Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  Time passed. A tramcar screaming in the dark

  Of total blackout down the Kudan hill

  Strikes, out of wire, spark on cascading spark,

  Lights from below the cherry swags that spill,

  In all the thickness of the rich April,

  Their pink festoons of flower above the street,

  Creamy as paint new-slapped. I looked my fill,

  Amazed to find our world was so complete.

  Such moments, in the nick, are strange and sharply sweet.

  A stanza MacNeice would have been proud to have written. Even in these few examples you can see how Johnston is beginning to realize the lexical freedom that strict forms offer. Up to the point where restriction cramps style, the more demanding the stanza, the greater the range of tone it can contain. Slang phrases like ‘professional as hell’ and ‘in the nick’ sound all the more colloquial for being pieced into a tight scheme.

  The second long poem in the book, ‘Elegy’, is written in memory of Johnston’s brother Duncan, ‘killed leading a Royal Marine Commando raid on the Burma Coast, on the night of February 22nd 1945’. This, too, ranks high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F. T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best things.

  It loses nothing by its air of doomed gentility. The narrator could be Guy Crouchback talking: there was a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets for grief in several different formal schemes, including blank verse. The stiff upper lip relaxes, leaving eloquence unchastened. There is no gush, but there is too much vague suggestion towards feeling, made all the more unsatisfactory by your sense that the feeling aimed at is real, harsh, and unblunted even by time. A first-hand experience has aroused a second-hand artistic response. The air is of an Owenesque regret, of the dark barge passing unto Avalon in agony, of a drawing-down of blinds. The few details given of the lost, shared childhood leave you wanting more, but the author is caught between his forte and an ambition foreign to it: he is a poet of controlled emotion who can give way to anguish only at the cost of sapping his own energy:

  Only through the hard

  Shaft-face of self-esteem parsimonious tears

  Are oozing, sour distillate from the core

  Of iron shame, the shame of private failure

  Shown up by the completeness of the dead.

  I wrote in the fierce hope of bursting loose

  From this regime, cracking its discipline . . .

  I wrote, but my intense assertion found

  No substance and no echo, and all I did

  Was raise an empty monument to grief.

  ‘Elegy’ is something better than an empty monument, but it is tentative beside its predecessor ‘Towards Mozambique’, and scarcely begins to suggest the abundant assurance of its successor, the third long poem in the book, ‘In Praise of Gusto’. This contains some of Johnston’s best work and instantly takes its place as one of the most variously impressive long poems since Auden and MacNeice were at their peak. It is not as long as either ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ or Autumn Journal but it has much of their verve and genial bravura. It embodies the quality to which it is dedicated.

  ‘In Praise of Gusto’ returns to some of the same subject-matter dealt with in earlier works, but this time it is all brought fully within the purview of what can now be seen to be his natural tone, a tone which taps its power from the vivacity of experience. His dead brother is again mentioned. This time all the emphasis is on the life they enjoyed together when young. Nevertheless the effect of loss is more striking than it is in ‘Elegy’, where death is the direct subject. One concludes, aided by hindsight, that Johnston loses nothing, and gains everything, by giving his high spirits free rein. It might have taken him a long time completely to realize the best way of being at ease with his gift, but with consciously formal artists that is often the case. The last thing they learn to do is relax.

  The poem is written in two different measures, the Onegin stanza and the stanza which Johnston insists on referring to as Childe Harold, although really Spenser has the prior title. Johnston’s mastery of the latter form was already proven. But by this time he could read fluent Russian and had obviously become fascinated with the breakneck measure in which Eugene Onegin unfolds its story. The Onegin stanzas of ‘In Praise of Gusto’ give every indication that their author will one day be Pushkin’s ideal translator. As well as that, they serve the author’s present purpose. The Onegin stanza is a born entertainer. As Johnston points out in his Author’s Note, ‘it has an inner momentum, a sort of infectious vitality of its own’. It packs itself tight and then springs loose like a self-loading jack-in-the-box. Comic timing is crucial to it:

  Beauties who manage the conjunction

  Of glamour and fireside repose

  Pack what I call without compunction

  The deadliest of knockout blows.

  Japan bewitched me. Half forgotten

  Were home and faith. The really rotten

  Part of it all, which, when it came

  Back later, made me sweat with shame,

  Was that our worlds were fast dividing

  And that my fondness must ignore

  The headlong chute direct to war

  Down which Japan was quickly gliding

  With all its ravishingly queer

  Compound of sensual and austere.

  The rapacious hostesses of pre-war Shanghai and wartime Alexandria now find their perfectly appropriate rhythmic setting. One of the many things that attracted Johnston to his Russian exemplar must have been the way Pushkin gives full value to the glamour of imperial court life without romanticizing its meretriciousness. Nobody who admires both will ever tire of counting the ways in which Pushkin and Mozart are like each other. Each could see all the world as it was yet neither could reshape it in any way except by making masterpieces. Even their own disasters lifted their hearts. (Pushkin said that trials and tribulations were included in his family budget.) Everything that happened belonged. Johnston has something of the same defiant exuberance:

  How Egypt’s hostesses detested

  The victories in our campaign:

  ‘Assez de progrès,’ they protested,

  ‘Vous étiez bien à Alamein’;

  And then they’d stress in full italics

  The point of being close to Alex,

  The races and the gay weekends

  Of bathing parties with one’s friends.

  They saw no merit in advancing

  Far from the nightclub and the beach

  Out beyond invitation’s reach

  To worlds remote from cards and dancing

  With absolutely not a face

  They’d ever seen in the whole place.

  But the Onegin stanza enforces epigrammatic terseness. As a countervailing force, Johnston employs the Spenserian stanza to luxuriate in his visual memories. Without sinning against cogency, they amply exploit this traditionally expansive form’s magically self-renewing supply of pentameter – a copiousness of rhetorical space which is symbolized, as well as sealed, by the long sweep of the alexandrine at the end:

  Mersa Matruh. A fathom down, the sun

  Lights on the faintest ripple of the sand

  And, underseas, decyphers one by one

  The cursive words imprinted on the strand

  In the Mediterranean’s fluent hand;

  For eastern waters have the graceful trick,

  By way of compliment from sea to land,

  Of signing their imprint, with curl and flick

  Of the vernacular, in floweriest Arabic.

  An extended metaphysical conceit has
been matched up to a rigorous physical form: two kinds of intellectual strictness, yet the effect is of a single, uncalculated sensory celebration.

  The essence of classical composition is that no department of it gets out of hand. After aberrations in artistic history the classic principle reasserts itself as a balancing of forces. In ‘In Praise of Gusto’ Johnston uses his Spenserian stanzas to specify his remembered visions, but he uses them also to unfold an argument. The same contrast and balance of perception and rhetoric was demonstrated by Shelley – a romantic with irrepressible classic tendencies – when he used the same stanza in ‘Adonais’. Shelley obtains some of his most gravid poetic effects by deploying what sounds like, at first hearing, a prose argument. The same applies, mutatis mutandis, to Johnston, when he remembers what the Western Desert looked like after the battles:

  Such scenes have potency, a strange effect,

  Contagion with an undefined disease.

  They throw a chill on all whom they infect,

  Touch them with sadness, set them ill at ease.

  The sense that friends now dead, or overseas,

  Fought here and suffered, hoped here and despaired,

  Transports us outside time and its degrees.

  Here is a new antique, already paired

  With the most classic sites that scholar’s trowel has bared.

  The poem begins in the Onegin stanza, takes a long excursion in the Spenserian, and returns to the Onegin. Though tipping its plumed hat to a younger version of the author – a satirical youth who ‘shot down other people’s fun’ – it conveys a whole-hearted acceptance of the good life, which apparently includes plenty of foie gras, champagne and personally slain partridges. If Dr Leavis were still with us it would be hard to imagine him appreciating any of this, especially when he noted the book’s dedication to Sacheverell Sitwell, familiarly addressed as Sachie. Yet the spine of the poem’s argument is that prepared pleasures, though it is churlish to eschew them, are not what inspires gusto, which is

  Immediately sustained delight,

  Short-lived, unhoped for, yet conclusive,

  A sovereign power in its own right.

  It lends itself to recognition

  More aptly than to definition . . .

  The reason it can’t easily be defined is that it is something more all-pervading even than a view of life. It is a way of being alive. Those gifted with it, if they have artistic gifts as well, can tell the rest of us what it is like. Reviewing his own life in search of its traces, Johnston now becomes one of those who have done so. The poem ends in a clear-eyed exultation.

  The fourth long poem in the book is a translation of ‘Onegin’s Journey’ which was originally designed to go between the present chapters seven and eight of Eugene Onegin. Pushkin eventually decided to leave it out, but it remains a logical subject for the translator of Eugene Onegin to tackle. He makes the accomplished job of it that you would expect, revelling in the inspiration engendered by the physical obstacles of the tetrameter and the rhyme that continually looms too soon. They help contain his prolific knack – so appropriate in a translator of Pushkin – for sonic effects.

  Throughout his work Johnston is to be found exploiting prosodic conventions (such as eliding ‘the’ into the initial vowel of the next word) for all they are worth. Sometimes he overcooks it, so that you have to read a line twice to pick out the rhythm. Sometimes the conversational stress and the metrical stress separate to the point where the reader must strain to put them back in touch with each other. Usually, though, Johnston maintains the old rules only in order to increase the number of ways he can speak freely. All those ways are on view in his rendition of ‘Onegin’s Journey’. But anyone wanting to acquaint himself with Pushkin would be advised to turn in the first instance to the Eugene Onegin translation itself, which Penguin has now brought out.

  The appearance of this great translation in a popular format is made even more significant by the fact that it carries a twenty-page introduction specially written by John Bayley. The author of the most distinguished book on Pushkin in any language, Bayley here gives the essence of his thoughts on Pushkin in general and Eugene Onegin in particular. Bayley’s book has always been the best full-length introduction to Pushkin, but until now Edmund Wilson’s essay in The Triple Thinkers (backed up by two further pieces in A Window on Russia) has been the best short one. Now Bayley has captured the second title as well as the first. I recommend this essay without hesitation as the first thing to read on Pushkin.

  As for the translation itself, it is what it was hailed as when it came out, and what it will go on being for the foreseeable future. Johnston knows better than I do what it lacks of the original. When, in Chapter Eight, he makes Tatyana tell Onegin, ‘Today it’s turn and turn about,’ he is well aware that there is an element of artificiality. In the original, Tatyana says just, ‘Today it is my turn,’ and it is one of the mightiest lines in all poetry. There is endless artifice in Pushkin but no artificiality. Yet by patient craft Johnston has kept to a minimum those necessarily frequent occasions when the painfully demanding form of the stanza forces an awkward phrase. Much more often he hits off the correct blend of intricate contrivance and easily colloquial expression. He catches the spirit of the thing, and a large part of the spirit of the thing is the formal spirit of the thing.

  To a remarkable extent, Johnston possesses, not just the same sort of temperament as his model, but the same sort of talent. We had no right to expect that any English poet who combined these attributes would make translating Pushkin the object of his life. But as Poems and Journeys shows, Johnston has done a few things of his own. He has recently finished a translation of Lermontov’s The Demon. There are other Russian poems one can think of that he would be ideally fitted to give us, among them the last and most intensely organized of Pushkin’s tetrametric creations, The Bronze Horseman. But on the strength of this volume it might also be wished that Johnston would go on to compose a long original work which would go even further than ‘In Praise of Gusto’ towards transforming the age he has lived through into art.

  One of the things art does is to civilize the recent past. In Poems and Journeys there are poems, both long and short, which add significantly to the small stock of works that have helped make sense of the British Empire’s passing and of Britain’s part in the Second World War. Johnston’s voice might have been more often heard in this respect, but he chose perfection of the life rather than of the work. As Auden noted, some artists have everything required for high distinction except the desire to come forward.

  If Johnston had come forward earlier and more assertively, there can be no doubt that he would have received a hearing. In some of his short pieces he makes fun of the ‘Trend Police’ and describes the poems turned out by himself and his fellow gifted amateurs as ‘catacomb graffiti’. In fact, the Trend Police would not have stood much chance of shouting down work done to this standard. The locus classicus is in no more danger of being obscured than the privileged orders are in danger of losing their privileges, although Johnston would have you think, in his more predictable moments, that the contrary was true in each case.

  The best reason for Johnston to think of himself as a part-time poet was that as a full-time diplomat he was well placed to write the kind of poetry which is necessarily always in short supply – the poetry of the man who spends most of his day being fully professional at something else, the poetry for which the young Johnston so admired Marvell.

  Yours to restore the wasted field

  And in distress to health

  To serve the Commonwealth;

  Yet with a wider-sweeping eye

  To range above the land, and spy

  The virtue and defect

  Of empires, to detect

  In vanquished causes, and in kings

  Dethroned, the tragedy of things,

  And know what joys reside

  Where the Bermudas ride.

  In recent times we have grown use
d to the externally formless epic – Berryman’s Dream Songs, Lowell’s History – and striven to convince ourselves that it possesses an internal form which makes up for its lack of shape. But this pious belief has become harder and harder to sustain. The virtues of the informal epic are prose virtues, not poetic ones. Only discipline can give rise to the full freedom of mature art. Charles Johnston has given us a better idea than we had any right to hope for of what Pushkin’s epic sounds like. But his long poems suggest that he has it in him to write an epic of his own. Even if he does not, his small but weighty output of original work, now that we have at last come to know it, enriches the poetic legacy of his generation and helps clarify that nebulous, nearby area of literary history where uninspired innovation creates its permanent disturbance.

  London Review of Books, 1980: previously included in

  From the Land of Shadows, 1982

  Postscript

  To meet, Sir Charles Johnston was something out of the past, and the past wasn’t even mine. He was an empire builder, and I came out of the empire he built. Somebody like him probably stepped ashore in Botany Bay with Captain Cook and explained to the Aboriginal reception committee, in a very clear voice, that he could recommend a good tailor. Upon his retirement from the diplomatic service he set about publishing, in small volumes under his own imprint, all the poetry he had written, and writing a lot more. But he never overproduced. Every poem was the finished product, foursquare and deeply polished, like a rosewood military chest neatly packed with an administrator’s kit. The total effect was formal, confidently traditional, expensively turned out and unapologetically direct, and as such was duly ignored by most of the regular reviewers. But one of his little books was dedicated to his translation of Eugene Onegin. Much occupied with Pushkin at the time, I was able to recognize the Johnston version as a success, and am still proud of having been among the first to say so. Having tried to write in the Onegin stanza myself, I was in a position to salute Johnston’s astonishingly high level of sustained technical accomplishment, and having used the original as one of my text books for learning Russian, I knew Pushkin’s meaning well enough to spot that his translator had worked the miracle of transferring it almost intact. So it was not entirely out of naivety that I hailed Johnston’s translation without reserve. Making it clear that unstinting praise was the kind he liked – he was direct in that way too – he invited me round to his flat. We were four for lunch. Johnston’s wife, a Russian princess descended by not too many generations from one of the military heroes in War and Peace, had had a stroke by that stage which rendered her silent, but she was a keen observer. She observed me as if she had last seen someone like me on the wrong side of a barricade. The Johnstons made a majestic couple: an appropriate adjective, because their other guest, and therefore my opposite number across the tiny table, was the Queen Mother.