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.

            

                

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.