by D J Enright
Injury Time
A Memoir
D. J. Enright
Contents
Introduction
Injury Time
Index
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Born in 1920, educated at Leamington College and Downing College, Cambridge, D. J. Enright spent over twenty years teaching English at universities in Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand, and Singapore. He returned to London in 1970 and later became a director of London publishers Chatto & Windus. First and foremost a poet, he published many collections in over fifty years, including Collected Poems: 1948-98 (1998), and translations from Japanese and German verse. He wrote novels for both adults and children, and revised with Madeleine Enright the English translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1992), while his enormous output of non-fiction includes his Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor (1969), a number of critical works, and several anthologies, among them The Oxford Book of Death (1983) and The Faber Book of Fevers and Frets (1989). Observations on life (high and low), literature, morals and manners, human or animal, are recorded in The Way of the Cat (1992), and two companion volumes to Injury Time - Interplay: A Kind of Commonplace Book (1995) and Play Resumed: A Journal (1999). D. J. Enright received the Cholmondeley Award in 1974; he was awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1981 and appointed OBE in 1991. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature since 1961, he was made Companion of Literature by the Society in 1998, an honour granted to no more than ten living writers at any one time. He died on the last day of 2002, after battling vigorously against cancer for seven years.
INTRODUCTION
Injury Time is D. J. Enright’s last book, completed shortly before his death in December 2002. It marks the end of a career notable not only for originality and accomplishment, but for variety as well. Enright was a poet, critic, novelist, reviewer, children’s author, translator and anthologist. He wrote a memorable book about Japan, The World of Dew, and an outstanding autobiography, Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor. And he ended up with three works – Injury Time and its two predecessors, Interplay and Play Resumed – which are hard to classify. He himself subtitled Interplay ‘A Kind of Commonplace Book’, Play Resumed ‘A Journal’ and Injury Time ‘A Memoir’. In an earlier age they might have been called something like ‘musings’.
Faced with this diversity, more than one obituarist was moved to describe him as a man of letters. This is a useful label applied in moderation, but one wouldn’t want to make too much of it. It suggests a servant of literature rather than a creator. It draws attention away from the fact that he was above all else a poet.
A poet who maintained a high level, and who demands – or at any rate deserves – to be read in bulk. His Collected Poems runs to some 400 pages. Open it almost anywhere, and you will find something arresting or enlivening; something to cherish.
His poetry is marked by a number of paradoxes. In many respects, for instance, it makes a point of being anti-literary. The predominant tone is plain and colloquial. There is a constant appeal to ‘life’, as opposed to fine notions, and to the primacy of human beings over myths. Yet the poems are also strewn with literary references. Two collections, Paradise Illustrated and A Faust Book, take the form of verse commentaries on other men’s masterpieces – Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Faust respectively. (With a lesser writer such undertakings might seem bookish and derivative, but not here.) Even in his most personal and least intellectual poem, the childhood sequence The Terrible Shears, he permits himself an unexplained allusion of a decidedly highbrow order – to Leverkühn, in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. The literature and life which are played off against each other in his work are also mixed together.
Again, to consider him in an international context is to be left with a double image: the citizen of the world, the man next door. He has a breadth, a freedom from insularity, which is very impressive – all the more so in comparison with the narrowness of contemporaries such as Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis, with whom he was once (in the days of the Movement) misleadingly associated. At the most obvious level this range can be accounted for by the simple geographical facts of a teaching career which took him to Egypt, Japan, Germany, Thailand and Singapore, and kept him out of England until he was fifty. More significantly, wherever he worked he displayed an openness, a curiosity about culture, an appreciation of the extent to which the lives of the local population were ordinary as well as different. But none of this made him a cosmopolitan, which seems exactly the wrong word for him. He was too rooted. The flavour of his personality remained inescapably English.
Of all the seeming contradictions in his work, the most striking is the discrepancy between his sombre moral concerns and his lightness of touch. His poetry reveals an exceptional awareness of the human capacity for hurting and being hurt. The thought of the twentieth century’s great atrocities is never very far away. He won’t allow himself to forget the realities of hunger, poverty, oppression. Yet he also contrives to be wonderfully entertaining. Among the English poets of his time, I would say, only Betjeman and Gavin Ewart surpass him in this respect.
His gift is best summed up by the little word ‘wit’ – a word, like ‘sex’, that often seems too small for the burdens it has to carry. At its best, without losing its power to amuse, it means understanding, insight, a sense of irony, an ability to make connections. Enright’s wit is generally of this superior kind; his comedy rests on a bedrock of seriousness. Take the short poem ‘Unlawful Assembly’ (the assembly was dispersed by the Singapore police). It is full of verbal ingenuities, but every pun in it makes a point, down to the final sad shrug:
Why subscribe to clarity?
In this vale of teargas
Should one enter a caveat,
Or a monastery?
Some Enright jokes, on the other hand, are there for their own sake. There was a strong element in him of pure comedian (people often said he looked like a comedian). He had the gift of making his readers laugh out loud. And though he sometimes gave signs of wondering whether his humour wasn’t at odds with his subject-matter, this was one of the quarrels with himself out of which he made his poetry. The impulse to clown had a way of breaking through, whether he liked it or not. But then anger, affection and a whole range of other emotions had a way of breaking through the clowning.
The early poems established his credentials as a liberal, a humanist and a democrat – well aware, like all the best liberals, humanists and democrats, of his creeds’ limitations. Sometimes he recalls E. M. Forster: the title of one of his early collections, Some Men Are Brothers, makes a perfect pair with Two Cheers for Democracy. And he doesn’t underestimate the madness of the world:
(You think it is easy, all this sanity?
Try it. It will send you mad.)
But he isn’t actually giving up on sanity. The comment is only a parenthesis.
In the later poems there is an increasing preoccupation with religion. Not so much with religion itself as with the sense of religion, or the empty space that religion has left behind. The brilliantly funny contrasts in Paradise Illustrated cut both ways. The myths are antiquated, the shallow colloquial idiom points up what has been lost:
‘Death,’ said Adam in funereal tones.
‘That’s the worst of what we have done.
As for the rest of it – that’s life.
But Death’s a killer.’
At the same time, there is no suggestion that God, if He exists, is ready to vouchsafe the answers:
Too weak to shiver, children die of cold.
God moves, unmoved, in mysterious ways …
But the human reaching out for God can be very moving.
What the poems fail to achieve (how many poems do?) is maximu
m verbal intensity. A few come close to it: some of the Japanese poems, The Terrible Shears. Many others feature subtle stylistic or rhythmic effects: they are far from being the loose jottings which detractors claim. But they don’t create a sense of absolute unalterable precision. Enright isn’t a poet who shows up at his best in anthologies. You have to read his poems in their natural setting to see quite how good they are.
That still leaves his mastery of prose. A tour of his prose writings which did them justice would linger over such landmarks as his sparkling defence of irony, The Alluring Problem, and the fine seriocomic novel he wrote about Alexandria, Academic Year (published in 1955, rediscovered in the 1980s and surely due to be rediscovered again). It would pay tribute not only to Memoirs of a Mendicant Professor but also to Shakespeare and the Students (an introduction to four of the plays which give you a vivid idea of what his virtues as a professor must have been). And it would pause to salute the most notable of his anthologies, The Oxford Book of Friendship, The Oxford Book of the Supernatural and The Oxford Book of Death. They are not just compilations but imaginative works in their own right – what Ezra Pound called ‘active anthologies’.
He was also an outstanding reviewer-cum-essayist. The most substantial of his critical essays were gathered together over the years in three collections: Conspirators and Poets, Man Is an Onion, A Mania for Sentences. They include some particularly useful studies of German authors – Hölderlin, Thomas Mann, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Günter Grass and others: vigorous assessments which allow for the possibility that many British readers may have resistances which have to be overcome. (A general set of reflections, ‘Aimez-vous Goethe?’, carries the deadpan subtitle ‘An Enquiry into English Attitudes of Non-liking Towards German Literature’.) But all the literary pieces are distinguished by humanity and good sense. They take stock of subjects ranging from Nabokov to Mishima, from Aleister Crowley to Stevie Smith – always with verve, though sometimes with less than total respect. A consideration of Simone de Beauvoir’s essay on the Marquis de Sade. ‘Must We Burn Sade?’, offers the thought: ‘Must we burn Sade? Now that you mention it, why not?’
Beyond these essays lie the hundreds of minor reviews which Enright published, and which are presumably never going to be collected. It’s a fate which has to be bowed to: not everything can be saved. But a great deal of admirable writing is going to be lost with them – beautifully apt formulations, illuminating asides, devastating (but never brutal) judgements, common sense delivered with epigrammatic force. Some of Enright’s remarks I find myself recalling years afterwards, long after the occasion for them has faded. His response when he was reviewing a dodgy biographical study of Thomas Hardy, for instance, and the author asked whether the events described in such and such a Hardy poem actually happened: ‘They happen every time you read it.’
In Interplay (1995) many of Enright’s gifts came together. It is a hotchpotch (his own word for it) which also doubles as an anthology and a collection of miniature essays. It contains anecdotes, squibs, aphorisms, reminiscences, timeless thoughts, topical notes, comic turns, unfamiliar quotations. There are even a few poems.
At seventy-five Enright had discovered a form of writing which suited him perfectly. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked so well for him when he was younger: the book very much reflects his advanced and advancing years. Not, one hastens to add, in any diminution of energy or acuteness. It is wonderfully lively. In some respects – in its reactions to news items and television programmes, for instance – it might even be called strikingly up to date. But it is also a work of long perspectives, of judgements tempered by a lifetime’s experience. Much of it is devoted to the condition of old age itself. And the fact that Enright went on living in the present didn’t oblige him to like the present. The book is also part polemic, part sottisier. It sets its face against false fashions and approved-of brutalities, against the coarsening and dehumanizing of contemporary life.
One must be careful. It is easy for old men to idealize the past, easy for them to attribute their own infirmities to the times they live in, easy for them to interpret any change as a threat. Enright was well aware of these dangers. He frequently reverts to them. But by and large he trusts his own reactions. And he provides evidence. Many of his quotations and examples are hilarious, especially when they involve mangled language. Others, in principle at least, are depressing:
The television listing says of a documentary: ‘… offers that awful cliché, a message of hope’. Most of the rest of the evening’s viewing has to do with murder, sexual problems, sick comedy. No mention of awful clichés there.
By itself, that could make you feel rather glum. But the quality of Enright’s attack is bracing. So, emphatically, is the book as a whole.
Three years later, Play Resumed offered more of the same – which is exactly what Enright’s admirers had hoped for. So, up to a point, does the present book. It is as fresh and attractive as its predecessors. But it is also shadowed, much more directly, by death. Illness is one of its central themes.
When I began reading the manuscript, only a week or two after Enright died, I felt melancholy and apprehensive. The melancholy didn’t go away: almost every page brought home how sad it was, and how frustrating, that one wasn’t going to be able to speak to this man again. But I can only report that as I read on, my most obvious reaction was laughter – one little explosion after another. Injury Time seems to me the funniest of the three final books, though I can’t quite say why. Possibly it’s pure chance. Possibly, near the end, Enright’s perception of human folly grew even sharper.
Certainly his exasperation is unabated. Corruptions of language are put on display alongside corruptions of manners: often the two are inseparable. The universities receive some particularly satisfying swipes (their fund-raising techniques no less than the nonsenses which prevail in English Departments). So, inevitably, does journalism. The triumphs of ignorance and the failures of sensitivity (or plain decency) are tracked down in many other quarters.
This is only one strand in the book, however. For the most part curiosity and pleasure in quirkiness get the better of pessimism. Distaste for bad writing is matched – surpassed – by the love of good writing. Small beguiling anecdotes jostle with reflections on large issues – on the Self, on whether anything matters. You are repeatedly impressed (though he himself would have groaned at the word) by Enright’s wisdom.
And then, in a region where wisdom is only of limited help, there are the ravages of illness. Enright doesn’t say much about them, and we are grateful for his reserve. But of course he says something, and there are enough glimpses to give us some notion of his multiple ordeal. (A mention of twisted arthritic fingers pulls us up short. That too: we hadn’t realized … ) There are also plentiful reminders that ‘patient’ will always be, as he says, ‘a demeaning word’. It’s no reflection on the care we receive. It’s just the way things are.
Mostly, though, we are struck by his determination to go on living life on his own terms as long as he humanly can. The book increasingly comes to seem a victory over the illness; and to that extent it is not only a wise book, and an entertaining one, but a heroic book as well.
John Gross
Many of you will not have lived before. You would never have dreamt of it. Now you are living, and we hope that you will enjoy it. But it is our responsibility to warn you that LIFE CAN GO DOWN IN VALUE AS WELL AS UP, and the past is not a sure guide to the future. Living can be bad for your well-being and even lead to death.
From ‘Warnings, warnings!’
(Old Men and Comets, 1993)
I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations.
Samuel Johnson
Next in criminality to him who violates the laws of his country, is he who violates the language.
Walter Savage Landor
Diseases crucify the soul of man, attenuate our bodies, dry them, wither them, shrivel them up like old apples, ma
ke them so many anatomies.
Robert Burton
Take heed, sickness, what you do:
I shall fear you’ll surfeit too.
Live not we as all thy stalls,
Spitals, pest-houses, hospitals,
Scarce will take our present store?
And this age will build no more.
Ben Jonson
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.
Susan Sontag
I write to Gale Research Inc., Detroit, to ask that any future requests to reprint material should be addressed to me, not to my literary estate. (See, if so inclined, Play Resumed, p. 199.) Next I buy a handsome A4 Feint notebook, Tiger Brand, from Ryman, hoping that notes will follow. A label says ‘Discontinued’. Is this a hint? A paper tiger? (Superstition, said Goethe, is the poetry of life. No, rather the foolish, shamefaced, harsh, implacable doggerel of one’s declining years.) And then ‘feint’, surely a good omen; defined in the dictionaries as ruled paper ‘with inconspicuous lines to guide writing’ – i.e. discreet inspiration.
C. H. Sisson has a poem, ‘Looking at Old Note-Books’, which begins: ‘It would seem that I thought,/ At that time, more than I ought.’ No danger of that here; this is a new notebook. Later in the poem: ‘There was the London Library/ Doing its best to confuse me.’ That doesn’t apply either, except that the Library lifts confuse me and the stairs forbid. An impoverishment of one’s life. Long ago, when searching out items for an anthology on the subject of Death, I fell over an invisible stool, stumbled against the bookstack, and dislodged a number of volumes which fell on the other side of the stack. A cry of distress arose, and I hurried round to find a frail young woman lying on the floor, covered in books. Apologizing, I scooped up the books and restored them to their putative places on the shelves. The young woman, recovering her wits, snapped out: ‘You’ve put back the books I want to take out!’ I limped away, feeling a trickle of warm liquid down my leg. Blood, it turned out. And a long tear in my trousers. Those were the days.