by Clive James
Outside by the river bank, the local doctor
Gets out of his ’47 Vauxhall, sucking today’s
Twentieth cigarette. He stops and throws it
Down in the mud of the howling orchard.
The orchard’s crouching, half-back trees take the wind
On a pass from the poplars of the other bank.
Under the scooping wind, a conveyor-belt of wrinkles,
The buckled river cuts the cramping fields.
The poem was called ‘Death in the Pergola Tea-Rooms’ and soon I knew it all, or anyway I could recognize any line from it, which is really the way we learn poems by heart unless we deliberately set out to memorize every word for performance on stage. Because I never put in the donkey work of rote learning, I never could recite the whole of ‘Who Gets the Pope’s Nose’ without making a mistake. But it wasn’t often in the next four decades that I failed to remember its last stanza, especially when I was suffering from the effects of too many cheap cigars in a hot foreign city: New York in August, for example, or Buenos Aires in January.
And high above Rome in a room with a wireless
The Pope also waits to die.
God is the heat in July
And the iron hand of pus tightening in the chest.
Of all God’s miracles, death is the greatest.
Here was an unmistakable music, but it wasn’t the music of a bush ballad. It was a music that went back at least as far as the tough articulation of Metaphysical poetry: at least as far as Donne. The displaced and reinforced rhythms of St Lucy’s Day were somewhere behind the way that line about the heat exploited the momentum of the line before it. ‘The Pope also waits to die.’ (Wait for it.) ‘God is the heat in July’. Even remembering it under your breath, you had to observe the heart-seizure of delay as the first line turned over into the second: the staccato pause before a dying fall. But Porter didn’t have to go to Rome to get the sense of Christendom winding up. He could get that in Harrods. There had been nothing startling about that death knell since The Waste Land. What was startling was the energy: the snap and syncopation of the dirge, as if the orchestra on the tilting deck of the Titanic, instead of playing ‘Abide With Me’, had broken into ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You’. Porter, like Amis and Larkin, might be delivering the opinion that England was all but dead: but, again like them, he was delivering it in an English language that was as exultantly alive as it had ever been in its greatest flowering. This was what I liked best about the best of the poetry that came out of what was journalistically known as the Movement: that it continued to be lyrical even as it pushed on into the furthest reaches of resignation, whether personal or political. (Porter is usually assigned membership in the Group, which followed the Movement: but by now, I think, we can afford to shuffle those tags, if we can’t forget them altogether.) Those two areas, the personal and political, were connected, of course: for an artist they always are – one of the main reasons why artists aren’t to be trusted in their political opinions. But Porter, especially, could scarcely conceal the impresario’s delight he took in assembling the last things and counting them off. If this was a Totentanz out of Holbein, it had lyrical flourishes out of Charlie Parker. Perhaps motivated by my personal circumstances at the time – there was a Haslemere girl in a cashmere twin-set and tartan skirt ensemble who didn’t want me to touch any of it or even breathe out in the same room – I especially admired the closing couplets of a dramatic monologue called ‘Made in Heaven’. Clearly the poem was taking its heartfelt revenge on some unattainable young woman who had married for advantage, and had lived to repent at leisure. But the poem didn’t take advantage of her: not, anyway, in the sense of neglecting to admit the power of her initial attraction, which had been a poetic power.
As she watched her husband knot his tie for the city,
She thought: I wanted to be a dancer once – it’s a pity
I’ve done none of the things I thought I wanted to,
Found nothing more exacting than my own looks, got through
half a dozen lovers whose faces I don’t quite remember
(I can still start the Rose Adagio, one foot on the fender)
But at least I’m safe from everything but cancer –
The apotheosis of the young wife and the mediocre dancer.
Cancer was much mentioned by Porter, and would go on being so. He wrote about it as if he had it. He didn’t, but it was a useful marker for a theme. Written out more fully, the theme was that the body disintegrates. He wrote about his as if it already had, so for his younger friends it has been progressively more startling as the years go by to find him looking almost exactly the same as when we first met him. (Those of us who have lost our hair find it hard to suppress the suspicion that it has been stolen in the night by those who have kept theirs.) Written out more fully still, the theme would be carpe diem; and the same theme, elevated beyond the personal, would be that society disintegrates too. In this last aspect he fitted all too well into the frame already assigned to Larkin and Amis, both of whom seemed to thrive on the idea that it was all up with the England they loved. In Porter’s poems about the First World War trenches – ‘Somewhere ahead of them death’s stopwatch ticks’ – there was plangent evidence that he had the same sense of a tragic loss of social coherence, even though his sense of the injustice that had made the coherence possible was equally vivid. From all three poets, the sense of an accumulating historical disaster seemed to me irresistibly persuasive on the artistic level, even though I personally believed that history was getting better all the time. By and large I endorsed Sartre’s joke on the subject. It was the only successful joke Sartre ever made, so we ought not to be shy about repeating it. Sartre said that he could have no real quarrel with history, because it led up to him. My three chosen poets had the opposite opinion: even Amis, superficially the most self-assured of men, showed signs to the keen eye that he felt disabled by the cultural wreckage piled up around him, and neither Larkin nor Porter made any secret of it. That they could treat this shared vision with an eloquence precluding sentimental indulgence was surely a sufficient claim to seriousness. In my own view of the way poetry in the English language was coping with post-war reality, their accumulating achievement was at least the equal of what was coming out of America. By picking on these three I don’t mean to say that there weren’t other Britain-based voices who impressed me just as much. I found much to memorize in the early collections of Thom Gunn, and David Holbrook, though he turned hopelessly chatty afterwards, had one poem, featuring the daunting line ‘I do not want to have had my day’, which for me permanently nailed down the feeling of falling apart that comes when you realize you have postponed your visit to the dentist for so long that he will call an ambulance if you finally turn up and open your mouth. Donald Davie, whose Olympian stance and de haut en bas critical attitude drove me high up the wall for the way they left Herbert von Karajan looking diffident, had one poem that I thought splendid: ‘Remembering the Thirties’. And, of course, one good poem is enough to make you a poet. (One major poem is enough to make you a major poet, for that matter: another bogus classification crying out to be ignored.) But these three poets, Amis, Larkin and Porter, were clearly going to go on being excellent, no matter what the critical opposition.
Some of the critical opposition was home-grown, and from a powerfully influential source. Al Alvarez not only thought that Ted Hughes got in more of the angst of the modern world than Larkin, he thought that the American heavyweights got in more of it than any of the British English poets at all. Lowell and Berryman, according to Alvarez, were the grownups: the poets who flew in the face of danger using its hot wind for uplift. Sylvia Plath’s suicidal commitment was a proof of seriousness. In comparison with the American effort, anything home-grown was threatened by the enervating heritage of the genteel. Only Hughes and a few others could hope to break out, to break through. Alvarez’s presentation of this line was dramatic, obviou
sly heartfelt, and, as always with him, argued with a command of rhetoric all the more persuasive for being tersely stated. I didn’t like to disagree with him. Reverential by nature for anyone who can write an elegant sentence, I have never enjoyed disagreeing with the essayists I look up to. Lately, as an Australian who believes that the still-flourishing Japanese right wing should not be encouraged in the convenient fantasy that the United States tricked their country into World War II, I felt bound to disagree in print with Gore Vidal, from whose earlier prose I learned a lot about the assembled sweep of plain rhythms. But in condemning American imperialism he had neglected to examine the extent to which he himself carried American imperialist assumptions, and I thought he needed to be called out on it. Much earlier, and presuming hugely on my scarcely established position, I had felt obliged to call Alvarez out on what I saw as the dangerous extent to which he was praising as professional commitment the careerist presumption of the American poets in taking the whole world’s suffering upon themselves, not just as if it were their responsibility – all artists feel responsible for everything – but as if it were somehow mirrored in their own interior drama, their unblushingly proclaimed psychic turmoil. It was the desire and pursuit of the whole: a potentially misleading desire, in my view, and a doomed pursuit. Convinced that Hannah Arendt had been right when she said that an artist is making a mistake when he views his own soul as the battlefield of history, I thought that the British poets, in restricting their historical and geographic scope, had a better chance of being true to the world beyond their set borders. None of them would have been capable of the blasphemous foolishness shown by Lowell when he described the dead Sylvia Plath as rising in her saddle to slash at Auschwitz. The British poets didn’t even mention Auschwitz. They had their own worries closer to home, and universal resonance, I thought, was more likely to arise from the treatment of those than from self-consciously, and self-servingly, addressing a big theme.
But Porter did mention Auschwitz, as confidently as he mentioned the Battle of the Somme. One of my British poets was an Australian, and what separated him from Larkin and Amis was the overt, stated inclusiveness of his historical range. Neither Amis nor Larkin much liked the place they called ‘abroad’. Porter loved it. Much more than theirs, his curiosity was at home everywhere, and in all times. He ranged further, and further back, than the echt British poets had chosen to find legitimate. Larkin deplored the very idea of writing poems about paintings. Porter wrote poems like that all the time. Amis, in one of his finest poems, harked as far back as a European princeling who had to bring his land to ruin before finding out the elementary truths about decent behaviour. But Amis rarely harked back as far as ancient Rome. Porter practically lived in ancient Rome: he was on quipping terms with Martial. I hadn’t thought Alvarez right when he argued that provincialism was a disabling flaw in the home-grown poets. But there could be no doubt that he was right in thinking them provincial. They were proudly so; and effectively so; but being so, there was bound to be a great number of reference points that they left out, even when the reference points were in their heads. Porter used what was in his head. There was a lot in there, and, as we now know, there was to be a lot more.
In the best sense, the body of Porter’s work, both in poetry and in prose, is an education: an education both for him and for us. From his published beginnings, he showed none of the mandatory Movement diffidence about a display of erudition, and he has gone on to build in print the university that he never attended, and which can’t be attended by anyone in any other form but this. What the Germans call Bildung is made manifest as the work of a lifetime. His body of poetry, in particular – his enchantingly conversational prose serves, but as a subsidiary – reminds us of how Proust would bring into his great book anything that excited him about the humanities. A critical anthology as well as a novel, A la recherche du temps perdu is forever in search of understanding: the understanding depends on what has already been understood by others; and Porter’s poetry works in the same way. In the field of classical music alone, his poetry could serve as the ideal introduction for the beginner, and the ideal reminder for the adept that the treasury of achievement belongs not to an individual nation, or even to the West, but to the world. And as with culture, so with history, the vivid pyramid built by this benevolent pharaoh marks a tomb asking to be plundered before it is even occupied. How does Porter escape Arendt’s dictum that an artist should not pretend that his own soul is a measure of all the world’s agonies? He escapes it by his selflessness. All who know him in real life are well aware that he is the most selfless of men. But there are seemingly humble people who are monuments of conceit in their public work. You would not need to know this artist personally, only to know his art, to realize that he is selfless even at the centre of his creative impulse. His famous poems written in honour of his first wife’s tragic death are merely the most obvious example. It took a supremely self-effacing poet to make a subject of the awkward fact that he couldn’t help seeing such an event as an opportunity for expression as well as a cause for grief. Milton never did that for Lycidas, or Tennyson for Hallam. You might say that it was a specifically modern possibility. But even in the framework of that modern ambition in which anything at all is grist to the mill, it was a specifically Porter possibility. Confessional poetry, of the type exemplified by Lowell when he printed his ex-wife’s letters without permission, excuses itself from ordinary responsibility on the grounds of a higher calling. Porter excused himself nothing. He made a self-examining, and indeed self-flagellating, subject out of the poet’s unstoppable urge to make poetry: the necessary shame of seeing inspiration in absolutely anything. You could call it recklessness if you liked, but surely a better word was courage. The hallmark, then as always in his work, was a sense of intellectual adventure.
Being Australian helped. Offended locals often remarked of the post-war Australian expatriates that they were treating the world as their oyster. Actually the first wave of Australian invaders into Britain were music-and-theatre people stretching from Melba through to Robert Helpmann. The second wave were the war correspondents: Chester Wilmot, and the commanding figure of Alan Moorehead, later to be the acknowledged mentor of Robert Hughes. Porter, Barry Humphries and Michael Blakemore were in the third wave, and the bunch to which I belonged were only the fourth. When my lot hit the beach, it was still not realized that these occasional incursions were adding up to a determined assault. No doubt I was unusually clueless, about that as about everything, but as I dug my foxhole below the dunes it took me some time to realize that Porter had already gone in miles ahead by parachute. As Baudelaire pointed out, writers who use military metaphors are laying claim to a belligerence whose physical consequences they would prefer to avoid. So I hasten to point out that there never was a battle, because there was never any real opposition. Except perhaps in Haslemere, Britain welcomed us with an open house. No criticism from the natives ever equalled the opprobrium from home, where for a long time the expatriates were thought of as having sold Australia short. But in fact they exemplified Australia’s greatest strength, and carried it with them as a flag. They were confident that the whole heritage of the arts, learning and history was theirs to be possessed by right. If anything about the Australians appalled the resident intellectual, it wasn’t their accents or their table manners, it was their world-eating propensity to loot the museum of history. Unplaceable by class, the Australians had no inhibiting expectations that they would be stopped at the door. The native assumptions of accreditation by background did not apply to them. They did not believe that they needed a double-barrelled surname to walk at large in Europe.
In the literary field, Porter was an early example of this freedom. Now nobody is astonished to find Germaine Greer helping herself to a naked young male body by Praxiteles, although she hopes that they will be astonished by what she says about it. The old Empire has turned upside down; Australia is a productive demonstration that the colonial investment didn’
t all end up in the debit column; and Australian voices help to project the English language, with a nasal shading to the vowels perhaps, but with all its resources fully and boldly deployed. Peter Porter is a big part of that Australian expatriate story, which even in Australia is now seen to be part of the total Australian story of an emergent, rapidly proliferating culture growing on the well-grounded trellis of political stability. Australian literature has become a thing of glamour. Inevitably, Australian poetry, as a highlight of the literary picture, is becoming a thing of glamour too. Already there is talk about which one is the Australian poet, Peter Porter or Les Murray. Actually both know that there are many other Australian poets who count. Murray writes about the late Philip Hodgins, and Porter about the late John Forbes. Both died too young; neither ever really left home for long; and they would have been enough to establish a national literature by themselves.