Macho!
Hembra!
Macho!
Hembra!
Macho!
HEMBRA!
The boy clinched the argument.
What about Che, then, I wanted to say, didn’t he have long hair?
Just as the following exchange used to take place, at least once a year, between me and mi mam:
Get your hair cut. Boys don’t have long hair.
What about Jesus, then, didn’t he have long hair?
Don’t talk to me like that!
So the bits of hair as he left them and, in the wardrobe, a purple crimplene shirt he’d worn only once, and all the heads in sombrero de yarey, on the tops of bodies belted with sheathed machetes and/or holstered pistols, swivelled, gawped and guffawed. The lobby rang with the studs of their boots. It was then I evolved the perhaps counter-revolutionary concept of machetismo.
I was sitting one day in the Public Library in the Academy of Science building in Carlos III reading Lydia Cabrera’s absolutely unobtainable book El Monte (1954), a book which apportions the Cuban flora to the various orishas, and is acknowledged by many writers to be one of the strongest influences on their work. This is especially true of those poets I have already mentioned who are seeking to create a specifically Cuban mythology for the revolution. I was reading how Shango inhabited the silk cotton tree, and the palma real, and the incandescent flame tree, and opposite me was a man taking copious notes from a book called Destilacíon de alcoholes. And well he might, for Cuba is pretty boozeless. I hadn’t had a drop in all the two months I’d been in Havana, except a gnat-piss beer named after the rebellious Indian Hatuey. The heat of the afternoon made me drowse in my seat under the bust of Cervantes, and suddenly I was myself again, pissed, on palm wine, Shango juice, wearing my purple crimplene shirt (Jan Hus’s colour, Miroslav Holub once told me) and my hair flowing in the wind off somewhere near Key West, and I strode along the wall of the Malecon, Malecon, and the shouts, Malecon, or was it Morejón or Marejón, but there was I, Shago (stet) the Shaky Fairy tilting a huge padded red phallus at all the military bureaucracies of the world. But, curiously, for all their African inheritance they don’t make palm wine in Cuba.
As we left Havana, on our way to Brazil to find Shango there, Jane bought a doll in the airport. One of those things – costumes, beefeater, guardsman – a nation projects something of its image into, and there was nothing else to buy except those lovely brown phalluses of tobacco with names like Romeo and Juliet. But I don’t smoke, though my wife had developed a taste for cigars in Havana and we were entitled to two cheap, definitely not hand-rolled ones per male person per evening meal. So I used to get the ration for Rosemarie. But she was tutted at by the same lift-lady who tutted at my hair, when she was smoking one. Women don’t do that. And Jane’s doll was none other than the hooded diablito of the Abakuá cult, noted, as Lydia Cabrera tells us in the study of the rites we have already mentioned, for its ‘agresividad’ and dedicated, above all, to Afro-Cuban (-Spanish) machismo. ‘To be a man’, one of their refrains goes, ‘you don’t need to be an Abakuá, but to be an Abakuá you need to be a man.’ And the innermost secret of this cult, the sanctum sanctissimorum, the Fa Ekue, as they say in Efik, and as El Macho Hemingway could no doubt tell us, behind the black curtain, is a skull. But machismo had the last word on me. I noticed with a sudden panic that in my Mexican visa, opposite ‘profession’, and no doubt misled by my pre-Havana days haircut, the consular authorities had written: ‘escritora’. I masculinised it discreetly on the short flight over to Mexico City, but fluttered a bit as they went through my papers, the toads in dark glasses who shoota de espiders in Mejico. One said, the other nodding at me, and I was terrified they were going to put the deleted ‘-a’ to the test:
Profesión?
Escritor.
Escritor?
Sí, you know, The Children of Sanchez and all that shit!
In Brazil, in Salvador, Bahia de todos os Santos, there was a boutique called Xangô, moda masculina, and it sold purple crimplene shirts. The African cults were on display for tourists. The hotels advertised TODAY, CANDOMBLÉ or TODAY, CAPOEIRA, that ritualistic foot fighting, of Angolan origin, that has given such a distinctive style to Brazilian football. Further north in Recife, in Pernambuco, all the cults are called xangôs after Shango, and at one I was given a medallion to wear round my neck by Pai Apolinário Gomes da Mota. It said that I was a filho do Xangou, a ‘son of Shango’, and when Shango came to possess the poor, ugly, worn women who were yet so graceful in their dancing, and became their joy, he was Xango meninho, ‘young Shango’, and Xangô velho, ‘old Shango’, and they were both St John the Baptist. The iconography of the double axe had survived on my red and white medallion, but had been metamorphosed over the years into a crutch, like Mendive’s hung on the wall of his house, like Jane’s. Researchers of the local Sociological Institute were doing studies of the relation between xangôs and pederasty, and on the high incidence of mental instability among the devotees, and a psychiatrist was using the drums of Shango in his patients’ therapy. I wore my medallion on the plane from Recife to Brasilia, and the bits of red paint came off on my almost hairless chest. In Brasilia all the buildings were El Che high and the ground plan was like a double axe. At night a violent storm swept across the surrounding desert. The lightning came out of the sky, first white, then red. It lit up all night the pyramid of the National Theatre, where they were playing The Devil Is a Woman.
I arrived back in England, unisex rampant, a son of Shango the Shaky Fairy, Santa Bárbara, St John the Baptist, suicidal king, virgin martyr, man, woman, young, old, black, white, god and guerrilla, and when I got back to Newcastle on the edge of the Roman Wall, I remembered how Tacitus had described Britain as bipennis, ‘double-axed’ (Agricola 10.3). I huddle over the fire, my flesh mottling to Shango’s colours, fondling my oshe Shango, staring into the flames of the Shilbottle cobbles, flushing in Shango’s honour as I brood on punishment and love, and invoke his epiphany, here and now, in Britannia, bold but gentle, brave but neutral, an orisha in touch with the dead, the living and the yet to be, and with only double axes to grind.
The Inkwell of Dr Agrippa
* * *
1971
When I search my childhood for something to explain what drove me into poetry, something like Pablo Neruda’s story of the silent exchange of a toy lamb and a pine cone between himself and an unseen boy through a hole in a fence, I can find nothing quite so significantly beautiful, but there are things which brought to me, early but obscurely, the same precious idea ‘that all humanity is somehow together’. ‘To feel’, Neruda says, ‘the affection that comes from those unknown to us who are watching over our sleep and solitude … widens out the boundaries of our being and unites all living things!’ My images are all to do with the war. One of my very earliest memories is of bombs falling, the windows shaking, myself and my mother crouching in the cellar listening, me begging to be allowed to rush out into the lit-up streets, the whistlings sounded so festive. The next morning, I found the overgrown tennis courts in the local park pitted with bomb craters. As I rooted around in one for shrapnel, I heard someone talking to a policeman utter the still haunting but no longer so puzzling phrase ‘humane bomber’. Another is the contact I had with German prisoners of war in a work party near our street. I remember only we children talked to them much. I introduced them to the pleasures of smoking cinnamon sticks, and bought their supplies from the chemist. Another is of a street party with a bonfire and such joy, celebration and general fraternity as I have never seen since. As I grew up the image stayed, but I came to realise that the cause of the celebration was Hiroshima. Another is the dazed feeling of being led by the hand from a cinema into the sunlit City Square after seeing films of Belsen in 1945, when I was eight. Around all these too is a general atmosphere of the inarticulate and unmentionable, a silence compounded of the hand-me-down Victorian adage, ‘Children should be seen and not heard,’
and the mock-Yorkshire taciturnity of ‘Hear all, see all, say nowt.’ Even now when I have finished a poem I have bouts of speechlessness in which that fireside atmosphere again casts dark shadows in my skull. When I began my travels, I converted that into a third part of my small-time self-dramatisations of ‘silence, exile and cunning’.
In our street in Hoggarty Leeds I was the only one who used his literacy to read books, the only ‘scholar’, and so every kind of cultural throwaway from spring-cleaned attics and the cellars of the deceased found its way to me. I acquired piles of old 78s – George Formby, the Savoy Orpheans, Sophie Tucker, Sandy Powell, Peter Dawson – and sometimes the odd book – an old guide to Matlock, the Heckmondwike Temperance Hymnal, stamped Not to Be Taken Away, and, above all, a Livingstone’s Travels so massive I could barely manhandle it. Somehow it seems that my two early ambitions to be Dr Livingstone and George Formby were compromised in the role of poet, half missionary, half comic, Bible and banjolele, the Renaissance ut doceat, ut placeat.
Although there were strenuous and exhausting years under formal education, my vividest memories of enthralled achievement are in minor closet dramas of midnight or dawn autodidacticism in the style of Thomas Cooper the Chartist poet. In some ways I still re-enact this when I write a poem. My school, Leeds Grammar School, to which I won one of six scholarships for the plebs, seemed to me like a class conspiracy. When I left, my final report said: ‘He possesses something of the poetical imagination, but suffers from the waywardness of that gift.’ The windows behind the altar in the school chapel were dedicated to Miles, the soldier, and Mercator, the merchant. Somehow I can’t recall the pig in the middle. But when I close my eyes now I see Poeta, the poet, sometimes as poised, saintly and acceptable as his worldly flankers, sometimes like some half-naked shaker in the throes of a virulent scribendi cacoethes, being belaboured by public-school angels wielding gamma minuses like immense shillelaghs over their glossy Cherry Blossomy hairstyles, driving the poet from the Garden of Eton.
It was probably no less a pressure than the whole weight of the Protestant ethic in its death agonies, a monstrous north of England millstone grit, that made me pit myself against the most difficult traditional verse forms. It had to be hard work, and it was, and it still is. I learned by what Yeats called ‘sedentary toil and the imitation of great masters’. I still find it all almost impossibly difficult, but the difference now is that, again in the words of Yeats, ‘difficulty is our plough’. Nothing encourages me more than the progress from a first to a final draft in Yeats. Some of my poems in The Loiners went through as many as forty or fifty versions. The forms I taught myself, through use and an enormous amount of translation, none of which I kept, are now enactments of unresolved existential problems, of personal energies in ambiguous conflict with the stereotype, sexual, racial, political, national. The themes, like Zárate’s History of Peru, are about discovery and conquest; celebration and defeat.
The myth of Virgil, whose Aeneid I read and re-read for some five years and still read often, and whose laborious mother-bear methods of composition I adopted as a heroic posture of my own, is a constant threat to the most hubristic poetic self-confidence. Virgil asked for his ‘botched’ epic to be burned at his death. The example of Rimbaud is also disturbing. Fracastorius, part of whose Syphilis (Verona, 1530) I translated in The Loiners, was born literally without a mouth and died speechless. And there is that most haunting epigraph in the whole of literature, the sentence from Azedinne El Mocadecci, prefixed to Edward Powys Mathers’s masterly and beautiful rendering of the Panchasika of Chauras, Black Marigolds: ‘And sometimes we look to the end of the tale that there should be marriage feasts, and find only, as it were, black marigolds and a silence.’ With these examples in mind and haunted by recent history on which speech gags, the choice, especially in an environment where poetry was only for the ‘lassy-lad’, seemed to lie between making my poetry important against all odds or giving it up, renouncing all this fiddle for the more important thing. I can’t see myself achieving the first, and however hard I try, I don’t seem to be able to manage the second, so I expect that like Virgil I’ll put off the final renunciation until my deathbed. Meanwhile, I go on trying, wavering between a parody of heroic effort I learned in the hushed attic of my childhood and an equally mock-heroic vow of silence.
The Loiners (citizens of Leeds, citizens who bear their loins through the terrors of life, ‘loners’) was begun in Africa, after I had thawed out my tongue on a Nigerian version of the Lysistrata, which I translated and adapted with James Simmons, the Irish poet. Shortly after the publication of The Loiners, I was killing time in Hereford Cathedral before catching a train home after giving a reading from the book, and suddenly I found myself standing before the Mappa Mundi, a thirteenth-century map of the world like a golden brain with a tumour somewhere near Paradise. If you look at Africa on it, you see all its prodigies, the Hermaphrodites, the Himantopodes, the four-eyed Marmini, the Psylli, the Troglodytes, and the kin of Fracastorius the mouthless race of Ethiopia and all their strange brothers. But in great gold letters the Dark Continent is labelled EUROPE. Prebendary A. L. Moir, writing on this incredible error, suggests either that the names were added erroneously by a later hand, or, and I like to think that this is the truth, that it is ‘an attempt to represent Africa–Europe as a single entity with interchangeable names’. I felt the same almost unbearable excitement staring at the Mappa Mundi (with no New World as yet) as I felt when I first read the words of Thomas Browne which I use as an epigraph to the African poems in The Loiners: ‘There is all Africa and her prodigies in us; we are that bold and adventurous piece of nature.’ Or when about to move to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I am now living, after four years in Africa and a year in Prague, I read in a poem attributed to John Cleveland:
Correct your maps: Newcastle is Peru.
That accident (I had my head split open by a laundry van at the age of three), that accident, Mrs ’Arrison, I overheard a neighbour say to my mother, all that there reading. It’ll turn ’is ’ead. Now I hear her saying: I told you so.
The Misanthrope
* * *
1973–4
JANE EYRE’S SISTER
This version of Le Misanthrope, commissioned by the National Theatre for production in 1973, the tercentenary of Molière’s death, sets the play in 1966, exactly three hundred years after its first performance. One of the focuses for mediating the transition was the famous series of articles that André Ribaud contributed to the French satirical paper Le Canard enchaîné, under the title of La Cour, with Moisan’s brilliant drawings, interpreting the régime of General de Gaulle as if he were Louis XIV. The articles were continued under M. Pompidou as La Régence. There are some obvious advantages to such a transposition: characters can still on occasions refer to ‘the Court’, but it is intended in the sense of M. Ribaud: the subversive pamphlet, foisted on Alceste in the same way as one was foisted on Molière by enemies angered by Tartuffe, can be readily accepted in a period during which, from 1959 to 1966, no fewer than three hundred convictions were made under a dusty old law which made it a crime to insult the head of state; above all, it has the advantage of anchoring in a more accessible society some of the more far-reaching and complex implications of Alceste’s dilemma, personal, social, ethical, political. Once the transition had been made other adjustments had to follow. The sonnet I first wrote for Oronte has now been replaced by something closer to my own experience of today’s poetaster. To adapt what John Dryden, one of my masters and mentors in the art of the couplet, said of his great translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, ‘I hope the additions will seem not stuck into Molière, but growing out of him’: no more intrusive, that is, than the sackbut, psaltery and dulcimer the Jacobean translators of the Bible introduced into the court of Nebuchadnezzar, or the Perigord pies and Tokay that the anonymous translator of 1819 introduces into his version of Le Misanthrope. That same version seems to base its Clitandre on Lord Byron. I have used contemp
orary, but less talented, models. The version itself is my form of exegesis.
I was ‘educated’ to produce jog-trot versions of the classics. Apart from a weekly chunk of Johnson, Pitt the Younger and Lord Macaulay to be done into Ciceronian Latin, we had to turn once living authors into a form of English never spoken by men or women, as if to compensate our poor tongue for the misfortune of not being a dead language. I remember once making a policeman in a Plautus play say something like ‘Move along there,’ only to have it scored through and ‘Vacate the thoroughfare’ put in its place. This tradition lingers in the verse versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is a typical piece of ripe Virgilian translation:
Penthesilea furent, the bands leading
Of lune-shield Amazons, mid thousands burns,
Beneath exserted mamma golden zone
Girds warrior, and, a maid dares cope with men.
That would have earned some marginal VGs from my mentors. With the help of Gavin Douglas, John Dryden, Ezra Pound and Edward Powys Mathers I managed to escape from all this into what I hope is a more creative relationship with foreign tongues. So my translation, when I do it now, is a Jack and the Beanstalk act, braving the somnolent ogre of a British classical education to grab the golden harp.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 7