Reliable Essays

by Clive James

  London Review of Books, February–March, 1983: previously included in

  Snakecharmers in Texas, 1988

  Postscript

  Sadly, the first thing I feel bound to say about this essay on Montale is that I still believe he was a great artist. It shouldn’t need saying. But all too soon after his death his copybook was retroactively blotted in a big way. It emerged that a good few, and perhaps most, of his reviews of books in the English language had been written by someone else. Montale had made a practice of handing the book to a subaltern, specifying the word length, publishing the results under his own name, and splitting the payment. If it had been discovered that Vermeer had known van Meegeren personally, and actually supplied him with paint, the scandal could not have been more rancid. It could be said in Montale’s defence that in Italy there has long been a tradition by which prominent painters whistle in the apprentices of their bottega to help fill the less challenging stretches of a canvas. It could also be said that in Italy there is a long tradition of outright corruption in all walks of life. At the time when Montale was posthumously rumbled, about half of Italy’s politicians were facing a stretch in gaol, and nobody was surprised except them, because when everyone is on the take the moral outrage is confined to those who get pinched. But Montale should have been above all that.

  Most of the time he was. Take away the stuff he farmed out and there is still a large amount of steady, responsible, thoughtful and generous reviewing – criticism in its most nourishing form. Take all that away, and there is still the poetry, which remains near the apex of European achievement in modern times. It should subtract nothing from a quiet triumph to find out that its author was a bit more complicated than we thought. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I was pleased when the man I revered as the epitome of selfless literary endeavour turned out to share a few characteristics with the man who fixed the World Series. But I wasn’t displeased either; just even more fascinated. The way to avoid that kind of fascination is to concern yourself entirely with art and learn nothing about artists: an impossible ideal and probably a hollow one. There are still a few major compositions by Stravinsky that I haven’t sat down to listen to properly. I could have devoted some of the time to them that I spent reading the first volume of Stephen Walsh’s biography. It reveals Stravinsky to have been a nasty piece of work in several respects. But I don’t, on that account, love the music I already know any the less, and might even feel inspired to search through the rest of it with reinvigorated concentration, having found out that the demigod really was a human being all along. There was something perfect about Montale, and now there isn’t, but somehow the bones of the cuttlefish are picked cleaner than ever, now that the soul which chose them for an emblem of purity turns out to have dealt the occasional card from the bottom of the deck.

  2001

  ON SEAMUS HEANEY

  Door into the Dark by Seamus Heaney, Faber

  Of all the newer tight-lipped poets Mr Heaney is the hardest case, and the tight-lipped critics whose praise is not usually easy to get have been sending quite a lot of approbation his way. His technique is hard-edged: a punchy line travels about two inches. The subject matter is loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth. Close to the vest, close to the bone and close to the soil. We have learnt already not to look to him for the expansive gesture: there are bitter essences to compensate for the lack of that. Door into the Dark confirms him in his course, its very title telling you in which direction that course lies. I will show you fear in a tinful of bait. It should be said at the outset that poetry as good as Mr Heaney’s best is hard to come by. But it is all pretty desperate stuff, and in those poems where we don’t feel the brooding vision to be justified by the customary dense beauty of his technique we are probably in the right to come down hard and send our criticism as close as we can to the man within. The man within is at least in some degree a chooser. If he chose to be slick, to let his finely worked clinching stanzas fall pat, there would be a new kind of damaging poetry on the way – squat, ugly and unstoppable.

  But first let us demonstrate the quality of the poetic intelligence with which we have to deal. This is the first stanza of his two-stanza poem ‘Dream’: it should be quickly apparent that his virtuoso kinetic gift can find interior equivalents in language for almost any movement in the exterior world, so that the mere act of sub-vocalizing the poem brings one out in a sweat.

  With a billhook

  Whose head was hand-forged and heavy

  I was hacking a stalk

  Thick as a telegraph pole.

  My sleeves were rolled

  And the air fanned cool past my arms

  As I swung and buried the blade,

  Then laboured to work it unstuck.

  All the correct chunks and squeaks are caught without being said. But where does it get us? It gets us to the second stanza.

  The next stroke

  Found a man’s head under the hook.

  Before I woke

  I heard the steel stop

  In the bone of the brow.

  He had a dream, you see, and his skill brings you close to believing it – but not quite. This deadfall finish is really a conventional echo of the professional toughies, ‘realistic’ about violence, who have been giving us the jitters for some time. Most of the other symptoms in the syndrome are manifest somewhere or other in the book. Human characteristics tend to be referred back to animals and objects. As with Ted Hughes, it takes a visit to the zoo, the game reserve, or an imaginary dive below the sod before the idea of personality gets any showing at all. The people themselves are mostly clichés disguised in heroic trappings. A stable vacated by a horse (‘Gone’) offers more character than the smithy still occupied by the smith (‘The Forge’). This latter poem, surely fated to be an anthology piece for the generations to come, can usefully be quoted in full:

  All I know is a door into the dark.

  Outside, old axles and iron hoops rusting;

  Inside, the hammered anvil’s short-pitched ring,

  The unpredictable fantail of sparks

  Or hiss when a new shoe toughens in water.

  The anvil must be somewhere in the centre,

  Horned as a unicorn, at one end square,

  Set there immoveable: an altar

  Where he expends himself in shape and music.

  Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,

  He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter

  Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;

  Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick

  To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

  The numbered questions in the back of the school anthology are obvious. What is the attitude of the smith to modern civilization? Is it the same as the poet’s attitude? And (for advanced students) would you consider the Leavisite views on the organic relationship of work to life relevant? But it should also be obvious that the interest of the poem drops considerably when the human being replaces the object at stage centre. Those hairs in his nose don’t do much to establish him, except as a character actor sent down at an hour’s notice from Central Casting. If he were more real, his attitudes towards mechanized culture might not fall so pat. Get through that doorway in the dark and you might find him beating out hubcaps or balancing the wire wheels on a DB6 – both jobs which can be done with as much love as bending your millionth horseshoe. There is no conflict here: there is just a received opinion expressed in hints and cleverly overblown in unexpected places – that altar, and the unicorn’s horn, which ought to be a rhino’s only that’s too easy. On the page the refined poem has its attractive spareness: it’s the implication, the area of suggestion, that worries the reader through the ordinariness of its assumptions about culture. Self-employed artisans are usually tough enough to see reality straight: given the chance, the leather-aproned subject might well remind Mr Heaney that there ain’t no pity in the city.

  Things l
ive; animals almost live; humans live scarcely at all. The inverse progression holds disturbingly true in well-known efforts like the poem about the frozen pump, ‘Rite of Spring’.

  That sent the pump up in flame.

  It cooled, we lifted her latch,

  Her entrance was wet, and she came.

  It’s a roundabout way for passion to get into print. The obverse poems to this are ‘Mother’, in which the lady ends up wanting to be like the pump, and ‘The Wife’s Tale’, a brilliantly tactile poem in which you touch everything – cloth, stubble, grass, bread, seed and china cups – except flesh.

  Mr Heaney’s ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’ forms an important section of the book and could well be pointed to if one were asked to isolate a thematic area absolutely his.

  They’re busy in a high boat

  That stalks towards Antrim, the power cut.

  The line’s a filament of smut

  Drawn hand over fist

  Where every three yards a hook’s missed

  Or taken (and the smut thickens, wrist-

  Thick, a flail

  Lashed into the barrel

  With one swing). Each eel

  Comes aboard to this welcome:

  The hook left in gill or gum,

  It’s slapped into the barrel numb

  But knits itself, four-ply,

  With the furling, slippy

  Haul, a knot of back and pewter belly

  That stays continuously one

  For each catch they fling in

  Is sucked home like lubrication.

  Evocation could go no further: the eels (‘hatched fears’) are practically in your lap. Similarly in poems like ‘Bann Clay’ and ‘Bogland’ his grating line, shudderingly switched back and forth like teeth ground in a nightmare, finds endless technical equivalents for the subject described: he really is astonishingly capable. And in ‘Bogland’ there is an indication that he can do something even more difficult – state the open statement, make the gesture that enlivens life.

  They’ve taken the skeleton

  Of the Great Irish Elk

  Out of the peat, set it up

  An astounding crate full of air.

  The spirits lift to the flash of wit. There ought to be more of it. Nobody in his right mind would deny that Mr Heaney’s is one of the outstanding talents on the scene, or want that talent to settle in its ways too early.

  TLS, 1969

  Postscript (i)

  One of my earliest notorieties was obtained by mentioning Seamus Heaney in the same breath as Yeats. I was right not to regret it, because sooner rather than later everyone was doing it. More commendably, this piece paid Heaney the compliment of careful writing on the reviewer’s part. By using ‘symptom’ and ‘syndrome’ in the same sentence to show that they did not mean the same thing (strictly, a syndrome is a group of symptoms) I pioneered a technique which I have been using ever since in the attempt to do my share of saving useful distinctions threatened with decay through misuse. As a TV critic, writing every week, I would frequently form a sentence around such paired words as ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’, or ‘mitigate’ and ‘militate’, in order to prove that the precision conferred by using them correctly was worth preserving. If the campaign had succeeded I could be more modest about it. It failed completely. As Kingsley Amis has pointed out, there is an iron law operating which dictates that anyone working in the media who makes such errors somehow never gets to read articles deploring them.

  The Metropolitan Critic, 1994

  Postscript (ii)

  To hitch a ride on the coat-tails of a comet is a bad ambition, but can be gratifying if it happens accidentally. I was lucky enough to be the first critic into print with the nerve, or the naivety, to suggest that Heaney might have a Yeatsian gift. For some time afterwards the comparison was cited by my detractors as clear evidence of hysteria. Later on it was called a boldly premature tip that turned out to be right, and still later everyone forgot that I had ever said it. But it was fun while it lasted. With another flight of fancy I was less lucky. In my mock epic poem Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage I fielded a Guinness-voiced character called Seamus Feamus. The nickname caught on, but I never got the credit for it. In profiles about Heaney, its coinage (but with the second name spelt ‘famous’, which loses half the point, one would have thought) is usually ascribed to his old literary chums in Ireland. This might very well have been so: it was an idea begging to be had, so anything less than multiple authorship would have been surprising. Fortunately it is not possible to copyright a coinage, or else professional jealousy would spawn a million lawsuits. If you invent a word or a phrase, you should be ready to see other people lift it without acknowledgement; why else did you invent it, except to get it into the language? In the best critics of any medium there is always a poetic urge, and in the critic of poetry it can lead to a professional deformation. Almost always he is, or has been, a poet himself, and when faced with a brilliant new arrival he needs to guard himself against his own envy. The best way is to admit it. From his first book, it was obvious that Heaney commanded, as a natural dispensation, a vocal register well fitted for grandeur – rather more grandeur, in fact, than the emergent Yeats, who spent a long time trilling lightly near the top of the stave before his voice finally broke. The comparison was elementary. Yet one poet of my acquaintance – famous himself later on, although not quite Seamus famous – spent years telling me that it was the silliest thing he had ever heard.

  2001

  THE POETRY OF EDMUND WILSON

  Apart from Poets, Farewell, which was published in 1929 and has been unobtainable for most of the time since, the two main collections of Edmund Wilson’s verse are Note-Books of Night and Night Thoughts. Of these, Note-Books of Night was published in America in 1942, took three years to cross the Atlantic (Secker & Warburg brought it out in May 1945) and has since become fairly unobtainable itself, although it is sometimes to be found going cheap in the kind of second-hand book shop that doesn’t know much about the modern side. Night Thoughts, published in America in 1961 and in Britain a year later, is still the current collection. It regroups most of the work in NoteBooks of Night into new sections, interspersing a good deal of extra matter, ranging from lyrics written in youth to technical feats performed in age. The final effect is to leave you convinced that although Night Thoughts is good to have, Note-Books of Night remains the definitive collection of Wilson’s verse. Less inclusive, it is more complete.

  Being that, it would be an interesting book even if Wilson’s verse were negligible – interesting for the sidelight it threw on the mind of a great critic. But in fact Wilson’s verse is far from negligible. Just because Wilson’s critical work is so creative doesn’t mean that his nominally creative work is a waste of time. Even without Memoirs of Hecate County and I Thought of Daisy, the mere existence of NoteBooks of Night would be sufficient evidence that Wilson had original things to say as a writer. It is a deceptively substantial little book which looks like a slim volume only by accident. There are more than seventy pages of solid text, with something memorable on nearly every page. Thirty pages are given to prose fragments and the rest to poetry. It isn’t major poetry, but some of it is very good minor poetry – and in an age of bad major poetry there is very little good minor poetry about.

  Wilson was no shrinking violet, but he knew his limitations. He knew that his touch with language wasn’t particularly suggestive so he went for precision instead. He possessed a lot of information to be precise with. Where his verse is excessive, it is the excess of the seed catalogue – a superfluity of facts. He never usurps the lyrical genius’s prerogative of saying more than he knows. Nor did he ever consider himself talented enough to be formless – his formal decorum always reminds us that he stems from the early 20th-century America which in retrospect seems more confident than Europe itself about transmitting the European tradition. The work is all very schooled, neat, strict and assured. And finally there is his gift f
or parody, which sometimes led him beyond mere accomplishment and into the realm of inspiration. In ‘The Omelet of A. MacLeish’, for example, the talent of his verse is reinforced by the genius of his criticism, with results more devastating critically than his essays on the same subject, and more vivid poetically than his usual poems.

  In Note-Books of Night the poems are arranged in no chronological scheme. From the rearrangement in Night Thoughts it is easier to puzzle out when he wrote what, but even then it is sometimes hard to be sure. Eventually there will be scholarly research to settle the matter, but I doubt if much of interest will be revealed touching Wilson’s development as a writer of verse. After an early period devoted to plangent lyricism of the kind which can be called sophomoric as long as we remember that he was a Princeton sophomore and an exceptionally able one into the bargain, Wilson quickly entered into his characteristic ways of seeing the world. Like other minor artists he matured early and never really changed. Indeed he was writing verse in the Thirties which forecast the mood of the prose he published in the early Seventies, at the end of his life. The desolate yearning for the irretrievably lost America which makes Upstate so sad a book is already there in Note-books of Night, providing the authentic force behind the somewhat contrived Arnoldian tone of poems like ‘A House of the Eighties’.

  —The ugly stained-glass window on the stair,