by Clive James
W. H. Auden, Look, Stranger! (1936)
Already a giant in his lifetime, Auden has been treated after his death to the monumental splendours of a pharaonic entombment. The posthumous books with his name on them are so big that you would swear he was occupying his own equivalent of the Valley of the Kings. It would be churlish to begrudge all this scholarly effort (Edward Mendelson is a learned, tactful and often necessary editor) but the original slim volumes are the form that Auden should be read in, if you can find them. A long search on the web for a copy of the marvellously entitled Look, Stranger! would be well worth it. (In the US the book was called On This Island, from another part of the title poem’s first line.) Safely in hand, the light but weighty volume reminds us that a few individual poems are where a reputation starts from. Actually there are other Auden slim volumes that yield even richer rewards, but only Look, Stranger! has poem No. IX (in a fit of pseudo-simplicity, the rebel angel was avoiding verbal titles in that period), and only poem No. IX starts with the mind-bending line ‘The earth turns over, our side feels the cold . . .’ When I first read that, I didn’t precisely fall out of my chair, but the chair moved about three feet sideways across the linoleum, propelled by my spasm of delighted awe. How did he do that? He did it again late in the book, with the last three lines of the almost equally excitingly entitled poem No. XXX: ‘And all sway forward on the dangerous flood / Of history, that never sleeps or dies, / And, held one moment, burns the hand.’ It seemed so effortless. And so it was, but only for him.
Richard Wilbur, Poems 1943–1956
If I had to pick the greatest separate book of American poetry since Robert Frost, Richard Wilbur’s Poems 1943–1956 (published only in Great Britain, by Faber) would have to be the one, even though it contains elements from three of his separate books, The Beautiful Changes, Ceremony and Things of this World; even though his Collected Poems 1943–2004, arranged in reverse so as to track his career from his later days back to the start, is in itself a mighty book; and even though his initial example was so infectious that at least one of the very best Wilbur poems was written by someone else. (Anthony Hecht’s wonderful poem about Japan would never, I am sure, have been the meticulous miracle that it is if Wilbur hadn’t set the standard for a filigree stanza.) The truth about Wilbur is that his post-war impact was so big it had to be largely ignored if the race of poets was to survive. Robert Lowell’s first volume Lord Weary’s Castle is easier to take, even when you open it at ‘A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. Anyone who doubts this contention should open Wilbur’s book at ‘A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra’ and note once again the elegant swagger with which a GI could come home from Europe with a whole cultural heritage in his pocket. On the aspiring poets among his fellow Americans he had the impact of a rococo asteroid, burning up their air with his displays of cool fire. Anyone capable of appreciating his artistry was helpless not to emulate it, and emulation guaranteed mediocrity. Wilbur’s brand of conscious artistry could be sustained only by his instinct for a phrase, the impulse ‘that flings / The dancer kneeling on nothing into the wings.’ Perfect. Some said just perfect, but they said it in helpless envy. The most corrosive enemy of his reputation, though, was the silence of critics to whom his clarity left nothing they could add.
Philip Larkin, The Whitsun Weddings (1964)
Philip Larkin is the most extreme case of a great modern poet who was threatened with a second death when his poems were edited into chronological order for a Collected Poems that forgot even the titles of the separate volumes published in his lifetime. Luckily the mistake has been corrected since, and a compendium which restores the original groupings is now available: but it was a close-run thing, because the design of each slim volume was critical to its overall effect. Of the three mature volumes, the second one, The Whitsun Weddings, would be my pick for a favourite, although in fact I was introduced to him through the first, The Less Deceived, and for years kept it with me, convinced that nothing could come near it. But the true proof of Larkin’s supreme art was that he could go on so intensifying his achievement that he defeated the law of rising expectations. With a tonal range stretching effortlessly from colloquial punch to highflying sonority, The Whitsun Weddings turned out to have everything, including a title poem whose last line about the arrow shower (‘Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain’) became a call sign for a generation. It even had the portents of death that mark the third volume, High Windows, and the volume beyond, the one never completed, that would have contained the blood-chillingly desolate ‘Aubade’. There might not, at first blush, seem to be much joy in him; but he gets the whole truth of life’s transience into unforgettably beautiful poetry, and it is hard to think of a greater source of joy than that.
Interlude
In my click-bait list of five favourite poetry books, all the poets are important but in my view none of them, not even Yeats, should be called revolutionary. That very adjective is an incongruous diversion into the tumult of politics, whereas poetry is written in pursuit of something more stable, even if not serene. As Richard Wilbur once argued (and his book of critical arguments, Responses, is an exemplary prose work about poetry) there might be the occasional revolution in poetry, but it will always be a palace revolution. If he had written that statement after the collapse of the Soviet Union, instead of before it, he might have added that when the stretch of history instigated by the Russian revolution had finally run its course, Mayakovsky, who had convinced himself that his poetry was a historic political instrument, finally stood revealed as having been important only in the history of his art. This should be importance enough, but even by that measure, the mission of the poet is to enrich literary history, not to change it. When the academic study of a poet begins to concentrate on his supposedly game-changing impact on the history of literature, it’s time to watch out. All too often it will be a case of the publicity outstripping the event. After the Second World War, Ezra Pound was still alive, and already it was being taken as gospel, throughout the burgeoning international network of academe, that he was the incarnation of modern poetry. His posthumous reputation reinforced that status: the living thaumaturge became an eternal guru. For a while I tried to believe it myself, until I realized – too gradually, alas – that the key requirement of admiring him was to be insufficiently receptive to anyone else.
THE ARROW HAS NOT TWO POINTS
In recent times I have gone back to Pound’s Cantos to find out if I was correct in so thoroughly getting over my initial enthusiasm for them, or it. (Whether The Cantos is, or are, a singular or a plural, is a question that I believe answers itself eventually, but only in the way that a heap of rubble gradually becomes part of the landscape.) Fifty years ago, when the mad old amateur fascist was still alive and fulminating, I fell for the idea of his panscopic grab bag the way that I was then apt to fall for the idea of love. As that sweet-if-weird moment in that sad-if-stilted passage in The Pisan Cantos has it: ‘What thou lovest well remains, / The rest is dross.’ I especially liked the sound of that at a time when my knowledge of eternity was nineteen years long.
When I fell out of love with The Cantos I fell all the way out, but one of my critical principles, such as they are, is to take account of the history of my critical opinions, on the further principle that they have never existed in some timeless zone apart from the man who held them, but have always been attached to him, like his hair, or, lately, like his baldness. There is a promising analogy there, somewhere: my hair yielded baldness as my enthusiasms yielded disenchantment. First the one thing, then the other, and the second thing clearly definable only in terms of the first.
But just as we can scrutinize the ageing remains of our bodies in the mirror and decide that these loose remnants would not even be here to be looked at if we had not been strong and healthy when we were young, so we can look back to when we were wrong, and decide whether we were as wrong as all that. Youth and health have their virtues even in envious retrospect, and
perhaps some of our early and ridiculous appreciations were pure and nourishing. Maybe, that is, we later overcorrected, like one of those terrible old men who write articles against the sexual laxity of youth when they are no longer capable of pursuing their notorious careers as indiscriminate lechers. Maybe we overdid the disillusionment.
In the case of The Cantos, I don’t think I did. I think I can nowadays go right through the long text of that doomed project and show that although it has some arresting passages, they are not quite as arresting as their author meant them to be, and indeed claimed them to be by the way he chose their diction and set them into position. I hasten to admit that for my younger self the claims seemed valid, and that I could not have been more arrested if I had been caught breaking into a liquor store. Back there in the late fifties, in the cafeteria of Manning House, the Women’s Union building at Sydney University where the male aesthetes were generously allowed to hang out between lunch and dinner, I used to sit alone at a table fortified with a revetment of books containing, or dealing with, or else directly relevant to, The Cantos.
My basic Cantos collection was the impressively fat Faber and Faber 1954 edition that held everything previously published from Canto I to Canto LXXXIV, including the sequence that had been separately published as The Pisan Cantos. (Somehow the Roman numerals seemed historically significant in themselves: as, clearly, they had to Pound, even while what he was fond of referring to as the Fascist Era was still running. When the Era was over he called it ‘the Dream’.) Visible from afar in its strident yellow wrapper, that thick, black-clad book – black as a shirt, now I come to think of it – was the Faber edition. A well-off but wildly original architecture student called Douglas Gordon outranked me because he had brought the New Directions edition back from a trip to the US, and in those twilight days of the old Empire a US edition of anything seemed more outlandish, more international. Gordon, always ready to prove that he could quote even the non-lyrical stretches of The Cantos at length, died cruelly young a few years later: I don’t suggest that the two facts were related. Gordon was nuts all right – nobody who had seen him in the university revue playing Richard III in Australia’s first public example of a black leather posing pouch could doubt that – but he was probably born that way. I’ve just remembered that it was Gordon who got me started on Pound, like a drug pusher with a genuinely religious connection to the product. He had caught me reading Eliot and he had said: ‘The Quartets, eh? It’s OK, but he’s a minor poet. The major poet is Pound.’ Next day I was reading Pound for the first time.
I also had the 1957 fascicle, exotically entitled Section: Rock-Drill, with the super-exotic subtitle ‘85–95 de los cantares’. (The foreign language, whichever one it was, seemed particularly resonant at a time when I could read scarcely a word in any language but English: a lesson, there, in the dangerous enticement of unfamiliarity.) For once devoid of roman numerals, a third collection, Thrones: Cantos 96–109, had only recently been published. Along with all these Cantos books, and the always attendant collection of Pound’s shorter poems, Personae, was my treasured copy of his big book of essays, Make It New; and, of course, the inevitable copy of Hugh Kenner’s commentary, The Poetry of Ezra Pound. The books were stacked up around the edge of the table. In the middle of this redoubt, my notebook was open to receive the jewels as I unloaded them from the main text. I can’t remember ever having been more excited in my life, but even at the time I spotted a difference between what I was up to and the way I had first read ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’. When I was reading Eliot, I had forgotten my participation in the event of reading. Posturing inside my gun pit of Poundiana, I was in no danger of forgetting myself. In my capacity as literary editor of the student newspaper honi soit, I accepted and printed long, sententious articles about Pound that I myself had written and submitted.
Finally I decided that I had been having myself on, as we say in Australia. On the ship to England I was reading late Yeats and early Auden, and my opinion of Pound was deflating fast. In London I insanely wasted the last of my eating money on a beat-up first edition of Pound’s early prose scrapbook, Pavannes and Divagations, extracted from a dust pile in a Chancery Lane second-hand bookshop, but I already knew that the thrill of his poetry was irreversibly gone, and for a subsequent half-century I held the opinion that the would-be sublime bits of his central extravaganza were undone by the solemn insistence with which they claimed their own worth. All too often, in conversation, I scornfully quoted that supposedly many-layered line from The Pisan Cantos, ‘the ant’s a centaur in his dragon world’, pointed out that not even an ant who had studied Dante would be able to attach any meaning to it, and wound up my case with the quick assurance that all the other putatively memorable bits in The Cantos (‘ “In the gloom the gold / Gathers the light against it.” ’ etc.) had never repaid the investment necessary to memorize them in the first place.
I was wrong about that. A lot of the ‘good’ stuff in The Cantos really is worth the sweat of digging it out, even if you conclude that rather less sweat went into dreaming it up than Pound was wont to claim. But you can say that he was asking for the impossible in ever wanting the thing to be taken as a unity. At one point, late in his life, he even admitted this, saying that he ‘could not make it cohere’. The failure was implicit in the language of the admission. In a unified work of art, the coherent vision must be at least partly present at the launching point: the work can’t be expected to produce the whole of its own impulse. But really nobody since Hugh Kenner in his heyday, when he was the arch example of the brilliant critic with greater communication skills than his nominal subject (if you wanted to know what Ezra Pound, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, and William Carlos Williams were really on about, you waited until Kenner had spoken), has seriously believed that The Cantos is, or are, all of a piece. In the UK, Clive Wilmer has lately been given whole pages in the TLS to continue with the old-style defence of The Cantos, but even Wilmer would concede that a lot depends on the consciously lyrical bits – what the Victorians would have called ‘the beauties’ – actually being beautiful. I wouldn’t want to sail in and say they aren’t. Certainly they still try. The typical deliberately gorgeous passage in The Cantos is working harder to be aesthetically loaded than a room decorated by Whistler, and time has added to the effect in just the same way. Something so perfectly in period acquires the pathos of freeze-dried evanescence.
To take a much praised example, the opening stretch of Canto XVII – a rhapsodic Arcadian evocation which will be more or less reprised many times throughout the magnum opus – is clearly meant to be nothing except lovely, but it is everything except specific:
With the first pale-clear of the heaven
And the cities set in their hills,
And the goddess of the fair knees
Moving there, with the oak-woods behind her.
And more (‘And the water green clear, and blue clear’) in the same vein, or seam: more then, and much more of more or less the same thing later, again and again. At irregular intervals, usually after a long excursus on economics and/or the pervasive evil of the international conspiracy of usurers, the vision returns, but the hope that it will snap into focus next time is never fulfilled. Instead, there is yet another rearrangement of standard components: the effect is at its most persuasive in the long lyrical sweep of Canto XLVII, but the props look well-worn even there, and elsewhere you are all too often reminded of how the Soviet press, as the Chinese press still does today, used to set up the leader’s clichés in ready-made slugs of type so that his latest speech could be reported in jig time. Palaces, terraces, marble columns, clouds, green sea, rocks, sea under the rocks, rocks under the sea, columns above the clouds, and so on for ever.
What Pound did instead of specificity was to toy with a kit of parts, each of them producing not much more than a blurred suggestion of neoclassical architecture with its edges outlined in neon, like a Vorticist version of a painting by Alma-Tadema. Pound
said he was specific – as his criticism reveals, bringing the thing out in all its thingness is practically the key item among his poetic desiderata – but he said so more than he did so. If it weren’t for its quirky syntactical mounting, would the ‘first pale-clear of the heaven’ be any more than a stock phrase for the break of day? Aren’t ‘the cities set in their hills’ just cities in the hills? And does saying ‘still’ and ‘stillness’ over and over really make things seem still?
in the stillness,
The light now, not of the sun.
‘Not of the sun’ is meant to be interesting because the light is from the sun, and our appreciation of the light has been purposely displaced from its source. But how interesting is the displacement? Elsewhere in the work, but along the same lines, as it were, we get ‘And the palazzo, baseless, hangs there in the dawn / With low mist over the tide-mark; /. . . / And the sea with tin flash in the sun-dazzle’ (Canto XXI). From a passage like that the ‘tin flash’ tends to stay with you, because it is less abstract than the imagery around it, but it rather emphasizes that the imagery around it is standard issue, even if you believe that ‘baseless’ might be a nifty pun. (Personally I think it’s tin-eared: people who construe Pound’s relentless jokiness as proof of unusual sensitivity to tone often have trouble accepting that he could be deaf to his own bum notes, but it could be doing him a favour to concede that he sometimes was.)