 'The Big House' and the 'Ducking Stool'; and when in different poems we find girls called Faith, Grace and Mercy, and a boy called Will, our patience with the mode gets near to breaking point. But it holds, finally, and gratefully, because most of the time, we know we can trust ourselves to Muldoon's good intentions. He is one of the very best.

Radio Telefis Eireann, 1978

Digging Deeper

Brian Friel's 'Volunteers'

'The great dramatic subject of internment deserves a great play': so the theatre critic of the Sunday Independent concluded his unsympathetic and symptomatic review of Brian Friel's Volunteers which had its premiere in the Abbey Theatre in 1975. He had seen a desperate and ironic play about internees, but his language deflected him towards the grandiloquent abstraction. That phrase, 'the great dramatic subject of internment', is symptomatic of the pieties and patriotism implicit in another phrase, now heard less and less from Dublin but once almost de rigueur when speaking of the Catholic minority in Ulster, who were 'our people in the North'. Both symptomatic phrases have indeed their essential truth, but that truth is devalued when they are bandied in a context where internment and the North have become a spectator sport.

Of course, the t.i.tle of Friel's play courts the stock response. Volunteers answer the call, rise to the self-sacrificing occasion and are n.o.ble in the cause, whether of Ireland or Ulster. The word has a sacral edge which blunts (nevertheless) to sanctimoniousness, and it is this potential sanctimoniousness that the play is intent on devastating. Misery and bravery can be enn.o.bled from a distance-the armchair poets of the First World War are a good example-but one of the artistic imperatives is to say the truth as exactly as possible. The message implicit in Friel's play is explicit in Wilfred Owen's 'Apologia Pro Poemate Meo': 'These men are worth your tears. You are not worth their merriment.'

Like Owen's soldiers, and still more like his miners, Friel's internees are dug in-on an archaeological site. For five months they have been on daily parole to a.s.sist the excavation of a Viking site that is soon to be buried under a multi-storey hotel. They have volunteered for the job, have been ostracized by their fellow internees for their collaboration and on this last day of the dig they learn that they are to be violently punished, probably killed, by their comrades back in the cells. They are trapped between political, economic and social realities and received ideas: victims, which is another word that Friel is intent on pursuing into accuracy. They come in under the indifferent eye of a warder, work their stint under the supervision of a petty bourgeois foreman and go out under the shadow of violent death. What happens in between is a masque of anarchy.

The action-or, more precisely, the interaction-centres on Keeney, a man who has put an antic disposition on, for Viking Ireland, like Denmark, is a prison. He is a Hamlet who is gay, not with tragic Yeatsian joy but as a means of deploying and maintaining his anger.

Volunteers to a large extent depends on the various plays within the play initiated by, directed by and starring Keeney, a shower-off and a letter-down, who uses as a starting-point for much of his improvisation the skeleton of a murdered Viking, exposed in situ, a bony structure that can be fleshed with any number of possible meanings: a symbol, in fact, as is the thirteenth-century jug lovingly restored by the site foreman.

A number of reviewers simply refused to accept the dramatic kind that Friel has broken into, a kind that involves an alienation effect but eschews didactic address. As a playwright he has always been obsessed by the conflict between public and private selves, by games and disguises. In Philadelphia Here I Come, he split his main character into two characters, Public and Private Gar O'Donnell, and vivified the perennial Irish father and son drama by this experimental, comic and enabling stroke. Double-talk and double-takes, time-shifts, supple dialogue and subtle exposures, these have been the life of his plays, but one occasionally sensed a tension between the vision and the form, as if a man whose proper idiom was free verse was being forced to realize himself in metrical stanzas.

In Volunteers he has found a form that allows his gifts a freer expression. Behind the writing there is an unrelenting despair at what man has made of man, but its expression from moment to moment on the stage is by turns ironic, vicious, farcical, pathetic. Friel would a.s.sent to the Yeatsian proposition that 'we traffic in mockery', although behind the mercurial histrionics of Keeney (marvellously played by Donal Donnelly) there looms the older saw that death is not mocked. The play is not a quarrel with others but a vehicle for Friel's quarrel with himself, between his heart and his head, to put it at its simplest. It is more about values and att.i.tudes within the Irish psyche than it is about the rights and wrongs of the political situation, and represents a further digging of the site cleared in his Freedom of the City.

Still people yearn for a reductio: what does he mean? He means, one presumes, to shock. He means that an expert, hurt and shocking laughter is the only adequate response to a calloused condition (perhaps one should adduce Sa.s.soon instead of Owen) and that no 'fake concern' (the phrase is the Honest Ulstermans') should be allowed to mask us from the facts of creeping indifference, degradation and violence. And he means to develop as a playwright and to create, despite resistance, the taste by which he is to be enjoyed.

The Times Literary Supplement, 1975

Faith, Hope and Poetry

Osip Mandelstam1 'Art for art's sake' has become a gibe because of an inadequate notion of what art can encompa.s.s, and is usually bandied by people who are philistines anyhow. Art has a religious, a binding force, for the artist. Language is the poet's faith and the faith of his fathers and in order to go his own way and do his proper work in an agnostic time, he has to bring that faith to the point of arrogance and triumphalism. Poetry may indeed be a lost cause-like Jacobitism, as a young Scottish poet observed recently-but each poet must raise his voice like a pretender's flag. Whether the world falls into the hands of the security forces or the fat-necked speculators, he must get in under his phalanx of words and start resisting.

All this is made sure by the example of Osip Mandelstam, the Lazarus of modern Russian poetry. Mandelstam's last published book came out in 1928 and in 1938 he died in transit to one of Stalin's prison camps, aged forty-seven. In the meantime and for two decades after his disappearance, his name was almost totally erased from Soviet literary records. His books were confiscated, he became a 'non-person', and the poems of his last ten years were buried in three school exercise books which his widow carried through war and persecution like the ashes of an ancestor. Yet nowadays if an edition of his work were to be published in Russia it would sell out in minutes. Mandelstam's faith, it would seem, has been justified: The people need poetry that will be their own secret to keep them awake forever, and bathe them in the bright-haired wave of its breathing.

Mandelstam served the people by serving their language. His early poems were written in a.s.sociation with the Acmeist poets, a group whose ideas parallel those of the Imagists and who came together at almost the same time. These first poems are fastidious and formal, breathing the air of the whole European literary tradition, exhaling themselves back into that air as a tang of Russian; yet one can see the organic link between the Parna.s.sian cool of these lines, written in 1915: This day yawn like a caesura: a lull beginning in the morning, difficult, going on and on: the grazing oxen, the golden languor powerless to call out of the reed the riches of one whole note, and the bare authority of this, written in exile twenty years later: When my string's tuned tight as Igor's Song, when I get my breath back, you can hear in my voice the earth, my last weapon, the dry dampness of acres of black earth.

And in another poem to that black Russian soil he asks it to be 'the dark speech of silence labouring'. As Clarence Brown puts it, Mandelstam was an aural poet: 'He heard his lines and took them down, having wrested them from silence, from what he could not, at first, hear.' Everything-the Russian earth, the European literary tradition, the Stalin terror-had to cohere in an act of the poetic voice; 'So Ovid with his waning love/wove Rome with snow in his lines'-this voice of poetry was absolute for him.

Mandelstam obliterates the Yeatsian 'choice' between perfection of the life or of the work. In 1971 he entered the martyrology of Russian literature when his widow's memoir, Hope against Hope, was published in the West. That story began with Mandelstam's arrest because of a poem he had written against Stalin. It had not been published, but an informer's whisper was enough to lead to his three-year exile in Voronezh (193437) and his second arrest and death, from heart-failure, almost immediately afterwards.

Still, if Nadezhda Mandelstam is one of the great sustaining muses of our time, inspiring and literally carrying the poems from silence into the world, Clarence Brown is one of the best advocates that any poet has ever found. His book covers Mandelstam's early life and work, up until the end of the twenties, and is the result of almost twenty years' immersion in the poetry and research into the life. As a biographer and critic, Clarence Brown works with a double sensitivity: he gets inside his subject to comprehend, to feel with him and affect the reader; but he also stands outside to see the poet in a context and to test the poems against his extremely literate ear and cultivated common sense. The pace of his book is slow but not leisurely; the tone one of concern, of intimate involvement. He is Horatio to Mandelstam's Hamlet in the strict arrest of death, and the best compliment I can pay the book is to say that it measures up its dedication, which is to Nadezhda Mandelstam.

Clarence Brown also writes about the poems with beautiful insight into their techniques and linguistic texture, and with obvious grat.i.tude and joy in their very existence. I cursed my ignorance of Russian as I followed his commentaries and as I read the versions of the poetry which he and W. S. Merwin have collaborated upon. Selected Poems contains work from all periods of Mandelstam's career, from the Acmeist verse of Stone to the last poems in exile, tears of fire and ice. The versions have the drift of contemporary American verse about them, and I have a notion that Merwin's rhythms soften the sculptured sounds of the Russian-inevitable, anyhow, when metrical, rhymed stanzas become free verse-but they nevertheless preserve the richness and uniqueness of Mandelstam's imagination, his premonition and almost celebration of doom and resurrection: Mounds of human heads are wandering into the distance.

I dwindle among them. n.o.body sees me. But in books much lived, and in children's games I shall rise from the dead to say the sun is shining.

We live here in critical times ourselves, when the idea of poetry as an art is in danger of being overshadowed by a quest for poetry as a diagram of political att.i.tudes. Some commentators have all the fussy literalism of an official from the ministry of truth. Mandelstam's life and work are salutary and exemplary: if a poet must turn his resistance into an offensive, he should go for a kill and be prepared, in his life and with his work, for the consequences.

Hibernia, 1974

Full Face

Robert Lowell1 The power and scope of poetry depend upon individual poets, what they are prepared to expect from it and how they are prepared to let it happen or to make it happen in their lives. Robert Lowell was exemplary in his dedication and achievement, and if there was some disagreement and some disappointment among his readers about the direction his gift took in Notebook and its progeny, there was never any doubt about the integrity and pa.s.sion with which he pursued his artistic ambitions. There was a nineteenth-century st.u.r.diness about the career. He was a master, obstinate and conservative in his belief in the creative spirit, yet contrary and disruptive in his fidelity to his personal intuitions and experiences.

There was a stylistic drama being played out all through his work. There was perhaps a conflict between his love of literature and his sense of his times, between his predilection for the high rhetorical modes of poetry and the age's preference for the democratic and the demotic. When, for example, I talked to him about that last buoyant poem in The Dolphin, the one beginning 'My dolphin, you only guide me by surprise', he said, in a self-deprecatory way, 'Oh, set-piece, set-piece', as if its self-contained energy, its finish and lift-off, were old hat. He did not really believe that, I think, but at that moment he was standing up for life against art, implicitly defending the bulk and flux of the less finished work that const.i.tuted the whole sequence.

That fourteen-line stanza or blank sonnet which he used compulsively during the years after Near the Ocean was an attempt to get nearer the quick of life, to cage the minute. Yet Lowell was not essentially a poet of the present tense: he was a looker before and after, a maker, a plotter, closer to Ben Jonson than to D. H. Lawrence. The annotations of Notebook were always straining away from the speed and particularity of their occasions and pining for the condition of meditation. Was there a 'misalliance'-a word he uses forcefully in Day by Day-between the gift and the work it was harnessed to do? One is reluctant to say yes in face of the gigantic effort, the pile-up of magnificent things he brought off within the general plan, the honesty and daring with which he lived through private and public trauma in the late sixties and early seventies, and the boldness with which he wrote them out-but finally and reluctantly, yes is the answer.

One is all the surer of this on reading the best poems in Day by Day. Here he abandoned the arbitrary fourteen-line template to which he had been cutting his poetic cloth; the poems are in a variety of verse paragraphs and stanza forms, freed but not footless, following the movement of the voice, sometimes speaking formally, often intimately, occasionally garrulously. But the reader is kept in the company of flesh and blood. We are always being told something interesting or sorrowful even when the manner of the telling falls short of whatever we recognize to be his level best.

Day by Day might have been subt.i.tled 'love songs in age', although this would not cover some of the more agonizing personal pieces, such as 'Visitors'-they arrived to take him to the mental inst.i.tution: 'Where you are going, Professor, you won't need your Dante'-or the unrelenting poem about his mother called 'Unwanted', or the poem about his school days, 'St. Mark's, 1933', which has the coa.r.s.e strength of a graffito. These and other poems crowd the book with specific autobiographical cries, yet I believe that the definitive poems are ones that conduct all his turbulence and love into a fiction or along the suggestions of an image-'Ulysses and Circe', for example, or the marvellous poem centred on Van Eyck's portrait of the Arnolfini Marriage and ent.i.tled simply 'Marriage': They are rivals in homeliness and love; her hand lies like china in his, her other hand is in touch with the head of her unborn child.

They wait and pray, as if the airs of heaven that blew on them when they married were now a common visitation, not a miracle of lighting for the photographer's sacramental instant.

There is a received literary language shimmering behind that writing and its simplicity and amplitude recall Pound's dictum that the natural object is always the adequate symbol. The feeling, being a bloom off the things presented, does not have to be stated, or restated. Lowell here attains what he calls in 'Epilogue', another of the book's definitive poems, 'the grace of accuracy': Pray for the grace of accuracy Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination stealing like the tide across a map to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor pa.s.sing facts warned by that to give each figure in the photograph his living name.

The intimation of mortality in that last cadence is typical of many other moments in the book when a sad, half-resigned autumnal note enters and nowhere with more typical riddling force than in the poem for his son Sheridan: Past fifty, we learn with surprise and a sense of suicidal absolution that what we intended and failed could never have happened- and must be done better.

Lowell's bravery was different from the bravery of John Berryman or Sylvia Plath, with whom his name has often been joined. They swam away powerfully into the dark swirls of the unconscious and the drift towards death, but Lowell resisted that, held fast to conscience and pushed deliberately towards self-mastery. His death makes us read this book with a new tenderness towards the fulfilments and sufferings of the life that lies behind it and with renewed grat.i.tude for the art that he could not and would not separate from that life. It is not as braced and profiled as, say, Life Studies; rather the profile has turned to us, full face, close, kindly, anxious, testing-a husband's face, a father's, a child's, a patient's, above all a poet's.

Irish Times, 1978

Notes.

Feeling into Words 1. Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition, Routledge, 1967.

In the Country of Convention: English Pastoral Verse 1. John Barrell and John Bull (eds.), The Penguin Book of English Pastoral Verse, Allen Lane, 1975.

Canticles to the Earth: Theodore Roethke 1. Theodore Roethke, Collected Poems, Faber, 1968.

Tradition and an Individual Talent: Hugh MacDiarmid 1. Michael Grieve and Alexander Scott, The Hugh MacDiarmid Anthology, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972.

A Memorable Voice: Stevie Smith 1. Stevie Smith, Collected Poems, Allen Lane, 1975.

The Labourer and the Lord: Francis Ledwidge and Lord Dunsany 1. Alice Curtayne, Francis Ledwidge, Martin Brian and O'Keefe, 1972; Mark Amory, Lord Dunsany, Lord Dunsany, My Talks with Dean Spanley and The Curse of the Wise Woman, Collins, 1972.

The Poetry of John Hewitt 1. John Hewitt, Collected Poems 193267, MacGibbon and Kee, 1968.

The Mixed Marriage: Paul Muldoon 1. Paul Muldoon, Mules, Faber, 1977.

Faith, Hope and Poetry: Osip Mandelstam 1. Osip Mandelstam, Selected Poems, translated by Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, O.U.P., 1973; Clarence Brown, Mandelstam, C.U.P., 1973.

Full Face: Robert Lowell 1. Robert Lowell, Day by Day, Faber, 1978.

Selected Bibliography.

Clarence Brown. Mandelstam. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

Clarence Brown and W. S. Merwin, trans. Selected Poems of Osip Mandelstam. New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1974.

Lord Dunsany. The Charwoman's Shadow. New York: Ballantine Books, Inc., 1977.

---. G.o.ds, Men & Ghosts: The Best Supernatural Fiction of Lord Dunsany, Edited by E. F. Bleiler. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1971.

Geoffrey Hill. King Log: Poems. Chester Springs, Penn.: Dufour Editions, Inc., 1968.

---. Somewhere Is Such a Kingdom: Poems, 19521971. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975.

---. Tenebrae. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979.

Ted Hughes. Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1971.

---. The Hawk in the Rain. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1968. Distributed by Merrimack Book Service, Inc., Salem, N.H.

---. Lupercal. London: Faber and Faber, Ltd., 1960. Distributed by Merrimack Book Service, Inc., Salem, N.H.

---. Wodwo. New York: Harper & Row Publishers, Inc., 1967.