Injury Time

by D J Enright

  On the front page of The Times, 11 December 1999, I spotted a weird reference to Madeleine Albright and Robin Cook meeting in ‘a Georget-own restaurant’ in Washington. Some of my favourite perversions, ‘the-rapist’, ‘men-swear’, ‘mans-laughter’, crop up in John Murray’s A Gentleman Publisher’s Commonplace Book, along with ‘not-iced’ (another word unamenable to hyphenation), ‘to-wed’, ‘male-factor’ (if you must hyphenate, the Oxford Minidictionary of Spelling can only suggest ‘mal-efactor’), and the demythologizing, down-to-earth ‘leg-end of King Arthur’s Table’.

  Professor Roy Harris has drawn the attention of The Times to its ‘alarming report concerning the “hot dog-munching sports fans” who allegedly fill baseball parks in the US’. More mysteriously poignant, a misplaced hyphen in an old Sunday Times magazine has inspired a poem by Charles Boyle, ‘Literals’:

  Ask them why so sad

  the streets-weepers here

  in the dun garb of the borough cleansing department …

  (Here, ‘dun’ is neither Dr Johnson’s low epithet nor the dictionary’s ‘poet’, but is defined in another sense as ‘dull greyish brown’, factual and rather dull, though tinged with melancholy by the context. Karl Kraus remarked that the more closely one looks at a word, the further back it points into its own history.)

  The wretchedness of the human condition, says Montaigne, means that we have less to enjoy than to avoid, that extreme sensual delight touches us less than the lightest of pains. (Once a generally received or at least professed opinion: ‘For the world, I count it not an inn, but an hospital’: Sir Thomas Browne.) Being well means not being ill. For instance, ‘The appetite which transports us in our relations with women seeks only to dispel the pain caused by ardent and frenzied desire; it aims only to assuage desire and bring us to rest and repose, freed from that fever.’ (Tell that to the entertainment industry.)

  Ah, the consolations that offer themselves in age! Death, even – it means not being ill, which means being well. Mind you – Montaigne is always minding us – if you could root out knowledge of pain, you would at the same time eradicate knowledge of pleasure. ‘For man, ill can be good in its turn.’ Which is also consoling, I suppose, if less persuasively. One seems to have heard something like it propounded in various unsavoury connections.

  Death is undoubtedly the most noteworthy action of a person’s life. But don’t kid yourself that the whole universe is taking note, or that the gods above are working themselves up over it.

  Some deaths are more notable than others. Pomponius Atticus, friend of Cicero, was ill, and all attempts to cure him only increased his suffering. He decided to die by starving himself. This course had the effect of restoring him to health. His friends were jubilant, and proposed a celebratory feast, but he told them that since he was bound to die sooner or later, and had gone some way towards dying, he would rather not have to start all over again.

  If you have profited from life, then go away satisfied. If life is giving you nothing, why do you still desire it? Montaigne himself wants death to find him planting his cabbages, and not too bothered about leaving the gardening unfinished.

  Went for a CT scan (computerized tomography). You recline on a couch and are gently propelled through what resembles a giant washing-machine. I remembered giving something towards its purchase. ‘This must be roughly four years old,’ I remarked, making to pat the scanner familiarly on its gleaming flank. ‘Oh no,’ said one of the team, ‘this is new: you’re thinking of the old magnetic one. It’s still around somewhere.’ The scanner began to hum complacently.

  I made a mental note, hoping the apparatus would pick it up, to exonerate certain types of useful computer from the general contumely.

  Peter Scupham tells me that once he dreamt he was reading his own obituary under the headline ‘Local Man Goes to Heaven’. But the headline was as far as he got. Dreams have a habit of leading us on only to thwart us. On occasion, though, to spare us.

  Since, among other things, Scupham is a dealer in second-hand books, it is not too surprising that in another dream he found himself reading a book entitled A Duck for St George, or Crusading in the Holy Land with Quack and Bill. A rare item, no doubt, in a once favoured genre. I don’t imagine Scupham had time to get much beyond the title.

  *

  Dreams, they say, tell stories

  To explain away our woes,

  And so we go on living.

  Even nightmares can show mercy. At times, so desperate are a dream’s efforts to palliate that the results are ludicrous to the waking mind. Writing of his sufferings from ‘the stone’, Montaigne adduced the dreamer in Cicero’s De Divinatione who dreamt he was embracing a girl and found that he had ejaculated his gallstone in the bedclothes. Montaigne wished he had that faculty, but alas his own gallstones had quite put him off girls.

  A recurrent explanation by teenagers of why they became pregnant has it that ‘There was nothing to do’, in which their mothers concur: ‘Nothing for them to do around here, is there?’ Except watch television – and ‘The government should do something,’ says one teenager’s mother, ‘there’s too much sex on television.’ In my teenage we didn’t have all that much to do – school work (reluctantly), reading library books, temperate friendships (same-sex), bike-rides into the countryside (which still existed then, and not far away), a kick around the Rec – but we did it. Also, indoors, spinning yards of cork-wool (what? The word isn’t in modern dictionaries), making papier-mâché bowls, shaping round trays with scalloped rims from old gramophone records softened in the oven … Utterly useless objects, art for art’s sake and keeping the kids occupied: all this cost nothing, and no one got pregnant.

  The idea of sex as something to do when there was nothing to do would have baffled us, even when we had absolutely nothing to do, or only boring or tiring things. It was something (rather intimidating) to be done when we had grown a good deal cleverer. Or were married, whichever came first. Not that the past was conspicuously better than the present – far from it – but I suspect that in a few important respects it was easier on the young. The young tended to be young then.

  Towards the end of 1998 a clinic opened at a Boots store in Glasgow for the purpose of providing condoms for children as young as thirteen. Parents were not to be consulted. Can you believe it? Surely the children would prefer the traditional sort of balloon that has a funny face and goes pop. No more was heard of the clinic, so we may assume it failed in its aim to combat teenage pregnancies and the spread of sexual diseases.

  Four years later, as part of a campaign to reduce teenage pregnancies, the Government suggests that parents should leave condoms about the house, as if hidden but not hard to spot, for their children to discover. The idea is that what the kids nick – forbidden fruit as it were – carries more weight than what is urged on them. A possible drawback comes to mind: enterprising youngsters may be led to seek out other buried treasures, such as diamond rings, pearl necklaces, gold watches and credit cards.

  When the natives of Tierra del Fuego swarmed round ships from Europe chanting ‘yammerschooner’, it was assumed they were demanding gifts. It now appears that the expression meant ‘be kind to us’. Heartbreaking.

  In age, the lurking suspicion that one never knew very much seems to be confirmed. One got by, yes – by a kind of confidence trick, by mimicking, trotting out a limited number of words and set phrases, beginnings that promised to go far but faded out discreetly. All the time one sensed there was a richer language somewhere, and a treasury of experience and knowledge. Like the language of the Maipure people, who lived around the Orinoco River until they were wiped out by a rival tribe towards the end of the eighteenth century, and their language was lost. Except that, even today, a few broken phrases survive in the speech of parrots, erstwhile pets of the Maipure people.

  Putting head in gas oven, worried over husband spending too much of his meagre wage on drink, or children refusing what food there was, the rent money, the gas
bill (a little extra on the next, but can’t be helped). A generation or two later, much has changed. Sick jokes about distracted women sticking heads in electric ovens. Gas oven’s had got a bad name. Once there were pink pills for pale people (a bit of a joke), Parrish’s Food, cascara sagrada (religiously taken), Sloane’s liniment, and the dreaded, unpronounceable, two-way Ipecacuanha Wine – and not much else in the medicine chest in the bathroom. (There may not have been a medicine chest; there may not have been a bathroom.) Nowadays there’s a pharmacopoeia in every household, conveniently washed down with a favourite drink. Or of course cars and their assiduous exhausts in the privacy of one’s garage. Whatever the means, fluctuating between classes, sexes and ages, suicide is a clumsy experiment, as Schopenhauer noted, whose outcome must remain unknown to the experimenter.

  Oh yes, Sylvia Plath resorted to a gas oven as late as 1963. A reviewer of The Oxford Book of Contemporary Verse (1980), in which Sylvia Plath was not represented, rebuked the compiler for being unable to come to terms with her. I suppose I had no desire to come to terms with her, and saw no moral, literary, psychiatric or otherwise legitimate obligation to do so. (And what does ‘come to terms with’ mean? Reconcile oneself to? – I would not insult her sad shade by imagining any such presumptuous thing.)

  A (relatively) respected newspaper has just printed articles on Sylvia Plath and Marilyn Monroe side by side: established icons, authenticated devotional images, the one highbrow, the other low-neckline. That once celebrated and potent chronicle of sorrows and sickness, Werther and its ‘vielbeweinter Schatten’, was as nothing compared with the ghastly, luxuriant saga of Plath/Hughes.

  Selfishly, one has other things to come to terms with, things that are more pressing even though they do not involve poetry or entail a gas oven. And in this one isn’t really all that alone. The world isn’t populated solely by prurient or self-seeking readers and writers avid for copy. It only seems that way.

  An Indian scholar working on ‘Sylvia Plath as a Modernist’ e-mails a British university to seek guidance on enrolling for a D.Litt.: ‘Modernism has been my keen interest and I have investigated the problems been faced by the poets who led troubled lives. Their obsession with death, their encounter with death tragically and the confessions recorded in their immortal works, has prompted me to still go deep down and probe extensively and intensively in to their lives and works.’ Sounds somewhat like a cystoscopy. Literature needs its physicians.

  Like other people, poets led troubled lives, confessed, and encountered death long before modernism, motors and medications came along. But ‘contemporary’, as Erich Heller remarked, is a ‘queer term of praise with which some critics appear to have replaced the older virtue of timelessness’.

  In Vernon Scannell’s new novel, Feminine Endings, about a creative-writing centre up north, a businessman explains his presence: ‘As you can imagine, I don’t get much time for reading. That’s partly why I thought poetry would be a good thing to get into. I mean because it’s shorter and it’s got what you might call cachet.’

  Cachet? So that’s it! How remote from my young days, when poetry – the reading of it, let alone the creatively writing of it – got you a bad name, or a mixture of bad names.

  ‘Cachet’ also signifies (I quote The Concise Oxford Dictionary) ‘a flat capsule enclosing a dose of unpleasant-tasting medicine’. That’s more like it.

  ‘No one could tell from these translations that Goethe was a great poet’: the complaint has often been heard. Bedevilled by considerations of contemporariness and timelessness, such translations are indisputably dispiriting. There is no better translator of Goethe into English today than David Luke, and yet … The unwieldy abstractions roll out like banks of storm clouds, portentous and platitudinous, frequently in binary blasts: ‘Freud und Schmerz’, ‘Geist und Körper’, ‘Luft und Lüftchen’, ‘ewige Gefühle’, ‘ewig Schöne’, ‘Weltseele’, ‘O Allumklammernde’, ‘Des hohen Himmels fruchtende Fülle’, ‘Lieb und Leben’, ‘O Erd, o Sommer!’, O Glück, o Lust’ … Luke has no choice but to follow. Could you tell there was a great poet here? If not, can you honestly blame the translator? (Small chance of his living up to Goethe’s saying, that translators are pimps busily cracking up the charms of some half-veiled beauty, and exciting an irresistible desire for the original.)

  Interestingly it is the finest of the perfect, simple-seeming lyrics, long held the least translatable, that come out best in English. However, Luke outlines a problem: Goethe’s poetry is ‘of the essence of German’ and, unfortunately for the translator, ‘the converse is also true: the poetry of the German language is of the essence of Goethe’. The idea strikes me as interesting, not to say arcane, but not quite real. Hölderlin is eminently translatable, so is a fair amount of Heine, the same (or more) is true of Rilke (possibly his idiosyncratic way with words emboldens the translator), and as for Brecht, you can hardly go wrong with him. In any case, even if Goethe is seen as inarguably sui generis, Luke’s practice belies his theory.

  There is an alternative Goethe, as Dionysian, subversive and mischievous as elsewhere he is Apollonian, authoritarian and earnest: the author of the Roman Elegies and The Diary (both translated splendidly by David Luke, the latter and parts of the former made public relatively lately), epigrams (some long suppressed), passages from Faust (often featuring Mephistopheles, ‘the spirit who always denies’), the novel Elective Affinities (scandalous and irreproachable), and impromptu pronouncements and asides recorded by Eckermann and others close to him. Whatever those ‘essences’, Goethe was not subject to them. This emperor is flesh and blood, unbuttoned; at times he hardly seems to be wearing any clothes at all.

  In Trains of Thought Victor Brombert writes about the English classes in a Paris lycée during the 1930s:

  Our most memorable prof d’anglais, Monsieur Labé, appeared to me as uncanny as Coleridge’s ancient mariner, whom he seemed determined to reincarnate. He too had a long grey beard and a glittering eye … With a visionary look, Monsieur Labé would raise himself full height from his desk chair, book in hand, one arm outstretched, and declaim the opening lines in solemn fashion. He became a seer, and no longer saw us. Yet he was not ridiculous. His vatic manner amused but also impressed us. I was titillated by the sound effects of his nasal chant and the marked scanning.

  The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

  The furrow followed free …

  It was then and there, and not in my French classes, that I first tasted the delights of alliteration and assonance.

  Monsieur Labé could become quite oracular, and then his forked beard would respond by flowing in separate directions, as though agitated by the conflictual winds of inspiration. He initiated us to Wordsworth’s sonnet:

  The world is too much with us; late and soon,

  Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:

  Little we see in Nature that is ours;

  We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

  I did not quite understand what a ‘sordid boon’ could possibly be, nor why it deserved an exclamation mark. Nor did I have a clear idea of how and to whom we had given our hearts away. The words ‘spending’ and ‘powers’ also remained somewhat foggy in the context. But no matter. Something did click.

  Every school should have a Monsieur Labé. (I reproduce him here by kind permission of W. W. Norton & Company.)

  ‘A lazar-house it seemed.’ Ghastly spasm, or racking torture, convulsions, epilepsies, fierce catarrhs, intestine stone and ulcer, colic pangs, pining atrophy, marasmus, dropsies, asthmas, and joint-racking rheums … All ascribed to ‘th’inabstinence’ of Eve, whose daughters are much in demand as nurses.

  ‘Nor love thy life, nor hate; but what thou livest, live well.’ Excellent advice, Michael. Unfortunately we’re not all of us archangels.

  Scholars say that Milton depicts Eve’s dreaming as irresponsible fancy (‘fantasy’), and Adam’s as showing a more discerning imagination. (Along the lines of Coleridg
e’s distinction.) But is this the case? Would Adam or Eve have dreamt at all, prelapsarianly? Wouldn’t their sleep be tranquil, untroubled, like (as we hopefully put it) a baby’s? It was after the Fall that we came to need dreams as solace, or deserve them as penance. They can hark back briefly to a state of innocence; they can point up the anxieties, sorrows, crimes and terrors of our waking life.

  But ‘our two first parents’ did dream, it seems. Normally, we gather, Eve dreamt of Adam or of work done or to be done. (At that time work and pleasure were one and the same; eating bread in the sweat of one’s face came later.) Her famous ‘dream’ – when Satan, squatting like a toad close at her ear, assayed ‘by his devilish art to reach/ The organs of her fancy’, and raise ‘at least distempered, discontented thoughts,/ Vain hopes, vain aims, inordinate desires’, until disturbed by Ithuriel with his angelic spear – was no dream generated within, but involuntary hypnopaedia, ‘fraudulent temptation’, seduction from without.

  When comforting Eve (who had gone some way to comforting herself: ‘how glad I waked/ To find this but a dream!’), Adam showed himself so knowledgeable on the subject – the fault lies not with fancy, whose important role is to serve reason by forming shapes from information passed on by the five senses, but with ‘mimic fancy’, which takes over when true fancy sleeps and, ‘misjoining shapes,/ Wild work produces oft, and most in dreams’ – that we wonder what he customarily dreamt of. In the absence of evidence, we may suppose, of God, or work done or to be done, and of Eve. His only recorded ‘dream’, of witnessing in detail the creation of his helpmate, occurred ‘as in a trance’, or as if partly anaesthetized (the least one would expect while having a rib removed). No discerning imagination at work there.