One’s first impulse on reading Alexis Lykiard’s latest verse collection, Schooled For Life, is to adapt Wilhelm Busch’s famous dictum Ist der Ruf erst ruiniert, lebt es sich recht ungeniert and remind ourselves of its possible converse: Wird der Ruf erst mal geehrt, lebt’s sich gaenzlich ungeniert. In other words:
Once your reputation is won,
You can live a life of fun.
For there is no doubt here that Alexis, having claimed his bardic laurels to join the pantheon, is having a great deal of fun at the expense of a number of cockshies, including settling old scores for slipper-thrashings from the missile-throwing pedagogues and catechising clergymen of his schooldays, as well as taking well-aimed pot-shots at vaunted British poets of a certain vintage and at pundits who have earned his opprobrium, not forgetting his risking lese-majesty with broadsides unleashed to singe the monarch’s kin.
Bitingly satirical and mischievously satyrical by turns, but always classically-Attically aphoristic (Alexis’s signature grace note), these poems may be enjoyed for their allusiveness just as much as for their neatly turned wit and banter. Witness, then, his chronicling of the privations of prep school life, where the nascent poet was . . .
. . . definitively marked for life.
Marked for Life — despite, we suspect, his schoolboy essays most likely scoring Alpha Plus — was no doubt an alternative title the poet spiked for this verse collection. In fact, such a poignant phrase captures the mood of Alexis’s troubled post-war childhood of exile and assimilation, as he seeks reassurance, recording the past in B-movie monochrome; how he was:
. . . desperate to fit in, own up, and accept my fate . . .
. . . Those times,
elusive yet recurrent, slow to fade away,
aren’t so disturbing to return to — younger days
of ’48, remembered rather as dark grey,
exhaustingly austere, too drab for love or hate.
A mood he countered, we learn, by his immersion between Chapel and Corps (organ music was a sonorous bore) in eclectic reading matter, including the novels of Charles Kingsley, a boyhood taste shared by a poet of enviable metrical brilliance from an earlier generation, Roy Fuller. In fact, Fuller’s account of reading Hypatia* is to be found in his fine novel of 1959, The Ruined Boys, in which he charts lost innocence much as Alexis does here in his own verses . . .
New troops of ruined boys fall in now, older soldiers gone . . .
and, of course, both poets appropriate the Master’s foreboding voice of 1930, Auden’s They gave the prizes to the ruined boys.
Readers of Alexis’s verses have learned to be alert to such allusive ludic nudges to his confraternity of pantheonic heroes born of his omnivorous appetite for the bon mot. When he isn’t head-butting sycophantic laureates and other toadies or savaging ‘Faberized’ fellow-travelling poetasters and flâneurs, this hircine omnivore is — satyr-like — more characteristically in Dionysian pursuit of the teasing evidence of bliss or of the true life [that] goes on forgotten. (A quest for the cleansing truths he admires in fellow poet D J Enright, which prompts Alexis’s penetrating and touching tribute, Master of His Arts.)
It is due to that same omnivorousness that Alexis has absorbed the finesse of favourite precursors in his verses, we are pleased to find, particularly in a suite of poems documenting Alexis’s recollections of prison life as writer/teacher-in-residence in the 1980s, with such redolences as . . .
. . . before this rapid cloudburst’s done
its worse, made space again for blue.
. . . high chainlink fence. And so the shutter clicks
to recollect our borrowed time.
In Captive Audience the observation of barracking inmates is demotically spot on:
. . . Young dopers relish any whiff of farce . . .
. . . aware
enough to suss that Art’s
an ancient con, a fancy caper, mere
time-displacing trick.
These witty poems of reluctant pedagogy where roles are reversed, with pupil turned educationist or even graduating to Brit. Council bratpacker, recall to mind the night classes taught by sometime Movement poet, Laurence Lerner, whose Those girls, those girls . . . (who imbibe a knowledge they believe to be / objective: not about themselves or me) is still remembered with fondness, an unresolved conundrum of Socratics that also calls to mind the case that the works of pedagogic poets comprise an actual genre in the classification of verse and here, in Alexis Lykiard’s Schooled For Life, there’s a respectable portion of it.
So an English education, both private and state-run — in all its incarnations and incarcerations, extramural and intramural — is Alexis’s overarching theme. Alexis’s atavistic Greekness and his relish for the niceties of English idiom are especially apparent in his first memories of school in 1946, when hors de combat on the . . .
First day at day school,
in the Morning Break, I broke
my arm . . .
and he becomes even more the Hellenist when invalided out of school . . .
. . . as lapsed Stoic,
my first words to the doctor
had been “I suffer”.
This canny adaptability of the chameleonic émigré — alert to local colour — is confirmed later when [following a kangaroo court in the dorm] . . .
Holding fast under duress,
hedonist Greek, I feigned becoming Spartan
A representative example of his narrative voice is his Chaps in Chapel and its elegiac conclusion that hints at immanence when recapturing his awkward past . . .
The Truth did not belong to some religionist
more likely to ‘All people that on earth do dwell.’
Fate or capricious genes will dole out our few days;
The sole concern is living well. Yet idols cast their spell:
Vainly we look skyward, though shadows need no praise.
However, this callow crisis of belief apart, it is difficult to quite see why Alexis the Dionysian maker of verses — whose flannel shorts stayed up via serpent-clasp elastic belt — dismisses the motto of his old school as obscure. (Radley: Sicut serpentes, sicut columbae. ‘Be wise as snakes and gentle as doves.’)
Surely there is no better motto for summoning up the uneasy duality that haunts the exilic poet?
