The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell

by Storm Jameson

  Smith.—By that aspect of Catholicism which Mallarmé describes as offering des entrailles à la peur qu’a d’elle-même, autre-ment que comme conscience humaine, la métaphysique et claustrale éternité. . . .

  Green.—In George Barker, a desperate jigging and pirouetting, mechanical, as if each of his emotions were connected by a wire to its object. Auden. . . . But what use is it for me to give you a great many names — and no new words? So much of the poetry we wrote was a private titillation. So many of us wrote, write, verses equal in weight and depth to the accounts given of their emotions by well-meaning novelists. We were all slaves to the object, to things. Violently as many of us reacted against it we were part by our nerves and thoughts of the mechanical civilisation we despised. We could neither change objects by assimilating them, nor love them and so create them — which I see now is the motive really of love. We used and arranged and played with objects in our poetry as if they were pieces of a meccano set. We imagined that construction has something to do with this game. Some of us were, as we thought, admirably simple — without a notion that simplicity is the end of a long arduous process, that it cost your Valéry a lifetime to be able to write,

  Qui pleure:

  Si proche de moi-méme au moment de pleurer?:

  that a succession of our puny and fanciful images contained barely one meaning, not to dream of the strict concentration of many meanings into one image which is truly simplicity — as it is everything else. One of the three writers we thought of for a few years, the later years of Ventre deux guerres, as our leader, Auden——

  Smith.—You were going to speak of him before, and hesitated. Why?

  Green.—Because he mystified me when I was alive, and still does. Of the three he had by far the strongest intellect, his perceptions were always acute, he saw the relations between things wildly dissimilar; his curiosity was, or it seemed to be, limitless; the answers his mind gave to the questions he put to it were always subtler, and he controlled them. Less, far less ignorant of himself than Spender, more inquisitive, more restless, bolder, than Day Lewis, he had finer possibilities than either of them, and his greatest danger seemed — then — the ease with which he moved about among an infinitely greater number of objects and recognised them with clearness and familiarity. Why trouble to explore when you are already richer, in images, in associations, and in the management of these, than any of your friends? He was careless because lazy. He would sometimes throw together in the form of verses symbols which had less energy than the language a child finds to talk to his puppy when he thinks they’re not overheard, or a neurotic’s habit of touching or avoiding lines. But he excited us, he seemed confident; no line, so far as I remember, he wrote, implied that he should be admired or pitied or even liked. He was disinterested.

  Smith.—Well?

  Green.—The truth is that I don’t know why he left Europe to avoid the war he — like the rest of us — saw coming, I don’t know whether to admire in him the resolution he made and carried out, facing what he knew would be disdainful comment from the many, to guard his integrity as a poet from the distraction of war and the worse distractions of hate, fear, grief, all the hardening and limiting a war fastens on us—

  Smith.—You have described a man for whom the many are indifferent.

  Green.—He may have felt that Europe was doomed. He may have fled, not from the war but from the Dark Age.

  Smith.—The man you describe must have known that the Dark Age is darkest for those outside it.

  Green.—I daresay. But if I can’t admire him — and it’s true I can’t, nor will he need or expect it — can I regret what seems to me a grievous miscalculation on the part of so ingenious a man? Is it possible that, without injury, he can break himself from his past? Can he establish, between himself and America, the correspondences a poet must have between himself and the outer world, in order to find it again in himself? Where will he draw energy, with so many channels stopped, and by an irrevocable act? His readers, and those of his generation who survive, will learn, in five? twenty? years, whether a poet can not only grow but grow loyally after the refusal, so harsh, so almost brutal, of an experience which seemed made for him. Do you remember Gide? — Tout ce qui cherche à s’affirmer se nie. . . . Ce que tu prétends proteger en toi s’atropie. Does it apply even to the integrity, the will to be himself, that Auden was anxious, justly, to save? I don’t know — but I know, although I hate to admit it, that I was disappointed and deeply wounded when he went away. It seemed to me, and still does, that he was injuring and making little of something we had in common, which was valuable, which we ought to have guarded, with all we had, if it was necessary with our minds and our precious — I mean it seriously — bodies. I can’t describe to you what this something is, since it must take a different form for each of us. For me it was the curve of a road I could see from my bedroom window, crossing the side of a hill to a group of trees. Alas. . . .

  Smith.—For me it was not one thing, it was several, all of them common and simple.

  Green.—A sort of hypocrisy, nervous, a false charity, because aimed obliquely at myself, makes me ashamed to accuse Auden of a betrayal, a want of friendship — oh, not to me. . . .

  Smith.—Yes, I know. I had the same experience in 1914, with a close friend. Instead of coming with me, he chose, for the best, the most reasonable of reasons, to find work in a reserved occupation. I was angry when anyone criticised him, and he did, I believe, useful work. . . . I had forgotten him until you spoke. Speak of something else.

  Green.—When at last the war came, it put an end to a great deal of intolerable maundering and whimpering. I am ashamed to remember how solemnly we pitied ourselves during the thirties. From our verses I could make a laughable anthology of groans and sighs. Who wrote:

  Leave, leave the sad star that is about to die.

  Laugh, my comedians, who may not laugh again —

  Soon, soon,

  Soon Jeremiah Job will be walking among men?

  Who: We have no home. Our bourgeois home is wrecked?

  Who: For them everything is drowned by the rising wind, everything is done against time? And who:

  Seeing beyond our noses

  A land never to flow with milk and honey,

  But winter a stone throw off and no more roses?

  All these, and many other voices as weak and puerile, run together in my mind in a shallow stream without light. If for an instant I think I am going to seize something in it, it has vanished before I can make it out. Is this one of the effects of dying? It can’t be — others of my memories are only too clear, too dazzling.

  Smith.—They can never have been alive, your little Jeremiah Jobs. How they would have bored me. How little I have missed. . . . Only the sun, the seasons, voices, tastes, a child. . . . But go on. And now? Even poets — who would turn the world upside-down for a phrase — are forced to notice a war. Though not, thank heaven, to let it dictate their verses.

  Green.—The two poets we expected most of — two apart from Auden — have changed, certainly. Spender less than the other. He was always a divided writer. In his early poetry, verses not unintelligent, not unshapely, not without charm — one is almost forced to describe it by negative adjectives, by what it is not — were followed, apparently without his noticing the change, by verses stammering a diffuse emotion, phrases unconsciously vulgar or meaningless, confused or flaccid thought, exactly like a man whose involuntary gestures contradict his willed poise or pose. Immediately below the surface even his happiest phrases flew apart, there was so little fusion between idea and object. But if I am not deceiving myself, his latest poems, full like the others of self-pity, are none the less an effort to disinterest himself. He is not yet able to separate his emotions from the objects they offer him, or to reflect a clear image of experiences which have moved him, or relate his experiences to life except on superficial levels. But it seemed to me that the effort had been made, it existed in spite of failure, helples
s tumbles into bathos and a conventional imagery — the newest cliches, of course. . . . Nipples of bullets. . . . Enthusiastic scent. . . . He is tempted, and only sometimes resists, to inflate a trivial or respectable image with a gust of imprecise emotion, so that it wobbles and sways on the point of bursting. Or by confusing a number of symbols — more often, a number of those less significant images which are metaphors — he offers a smudge of his experience. Or of ideas not worth the trouble of elaborating — they could not be compressed, they would disappear — into verse. Or liberal and humane sentiments, irreproachable as opinions, are expressed in a vague flat way or with an emphasis which calls attention to their decent ordinariness. But here and there in these new poems a spontaneous brilliance, a brief certainty of power or knowledge: for the space of a few verses, or a few lines, he is sure of himself, sure of what he has felt or seen, and able to give an account of it in terms of poetry. Here, I thought, when I was reading and re-reading, here perhaps is a poet, if he would wait. If he were not driven, by some anxiety, to show what he can do. His danger is quite different from the danger we imagined for Auden. He has fewer easy certainties, he is not amused by his own wit and mental agility, he would not, I think, say to himself: Why wait when I can write so well now? Rather it would be: Why wait when I am suffering like this? people should know how over-sensitised I am, how acutely I feel. And yet it does not seem impossible — or it does not yet seem impossible — that at some moment it may occur to him to give up trying to express his feelings with the greatest sincerity and suggestiveness, and try instead to make them yield the purest and most exact poetry,

  As for Day Lewis, he was always the cooler, more apt to regard his sensations and thoughts as objects. He seemed, too, to take a greater and simple pleasure in his impulse to write poetry. He had a gaiety which is very pleasing, and more modest than Auden’s self-amusement. His latest poem — and the last I shall read—

  Smith.—You will have all the keener pleasure in listening to the rest of them when he brings them with him.

  Green.—Perhaps. . . . I am sure at least that his poetry will mature more naturally and gracefully — a good loyal little wine — than the others, that at every stage he will be more firmly in control of his mind’s energy. In his latest poem — it is in some sort a meditation on the idea of time as a state of being, a sensation carrying with it its weight of desires and thoughts — the symbols he finds correspond exactly to the sensations and memories he collects in himself. Certainly he has the will to see his own nature and the nature of life clearly, and to express clearly, and with the appropriate subtlety, what he sees. I only wonder whether he has the persistence. . . . Already I begin to see what effort is needed, what relentless labour, de n’attendre pas la mort pour mourir.

  Smith.—But are there no very remarkable poets living in our country?

  Green.—Certainly there are. I can think of three — Walter de la Mare, T. S. Eliot, and Edith Sitwell. They are all older. The last of these interests me extremely. I have watched her move, from that early dance of all her senses and wit, to a profound sensibility, exquisitely controlled, a suppling of the intellect, to an ease in discerning the relations between things, to an always greater power to concentrate images and sensations within the forms of a poetic statement — if statement were not too frigid a word for these apparitions which are her newest poems. How I regret not being able to read the poems she will write. Her brilliance has a contour, her light obscurity and warmth. To a clear intellect she joins superbly firm senses and a delight in exercising both. Her wit moves between what is most abstract and what is most gentle and touching. It opens an abyss of quietness or horror, descends into it, ascends, always seeking what it never loses, the double note of existence—

  Smith.—Which here, if you listen, is single.

  Green.—My ears are still burning from those other sounds.

  Smith.—You are not sufficiently dead. . . . But don’t listen — yet. . . . You know, all these notes — of existence, as you say — have their source here. You’ll leave me, to find one of them, to listen to death flowing away into life. And I have so many questions unanswered. Were there no young poets? All these you have talked about are older than I am.

  Green.—Oh, any number. Their verses are both trivial and serious. Serious because they have a foreboding, trivial because they are only poets by default — default of life. Few of their verses are worth printing.

  Smith.—Yet it is right that the young of this war should be printed. I should feel as little impulse to criticise them as I would to dissect the two or three weak notes, endlessly repeated, of a February bird. If I read them, shouldn’t I feel the same momentary anguish, the same memories, so close, so lost, of childhood, the same despair at the thought of dying and losing all I saw, as moved the writers? Emotions which have as little to do with the poem as with the bird’s twittering — nothing, in fact, except the occasion. And if one of these young becomes all at once mature, a poet, it can only be because his death is taking the place in him of his ignorance, uncertainties, mistakes, his joys, die serious illness of his son, his conversion, voyages, arthritis, his old age. . . . All these voices I can hear entering and leaving your ears, they are the same voices of my friends; the past is still breathing; the same seeds fall into the same furrows. How well I understand the anxiety of you and your friends not to vanish without having been noticed. I, too, pushed my lips out to catch a drop of that immortality which tastes so differently from anything I expected.

  Green.—It seems to me that what I taste is very faintly salt, as though the sea were not far off.

  Smith.—Wait, wait. . . . Tell me whether you and your friends thought of us at all. What did you think?

  Green.—That we are not like you, that if we could talk to you about war you would exasperate us and we you, that our lives, from our childhood, have been different, less simple, older than yours. I remember the lines written by one of us—

  For us

  No voice will speak in the white cemeteries

  Of France. We are not of that careless kind

  To whom life seemed to offer prize on prize,

  Who, at the terminus, with laughing eyes

  Saw only joy in battle. Blind, stark blind.

  Not very good verses, but they rhyme a feeling most of us have.

  Smith.—Who has been telling you lies about us?

  Green.—For you, the war was a crusade, it excited you; and you had a faith, you believed you were saving something. To us from our childhood the thought of war was unspeakably boring, and often frightening. It made us angry and nervous. We have seen how little it can save. When it began we fought because we had to, because it seemed the thing to do. We were never eager to go.

  Smith.—But who tells you that we were? All my friends, all of them, and I too, went regretfully and at once, feeling we had to, that it was the thing to do. We may have been simpler than you, but we were not blind or careless. And how bored we were. My God, how bored. . . . There is a difference. We were less sorry for ourselves. . . . And another — you expected it. And if you thought of the future — I don’t think we thought about it, we only longed for it, the present was so boring, such an excruciating waste of our time — I have no doubt you thought of it in a more explicit way. But your backward glance regrets all the things we regretted, your senses are identical with ours — and your memories. No, no, you have been deceiving yourselves, you are like us. And we, too, thought, but without pride, that we were a marked generation.

  Green.—Tell me — did you, in a moment of danger or afterwards, feel sometimes an extreme pleasure only in living — so that the smell of bread or to taste it was positively exciting?

  Smith.—Yes.

  Green.—I used to pray to keep it, if I survived.

  Smith.—I did that, too. I know now that if I had lived, life would have been more like this than like that. . . . War is more exacting than at the time it seems. . . .

  At this moment,
another young soldier appears in the doorway of the room, which opens on the yard. They see, from his uniform, that he is a Czech. Smith feels that something on which this stranger was relying for his life has given way, and he hurries to speak, though long since he has discovered the crudity, because of their obstinate logic, of words.

  Smith.—Were you looking for us?

  Czech.—No. I saw the house and it reminded me of one I know very well. Now that I look at it closely I see I was deceived by a doorway, and a tree near it. In fact I can scarcely see it. . . . I — it confuses me.

  Smith.—Use my eyes. Here are two chairs, a window, a mirror, here is a sofa. Stay until you feel quiet.

  Green.—Why are you here? Your country is not at war. You were well out of it.

  Czech.—Is that what you others think? … Show me anything you like of the vileness of war, I will show you something far darker — a rational terrorism, cold, deliberate, wounding parents through the torture of their children, the dreadful mutilation of prisoners, the destruction of reason in the very minds of the ruled. You have never seen cruelty.

  Green.—Not so close. Not clearly. There is a real difference between you and us. It came into the room with you, and I saw that I, and my friends, and this soldier of 1914, are all ignorant beside you. Your nerves themselves know more than ours — the human violin remembering what has been played on it.