The Meaning of Recognition

by Clive James

  Postscript

  I had a record stretching back for decades of being interested in Formula One no matter how tedious it got, so if even I was protesting, the sport was in trouble. Not long afterwards, the boom was lowered on team orders, but nothing could stop the Ferraris dominating the events. Michael Schumacher and Rubens Barrichello were racing each other again, but they would have had to crash into one another if any other marque was going to have a chance. It’s in the nature of the sport that a little difference makes all the difference. But the technical edge of a leading team would matter less if the cars could pass each other. It is downforce that makes the sport incurably uneventful. The Americans, in their various versions of open-wheel racing, equalize the technology to make sure that the cars can race beside each other. So the American versions are superficially more exciting for the TV audience than Formula One, just as baseball on TV is superficially more exciting than cricket. Actually there is a lot happening in a baseball match that can’t be deduced from the image on the screen by anyone except an expert. Usually it takes the commentators on the spot to pick the difference between a slider and a knuckleball. But the overt struggle for supremacy is easy to follow, and even if the pitcher pitches a perfect game – no hits, no runs – the spectacle is not necessarily boring. Formula One is often a boring spectacle even to those who understand the details of its true fascination, the struggle behind the scenes for the decisive technical edge. As a result, there are always a few voices in favour of Americanizing the sport. But only a few. Like food, Formula One is something that the world does better than America, and it adds to the fun that the Yanks don’t get the point. The fun needs a lot of adding to, but there is cause for pride even in that. My promise not to watch, incidentally, lasted for two whole races.

  In the following season, elaborate new rules were introduced to even things out, and in the 2005 season the rules were made more Byzantine still, to the point where, near the end of a race, it could be won by the car whose tyres were in the best shape. The dominance of the Ferraris melted away in the technicalities, and there were several occasions when the final laps became almost as exciting as watching kittens fight. The downside, however, was that the television commentary became full of talk about tyres.

  A MAN CALLED PETER PORTER

  When I first read him more than forty years ago, I thought Peter Porter was the same age as he is now. Impressed by his evident conviction that the modern world was essentially a Technicolor version of one of those Dürer woodcuts in which the knightly rider was flanked by death and the devil in his journey through a landscape ravaged by war and plague, I pictured the agonized artist as a gaunt, white-bearded figure hunched under a velvet cap, knocking out his long-pondered apocalyptic visions by candlelight. Not that his poems creaked: indeed they hurtled. But however long their rhythmic breath and legato their line, they still sounded like the last gasps of a sage, and all the sages I had ever heard of had whiskers on them. It was a poem by him that first led me to look up the word ‘eschatology’. The poem was called ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’ and ‘eschatology’ was the last word in it. Up until then I had thought I understood roughly what he was talking about in the poem, although I had to delve deep into my memory of Sydney University First Year History lectures on the Holy Roman Empire in order not to be stopped cold by the word ‘chiliasm’. Deep down, as in a sunken cathedral, a bell rang: ‘chiliasm’ was something to do with the millennium. But what was ‘eschatology’, precisely? I didn’t even know what it meant vaguely. I had seen it before, probably rendered phonetically in my own lecture notes, but I had put off finding out. Now it was time, although I couldn’t tell then that it would be far from the last time that I would owe some of my education to Peter Porter. Whenever, today, I read ‘The Historians Call Up Pain’, its colloquial yet erudite sonorities bring back for me a place, a year and a state of mind in which I was ready for a new kind of mental thrill. The historians may call up pain, but the poets, when you remember your first encounters with them, call up the past: your past, the personal past, a stage of your life. Popular music works the same way, but no popular music ever had a vocabulary like this.

  We cannot know what John of Leyden felt

  Under the Bishop’s tongs – we can only

  Walk in temperate London, our educated city,

  Wishing to cry as freely as they who died

  In the Age of Faith. We have our loneliness

  And our regret with which to build an eschatology.

  I had very few books in those days. Luckily one of them was the Concise Oxford English Dictionary. ‘Eschatology’ turned out to mean the branch of theology concerned with the end of the world, the last things. Well, that fitted. He was talking about the last things as if he were one of them. It was death-bed stuff. In the absence of any biographical notes on the author, I judged his home address to be a veterans’ hospital, possibly an iron lung. But I was in pretty bad shape myself. The year was 1962, I had just arrived in London, I was cold and broke, and it felt as if life on earth were coming to an end. Here was a poet who spoke to my condition. Suddenly I was less alone. I had become a walker in our educated city: a description that took redoubled force from the consideration that I could hardly afford to ride on a bus. In the winter of that year I was living in a large paper bag on the floor of a kind English acquaintance in Tufnell Park. His name was Geoffrey Hindley, he was working for Thames and Hudson at the beginning of what would be a distinguished career in publishing, and he had pressed upon me a slim volume called The Less Deceived, by some librarian called Philip Larkin. By Larkin I was suitably bowled over: was encouraged, even, to rise from my paper bag and write a few more poems of my own.

  But Peter Porter I discovered by myself, and the impact, as a consequence, was even more to be cherished. Nobody had said: ‘You must read this: it’s good.’ The poems themselves said that, especially when I didn’t fully understand them. The first poems of his I read were in a little book called Penguin Modern Poets 2, published that year. There comes a time in your life when most of the places you go to you will never go back to, and nearly all the books in your shelves you will never read again. But this little book I go on and on picking out of its shelf. Until recently I bought every copy of it I found second-hand, until I realized, with a jolt of guilt, that I might be depriving some other young walkers in our educated city of an essential discovery. The volume featured three poets: Kingsley Amis, Dom Moraes and Peter Porter. I knew who Kingsley Amis was. There were whole passages of Lucky Jim that I could recite from memory, and very soon I felt the same way about his poetry, which would have ranked him unquestionably among the most celebrated modern poets if it had not been for the gravitational distraction of his celebrity as a novelist. Moraes I had somehow read about in a copy of Isis that had reached Sydney before I left. He was an Isis idol, and when I read his poetry I thought that ‘idol’ was a fair description, although in the not very long run he turned out to be one of those poets whose mature accomplishments come mainly at the beginning.

  But of Peter Porter I knew nothing, and only realized that he might be of Australian origin from internal evidence in his work. Provocatively scattered among the copious European references there were weatherboard churches, Bunya pines, milk shakes, the Canberra Temperance Hotel – which was perhaps in Brisbane instead of Canberra but certainly wasn’t in Salzburg or Vienna – and (the title of a poem, this) ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’. Phar Lap had been born in New Zealand but it sounded as if Australia might be the point of origin for the poet, a long way from John of Leyden and the bishop’s tongs. You will guess correctly that I wasn’t reading many literary magazines at the time, or the literary pages of the heavy newspapers. I couldn’t afford to. Sometimes, today, I wonder heretically whether that kind of ignorance wasn’t the best state to be in. I wasn’t reading about books, I was reading the books themselves. I was in contact with the primal stuff, just as, when I slept, I was in contact with the floor. Slee
ping without a mattress is not as dangerous as flying without a net, but it can be equally invigorating. So can reading and judging poetry without the pre-emptive commentary of professional intermediaries, or even the fervent introductions of an enthusiastic adept. If there is a line in the poem that gets through to your mind unannounced, like a cosmic particle appearing in a bubble chamber, then it must have been sent by real power. Phrases, lines and whole stanzas by Peter Porter had that kind of brain-drilling impact. Let me start with the phrases.

  ‘Once bitten, twice bitten.’ It was part of the title of one of his poems – later I found out that it was the actual title of one of his early collections – and I thought straight away that it was the ideal condensation of an attitude: a proclamation of innocence, and a protest against being saddled with it. By now, all of his friends have long known that he makes a point of presenting himself as the incorrigible gull; just as, less self-destructive in his personal habits than almost anybody else, he has always presented himself as someone about to disintegrate physically; and, more neatly dressed and better-looking than almost anybody else, as the werewolf in the cheap Daks suit that ‘hugs me in its fire’ with a classical overtone of the shirt of Nessus. I hope, before the busy scholarship of posterity gets a look in, that the accumulated ribbing from his delighted colleagues will help to establish that his tremulous stance as a victim of fate was always more persona than actuality. As the Italian scholars have taught us, there is a difference between Dante personaggio and Dante poeta, and it would need a very clueless student to believe that Porter poeta’s large and still steadily increasing achievement was not the product of a confident artist in majestic control of his output. But it should also be said that he has never pretended to be in control of events. From the beginning – and this is surely part of the reason why he never sounded young – he had an unusually honest capacity to register the terrifying indifference of circumstances to the individual, no matter how blessedly gifted that individual might be. The proper name for this is humility, but he was always ready to play the patsy in order to underline it. He made himself out as the man who, in everyday life, would not get what he wanted, and who was twice as culpable for wanting it. Once bitten, twice bitten: that whole idea in four words, or six syllables if you prefer. It was chastening to see him pack such a lot in. He was eloquent, but reading him made me feel garrulous, as it still does.

  Another pregnant phrase: ‘If only I had a car’. Porter personaggio was without wheels. It followed that he could not get the kind of girls he had already condemned himself for wanting, the ‘girls in Jensens’. That was yet another phrase, and one I painfully remembered when I paid my first visit to the King’s Road and saw what he meant. When London first began to swing in the early 1960s, it soon became horribly clear that the promised freedoms of swingingness would not include freedom from the fixed exchange rate between cash and sex. The most desirable young women seldom walked when they could ride, and what they were riding in was not only priced to be out of reach, it was shaped to look it. The sinuous apex of the bird-puller car market was reached by the Marcos sports two-seater, which was actually designed so that young women of a certain refinement would be obliged to lie down straight away when they got into it. But Porter had already seen this happening in the 1950s: ‘Love goes as the MG goes’ was another phrase potent with impotence. As the patter and rattle of bongo drums leaked from the coffee bars, the MG was usually going home to where the rich lived, and the girl was in it. Either in the passenger seat or behind the wheel, she – I loved this phrase – ‘vanished on the road to Haslemere’. There was a longing in the cadence: the longing for what was teasingly available, except that you couldn’t have it. I knew just how he felt. Moving up from phrases to lines, I can still quote from memory the line that made me realize I knew. ‘The flesh-packed jeans, the car-stung appetite.’ He was deriding himself for desiring what he was not supposed to desire. Here was poetry that said, in its every stanza, that art and history were what counted. Yet it was also poetry that admitted the full force of the advertised consumer world. Despite the consolations of high art, money mattered; possession mattered; even breeding mattered. Out there in Haslemere, he said, ‘the inheritors are inheriting still’.

  He could not bring himself to say they shouldn’t, because he could not deny his hankering to share their privileges. That suave matinee idol Harold Macmillan, in his scarcely believable role as prime minister, extolled a way of life ‘based on the glossy magazine’. Macmillan actually said that, and your political convictions did not have to start very far to the left of centre for you to find what he said absurd. But Porter did not find it absurd that anyone should feel that way. He said that it had always been that way. It had been that way in the time of the Jacobean playwrights. The MG girl on her way to Haslemere showed up in a poem called ‘John Marston Advises Anger’, from which came another compulsorily memorable line that I found myself mouthing glumly as I watched the high-born miniskirts swerve out of reach. ‘It’s a Condé Nast world and so Marston’s was.’ For the line to work, you didn’t have to know exactly what John Marston wrote. At Sydney University I certainly hadn’t known, although some of the examination questions suggested by their wording that it might be prudent to pretend I did. But you did have to know what a Condé Nast world was. It was a world of advertised attractions that really did attract. It was useless to say they didn’t. Not even Trotsky would have been able to get away with saying that. He might have said that they shouldn’t, but that was a different thing.

  Porter was saying that they shouldn’t, but saying it from the position of strength – strength, not weakness – conferred by his admission that they did. By conceding his own lust, cupidity and frustration, he was reinforced in his bold determination to identify those same things as important strands in the coaxial central cable of history. Here was the fruitful paradox behind his eschatological manifesto: if, despite the threat of nuclear annihilation, there was to be a future after all, it would be made of the same stuff as now, because now was made from the same stuff as the past. There would be a future as long as there were humans. In the long run, even inhumanity was human. After all, sharks don’t build concentration camps, and ants only look as if they do. Cruelty has always been a component of the human world; things had always been terrible for just that reason; and creative for the same reason. Life, although it had always seemed, to the sensitive and cultivated, as if it were coming to an end, was a continuity. This was a cold consolation to draw, but if you were living in a paper bag it had a charm all the more seductive for being ascetic. I found myself unable to stop learning his poems by heart.

  Later on, when I wrote my first critical article about him, I fatuously chastised him for his obliquity, and said that his poetry fascinated me despite my not much liking it. In just such a way, men say of the woman they love, but who is giving them a hard time, that they love her but don’t much like her. The truth always was that I loved his poetry, and in the matter of his obscurity I didn’t even have the courage of my convictions. Scarcely able to read French prose in those days, I had nevertheless put in the hours memorizing the great modern French poems since Tristan Corbière and Laforgue – my recital of them would have made a comic performance excelling even the only intact speech in French by Edward Heath that we have on tape – and I had reached the correct conclusion that Rimbaud’s ‘Bâteau Ivre’ was an inexhaustibly rich treasure house, a true masterpiece. But I still believed then, and partly believe today, that its magnificence comes at a high price to the reader, who sometimes can only feign to be abreast of its action. Rimbaud had once written a new poem on a cafe table, using his own fresh excrement for ink. If I had been the proprietor of the cafe, I would have charged the pungent little vandal double for the mess and triple for not making sense. But he did make a kind of sense, of course; and so, I gradually realized, did Porter. Not all that much later still, when I wrote about Porter again, my conclusions reflected my awareness that the way I
had learned his poems without trying proved that they had a certain kind of intelligibility after all. In fact they were as understandable as could be while getting so much in.

  In recent times I have had the privilege of collaborating and contending with him in several series of dialogues for ABC radio in Australia, and the subject of intelligibility in poetry has often come up. Though I still think he is too generous in finding Wallace Stevens valuable as a whole instead of in part, and in rating the later, deliberately opaque Ashbery as high as the earlier Ashbery whose thread I can follow, the Porter line on this point is hard to rebut. It is not, after all, as if he endorses holus bolus the idea of poetry written for poets, and he positively dislikes the idea of music composed for musicians. Loving music too much to put up with the music that has no inspiration beyond its own technique, he feels the same way about poetry. He would be no more likely to quote J. H. Prynne than to whistle anything by Schoenberg after Verklaerter Nacht. But he is right to think that there can be poetry that makes sense of itself beyond any argument paraphrasable in prose. The evidence has been in since the very earliest Eliot that tone and intensity can do the uniting in a poem, and the weight of its fragments can hold them together. Porter still writes that way, becoming clearer and clearer as he goes on only because he has always written that way, and his approach to a theme has become part of our repertoire of recognition. As now, so then, his characteristic tone was of a delphic bulletin you couldn’t quite follow, illustrated with imagery you couldn’t forget. If he had not been driven by a sense of structure, he would have been impossible to remember even by the phrase. But I found myself remembering him by the line, and then by lines that linked inseparably to each other: by stanzas, in other words, although he did not always write in stanza form. Indeed his signature form in those days was a one-piece oratorical extravaganza, welded together by the arc-light intensity of the paragraphs that had been drawn into it. Paragraphs like this: