Geoffrey Hill
Clavics
Enitharmon Press, 2011
40 pages
£12.00
ISBN 978-1907587115

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Given Geoffrey Hill’s current reputation as a “difficult” poet, it’s easy to forget how reader-friendly, lucid, and accommodating he could once be. Here are two stanzas from the opening of Hill’s book-length poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), written in memory of the French poet killed in World War I:

Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurés

Dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares

Through the café window crêped in powder smoke?

The bill for the new farce reads Sleepers Awake.
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Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

The assassin? Must men stand by what they write

As by their camp-beds or their weaponry

Or shell-shocked comrades while they saga and cry?

And here is the first stanza of Hill’s most recent book-length poem, Clavics (2011), written, a helpful dust-jacket blurb informs us, in memory of “William Lawes the Royalist musician, killed at the battle of Chester”:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise

Numerology also makes much sense,

O, Astrea

Watch us conform

To the immense

Lore, hypertense

Attaching to the swarm-

Ing mass the dense fluctuations of the material

Out from which I shall be lucky to twitch

Creative fire.

See where who goes?

Astrea, bitch!—

Suffices what she does

Returning rich

To the low threshold of contemplation

Her servile master subsisting on scraps

Keeping station

As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. I really can’t say, and I bet you can’t either. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy began (literally) with a bang, but it also did an admirable job of filling readers in on relevant historical and biographical details without making them feel that they were being lectured, and without resorting to footnotes. Faced with an opening stanza like the one above, readers of Clavics can only hold on for dear life and hope things get clearer as they go along.

And at first it seems there’s reason to hope things might: “Clavics”, according to the mock definition that Hill provides from the “Oxford English Dictionary, 2012,” is “[t]he science or alchemy of keys”, and the poet and critic Ernest Hilbert has suggested that, taken together, the two stanzas of each section (the form of the second stanza in each case is modelled on George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”) are meant to resemble a key, or perhaps a key and keyhole. Perhaps, as door after door is opened, it will become increasingly clear what Hill is talking about. Certainly the second part of Section One is a model of clarity, if only compared to what came before:

Intensive prayer ís intensive care

Herbert says. I take it stress marks

Convey less care than flair

Shewing the works

As here

But if

Distressed attire

Be mere affect of clef

Dump my clavic books in the mire

And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff

One recognises the characteristics of Hill’s late style—the defensive attempt to disarm the reader and critic by defying them, the allusions that are so prevalent as to resemble a nervous tic, and an honest attempt to rehabilitate or redeem the sloganeering of contemporary language. George Herbert’s marvellous sonnet “Prayer” compares its subject to everything under the sun—and beyond the stars—so why not “intensive care”? There’s a formidable intelligence and powerful personality on display in this stanza, and had the poem continued on like this, it might have been worth the effort.

But the bulk of Clavics turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible, to parse, and all too many passages that do yield up paraphrasable sense read like implausible headlines or mnemonic devices, as though they had been composed according to an Old-Norse verse form after one too many quaffs of mead: “Erasmus, in Praise of Folly: / Grand antidote no substitute for bling”; “Richard Dadd dab hand at Prize Depiction”; “Straw men in flagrante folk-upbraided”. It’s not that one can’t identify some of the themes to which Hill has dealt with so often throughout his career, particularly the relation between political power (violence) and art. The problem, rather, is that what he says about these topics here so often verges on gibberish.

For the many critics who have regarded Hill’s work since The Triumph of Love (1998) as a descent into grouchy obscurantism, Clavics will read like one more stage in a great poet’s decline. My own baffled incomprehension when faced with the work at hand is a slightly different case. While I’ve found none of Hill’s later works easy, I do think that a reasonably open-minded reader (particularly one sympathetic to high modernist literature) can find much value in them. The critical consensus has rightly regarded Speech! Speech! (2000) as Hill’s most rebarbative and difficult work up until this point, but even in that book, there are passages of great descriptive beauty as well as a spiky rhetorical power:

Reformation woodcuts enscrolled such things

between the lips of magistrates, prophets,

and visionary infants. To me it sounds

like communications breakdown, somebody

promoting his (say her) fanatical

expressionless self-creation on a stuck track.

Our show-host has died many times; the words

of welcome dismiss us.

Anomie is as good a word as any;

so pick any; who on earth will protest?

Whatever is said now I shall believe it

of the unnamed god.

The idea of playing this kind of clenched, fragmentary utterance across an intricate metrical and visual pattern, as Hill has done in Clavics, is an intriguing one. But as much as it pains me to say it, this new work does not contain one successful passage of the same length as the above. Now and then pieces bob up, like flotsam from a wreck, that recall Hill at his best:

Listen to and make music while you can

Pray Mater ora Filium

Cry Spem in Alium

God is made man

Choric

Lyric

Heaven Receives

Impartially these tributes

Creation call it that believes

Even to blasphemy in our ranged throats

On every page there are lines that crackle with intelligence : “Untenable still the timeless values”; “Virtues by will / Without them let us call plunder plenty”; “But one / Candle lit on / The well-iced birthday slab, so be my guest.” However, Clavics is a mistake that few poets now living would have the talent to make, but it is no less a mistake for that.

I can’t help thinking that this new poem is intended to express its own impossibility. Hill seems to be saying: Look, I have taken as my poem’s ostensible subject a musician; I have written said poem in a tightly rhymed form that is also a visual emblem; I have alluded to George Herbert, who was both a gifted musician and the English poet who married form to content more perfectly than any other. Further, I have cast my poem in 32 sections, 32 being the number of paths of wisdom in the Cabbala, as well as being one shy of the Christologically significant 33. None of that will help, though, since I, the poet, am writing in an age of “anarchical plutocracy” (to use William Morris’s term), when language has become so cheapened by politicians and the media that one can scarcely use it honestly without endless qualifications and self-recriminations. If parody and self-parody become indistinguishable, and I end up writing lines that are at once bad poetry and bad ad copy, so be it. Ich kann nicht anders.

The haunting dust-jacket photo for Clavics depicts a barn owl returning to its nest with wings spread wide, a living mouse dangling from its beak. The owl seems to wear a pleased expression on its face. The image would have been an apt emblem for nearly any of Hill’s previous works, obsessed as they have been with power, bloodshed, and sacrifice. Given the owl’s association with learning and scholarship, though, I wonder if the image doesn’t also serve as a warning to the hapless reader. As the book proceeded and my bafflement increased, I increasingly identified with the mouse’s predicament borne up to its dark end.

Bill Coyle is the author of the poetry collection The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) and recipient of a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2010).

Jeffrey Eugenides
The Marriage Plot
Fourth Estate, 2011
416 pages.
£20.00
ISBN 978-0007441297

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Jeffrey Eugenides’s previous work hasn’t exactly shied away from bookishness. His 2002 novel, Middlesex, for instance, mentions French philosopher Michel Foucault on its first page. But The Marriage Plot, his latest, takes this tendency to an extreme. “To start with,” it begins, “look at all the books.” The books in question are the personal library of one Madeleine Hanna, at this point about to graduate from Brown University. The library includes “the complete Modern Library set of Henry James, a gift from her father” and “the first edition of [John Updike's] Couples, belonging to her mother, which Madeleine had surreptitiously dipped into back in sixth grade and which she was using now to provide textual support in her English honours thesis on the marriage plot.” This is a kind of prospectus for the novel: the next 400 pages will display the mores of the upper classes and the “international theme” (hence the James), that genre of modern American fiction we might term the white male novelist’s guide to sex (hence the Updike), and a rather by-the-numbers metatextuality (hence the appearance of the honours thesis and the title a hundred words in).

The novel commences in 1982, and its first section is dedicated to Madeleine’s undergraduate infatuation with structuralist theory, with Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse, and with one Leonard Bankhead, a manic-depressive polymath who bears an uncanny resemblance to Eugenides’s friend, the late David Foster Wallace. Their relationship, which reaches an early crisis in an argument over Barthes’s analysis of the phrase “I love you”, comes to overshadow her graduation. Throughout the novel characters will confuse their grad school problems with their personal and romantic ones. This is a source of comedy throughout:

Though auditing a class at the Sorbonne taught by Luce Irigiray and titled The Mother-Daughter Relationship: The Darkest of Dark Continents, Claire had followed maternal example by setting out guest towels.

And yet such allusiveness is not exactly, or not solely, a joke. The novel is marked by a continued process of reference to other texts; in some places the injunction to “look at all the books” is nine-tenths of the information we need to decipher the plot.

When Leonard’s rival Mitchell Grammaticus first appears, he is reciting a prayer, which the narrator notes the reader may be familiar with from J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Throughout the novel characters are introduced with paperbacks in hand, from cameos like the “girl with stiff pink hair…smoking a clove cigarette and reading Invisible Cities” to plot-determining episodes like the following: “One Sunday morning, before winter break, Abby’s boyfriend, Whitney, materialized at their kitchen table, reading something called Of Grammatology.” Some characters seem to be the result of central casting: the reader can predict the exact dimensions of one of Eugenides’s caricatures from the fact she’s introduced reading New French Feminisms. This last episode takes place in Paris, in one of two sections following Mitchell around Europe and Asia as he thinks about Madeleine and whether to enter divinity school. Inevitably, we’re given the list of books he packs, “a cache that included The Imitation of Christ, The Confessions of St. Augustine, Saint Teresa’s Interior Castle”, amongst others; and yet the book which has the greatest effect on him is Something Beautiful for God, an illustrated introduction to Mother Teresa. In the second of these sections Mitchell establishes himself as a volunteer at Teresa’s Home for Dying Destitutes, Calcutta. His attempts at theology and charity are the only point at which a character’s aspirations move beyond marriage or further education.

Meanwhile, Madeleine and Leonard are residing at the latter’s postgraduate placement, a laboratory near Cape Cod, trying to deal with the effects of Leonard’s illness on their relationship. It’s here, 150 pages into the novel, that Leonard starts to diverge from his model, to develop as a character in his own right. Unfortunately, he is a profoundly unpleasant one. A charitable interpretation is that Eugenides intended a sympathetic portrait of a remarkable intelligence in thrall to illness; what emerges, however, is a rather dated version of the trope of the mentally ill person as arch-manipulator. Leonard calculates that proposing marriage to Madeleine is “the solution to all his problems, romantic, financial, and strategic”. Their marriage is, unsurprisingly, ill-fated; their honeymoon, disintegrative. Leonard will disappear in Monte Carlo and reappear with no memory of his missing days, having been seen, meanwhile, in a brothel; this follows a scene in Nice which is, in Eugenides’s description, only a couple of face-saving clauses from a portrayal of marital rape.

G.K. Chesterton once commented on the unfriendly caricature of Leigh Hunt in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House. Dickens, says Chesterton, might not have been suggesting “suppose Hunt had been a rascal”; rather, he was fancying, “suppose a rascal had behaved like Hunt”. Eugenides denies vigorously that he ever meant to base Leonard upon Wallace, despite the biographical correspondences and highly specific details like Leonard’s absurd dependence on chewing tobacco to mitigate the side effects of his medication. Ultimately, what prompted Eugenides to incorporate his friend in such a fashion is probably beyond the realm of criticism. Yet it’s been an unavoidable feature of the novel’s reception. At any rate, perhaps ultimately this disproportion is engendered by weaknesses in the novel itself: Leonard Bankhead’s resemblance to a particular person is so pronounced, so hard to avoid, because a lot of the time Madeleine Hanna resembles no one at all.

Eugenides has always written about female experience, but in both his previous novels, narrative and form have worked together to acknowledge the problems inherent in doing so. For one thing, in both The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, life as a woman ends during adolescence: in the latter by gender-reassignment surgery; in the former, more straightforwardly, in the manner of the title. And in both books the stance of the narrator—the confused outsider’s viewpoint in Suicides, the adult Cal’s ironic detachment in Middlesex—acknowledges the problem implicit in a male author’s attempt to dramatise female experience. The privileged-youths-consider-grad-school milieu of The Marriage Plot doesn’t seem a great distance from adolescence per se: at one point in the first part Madeleine is “furious at everyone and everything, at her mother…at Leonard for not calling, at the weather for being cold, and at college for ending.” But the over-the-shoulder narration leads to difficulties. At times it’s hard not to see the middle-aged, goateed author on the jacket photo ventriloquising Madeleine: when, for example, Madeleine looks back on her romantic career as an undergraduate, comprising three monogamous relationships and an abortive one-night stand, and sees herself “broken by love, by empty promiscuity, by self-doubt”. Or the above-mentioned scene in Nice, in which Madeline “knew that she shouldn’t let Leonard have sex with her after the way he’d treated her all evening. At the same time, she felt so sad and unwanted that it came as a huge relief to be touched…But she couldn’t say no.” Madeleine is more a passive agent of male desires and ideas than an actor in her own plot. In a book where at least one character is explicitly mocked for an interest in the current state of feminism, the total effect is more than a little queasy.

Near to the novel’s conclusion, Madeleine’s and Leonard’s first fight—over Barthes’s celebrated definition of “I love you” as an empty utterance that “once the first avowal has been made…has no meaning whatsoever”—resurfaces in the language of the romance novel:

Madeleine said nothing because she didn’t know what to say. Even “I love you” seemed inadequate. She’d said this to Leonard so many times in situations like this that she was worried it was losing its power.

It is this banality which constitutes the novel’s singular truth: that things, books, and relationships we’ve intellectually idealised can turn out to be empty when it comes to the real world. Mitchell, in India, finds that he cannot adjust to the life of charity he has imagined as the day-to-day effort of cleaning the sick and dying proves too much for him. And once Leonard has left Madeleine, and Mitchell has reappeared, the marriage plot we’ve been enveloped in all along is invoked once again only to be quietly discarded. Mitchell rather breathlessly telegraphs the entire action of the novel:

From the books you read for your thesis…was there any novel where the heroine gets married to the wrong guy and then realizes it, and then the other suitor shows up, some guy who’s always been in love with her, and then they get together, but finally the second suitor realizes that the last thing the woman needs is to get married again, that she’s got more important things to do with her life…do you think that would be good, as an ending?

But this suggestion that Madeleine might go on to do “more important things” takes place on the last page of the book. Eugenides finds himself stuck: what a Madeleine Hanna might accomplish on her own terms, under her own agency, is beyond the scope of the marriage plot, or at least of The Marriage Plot.

Tom West is reading for an MSt in English Literature at Regent’s Park College, Oxford.

Umberto Eco
The Prague Cemetery
Harvill Secker, 2011
448 Pages
£20.00
ISBN 978-1846554919

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The historical breadth and depth of Umberto Eco’s latest novel, The Prague Cemetery (Il cimitero di Praga), is nothing short of dizzying. Following the exploits of its protagonist, Simone Simonini, and his Doppelgänger, the Abbé Dalla Piccola, the novel whistles through Garibaldi’s and his Redshirts’ role in the unification of Italy in 1861 to the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 and the short-lived, bloody Paris Commune that ensued. Simonini, purportedly the novel’s only fictional character, has less talent as a secret agent than as a forger of legal deeds. He creates “new copies of genuine documents that have been lost or, by simple oversight, have never been produced, and that could and should have been produced.” Eco introduces Simonini’s singular skill as the literary “missing link” in the novel’s structuring subject matter, the evolution of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic hoax from the turn of the last century about Jewish world conquest. Even today, the myth has not been put entirely to rest.

Obsessed with the seemingly irresistible seduction of conspiracies and lies over and above truth, of arcane knowledge behind the veil of reality, the rich (and at times indulgent) material of The Prague Cemetery is in perennial danger of merely propagating the myth, a point made by Riccardo Di Segni, currently the Chief Rabbi of Rome. The novel, which the dust jacket vaunts as an “inspired twisting of history and fiction”, has been criticised for failing on both these counts. On the one hand, the novel offers no real plot in the conventional sense, just a dense collection of carefully collated historical facts held together by the conjecture of a narrative thread. On the other, there are those who, echoing Adorno’s oft-cited assertion that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”, consider the literary form inappropriate for dealing with such a serious topic. However, between the infantilised perspective on the Holocaust of John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006) and the solemn overview of Saul Friedländer’s colossal historical tomes, Eco offers a new and intriguing postmodern insight into a complex phenomenon that forces the reader to confront questions of literary and historical truth, individuality and intertextuality.

To be fair to Eco’s critics, the novel certainly seems to be less entertaining than his previous works, a phenomenon that arises out of a subtle change of approach. Speaking recently to the Guardian about his previous career, Eco related that his own doctorate had the structure of a “whodunnit” that lead the reader through a series of logical deductions before revealing its conclusion. Held together by the conundrums of medieval hermeneutics, Eco’s first novel, The Name of the Rose (Il nome della rosa, 1980), a murder mystery in a monastery, adopted the same formula. Foucault’s Pendulum (Il pendolo di Foucault, 1988), conversely, in which three publishers concoct an occult conspiracy, already examines mystery ab initio. The themes of his previous novels, the Knights Templar and the Kabbalah, are not as heavy as the anti-Semitism that is the focus of his latest novel. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1905, claimed to be the minutes of a meeting of the world’s foremost Jewish leaders about their plans for global domination, a meeting supposedly held at the cemetery in Prague. In 1921, the Times of London exposed the document as fraudulent by identifying the satirist, Maurice Joly, as a literary influence. Nevertheless, the Protocols were widely accepted as true and eventually cited in the first volume of Hitler’s Landsberg tirade, Mein Kampf (1925). In response, Eco could easily have written something more serious than a novel. Currently professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna, Eco is the author of innumerable essays and a public intellectual who readily gives interviews. Indeed, Eco has openly spoken out against anti-Semitism. Another earnest treatment of the topic, however, would not have been as effective in grappling with such an entrenched conspiracy as a novel with its own dubious claims to historical truth. The Prague Cemetery succeeds in dealing with its counterpart as another intertext, a repository of its composite writings and influences.

Like many self-referential postmodern novels, The Prague Cemetery continually falls apart at the seams. This deconstructive sensation is evoked most satisfyingly in the novel by the constantly fragmented narrative perspective. As a first instance, the novel’s “Narrator” attempts to add a veneer of historicity yet, despite remaining unnamed and referring to himself exclusively in the third person, he is evidently in possession of an identifying psychological mindset. At one point the narrator admits to summarising certain items of information “so as not to unduly bore the Reader”. Then, in an appendix titled “Useless Learned Explanations”, which in fact gives an historical timeline on which the novel is based, the narrator confesses to creating “a few incidental minor characters”. He continues, “for narrative economy I have made a single (invented) character say and do what was in fact said and done by two (historically real) characters”. As a second instance, the novel’s protagonist suffers from a split personality: Simonini and Dalla Piccola gradually deduce through their correspondence with one another that they must in fact be the same person. Moreover, as an individual, Simonini is always at the whim of greater powers: he is a master forger but never an executor of his own will; he may be employed by the secret services of three states—the Piedmontese, the French, and the Russian—but is never an agent. Even Simonini’s hatred of Jews cannot be called his own. “I began to regret that I had never wanted to meet a Jew in my life”, he recalls at one point. Instead, Simonini is simply a vessel for the prejudices of his bigoted grandfather, and by extension, of the general public. The lies of Simonini’s own creation are lumbering. To his dismay, Simonini’s go-between from the French secret police compliments him on the purchase of a finely crafted swordstick, a concealed weapon with which he had imagined duping would-be assailants. “With a pommel of that kind, it couldn’t be anything else”, grins the liaison. At the same time, these lies, despite their obviousness, are readily believed, whether for political expediency or the mystique of hidden truths. Simonini’s intermediaries from his various intelligence services are unable to link him with Dalla Piccola, and Simonini need only don a false beard to become a different person altogether. Nevertheless, unlike Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones (Les Bienveillantes, 2006), which lays bare the thought processes of an executioner from the SS, the novel encourages the reader not to identify with its despicable yet forever evaporating protagonist, who goes by the motto odi ergo sum (“I hate therefore I am”), but to focus on the text itself.

Simonini, bereft of his own individuality, unites the style and structure of the Protocols with that of the novel that created him. Reworking a scene from Alexandre Dumas’s novel Joseph Balsamo (1846) that describes a Masonic meeting on Mont-Tonnerre, Simonini writes in the style of Eugène Sue’s conspiratorial novels. Simonini then makes alterations to his original draft following encounters with the aforementioned Joly and Hermann Goedsche, whose real-life chain of plagiarisms going all the way back to Dumas form the basis of the Protocols. Finally, Simonini transfers the forged document to the Okhrana, the tsarist secret police. In this way, the protagonist of The Prague Cemetery spins the same web over the Freemasons, the Jesuits, and finally the Jews. The reader is left to question how this work of fiction can claim more truth than the forgery it depicts, or more relevantly, as one reviewer laments in the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, whether there is anything that can be done if its lies are so compelling. In stark contrast to the Protocols, the novel advertises itself as a fabrication. Rather than offer the reader a key to unlock its mystery, the radical intertextuality of The Prague Cemetery forces the reader to confront his or her own interaction with the text. For this reason, it is easy to forgive the author for repeatedly forcing the reader to consult reference works and external sources in order to make sense of the novel’s immense detail. With due deference to Eco’s critics, this is a scholarly pleasure in itself. The novel weaves into its plot a generation’s worth of historical figures and turning-points, including the Dreyfus Affair and Sigmund Freud as “Doctor Froïde”, among others. Add to this the difficulty the translator, Richard Dixon, must have faced when confronted with this international, if not supranational, tale: in addition to the original Italian, the novel compiles seemingly endless lists of French dishes, which, like many of the novel’s enigmas, have been wisely left untranslated.

As a piece of historical storytelling, The Prague Cemetery is delicately balanced between elitism and accessibility. The novel offers an incisive insight into a captivating yet often overlooked period of European history. It does so in a way that only a narrative can bring to life, yet does not shy away from challenging the reader. It will frustrate many readers expecting either an historical or literary account, but will reward those with intellectual curiosity. At times, the thrill of the mystery seems to take a backseat to the gravity of its subject matter, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the birth of modern anti-Semitism. However, as a fictional text, Eco’s postmodern novel places a heavy burden on the reader by pointing out his or her susceptibility to the textual lie, while simultaneously having faith that the reader will acquire the tools to resist the temptation of clandestine knowledge and see through its fallacious promises.

Reinier van Straten is reading for a DPhil in Modern Languages at Magdalen College, Oxford.

Roddy Lumsden (ed.)
The Best British Poetry 2011
Salt Publishing, 2011
176 Pages
£9.99
ISBN 978-1907773044

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The Best British Poetry 2011, edited by Roddy Lumsden, is an anthology of meticulous compilation: after a year spent foraging in the various British literary magazines, Lumsden has gathered 70 poems—representing 70 poets. In a format openly indebted to The Best American Poetry series, each poet has in turn commented on their poem’s inception. Fundamental to the nature of this collection is the method of the editor; this is not an anthology of the most celebrated contemporary poets. Rather than being selected by virtue of reputation, each poet wins their place in this book by having a single good poem published in a magazine this year. As such, some of the names are obscure, but every poem repays forensic reading. Refreshingly, there is little holding this anthology together thematically; although a couple of themes are more common than others. The modernist suspicion about the possibility of meaningful communication is worried over a lot—and it’s interesting to see that it remains a contemporary concern. However, what’s most striking is the diversity of style that a relatively small anthology manages to contain.

One of its earlier offerings, Mike Bannister’s “Satin Moth”, provides us with a metaphor of the collection’s variety. Its preoccupation is with the different properties of things:

Defiant Lymantriide, you advertise,
against the protocols of subterfuge,
flaring, pristine, rebellious in the night;
stealing in to our dream on soundless wings
to taste the obscure chemistries we share
with poplars, or the willow leaf.

As we read, precise classification (and with it, notions of order and hierarchy) evaporates into “the obscure chemistries we share”; the empirical solidity of that “Lymantriide” dissolves into an oneiric being. “Subterfuge”, too, gets at this quiet transmutation—all the more clearly when the word’s Latin roots are recalled (subterfugere: escape secretly). The subterfuge is self-reflexive: in its entirety, the line “against the protocols of subterfuge” suggests a dismissal of such subterfuge. Yet we come to a turning point as the moth is found “stealing in to our dream”. Read retrospectively, then, our understanding of the subterfuge line is altered: it must have been the “protocols” of subterfuge done away with, not the subterfuge itself. The rules are disregarded: though this, too, is contradicted by a slyly conducted pentametric line, which slowly disintegrates approaching the final stanza.

This is in part a poem about noticing; a poem about what Bannister describes as “considering the metaphoric / significance of ordinary things”—yet there remains something of the loss of things, too. It’s a subtle effect, initiated in the first instance by that comma stopping the first line, making an intransitive of a transitive verb—we can only wait for a subject that never comes. It’s an elsewhereness that, moth-like, flutters down into the final line (“stillness for the ghost of stillness”), leaving the poetic voice both settled and trailing behind some indefinable thing-in-itself.

Giles Goodland’s “Waves” gets at a similar elsewhereness, but this time moves it away from the level of thought to hint at the inadequacy of words themselves as they hover in an intersubjective realm. As in W.S. Graham, thwarted attempts to gather them are figured in the repetitive rhythms of the tide:

The sea is a misunderstanding
we have to go through in order to make sense,
like the word for the loss of a word.
It leaves a sense of having left,
through which silence leaks.

These lines skillfully encompass a difficult reflexivity that embraces, rather than rejects, boundaries. The uncertain and dislocated “it” momentarily offers a hope that we can gesture toward that lost word, but this begins to be unravelled by the vagueness of “a sense”. “Silence” is positioned strongly, here; absoluteness overpowers the nebulosity of the preceding lines—we have lost hope. Subtle repetitions across stanzas maintain the delicate rhythmic balance of returning tides. It’s the uncommon way this poem deals with a commonplace anxiety (“you live in a house made of thought”) that makes it such a good piece of writing. The panic is sunk in the obliquity of the closing lines, which, with striking imagistic force, return us to those familiar themes of silence, incommunicability, helplessness:

Lip-read the sea rolling in pain. See
such children it sucks like a sweet.

The pebbles are frantic under them.

Emily Berry is also preoccupied with the points at which language falters—but her gothic “Arlene” demonstrates so in a very different way. The narrator becomes obsessed with the name, repeating it as a mantra until we no longer seem to understand what it means, or whether it comforts or not. But where Berry particularly succeeds is in positioning her voice on the tonal knife-edge between hysteria and relief:

Thank you, Arlene. Thanks for this opportunity. Thanks
for this shaft of light lying like a plank across the floor.
Thanks for the visceral scrape of the freezer trays,
and for a picture of a lady with no clothes on. Most of all,
thank you, Arlene, for giving us things we did not have before…

This suggestion of a supernaturally induced Stockholm syndrome moves into a less obvious verbal Stockholm syndrome. In a poem where the prison is uncertainty, the stability of the single stable word is quietly interrogated. “Arlene” is offered as the word to describe unknowns both resembling “God”, and later, “the devil”:

… We didn’t know if we were talking to God,
or Arlene, or someone else. She was behind us like a devil.
The devil had her hand on my back and she stroked our hair
and she was sweet Arlene…

And so it goes on, with attractive energy, juxtaposing certainty with uncertainty—moving swiftly from safety to danger and then back again. The alternative of a world devoid of Arlene appears as a kind of existential solitude.

“Delicacy”, by Catherine Ormell, uses a similar repetition. It’s refreshing to see an identical technique used by two very different poets to achieve two very different effects. The difference lies in Ormell’s use of “plum” as not quite a euphemism, but at least as a distraction. Obsession here is more a willful preoccupation, rather than terrifying uncertainty, as in Berry’s poem. Ormell begins:

The chateau would have been beautiful though melancholy
if the birdscarer had not gone off from five a.m.
with the dreadful crack of a gun, every nineteen minutes
and fourteen seconds, in the name of plums.

Tellingly, that lost “beautiful” Eden of the chateau is beautiful only along with “melancholy”. The prelapsarian tranquility might be ruined, but it never sounded all that good to begin with. Ormell manages to retain gravitas until the last, and the controlled bathos—building through the polite “dreadful” of the gun; the precision of the time; the hinted indignation at the reason for this disturbance of “melancholy”. These things all point toward the tendency of the troubled mind to fixate upon an irrelevant fact or object in order to function—in order, as suggested by the opening, perhaps, to get out of bed in the morning. The poem could be read as a description of middle-class neurosis: the “chateau”, the hunting, the “delicacy”. The last of these is figured both as the literal plum (although, amusingly, they’re plentiful) and that purpose of the plum: namely distraction from more meaningful things (“I’m sure I can feel my cardiac plum darken”). It’s subtler version of what Edward Lear does: the juxtaposing of inexplicable horror with extreme politeness.

This same strange, repetitive word substitution technique is taken up by Amy De’Ath, who knowingly extrapolates it beyond the bounds of emotional sense:

Who cares about the psychosocial fabrications of a lusty brick?
What if it’s wrong?
What if I want to lie, compete, ease my conscience on a salty brick?

Rest my hot cheek pearling beads of salt onto the
perverse orange brick of perverse consolation with
radical implications for all girls and boys who dare to be
churlish, who forget the brick and blossom of my body
and remember to speak through the irony of
windbreakers broken by the wind and tossed to sea in
the bedroom where no one has sex.

The flippant forward motion of these lines is attractive, but they perhaps don’t live up to their own swagger. They’re lines that comment self-reflexively on their own “perverse” nature. In asserting their “radical implications for all girls and boys who dare to be / churlish”, they summon the voice Burt attributes to poets of the elliptical school: one that “speaks the poem and reflects the poet”. In this sense, De’Ath is conventional: we move from the hubris of the opening voice to a series of distorted scenes in a manner common to the conventions of what critic Stephen Burt has dubbed “elliptical” poetry. Even so, this is primarily an American style of writing, and interesting to see in a young, British poet—albeit one who’s spent time studying in the United States.

What seems uncertain is whether the recurrent surrealist use of “brick” quite does what De’Ath wants it to. It supports a self-conscious claim to radicalism that the poem doesn’t successfully pull off—not here. Still, there are some nice moments: the “irony of / windbreakers broken by the wind and tossed to sea” violently rewrites Heaney’s more tepid image of seed-cutters kneeling “behind a windbreak wind is breaking through”. There are also good things elsewhere:

Arriving at the beach in the context of a coveting
style of life, in the scrubby bench I found again
my teeth

There’s a deliberate awkwardness to these lines, though it’s difficult not to hear in them a flat-toned Prufrock, wandering about in his new “context”, “coveting”. And if you notice that, then you also think of Eliot when you encounter:

In the comfort of the taking, to the extent the dead
men. However they died to me. However they sold
their wares on the doorstep on red tiles I saw them

I have so far mentioned just a few of the poems in this collection, and I should do more to point out its stylistic breadth. That’s quickest done by leaping from De’Ath to W.N. Herbert, with his “Errant” (or an extract from it). Within the context of this anthology, Herbert seems deeply unfashionable. He rhymes in a way that is rare here—and fashion (or lack of it) is an idea he plays about in the early lines:

A daoist vegetarian, too hip
to compromise the future with his vote;
a dope who, vindicated by the trip,
still couldn’t tell the ocean from the boat,
got off his floating world, grew backwards to
the family as art, then failed to follow through.

Plodding perfect rhymes offset the sentiment with conformity, with the obvious disappointed rhyme made at the obvious moment. Anxiety is the thing shared with the other poems by other poets, but this anxiety is not a trendy one about the abyss or the failure of language. Rather, this is an anxiety produced by a cancer scare—even the anxiety is refreshingly old-fashioned. The “brain” is first an “anxious loch”, “through which an ageing doctor wasn’t sure / but thought she saw a tumour like a trout” and later an extinguishing force: “the cat’s eyes / that should have lit its single track all scratched / out by anxiety”. Place names recur, we travel about the various roads, we wake up in hospital and move into dreamscapes:

I saw the frightening place I’d visited
back in the Haugh, though like the country of the dead

was never there at all, instead it was
a Helicon, that habitation next
to clarity, awake to lack of cause
and simple as cold water’s lens, its flex
of sunlight in cupped palms. Placed outside text,
you watch that scorpion beside your foot
and see it has no goals, is unperplexed
and ready as a sickness. There’s no route
that leads to anywhere but here; no shame,
no game: the Silk Road and the Low Road are the same.

The line breaks carefully shift the meaning of the end words onto another “foot”—“next” moves from a temporal “next” to a spatial “next to”; “flex” slides to “flecks”; “shame” is made a mockery of in a parodic boys’ toilet chant—before the shrugging indifference of that extra closing rhyme. It’s a slipperiness that fits that impossible “sunlight in cupped palms” or the dual roads. “Foot”, too, is both the metrical foot and the human foot stepped out of the world of the poem. Whichever foot we choose to remain with, the scorpion—that danger with “lack of cause”—is unavoidable.

Mark Burnhope takes on this despair problem with a parodic side-swipe in his “Twelve Steps Towards a Better Despair”, with its sashaying lines:

Make sure you have shouldered the world for a man who tried
dying — sorry, died trying—to climb a cliff summit,
or summat like it, to find a stronger sunlight

A charming feigned imprecision—the herculean charm of the despairing—lapses momentarily to reveal a hidden intensity of sentiment. One is reminded of Thomas Mann’s observation that ironists are drawn from the sentimental.

It’s difficult not to become addicted to flipping between the poems and the poets, reading and re-reading, switching between your own understanding and the poet’s. The two often merge into a palimpsestic conclusion. Sometimes those back-page notes are a poet’s reading of their poem, but often they’re just a note on how the poem came to be. It’s difficult to say whether this really added anything to the reading experience, but it’s an interesting quirk in an interesting anthology, comprising a more eclectic collection of poems than any short review could adequately capture. Burnhope writes of an iceberg that “it will stand / for solid material to marvel at”— and this review can only touch the tip.

Aime Williams is reading for an MA in English Literature at University College London.

Harold Bloom
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Yale University Press, 2011
368 Pages
£25.00
ISBN 978-0300167603

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The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life, by Harold Bloom, tries to make sense of a career that spans more than 50 years. Although Bloom takes his subjects very seriously, this is not a work of serious scholarship. The book is necessarily broad and Bloom makes no secret of its populist intent: there is enough autobiographical detail to keep the casual reader interested, and his judgements on Shakespeare, romanticism, and American poetry are more pleasingly put than they are anything new. Suspended somewhere between memoir and literary criticism, the results are by turns frustrating, inspiring, infuriating, and unexpectedly moving.

Since 1959, Bloom’s research interests have ranged from romantic to contemporary to American poetry, from gnosticism to the Bible. He has cast himself as a defender of the Western canon and a champion of Shakespeare, but it was the publication of The Anxiety of Influence in 1973 that made his name as a literary critic, and that book still defines his career nearly 40 years later. Put brutally, Bloom’s theory of influence amounts to a literary “survival of the fittest” via Sigmund Freud: all poets must confront their literary forebears; the strong poets will overcome their immediate influences while the weak poets will fail to do so and languish in mediocrity. The Anatomy of Influence is a retrospective of a lifetime’s careful reading considered under the shade of this idea, his most famous and abiding insight.

Shakespeare and Walt Whitman loom large in The Anatomy of Influence, and extended sections of commentary make up a substantial number of chapters devoted to their work. Bloom discusses more than 30 other writers as well, but never strays far from the two poets he loves best. Bloom deliberately excluded Shakespeare from The Anxiety of Influence, claiming that the great poet of the English language belonged “to the giant age before the flood, before the anxiety of influence became central to poetic consciousness.” That was then; now Shakespeare is construed as the patriarch of Bloom’s theory of poetic influence. Bloom argues that the Bard is an influence on everyone. Even Shakespeare’s early work influences his later work. “Shakespeare”, Bloom writes, “invented us”. This marks a return to the argument Bloom made in Shakespeare: Inventing the Human (1998). It is the most ambitious claim of The Anatomy of Influence, and arguably of Bloom’s career, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. What Bloom means by “Shakespeare invented us” is that Shakespeare is the father of modern English-speaking language, culture, and humanity; he is the ultimate influence.

The reader is asked to accept this argument almost entirely on the basis that Harold Bloom is making it. There is undoubtedly a strong case to be made here, but Bloom is not the right critic to make it. The effect of Shakespeare on humanity cannot be proved without recourse to social and cultural history. In the absence of convincing argumentation and scholarship, Bloom’s grand vision of Shakespearean influence relies heavily on hyperbolic axioms. They run from the enthusiastic (“Shakespeare most mattered because his men and women are ever-living representations of complete human beings”), to the metaphysical (“Hamlet centers the literary cosmos, Eastern as well as Western”), to the unconvincing (“Confusing Shakespeare with God is ultimately legitimate”), until the inevitable admission, “For me, Shakespeare is God.” For me, this is where Bloom’s rhetoric gives out—and where Bloom gives up. Although Shakespeare proves too much of a giant to be explained in terms of influence anxiety, these chapters, while ultimately unsuccessful, are worth a look. Who wouldn’t want to watch Bloom grapple with God?

The Anatomy of Influence, then, reconsiders The Anxiety of Influence with a view to explain, not the theory itself, but how the theory can work within the entire Western literary canon. Instead of presenting a unified theory of influence Bloom gives us a selection of the strongest arguments from his back catalogue. Readers hoping for a serious and sustained consideration of the book that made Bloom’s name will be disappointed. The influence of Northrop Frye is mentioned only in passing, while T. S. Eliot is given even shorter shrift. (Bloom describes him as “one of the worst literary critics of the twentieth century”.) The critical provenance of Bloom’s theory of influence, then, is not up for discussion, but nearly everything else is.

The Anatomy of Influence is at its best in the introduction and after Bloom’s bout with Shakespeare. In the clear and convincing chapters on the poetic influence of Epicurus and Lucretius, as well as in his magisterial commentaries on Whitman, the reader is treated to the musings of one of the great literary critics of the 20th century completely in his element. As with the chapters on Shakespeare, quotables abound, but here they strike the right tone. Amusing swipes at Matthew Arnold (“the most overrated of all critics, ever”) chime with interesting asides on Freud (“the Montaigne of his era”), but Bloom can get carried away in his search for the soundbite. Take these appraisals of contemporary letters: “Cynicism abounds. Reality is becoming virtual, bad books drive out good, reading is a dying art.”; and “I will no longer strive with Resenters and other lemmings. We will be folded together in our common dust.” This is Bloom the pantomime villain. These sententious mutterings as well as shadowy allusions to “New Cynics” and other abstract non-threats are unnecessary and feel a little forced, if not contrived, to play up to his contemporary, curmudgeonly, public image.

It is, instead, Bloom’s use of autobiography that really pulls the book along. The strongest and most revealing moments come when Bloom’s sheer faith in poetry breaks through his bluster. In a passage considering Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”, the reader is confronted with an uncharacteristically vulnerable image of the author:

Last year I lay five months in the hospital with a broken back and other maladies, and lost myself day after day reciting “Lilacs” to myself soundlessly. I possess it now by more than memory since in part it was the angel of my modest resurrection.

This is only a brief moment in an overly long book, but these two sentences are worth all the mean-spirited zingers that Bloom can muster. The title of the first draft of The Anxiety of Influence was “The Covering Cherub; or, Poetic Influence”. Here, Bloom steps beyond his cranky comfort zone; he lets us see the angels that attend his writing, and it is both inspiring and somehow very sad.

In this scene in the hospital, the book’s subtitle “Literature as a Way of Life” is shown to be more than a platitude, as it hints toward the articulation of a belief in literature that is religious in its intensity and sincerity. At heart, this book is a meditation on what it means to give a life to literature. The sacrifices Bloom has made in pursuit of his obsession haunt his prose and his bullish critical persona. The isolation from colleagues and the academy is bitterly celebrated. The only contemporary Bloom recalls with any fondness is his dear friend, the late literary critic Angus Fletcher. The strength and endurance of Bloom’s passion for reading is admirable but the loneliness which it appears to ensure is difficult to ignore. The inward turn that opening a book or chanting a poem represents is at the centre of both his solace and his solitude. At the beginning of The Anatomy of Influence Bloom states that, “My book isolates melancholy as the agon of influence” before less confidently adding, “perhaps I write to cure my own sense of having been overinfluenced since childhood by the greatest Western authors.” Bloom’s 39th book is sprawling and digressive, flawed, and often grumpy. But it is more than melancholy; most of all it is a testament to an extraordinary faith in literature.

Angus Brown is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Jesus College, Oxford.

China Miéville
Embassytown
Macmillan, 2011
432 Pages
£17.99
ISBN 978-0230750760

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His pockets heavy with awards for his previous novels, China Miéville has returned with a new book set in a brand-new universe. Dubbed his first “straight science fiction” book, it forsakes the grime and grease of New Crobuzon (Perdido Street Station; The Scar; Iron Council) and takes us to Arieka, a frontier planet on the edge of known space, where humans (Terre) and the occasional immigrant alien live in the eponymous Embassytown. Set in the middle of a much larger, indigenous city, the human settlement survives only on the sufferance of the planet’s original inhabitants: the mysterious Hosts.

The nova (the points of departure from reality which drive a science fiction work), as always with Miéville, come thick, fast, and inventive. The Hosts speak Language; an impossible thing, where words “don’t signify: they are their referents”. They speak it with two voices, so communication between the humans and the hosts is achieved only through a small cadre of Ambassadors, native pairs of humans raised and engineered to think, speak, and be as one. The epic, apocalyptic narrative is centred around the arrival of a new and impossibly unalike Ambassador (plural), whose speech has terrible consequences for the Hosts and Embassytown.

The city itself is a small colony of a Terre power named Bremen, and much of its politics are patterned after colonial intrigues. This is an old-fashioned world; while space travel is possible through a kind of sub-dimension called the “immer”, it is far from smooth, re-introducing an ancient “sailing the high-seas” culture and ethos into this far future. Homo diaspora has spread far and wide, but communication through the immer is sluggish, amounting to a message in a bottle between planets, so the slick federations of Iain M. Banks’s “Culture”, for example, or Le Guin’s ansible-connected universe, are missing. This is just one example of something admirable in all Miéville’s work (see the madcap technologies of Bas-Lag for example), which is its grasp of how polished technology strips us of the excitement and possibilities of technology-in-progress. Most of us, even now, are reduced to simply using tools we cannot hope to understand. In literature, this tends to give advanced technology a deus ex machina quality, robbing it of the possibility of penetration by the narrative, of dialectical interaction with character and plot.

In contrast, Miéville enjoys the dirt and texture of the imperfect and organic, the grain of it: wood, bone, and flesh are more evocative than clean plastic. The technology of the Hosts is one of biorigging, where factories are gargantuan beasts lumbering across the landscape, shitting out little living machines, while vast contracting throats haul goods from country to city, to vomit them out at their destination. These living technorganics, hovering on the edge of decay, enter into a much more polysemous relationship with the reader than traditional technology would. They are useful, elegant, grotesque; a Rorschach blot that tests the edges of your attitude toward self and other, soul and organism: “My aeoli mask in a rare reminder of its biorigged life shifted, uncomfortable at the smell of the dead.” In an instance of pathetic fallacy, the fleshy buildings of the Host city sweat and shudder with the sufferings of the populace; to say that “the city is dying” in this world is to mean it.

Of course, all this strangeness is nothing without something for the reader to recognise and relate to, and the realism of the historical is where Miéville comes into his own. The rhythms of life in Embassytown are both alien and utterly natural in his hands. The social, economic, and political life of the city—both quotidian and mid-crisis—has a veracity and insight that makes one forget the estranged setting. The narrative itself is solid throughout, with each development coming out of the delicately nuanced dialectic between protagonists and environment, building all the way to an apocalyptic climax. This “realism” is on a level much more significant than that of appearances, and has been a strong point of Miéville’s work in the past (the much-lauded The City & The City is perhaps the best example). It allows the reader to absorb the imaginary quality of the world and form the necessary connections and sympathies on a social level, not just at that of the protagonist. As a result the narrative’s emotional and intellectual gambits, amplified through the estranging lenses of science fiction nova, are much more effective.

Thus, though the semiotic themes of the Host’s impossible language fascinate admirably, the book is not only a playful extrapolation of a clever idea. The narrative is that of the best science fiction, resonating with deep structures of the human experience, and blending the intellectual with the emotional. There is a powerful trope questioning our ideas of consciousness—between AI, human, and Host—a trope that is not clearly resolved, and whose ambiguity confuses our natural empathetic instincts. More directly, Miéville continuously manages to pinpoint some human desire, some hurt or need, and finds in the structure of his world the symbolic means to amplify that feeling back at us tenfold. There are moments of crippling sadness—a desperation for recognition in one character; the deep loneliness of another left behind by moving times—where the whole world seems to line up and resonate with the emotion, pushing the experience beyond anything realistically possible, but getting closer to communicating a truth in the process.

Ultimately, it is the complex operations of truth, narrative, and the imaginary in framing, shaping, and controlling the human experience which Embassytown takes as its subject. It is a narrative that encompasses the shuddering convulsions of any shift in perspective, and the danger of a fixed idea of truth, that can only come down from on high, and must disguise its inevitable partiality with violence. The book flickers between the possibility and impossibility of truth, seeming finally to come to a rest at a resolution much in keeping with the messy technorganic setting; that what is best is the messy process of constant death and regeneration, of necessarily failing attempts built on the already failed.

With such a topic at its heart, the text is always aware of its own position—a story about stories in an infinite weave of other stories. The narrator, Avice, is constantly making us aware of the constructed nature of her tale in a Brechtian fashion, allowing us even to know when she is using technique for the sake of a better story. Simultaneously, she hates it when another character, telling of his own experience, “modulated his voice and timed his delivery and turned it, true as it was, into a story.” The text is alive with an imagined self-consciousness, a fictionalising of fiction that in turn pretends and suggests the “reality” of the base text, and so allows Mieville’s strange world to slip, accepted, into our thoughts without resistance.

At the recent Marxism conference in London, China Miéville spoke about the category of “committed fiction”. About how it is often seen as “bad” fiction, because its too polemic, or didactic, to retain any real aesthetic value. Or that “good” fiction tends to be seen as above and beyond grubby politics, plugging directly into some higher plane of transcendental human values and truth. For Miéville, however, politics will out, and it is willful blindness to think otherwise. He considers his work, not as overtly didactic, but as waving a flag and having its politics imbued in its blood and bones. In Embassytown, the reader is invited, in the best traditions of science fiction, to see their reality as a fiction. To see how these complex ideas about the nature of truth, power, hierarchy, rebellion, desire, and freedom are manifest all around us. The physicality of the characters, the landscapes, the choice of technology, the immer; every aspect of the book is flesh to a powerful and radical perspective that rides the crest of the age, and beckons us on.

Rhys Williams is reading for a PhD in English Literature at the University of Warwick.

George Craig, Martha Dow Fehsenfeld, Dan Gunn
and Lois More Overbeck
The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956 Volume 2
Cambridge UP, 2011
886 Pages
£30
ISBN 978-0521867948

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The “siege in the room” is one of the most productive periods of literary achievement by a single author in history. From 1946 to 1950, Samuel Beckett entered a new phase of writing that brought him unprecedented recognition, not least from the notoriously hard-to-please Jean Blanzat reviewing Molloy for the Figaro Littéraire: “[…]pouvoir dire, au moins une fois dans sa vie, qu’un grand écrivain vient d’apparaître”. During this time, Beckett revolutionised the novel with three works—Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—not to mention four other astounding nouvelles; and transformed the course of modern drama with Waiting for Godot while diverting his efforts from fiction. Readers will wonder: how on earth do the letters account for this?

Now I must buckle down to doing the wearisome tidying up of my play, which will probably be called En attendant Godot. Above all I must make sure that the anus is clear.

Fond regards,

Sam

[to Georges Duthuit, March 1949]

The scatological indifference is startling; and yet the author’s ambition to tidy up “holes” recurs again and again in this volume, providing an astonishingly fertile space for the excavation of persistence, loss, and discomfiture.

One might have assumed that this frenzy of creativity would require a break from letter-writing. Here, however, is the proof that his activity as a man of letters also grew. Stretching to almost 900 pages, The Letters of Samuel Beckett, 1941-1956 represents only 40% of the total number of letters written during those years. So what is missing?

Firstly, the letters Beckett sent to Josette and Henri Hayden while he was hiding in the Vaucluse. The recent purchaser of that collection has not permitted access and the hope remains that they will be released for inclusion in one of the subsequent volumes. One is less sure why passages have been left out of the exchange with Beckett’s American lover, Pamela Mitchell, when internal evidence suggests they have already been reproduced. It should also be noted that the letters that are included in this volume date from January 1945; not from 1941, as the title advertises. None of the few letters written during the Nazi Occupation up to the Liberation of Paris make “direct reference” to the work, such as the Watt notebooks.

Yet the range of correspondence in this second volume really begins under a climate of constant surveillance during which the Irish writer was pinned down and unable to move. The editors have accordingly opted in favour of historical continuity, despite the intervention of war, in ascribing to this volume the originary date of 1941 without the letters. Vital exchanges from this period are included but only in the general introduction. To Cornelius Cremin, first secretary of the Irish legation in Vichy, Beckett writes:

Have had prolonged interviews with the local Gendarmes, in their barracks 6 miles from here. My history almost day by day from my first setting foot in France. They can’t believe that I can be called Samuel and am not a Jew. Yesterday they took away my identity card I suppose to see if it had not been tampered with. My movements are restricted in the extreme, radius of ten kilometers about.

[11/10/1942]

And to Sean Murphy, the Irish minister to France, he adds eight months later:

But with regard to this constant prying into my identity, my past movements, my present movements, my means of existence, my mode of existence, why I am called Samuel, etc. etc.[…]when my only offence, I mean that of having clandestinely crossed the line of demarcation, has been judged in the police-court of Apt and presumably purged by the payment of a fine of 400 francs[…]You might even mention, if you could be so kind, that you believe me to be inoffensive.

[30/6/1943]

This relentless interrogation sets the scene for the more complex and divergent commitments that are explored in the volume after the Second World War. We are able to see how Beckett’s personal history clashes in fascinating ways with the histories of his addressees. Having risked his own life working for the French resistance cell, “Gloria SMH”, he maintains a positive relationship with Georges “Belmont” (previously Georges Pelorson), who collaborated with the Vichy Government. We learn that Beckett’s most heartfelt moments “spilling my guts out” and “unloading all this” (this from a man who preferred France at war to Ireland at peace) are aimed toward a figure who was regarded with considerable suspicion by the French cultural mainstream for his escape to the United States during the war period. Sometimes it is the figure of the art historian, as we saw with Thomas MacGreevy in the first volume, which is being pursued at all costs. These outpourings are just as powerfully felt in the ardent perfection of Beckett’s language-skills with Mania Péron, to whom letters now have to be addressed in the absence of her husband, Alfred. Fellow exchange-student “Alfy” had worked alongside the Irish author on the translation of Murphy and of “Anna Livia Plurabelle”, and recruited Beckett to the resistance before he died on deportation from the Mauthausen concentration camp. As the letters progress, it becomes clearer how it is his basic commitment to others that Beckett is restructuring; and as the author becomes increasingly decentralised in his thinking, we are able to sense why Jérôme Lindon, so much more than a publisher to Beckett, went on to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature on the writer’s behalf.

The war continues to act as an enabling influence for Beckett. We appreciate how it disengages the special feelings of privation, allowing his muscular erudition to fall away into the kind of artistic achievement that we now associate with the writer’s minimalist style. It is interesting to note at the start of this volume how the editors have chosen to accentuate the saturation of James Joyce’s influence. The last letter that Beckett sent to Joyce (the day before Joyce died on 12 January 1941) is illustrated on a prefabricated lettercard “written” by means of struck out phrases, as was required during the Occupation. An uncanny tribute indeed to the latter’s technique.

The breadth of correspondence that follows is considerable. Recipients range from the Irish Republican rebel Ernie O’Malley to the shy Swiss novelist Robert Pinget; from the distinguished French magistrate and composer Edouard Coester to Simone de Beauvoir, who is judged to have overstepped her editorial duties with the abridgement of Beckett’s “Suite”: “You are giving me the chance to speak only to retract it before the words have had time to mean anything.” The author’s increasing contact with publishers in this volume, such as Peter Suhrkamp (head of S. Fischer Verlag and of the imprint Suhrkamp Verlag) allows us to gain real insight into the public recognition that emerges as Beckett is forced to consider aspects of adaptation, translation, directing, and performance beyond his occupation as a fiction writer. No one was more taken aback by this sudden shift in literary fortunes than Beckett himself, and many letters show him struggling to come to terms with these changes. The exchange with Michel Polac, head of Radiodiffusion Française, prompts an especially fruitful crisis:

It is not given to everyone to be able to move from the world that opens under the page to that of profit and loss, then back again, unperturbed, as if between the daily grind and the pub on the corner.

And he adds:

As for wanting to find in all this a wider and loftier meaning to take away after the show, along with the programme and the choc-ice, I am unable to see the point of it. But it must be possible.

[after January 23, 1952]

That final intimation reveals much about the way the author was eventually compelled to take over the stage as a director.

It should be noted that the general editors have overcome the pedantic tendencies of the first volume. The signs of emendation [for and sic] that caused interruptions to reading have now been mostly removed, without any cost in distortion to the understanding. The pruning of unnecessary biographical detail (where parts of that knowledge could be assumed for major figures) in favour of well-placed individual illustrations, like that of Alexander Trocchi, has also enhanced the book’s excellent appearance overall. New problems have been introduced, however, by the enormous number of French translations, especially those required by the Beckett–Duthuit exchanges that form the bulk of this volume. These cause real spatial constraints and pose difficult questions for an English language edition.

The demand for translation is not supported by Beckett’s own reading of literature, which takes place in the original language. Furthermore, his movement to rural France—firstly, to Roussillon-sur-Apt in the Vaucluse during the Occupation, and later to Ussy-sur-Marne after the war—refracts a tongue beyond that of the cultivated Parisian. The inventive side of the author’s linguistic development results in additional difficulties with syntax, regardless of the pains he takes elsewhere in refinement and perfection. Some of the most excited passages in discussion with Duthuit might be perceived as untranslatable. How can one translate those words that “lie” in speaking their author? And how does one account for extracts of the original correspondence on which Beckett’s meaning remains contextually, and playfully, unstable?

The translator, George Craig, is to be praised for taking on such tasks and many more in this volume. Thoroughly aware of Beckett’s self-translations, he has allowed the English to preserve its distance from the French by sensing (without anticipating) the author’s feverish desire to combine various inflections and registers. Craig’s ability to resist “turning the unusual into the usual so that it won’t read like a translation” (as Beckett wryly notes of Erich Franzen’s version of Molloy in this volume) will impress readers, as does his capacity to separate the author’s self-depreciations from his more considered judgements. One wonders, however, presuming that most readers approaching this book will have some French, whether all of the secondary passages (those not written by Beckett) needed to be translated, and whether that could have freed up more space for the author.

Francis Hutton-Williams is reading for a DPhil in English at Exeter College, Oxford.

Timothy Clark
The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment
Cambridge UP, 2011
270 Pages
£55
ISBN 978-0521896351

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The title of Timothy Clark’s The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment may strike many as obvious, or perhaps even dull, especially in light of the titles of numerous other introductions to this emergent intersection of literary study. Take, for example, Glotfelty and Fromm’s The Ecocriticism Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology or Lawrence Coupe’s The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Ecocriticism or, indeed, Lawrence Buell’s tantalisingly framed The Future of Environmental Criticism. All seem intent, in their titles alone, on carving a new niche. It is hard to tell whether it was Clark’s decision to forgo this nomenclatorial investment, or whether it was simply sober editorial demands. Nonetheless, Clark’s rather pedestrian title ultimately complements his own awareness of the various conceptual problems that afflict this intersection and the difficulty in pulling together the disparate strands of output ascribed to it.

The title is, in short, a surprisingly strategic gesture. In my view, Literature and the Environment works as the first serious attempt to cover this intersection as an intersection, not as something which from first principles the commentator wishes to set up as a “new approach”. Whilst this is clearly something Clark has his doubts about, repeatedly referring to ecocriticism’s “faltering” contributions to environmental causes, it also remains something for which he preserves a significant degree of optimism. It is the foundational neutrality of his approach that permits him this dual position. Clarke is able to stand at a distance and function first and foremost as a critic, unimplicated in the case that is being made the world over for ecocriticism’s literary inauguration.

Of particular interest to Clark in this regard is the notion of a definitive ecocritical methodology. Given particular focus are claims that ecocriticism, due to its dependence on claims originating from the environmental science community, lends itself particularly well to interdisciplinarity, and that the distinctive feature of ecocriticism is the “multiple literacy” exercised by its proponents and demanded from its readership. “Ecocriticism”, Clark claims, “often subjects itself to an ethic of truthfulness, accuracy and coherence of a kind more often associated with scientific or professional academic work”. However, concluding a fairly scathing close reading of essays by two self-proclaimed interdisciplinary writers, Stephen Jay Gould and Ian Marshall, Clark reflects, “In sum, ‘narrative scholarship’ of this kind serves perhaps as a reminder of just how difficult rigorous interdisciplinarity would be”.

The book itself, however, is anything but a categorical write-off of ecocriticism’s capacity to achieve such a methodological novelty; rather, it is better seen perhaps as a call for redoubled efforts toward attaining a true interdisciplinarity, that is, one “attentive to strict modes of argument, to scientific method, as well as subject matter”. In this regard, Clark’s attitudes are best reflected in the respect he has for the biologist and writer Donna Haraway, whose notion of “multiple literacy” Clark frequently refers to as a promising paradigm for successful interdisciplinary methodology. As his scepticism suggests, however, he maintains that this approach remains far from full realisation.

What might also strike readers is the lack of reference to conventional fiction. There is a lot of literary theory, a lot of discussion of environmentalism in a direct sense, but proportionately less straightforward literature connected to it. This is, in part, a function again of the breadth of Clark’s brief (“literature” after all isn’t necessarily literary), as well as a tentative endorsement of Robert Root’s idea of the value of a “creative non-fiction”. It is also perhaps an intimation that any lack is in fact a result of the unprecedented scale of contemporary environmental problems; that is, we are still waiting for literary responses commensurate with the scale of environmental realities. Via this approach, Clark repeatedly taps into a very fruitful debate about the “literary space” which sees him not only arguing for the literariness and value of interdisciplinary writing and non-fiction, but also interrogating the very stability and usefulness of fiction itself.

Take for example Clark’s interest in Anne Dillard, who courted controversy in her 1974 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, in which she had presented fiction as fact, apparently regarding the latter mode as more efficacious than the former. So too, the problems encountered in the work of writers such as Gretel Ehrlich, who, in her 2004 novel, The Future of Ice, often “asserts as given scientific fact” things that are, according to Clark, “very inaccurate”. Due again to the close proximity of her writing to scientific inquiry, Clark concludes that “Ehrlich’s revisionist project is not refuted by her errors in basic science, but it is surely undermined” (my emphases). These examples are just two of many attempts made throughout the book that seek to “democratise” the literary field and contest generic hegemonies. “Such well used procedures of reading”, he claims, “usually treat fiction and non-fiction in the same way, as the arena of competing cultural representations and identity claims”. In doing this Clark raises important questions about the function of literature in the face of environmental crisis (real or perceived). But it is here, perhaps, that Clark falls short. Despite repeatedly raising these questions, there is little or no explicit attempt made to offer answers. In a field that is demonstrably about how we might prevent or mitigate environmental damage, Clark offers no real framework for considering literature’s capacity in this regard.

The combination of Literature and the Environment’s appreciation of the breadth of its field, added to those moments when it reveals problems within it (a feature structurally imbedded through the “quandaries” Clark has scattered throughout the book), ultimately frame this intersection as intriguingly amorphous. Particularly for students of the field, this will no doubt be encouraging: the problems and inadequacies that Clark highlights are presented as reasons to engage rather than as fatal flaws. This enticing quality is something that is supported by Clark’s own palpable enthusiasm for the intersection. Though he is often eager to lodge his concerns regarding the occasionally “opportunistic” nature of ecocriticism and its purported methodologies, it is obvious that he sees a future in it, a sentiment no less evident in the text’s closing lines, which see Clark “anticipating the daunting but exciting kinds of literacy essential in the centuries to come”, to which “ecocriticism offers its emerging and still faltering voice”.

Chris Maughan is reading for a PhD in English at the University of Warwick.

Dorothy Edwards
Winter Sonata
Honno Welsh Women’s Press, 2011
416 Pages
£8.99
ISBN 978-1906784294

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Dorothy Edwards’s only novel, Winter Sonata, has been overlooked in the past, but thanks to Honno Classics’s new edition, it has been brought in from the cold. Edwards was a promising but ill-fated writer of the modernist period, whose prose lends a brutal sense of rhythm to domestic routines and the fluctuations of weather. Edwards returns to the same hearths at breakfast and suppertime over several months; her writing reshapes ordinary days and nights with a methodical beauty. The four chapters of the novel are supposed to represent the recurring melodies of a four-movement sonata, but although music is an important theme in all of Edwards’s work, Winter Sonata tests the relationship between writing and music by suggesting the connection and then using a style which is deliberately harsh, plain, and in some senses, unmusical.

As Dr Claire Flay points out in her comprehensive introduction to this new edition, Winter Sonata is populated by characters who are almost entirely in a state of “emotional hibernation”. Edwards carries over the quiet resonance of her short stories into the interaction between the working-class Clark household (in which Mr Nettle is a lodger) and the Neran family (who are far richer). Mr Nettle’s arrival, illness, and recovery frame the narrative, and it is Nettle’s quiet and largely undisturbed introspection that epitomises the isolated state of all the characters in the novel. The action is very restrained, and the reader is denied the usual landmark plot events of births, marriages, and deaths. Instead, Edwards offers tableaux in which the Neran sisters, Olivia and Eleanor, search for something “interesting” to occupy them during the cold winter months. Pauline Clark and Nettle have musical talents which provide the Nerans with entertainment, but mostly serve to demonstrate the uncomfortable disparity in class between the two households. Edwards contrasts the stultifying atmosphere at the Nerans’ house with the sufferings of the adolescent Pauline, who scurries about searching for human affection “like a little cat”. Edwards excels in her straightforward observations of Pauline’s natural, if limited, hopes and desires and in her descriptions of Pauline’s relationship with her little brother.

The relationship between writing and painting—like that between writing and music—is interrogated, as Edwards repeatedly makes reference to the colour and shape of familiar objects, but never allows their symbolic qualities to flower, and indeed sometimes she undercuts such sentimental attachments completely. Edwards uses a painter’s eye to look into the hearts of her characters dispassionately, replicating the prejudices of symbolic attachments, rather than their beauty. For example, Mr Nettle’s admiration of Olivia’s pure white dress as something “different” is robbed of emotional eloquence by the concurrent feeling he has for Pauline and her mother, who “were…painted in the dull colours of everything that is too near.” Edwards describes only a small number of the physical traits of her characters; the blue of Eleanor Neran’s eyes, for example, never fails to be mentioned whenever she appears. However, their blueness says nothing about Eleanor’s internal life, and the fixation of her suitors upon the consistent colour of her eyes, rather than her changing perception of the world around her, is symptomatic of the way in which the novel’s characters are in large part passive observers of their own lives.

Olivia suffers with a depression that prevents her from finding “imagination and affection” enough to see the world with “life and depth”. This idea that the world—especially the winter landscape—may take on meaning (or be devoid of it) according to the view of the observer is what underlies all of Edwards’s detached landscapes. And yet, Edwards’s careful use of the pathetic fallacy does not follow well-trammeled paths; in fact her characters are shown to be reflections of nature’s moods, not the other way around.

Sunrise and sunset, the changing moons, and the bare branches of trees are described mostly in sober, measured sentences and with a restrained palette. While her prose does not have lilt or musical lyricism, Edwards uses the phonetic impact of words to mimic natural processes to great effect. Mr Nettle’s experience of the first frost, for example, is conveyed through the strict use of short modifiers:

When he had shut and locked the door there was no longer anyone to be seen. The sharp sickle of the moon shone coldly, and thin white clouds moved in cold silence across the sky. There were no stars, and if there had been, there was nothing for them to see with their cold cunning little eyes.

The alliterative force of sibilants and plosives simulate the sharp cold of a nippy night.

Edwards’s style has the frost of winter about it, in the way that she applies the same syntactic patterns to the rural backdrop and her bevy of characters with an equanimity that deadens their emotional agency. For example, Edwards prefaces the Nerans’ visit to Mr Nettle’s lodgings with a summary of the changing season:

[a]fter that it rained very heavily nearly every day until the short pale grass was sodden with rain, and often there were large, curiously-shaped pools on the low flat fields. There was water in every hollow on the roads, and with every movement of the wind the green trees in the churchyard sent down showers of drops on to the graves.

The insistent rhythm of rainfall is integral to this passage. Edwards conveys the monotony of rain and links it to those being rained upon by using a consistent pattern of double adjectives: the “short pale grass”, “low flat fields”, and “cold white sky” are implicitly connected to Olivia’s “large dark eyes”. Without the humanising breath of a comma, these adjectives give the impression of an incessant and uncontrollable force, like the weather. Olivia’s gaze is important here, too, as it is not Olivia herself, but her “large dark eyes” which “looked towards the window”. Her act of silent observation is paradigmatic of her situation; gazing passively upon the landscape, her emotional stillness is ratified by the bleakness of rain and snow. Into each life some rain must fall!

Edwards uses parataxis to depress her readers’ expectations of narrative contour and to express the distance and coolness that exists between her characters. Instead of flowing on from one another, her sentences seem to stand isolated, without cause or consequence. This structural trend is a representation of the distance between the Nerans, Mr Nettle, and Pauline’s family. The intellectual flirt, Mr Premiss, is able to exploit the loneliness of the villagers, because as a visitor his lifestyle is far less static. Part of his power comes from his ability to be direct and insightful about everyday social transactions: “Why, Miss Eleanor,” he said, “in this world we poor mortals stand alone, rather far from each other, and it is not altogether easy for us to meet…If you were ever so kind as to condescend to flirt with me, it would be like a little white dove flying towards me.” Premiss is unique in the novel in that he interacts with the Neran sisters and with Pauline without a discriminating sense of their social standing. The distance between people which Premiss comments upon is most apparent in Pauline’s encounters with the Nerans, as it is in these scenes that the awkwardness of class hierarchy is most acute and stifling. George’s visit to the ailing Mr Nettle is the occasion of conversational apathy between himself and Pauline, a scene set off exquisitely by Edwards’s characteristic blunt turn of phrase: “Pauline stood with her back to the sideboard and looked at him without much interest…He took no notice of her, in fact it did not occur to him to talk to her. So they remained silent and did not have the advantage of each other’s ideas.”

The power of ideas and conversation to reshape the winter landscape into something which can be understood in terms of “ambition and human aspiration” is stifled by the characters’ reluctance to engage in debate with one another. George tries to take a positive message from “seeing how the trees and things [do] the same thing year after year”, by using the shift back and forth between growth and hibernation in nature to excuse “a certain monotony in the results of [human] achievements.” Edwards contrasts this lone articulation of the relationship between humanity and nature with the daily, lived experience of her characters, which, for the most part, takes part in silence. The monotony of winter as it is expressed in the novel is best summed up by Olivia’s introspection, her passive gaze frustrating any attempt by the reader to ascribe “deeper implications” to “the place and the people around her”.

Grace Egan is reading for a DPhil in English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford.

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^{© Clarissa Upchurch}

George Szirtes is a Hungarian-born poet and translator who came to Britain in 1956 as a refugee. He studied painting at the Harrow School of Art and the Leeds College of Art and Design before publishing his first book of poetry, The Slant Door, in 1979. In 2005 he won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his collection Reel. He has translated Hungarian poetry and drama into English, including works by Sándor Márai, Ottó Orbán, and László Krasznahorkai. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and teaches at the University of East Anglia.

Paul Sweeten corresponded with George Szirtes by email.

Your relationship with English is often understood in terms of your absorbing it as a second language. You have lived in Britain for most of your life, so has this now become a journalistic preoccupation, or are there times when English still feels like a second language to you?

There are times—moments, especially when speaking Hungarian—when English does feel like a second language and, perhaps, no bad thing, at least some of the time. The sense of language as a material body is useful for any writer, especially a poet. I myself think it odd that I should be a poet in English: it is as if some distinct and fortunate transformation had occurred at an early age. But if so, I am inside the change, not outside, so journalistic preoccupations are perfectly valid.

Does that sense of language as a material body become heightened when translating? Christopher Ricks once described translations as “cover versions”; is that your sense of the process, and do you take many artistic liberties when translating Hungarian poets into English? How much George Szirtes, for instance, goes into your translations of Sándor Márai?

Yes, that sense of material body is heightened in translation: each language destabilises the other: that means we become more aware of the fallible body of each language. One language asks: Can you do that? The other replies: I can do this, which is like that. The first language cannot know if it is properly understood: language two understands there are some things it can’t do. Their joint experience is uncertainty of intention and meaning and the sense of limit in both. I like Ricks’s definition though. There is, after all, a genuine quality in Blondie’s version of “The Tide is High” that is not quite the same as the quality of the original by the more obscure Paragons. My Márai is not better than Márai, it is just a possible English Márai that depends entirely on the Hungarian Márai. As far as Anglophone readership goes, Márai was the Paragons and my version, with a bit of luck, is Blondie. The big difference is I don’t get fame and money whereas Blondie did.

“Taking liberties” suggests something faintly criminal, or at least improper. Is there a proper behaviour towards the the original text in poetry? How many different English interpretations do we have for, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”? There is an area of likely agreement but new readings continue to be offered. Which of the interpretations is the most proper? At what point does the reader begin to take liberties? I am generally within the sphere of propriety if only because I am aware of translating unknown poets, often for the first time. If Don Paterson translates Machado he feels no such obligation.

I’ve heard you talk about arriving in Britain with nothing but a book of photographs, and anyone familiar with your poetry will be aware of how important a role the captured image plays in it; there seems to be something of Keats’s Grecian urn figures at work, characters frozen in artifact. What do photographs mean to you?

I still have the case of photographs, though I have shared the actual photographs with my brother. My own mother was a photographer, and as a child, I remember watching her work at the light-box, retouching and hand-colouring. I wrote about these activities before I became as involved as I now am with photographs and photography. They are tied in with memories of mirrors (as in “At The Dressing Table Mirror”, a poem about the death of my mother, published in 1976). So mirrors and photographs are related. Broadly speaking, I think Barthes gets it right in Camera Lucida. The photographic moment is fascinating because it is by its very nature tragic, a memento mori. The moment has, by definition, gone. The record of the moment anticipates and includes the moment of going. Of course there are great photographers and ordinary snapshots. The great photographs are those where the image is not merely record but symbol. Everything is precisely where it had to be in order to generate a meaning beyond itself. Record and symbol are endlessly fascinating. Keats’s figures are frozen in a formalised moment, in a state of stylised desire. In that sense they too are potent symbols.

That symbolism in great photographs can hold an almost happenstance quality. It seems with painting there is more a sense of the artist’s hand; it’s a more contrived form, perhaps, but much of the beauty of poetry is in its contrivance. Did it feel like a natural transition to write poetry after studying painting?

I was writing before I started to paint, but I took to painting (at school, very late, after Christmas in my third year of Sixth) with great enthusiasm. There seemed to be the freedom to create one’s own cosmos in painting. Then there was all that glorious messy physical stuff. Language is the equivalent of that stuff. The power to create a cosmos is similar. I still love looking at paintings but am much more aware of them as constructions. Maybe part of getting older is the desire to be closer to life, as photographs seem to be.

The collection for which you won the T.S. Eliot Prize was Reel. I’ve always liked how tercets look on the page, and in that collection their spacing gives me the impression of a slide projector. How did you see that particular form working in relation to the other aspects of the poems?

The title poem of Reel is written in terza rima, as is a good part of the book—practically the whole of the first half, including “Meeting Austerlitz”, “Noir”, “Sheringham”, and “Flesh: An Early Family History”, a terza rima sequence with some eclogues in between the sections. I adapted Dante’s terza rima because it is an ideal episodic narrative form, (as in the Commedia) each verse clipping into the next, each section sufficient to articulate a central event. The slide projector effect you mention is for me a film clip that contains its own brief narrative, each episode part of a broad theme. There is, incidentally, a very new book, A Companion to Poetic Genre (ed. Erik Martiny), for which I wrote the terza rima chapter.

Having taught creative writing for a number of years and having kept a very active online blog, do you feel that the role of the public poet has been given greater breadth by these relatively recent developments—writing schools and worldwide discussion media—or are they merely incarnations of the kind of platforms to which writers have always had access? I don’t mean to say that you undertake public readings, teaching, blogging or anything else merely as “George Szirtes: Poet”, but your success has come at a time where writers are expected, to use Martin Amis’s word, to “perform”. Did you ever have a sense of that part of your life accelerating; after you won the Eliot, perhaps?

Inside that question nestle a good many others. There are various senses of the word “perform” here. The blog didn’t start out as performance, only in the sense that all writing is performative, but as notes that had an implicit, if unknown, public aspect. In other words I didn’t think the blog had anything directly to do with my fortunes as a poet. It was an interesting toy that made me think. It still does, though I am aware that it very quickly became an aspect of what you call, “George Szirtes: poet”. I do however believe my thoughts on this or that matter, as expressed on the blog, are read by some people with not much interest in poetry, let alone mine. In that respect I am “George Szirtes: human being (poet)”, a concept I rather like because of my growing belief that poetry is an aspect of being human, rather than an exclusive fully self-defining identity. I am, on the other hand, primarily known (if I am known at all) as a poet and a translator, albeit of a peculiar kind that might be described as George Szirtes: human being—English language writer of Hungarian birth, some links with Jewishness (poet and translator).

The question is partly whether I “perform” that. Larkin said he didn’t give readings because he couldn’t go round pretending to be himself. Any public appearance is a form of pretending to be oneself—and I mean a simple visit to the doctors where one behaves as one believes one should behave to doctors, just as much as being on stage as “George Szirtes: poet” not to mention all the other descriptive material. Performance is itself an aspect of human existence. What complicates matters is that for some time now publishers have depended on poets reading in public to sell the books because most bookshops don’t stock poetry, or only very little. At the same time an entire genre of “performance poetry” has developed in which the stage performance is of primary importance.

What did the Eliot Prize mean? In the first place it meant that three poets on one occasion chose my book over others. Three different poets on another day might have chosen something else. Nevertheless, the fact that they chose it meant that from then on I was one of a small group of poets who had been awarded the prize and that the prize would now enter the performative definition: George Szirtes (poet, Eliot Prize winner) plus the rest.

Frankly, I am with Larkin in some respects. I am glad of what the prize has brought me: a lot more attention, a lot more invitations, all those things you might call “acceleration”. The poetic vocation is psychologically insecure so it’s nice to be assured that the work is thought to be of some value. It is nice, but it is stupid to believe assurances. It is good that it should give one confidence to go on and try new things, but it would be stupid to go and do the same things all over again. Being a poet means living on one’s wits and nerves: those are best kept sharp. Best not be cosseted or flattered then. Plough on.

The role of the public poet? The public role of the poet? I don’t think I am a very public poet, but am aware modern technology has opened new channels of communication that, especially in the case of younger poets, has led to a new kind of consciousness. This may be more a matter of amplitude rather than of a radical change of kind. In any case, it has changed the old notion of being “public”: a whisper can very quickly become public material. I know I live in that world, that it swirls around me. I try to add the odd well formed sentence to it because doing that helps me think and has in some way modified the way I write poetry too. That is part of ploughing on.

Paul Sweeten graduated in 2010 with an MSt in Creative Writing from Kellogg College, Oxford. Paul is the editor-in-chief at the Oxonian Review.