Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  Born only two years before Allen Ginsberg’s Howl was published in 1956, Donaghy grew up as an Irish Catholic in New York at a time when American poetry was supposedly breaking its last bonds with the transatlantic formal tradition. He was never automatically contemptuous of the results that accrued to this final freedom. He just doubted its validity as an historical movement. Whether by instinct or from his training as a musician – questions of underlying psychology preoccupied him all his short life – he was suspicious of the idea that freedom from all restriction could yield perfect creative liberty. (He always insisted that even Howl was not the Whitmanesque ‘barbaric yawp’ that Ginsberg claimed, but a carefully worked and reworked artefact.) At Chicago University, where Donaghy edited the Chicago Review and founded his music ensemble, he was already grappling with the critical questions that arose from a too confident assertion of American separateness.

  In pursuit of his future wife, and perhaps also in pursuit of a more nuanced context in which to work, he moved to London in 1985, and steadily established himself as an imported expert who knew more than the locals. Actually this, too, was an American tradition that went back as far as Henry James, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, not to mention the Eighth Air Force during the Second World War, but his presence was refreshingly new to a whole generation of young British poets who came to his classes. The impact of his own collections of poetry might have been enough to pull them in, but his powers as a mentor kept them glued to their chairs. There was a paradox in that. Donaghy never ceased to warn against the menace of the ‘creative writing’ industry on either side of the Atlantic: hundreds of creative writing teachers with nothing useful to say, thousands of creative writing students publishing first collections that would go nowhere.

  But his British students knew that they had found a teacher who transcended his own suspicions. At least a dozen gifted young poets benefited from his combination of a broad sympathy and a tight focus on language: if they are now a school without a name, it was because he taught them the merits of unbelonging. He had an even wider field of influence, however, through the pieces he wrote for such outlets as Poetry Review. Many of these pieces, undertaken as journeywork at the time but always lavished with the wealth of his knowledge and the best of his judgement, are collected in this book, and it is remarkable how they coalesce into the most articulate possible expression of a unified critical vision. He was a crucially important reviewer, and my chief concern here is to say why.

  When reviewing another poet, Donaghy relied first and foremost on his ear for loose language. Devoid, on paper at least, of malice or professional jealousy, he could nevertheless quote a dud line with piercing effect. Robert Bly thought he was being profound when he wrote: ‘There’s a restless gloom in my mind.’ Donaghy could tell that whatever was happening to Bly’s mind at that moment, it wasn’t profundity. But he made such judgements a starting point, not a death sentence. What had the same poet written that was better? Donaghy could quote that, too. He was always searching for the language that had reached a satisfactory compression and power of suggestion. (It didn’t have to come from ‘the tradition’, or even from a poem: he was a close listener to song lyrics, playground rhymes, and street slang.) When he found it in a poem, he had his principles to help him explain it.

  To his chief principle he gave the name ‘negotiation’. A sufficiently tense diction, the alchemical pay-off, was, Donaghy argued, most likely to be obtained from a contest between what the poet aimed to say and the form in which he had chosen to say it. If the poet tied the creative process down to his initial commitment, with no formal pressure to force him to the unexpected, there was no contest; and a contest there had to be, no matter how loose the form. Always a great quoter, Donaghy, on this point, quoted Proust to telling effect: ‘The tyranny of rhyme forces the poet to the discovery of his finest lines.’ The tyranny didn’t always have to be of rhyme, but there had to be some tyranny somewhere. Negotiation was Donaghy’s touchstone concept, and lack of negotiation was the reason why he thought an informal poem was even more likely to slide into banality than a formal one. When he found intensity within an apparently formless work, it was because the author had imposed some kind of discipline upon himself, locally if not in general. He found a good example in C. K. Williams, whose ten-beat loose lines had, in Donaghy’s opinion, an underlying formal drive, proving that something concrete had been negotiated even when the poem steered towards abstraction. This capacity to find practical merit even in what he was theoretically against was a precious virtue.

  It was matched by an equal capacity to find the limitations even in what he was theoretically for. John Updike’s poetry was as formally virtuose as might be wished, but Donaghy thought that too much of it was too much so. There were too many poems that ‘almost made it before the skill took over’. The implication was that a display of skill should not be an end in itself, even though to eschew skill altogether was a bad way of avoiding the danger.

  In this way, Donaghy left a door open so that he could get back to the informal spontaneity of American modernism after William Carlos Williams and praise it where praise was due. His openness to the possible strength of the informal poem lent him the authority to say that the rewards from a formal poem could be greater, just as long as they had been properly negotiated. But he was always certain that the informal poem had far more dangerous ways of going rotten than the formal one. When the formal tradition decayed, the result was, at worst, sclerosis: a malady whose chief symptom he neatly summed up as ‘rhyming in your sleep’. But the informal tradition in decay was an infinitely adaptable virus which would always try to pass itself off as the next development of the avant-garde. Donaghy the mighty quoter liked to revisit his favourite quotations, and the one that he revisited most often was from Auden. ‘Everything changes but the avant garde.’ But the witticism isn’t the whole truth. The avant-garde does change, in its scope: it continually increases its territorial claims. Logically it should have run out of steam when the ne plus ultra stood revealed as the reductio ad absurdum sometime during the reign of Dada, but here we are, almost a hundred years later, and there are still poems exploding all over a full page in the London Review of Books like fine shrapnel, just as if Apollinaire had never done anything similar.

  Donaghy, not very neatly for once, referred to such abjectly posturing stuff as L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry. He was borrowing the title of the busy movement’s home-base magazine, but he might have done better just to call it poppycock. Large-heartedly, he found enough time for this tirelessly self-propagating fad in which to decide that it added up to nothing. (His rejections were seldom immediate, but they were always decisive when they came.) Donaghy’s British acolytes were not encouraged to follow the example of those established poets, often well protected within the academy, whose poetry is beyond criticism because it is about nothing except language. Donaghy wanted his young hopefuls to write negotiated poems, which are never just about language even when they say they are. Some of his modern models were British, or at any rate Irish: he said he didn’t mind being asked to talk about ‘Auden & Co’ as long as it was understood that the ‘Co’ meant MacNeice. There was a whole teaching programme hidden in that one remark, because it will always be true that a neophyte stands to learn more from MacNeice than from Auden: it is useful, if frustrating, to try copying MacNeice’s strictness, but it is fatal to try copying Auden’s apparent nonchalance.

  But for his British students and readers, Donaghy’s most provocative models for the accomplished poem were Americans. His range of examples drew from the two great lines of achievement leading on from Whitman and Emily Dickinson but he lent no credence to schools, only to the intensity of the individual talent. In one of his reviews, he ascribed to Richard Wilbur ‘the most flawless command of musical phrase of any American poet’. It’s a mark of the consistent authority of Donaghy’s critical prose that the confidence of such a judgement sounds precise, instead of just like a puff on a jacket. In
the quarter of a century before Donaghy became active as a reviewer, the outstanding critical voice in London had been Ian Hamilton. Nobody wrote a better argument than Hamilton, but not even once did he say something like that about Wilbur, or indeed about anybody. Hamilton was strongest when he found weakness. Donaghy, in so many ways the heir to Hamilton’s seals of office, was no more forgiving to lax expression, but far less inhibited about communicating enjoyment, instead of just leaving it to be inferred.

  Donaghy was not immediately famous as a critic in Britain, whose citadels fall slowly. But he was immediately understood: the broad sympathy of his view travelled well. Especially he was understood by his young admirers, to whom he gave, by his guidance of their reading, the modern American poetry that matters. Indeed he gave them America, with the result that some of the best poems about America in recent years were composed in Britain by young writers who had got their standards for highly charged and musically cadenced language from him. We all enjoy such a coup as Frank O’Hara’s poem about Lana Turner, and even those of us who think that John Ashbery has turned into a factory get a kick out of his classic poem about Daffy Duck. But not even O’Hara or Ashbery ever wrote anything quite as good about American popular culture as John Stammers’s poem ‘The Other Dozier’. Once it would have been a sign of cultural subjection for Britain to claim that some of the best American poetry is written here. Now it sounds more like a simple claim to truth: the Atlantic has become an exchange of energy, and Donaghy is partly responsible.

  He was also responsible, and more than partly, for ensuring that some of the best American criticism would be written here. He might have found it harder to write it at home, where any critic who publishes a limiting judgement is thought to be an assassin. In a previous generation, the same had been thought of Randall Jarrell, but in fact Jarrell could be adventurous and generous in his praise: nobody, not even Galway Kinnell when introducing his indispensable selection from Whitman, could do a better job than Jarrell of showing why the best lines and phrases from Leaves of Grass defied belittlement even at their most naive. Jarrell’s strength as an appreciator, however, depended on his powers of discrimination, and that dependency will always be regarded with suspicion in America, where a critic sins against democracy if he finds some poets more valuable than others. Donaghy, who had already committed the same offence, probably did well to head for less tolerant climes. And after all, he brought the best American criticism with him, just as he brought the best American poetry. Donaghy the great quoter always paid his fellow American critics the tribute, with due acknowledgement, of reproducing their best lines. Thus we came to hear Dana Gioia’s opinion that ideas in the poetry of Ashbery are ‘like the melodies in some jazz improvisation where the musicians have left out the original tune to avoid paying royalties’. Donaghy knew he couldn’t beat that, so he quoted it. But there were many occasions on which he matched it. He could deliver judgements in a way that people remembered, and for anyone who is capable of doing that, it really matters if he is right or wrong.

  In his theoretical work it mattered less. Quite a lot of Donaghy’s writing on psychology is included here. The incidental remarks are frequently valuable, but in the end there is no settling some of the conundrums about the functioning of the brain: or anyway, if they ever are settled, it probably won’t be by a poet. Perhaps partly because of the traditional nostalgia of the lapsed PhD, science always fascinated him. He not only admired Coleridge, he emulated him, producing pages of text in which various parts of the argument go on in various frames, rather as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner grew annotations in the margin. But such pretensions to complex simultaneity weren’t what made Coleridge a genius, they were what ensured his genius would never be coherent. Donaghy was in no such danger, because he knew what came first: the sayable, memorable, living poem, and his living response to it. Science didn’t even come second. His repudiated but never forgotten Catholicism would have a better claim to the silver medal. When he talks about poetic truth, he just can’t help mentioning the Elevation of the Host. Ritual was deeply embedded in him, like music. They were formal resources. But every resource of his mind and memory was in service to language, of which, both creatively and critically, he was a master. Had he lived, he would surely have done such great things that he would have been universally recognized as one the voices of his time, not only in poetry but in the understanding of it. Some of the reasons we can be so sure are in this book.

  Interlude

  Like his predecessor T. S. Eliot, Michael Donaghy was an American literary figure in London, but unlike Eliot he felt no compulsion to blend in. For the Americans who changed countries, it was always a big decision whether or not to go native. For the Australians, the decision was less momentous, perhaps because the locals cared less; the British don’t feel usurped when an Australian takes over the store. In the years between the wars, the Australian man of letters W. J. Turner established himself in London with such thoroughness that, by the time I came to hear of him, I didn’t realize that he had ever been Australian at all. My friend Peter Porter never tried to disguise his origins, and often used them in his poetry; but he made it clear that his mental map was European. Treating even Britain as a mere province of Christendom, he was as much at home in a Florentine church as he had ever been in a Brisbane pub. In the earlier part of his London career, Australian critics tended to regard him a traitor because he went, and British critics as a carpetbagger because he stayed. Porter’s way of being uncaring was to be equally impatient about nationalist pressure from either side, but it added up to what looked like nonchalance, and I was pleased to emulate it when I could. I was careful, though, to remember my poetic origins. A. D. Hope’s commanding use of the argued formal stanza remained a model, and even in Cambridge I went on collecting his books, although in his later work he was seldom at his best. Having lost control of his line, he debarred himself from writing anything like Auden’s poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’, which sums up a technical mastery developed through decades. Having ruled out his own life as a subject, Hope would have been unable to contemplate a truly mature work such as Thom Gunn’s ‘The Man with Night Sweats’, even had his sexuality permitted the topic. When he was young, he attracted press attention by writing poems in which he featured as quite the stud, but afterwards he went respectable. The typical late poem by Hope features minor characters from the classical catalogue acting out scenarios hard to identify even from Bulfinch or Lemprière.

  James McAuley, another Australian poet whose example loomed over my desk from the beginning, was just as eager as Hope to devote his later career to pious generalities. Where Hope’s were about mythology, McAuley’s were about Catholicism; but they were equally bloodless. McAuley, however, never let go of his technical skill, and on at least one occasion, making a rare reference to his personal history, he created a poem in which true candour and delicious music blended impeccably. His work wasn’t always that attractive, but with poetry our memories play an unfair trick that works out well: the outstanding becomes the typical.

  THERE YOU COME HOME

  One of Australia’s great artistic treasures, James McAuley’s poem ‘Because’ is only a slight thing physically. Ten spare quatrains in total, swinging lithely along on a lattice of conversational iambic pentameter, it is over almost as soon as begun. Yet for some of us Australians who were born and raised while the poet was still alive, his miniature masterpiece, during the ensuing decades, has done the work that the tiny Amalienburg pavilion at Nymphenburg does for anyone who lingers in its network of reflections for a while – for as long as possible, usually – and then goes away reassured that there is an eternal value in perfect making. It’s the way the poem is built, indeed, that transmits its aesthetic charge.

  The poem’s actual argument – if it could be reduced to its bare prosaic bones, we would find the poet blaming his unhappiness on his parents – I have always found to be as depressingly bleak as McAuley’s brand of Catholicism: a
convert’s brand which had a way of condemning his own weaknesses while leaving him free to pursue them, just as long as he sounded strict enough. McAuley’s devotedly anti-communist politics were useful at the time, but this tinge of Jesuit worldliness was never attractive, no matter how winningly he may have played a honky-tonk piano after dark. (In Australia in those wowser-ridden days, it was often the Jesuits who had read Ulysses: after all, they travelled.) Two of Australia’s best critical minds, Leonie Kramer and Peter Coleman, later devoted slim volumes to McAuley without even once making you like him. I myself, in my Sydney University days, saw him deliver a lecture about the newly published Doctor Zhivago and wondered ever afterwards how he could have been so alkaline on such a vital topic. From his dress and manner I would have said he was an accountant, except that he wasn’t having enough fun. But if you look at ‘Because’ long enough you start to wonder if he didn’t have the kind of personality, not to say intellect, that depended on form for its focus.

  The poem, a late work, starts off by being about his dead parents. In the first stanza we are already led to suspect that this is a soul-curdling subject for him. The phrase ‘a kind of love’ gives us the evidence straight away: a valuable lesson in dramatic tactics, because very few poets ever learn to start the action early, as soon as the finger has been inserted in the listener’s buttonhole.

  My father and my mother never quarrelled.

  They were united in a kind of love

  As daily as the Sydney Morning Herald,

  Rather than like the eagle or the dove.