Showing posts with label Louis MacNeice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Louis MacNeice. Show all posts

Friday 8 September 2023

Tyro Poets? Eton v Marlborough? (Finishing School for Versifiers, Pt.7.) Juvenilia

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who was not, in the Thirties, Red?
                                                               (G. Moor, New Statesmen, 1956.)
 
‘A lyric tongue and jaded Weltanschauung
  should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’ 
                                                           (Catherine Eisner, 2023.)
 
It struck me the other day, just as a sort of prosodic hypothesis, that two tyro poets with brilliant minds – near contemporaries and destined for notoriety in the British press – should surely have composed some specimens of juvenilia showing promise in their 1920s schooldays, since, in each case respectively, their mentors were poets – Edith Sitwell and poet-in-the-making Louis MacNeice.
 
The schoolboys? Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt.
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).

Anthony Blunt                 Brian Howard

In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.

Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .

Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)

The harsh green outline of the downs
Tight as a bow string
Strikes a discord in the sky.

This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .

By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’  (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.

Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)

. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .

Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’

These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:

(I wish I was back home in Philadelphia).
Why did the small queens run so hurriedly
just because I play Satie on my musical box
a little furtive music like the rubbing together of biscuits . . . 
 
And, of course, we are not alone in adoring the outré conversational chords of Satie so it is unsurprising that these 1924 poems (dismissed by Brian as ‘that bad derivative thing’) should appeal to Satie-lovers, and were considered ‘immortal lines’ by Betjeman, who cited them as ‘immortal’ for not only the biscuity acoustics of their vers libre music but also for Brian’s sensual phrase, ‘Four lips make a mouth . . .’
 
In my own view, there can be no doubt that Brian Howard, a schoolboy precociously drawn to the ‘Imagist’ vision, exhibited authentic synæsthesia . . . as of a (juvenile) alien Kosmonaut’s first encounter with the phenomena of our planet when assigned to a desperate search for sublime correlatives to match those of Worldlings.

Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies.

A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?

Of course, essentially, poetry in England at that time was a plutocratic pursuit since only the privately educated elect had the leisure of their privilege to garnish the utilitarian nouns of the People with the choicest of adjectival conceits packed in hampers sent from Fortnum’s. The Proles as poets – if there were such – perforce travelled light, sans adjectival fripperies, denied the luxury of excess baggage by the exigency of their voyaging in steerage.
 
Despite their dedicated posturing as champions of Ars Longa, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War certainly could be said to have chivvied those two schoolboy pals, Blunt and MacNeice, briefly into becoming more than bystanders in a Rebellium Brevis, during which they both affected to be Communist-leaning sympathisers.
 
An affectation? When Blunt was asked by an interviewer whether he had gone to Spain in 1936 for political reasons, Blunt admitted, ‘I went to see the pictures, dear boy! The Prado is a Mecca for art historians . . . Oh, I was only a paper Marxist!’ Even his companion on that trip, Louis MacNeice, conceded: ‘In the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.’ MacNeice later wrote that he never shared the idealistic impulse of many of his fellow writers and friends to be a Communist, ‘I joined them . . . in their hatred of the status quo.’ It’s true that, recalling Marlborough in their final year, Blunt also confessed his political naivety: ‘Politics was simply a subject never discussed at all, and what happened to be going on at that time in Europe was no concern of ours. Inflation in Germany merely meant that one could get an incredibly cheap holiday!’
 

The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.

For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows. 

He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years. 

And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’

(In 1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)

Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’

Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’

Don’t call me comrade.

It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.

In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment. 

Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)

And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?

Incurable nostalgists.

But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)

For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .

See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/

When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk  . . .

        When good King Edward ruled the land
        And I was a chubby boy.

Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’  

Can the same be said, then, of  Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?

See Prescient Words of Godfather Who Foresaw Birth of Winston Smith.  

Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’ 

Yes. One suspects Blunt shared the view of the Wehrmacht ‘tourists in uniform’ and, for him, Paris would always remain, as for Jünger, the cerebral sensualist’s first destination for intellectual R & R.

In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published
in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008.
Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur,
Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo-
montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips 
in its
passion 
the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso.
 

Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.

But then Blunt had convinced himself that he was serving the Comintern and not the Kremlin, hadn’t he? Never mind that even before the Occupation of Paris in 1940, Stalin had set his mind to ‘arming the people’ of France, with draft instructions from the Comintern to the French Communist Party, dated 11 June, providing for the creation of a ‘popular militia’*. It was proposed that French Communists living in Moscow be sent back to France ‘in order to raise up the people against the bourgeois traitors.’    

Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)

Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’

Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?

Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a shabby  ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.

He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’ 

Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus) as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe (Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.

What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.

For another patrician anglophile’s social remedy, compare  
the Di Lampedusa Principle  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Lampedusa_strategy 

It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  

The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.

Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.

Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?

In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.

And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.

We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction. 

Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.

A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction? 

How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.

For Blunt it was a moral imperative for which he would be harshly judged. It is a dilemma that faces any moralist seeking the strait gate and the single narrow path: How does one remain ‘forensically honest’? (But there is no path though the woods.)

As the Germans say, Du kannst nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?

Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.
 
Today, in our self-referential postmodern world, one wonders whether Anthony Blunt, the Francophile, would have welcomed a France ruled by the cultural Comintern he foresaw. Probably. That’s because postmodernism – for Blunt – would be seen to have achieved the desired bloodless cultural shift by a new army of ideological warriors; warriors led by the cynical propagandising voice of a siren-like La Desapasionada he too would have undoubtedly followed.
 
France has a name for them, as you no doubt know: ‘Bobos’ . . . bourgeois-bohemians who are reactionaries at heart. The postmodernist writer Laurent Binet seems to believe in their creed of Po-Mo Oulipian fatuities. His ineffable unquestioning smugness is astonishing:
‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’
 HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013.                   

No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse.  

For more Po-Mo Bobo fatuities, see Michael Haneke’s Amour and reflections on the dilatoriness of Paris’s plumbers:  

 

Last word

Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’

So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very
Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are
seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through
transformational interpenetrations, charged with the
power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines
of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction.
Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it.
Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting
two mutually contradictory meanings as correct.
Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’


 
 
The sources for these Oxbridge character studies can found in definitive biographies researched by two remarkable women, with each writer sensitively intuitive and diligently scholarly in tracing every passage of the lives of these extraordinary subjects . . .

Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure (1968) by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001) by Miranda Carter.

See also a glimpse of the proto-Bright-Young-Thing of the 1920s, here, 
From an Unswept Floor . . .
 
See also another intimate view of Anthony Blunt, here.
Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
 
*Afterthought: The success of ‘popular militias’ as an ideology was sustained long ago, of course, by the Gun Lobby of the USA, France’s hallowed friend of Liberty. There’s even a statue devoted to her. See Ellis Island 1902



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 

See also
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

Monday 6 March 2017

Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith.

To my mind, in literary terms, there are two epochs that begin with Year Zero

The first Year Zero I have mentioned a number of times in these posts – 1888 – defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values).

But rereading the October–December 1944 issue of Penguin New Writing I stumbled on a date whose similarly reduplicative digits reminded me that George Orwell had predicted Year Zero to be almost certainly 1944 for the Revaluation of All Values for a Generation  . . . for the citation refer to Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston’s first entry in his diary . . . 
April 4th, 1984.                                                                                                     He [Winston Smith] sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.
So for Winston, the Epoch of The Last Man in Europe (being the dystopian novel’s original title) commenced no earlier than 1944.

How prescient, then, of Louis MacNeice to publish his Prayer before birth in that same year (in Penguin New Writing four years before the drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four), almost you would think as a godfatherly charm against O’Brien’s vision of totalitarian tyranny : If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

The precursors of Winston’s future plight in Big Brother’s dystopia are truly remarkable . . . the threats to ‘freeze my humanity . . . . dragoon me into a lethal automaton’ . . . rats, truth drugs, and the ‘wise lies’ of propaganda . . .   and the lure of the elusive pastures of the Golden Country . . . and the menacing Man Who Thinks He is God . . .  

Prayer before birth

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me.
                             Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
                                   club-footed ghoul come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; console me.
                             I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
                                   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
                                         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

                             I am not yet born ; provide me
                             With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
                                   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
                                          in the back of my mind to guide me.

                             I am not yet born ; forgive me
                             For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
                                  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
                                        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
                                             my life when they murder by means of my
                                                   hands, my death when they live me.

                             I am not yet born ; rehearse me
                             In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
                                  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
                                       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
                                             waves call me to folly and the desert calls
                                                  me to doom and the beggar refuses
                                                         my gift and my children curse me.

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me,
                             Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
                                   come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; O fill me
                             With strength against those who would freeze my
                                   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
                                        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
                                              one face, a thing, and against all those
                                                   who would dissipate my entirety, would
                                                          blow me like thistledown hither and
                                                               thither or hither and thither
                                                                   like water held in the
                                                                         hands would spill me.

                             Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
                             Otherwise kill me. 
    Louis MacNeice                             
(1944)                             

Let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
            
                

Thursday 13 October 2011

At Grass, the Blinking Stars ... Doctored Art?

I'm certain I recall reading in Andrew Motion's biography of Larkin (Philip Larkin: A Writer's Life, Faber and Faber, 1993) that, though he much admired Larkin's well known poem about racehorses put out to grass, he was disturbed by the inaccuracy of the final line of the final stanza ...

Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With bridles in the evening come.

Motion feels that racehorses 'At Grass', taken by grooms to their stables, by implication, would be led by 'halters'.  The line, then, should read:

Only the groom, and the groom's boy,
With halters in the evening come.

Motion is absolutely right here. The bridles suggest horses equipped for a race, which is quite the opposite of the poem's mood of 'Veterans at Rest' and 'Triumphs Past'.

This brings me to the heretical idea that works of art, conceivably, could be tweaked and doctored to engage more empathetically with latter-day sensibilities. Do I mean bowdlerisation? No! Of course not!

I mean that some modern meanings of certain words can torpedo the effects the lyricist intended.  Shall I ever forget the ripple of laughter at the Royal Festival Hall when that splendid Toulonnais, Gilbert Becaud, sang an English translation of one of his songs: 'The blinking stars are dancing ...'  He simply could not understand the Londoners' (not unkind) laughter.

My sensibilities are also disturbed by the jarring appearance of 'free lances' in Louis MacNeice's classically perfect 'The Sunlight on the Garden', even though I know very well the meaning MacNeice intended, and its pathos. It's just that so many other contemporary – and dullish - associations are now conjured up by the term. That is why I have presumed, for my own private delectation, to doctor the poem so my attention does not waver at the beginning of the second stanza.

A massive presumption, yes! (To loosely change: Our freedom as free lances/Advances towards its end;/The earth compels ...) N.B. The iron 'Siren' neither reflects the Spanish Civil War nor the London Blitz of WW2 since this prophetic poem was completed in the mid 1930s. The dictators who wreaked havoc in both those conflicts I now dub, specifically, the 'unanswerable rogues' who never answered for their actions.

The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

We know the rogue who answers
Unanswerably at the end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful, too,
For sunlight on the garden.