The Writing Life
Page 22
Scripsi, 1982
ESCAPING THE CIRCLE OF HELL
THE BRITISH TEND TO think of Peter Porter as a resident Australian while recognising him as one of their finest poets. Australians, if the anthologists are any guide, do not know what to call him. He was born and grew up in Brisbane, left it finally when he was twenty-two, and has spent the whole of his working life in London. He makes no apology for being an expatriate. But where he writes from is not the heart of a lost empire but the heart of the language he speaks, which is, one suspects, the only place he has ever been at home.
Language is Porter’s life as well as his livelihood. Reviewer, radio and film critic, record reviewer, and owner as he puts it in a poem of ‘one hundred and seven Bach cantatas’, lover of opera and Italy, occasional visitor to hell (his Brisbane childhood and adolescence provide as powerful a vision of it as Orcagna’s), expert on the many ways of upsetting God’s syllogism, he is a self-taught polymath, the cleverest poet since Auden when it comes to the apt allusion and the phrase that fixes in acid our late twentieth century in full cry – the cry often enough of rage and pain.
He is metropolitan, a born city-dweller: ‘Where can there be nature enough,’ he demands, ‘to do without art?’ Although he moves a bit awkwardly in the world of machines he is a post-technological man and finds room in his poems for everything our odd late world throws up. It is all grist to the mill of his dream-factory.
Porter knows more than most poets and uses what he knows. Our age is self-conscious: the world we inhabit is a vast museum – call it History, or Art, or the History of Art. For Porter, the exhibits are still alive and active. All those works by Melozzo da Forli or Piero di Cosimo or Giulio Romano, a lot of what happened in history (especially the darker bits, ‘its truculent deeds of hate’), the operas of Donizetti, are still happening, right there in the daily life of the poems:
There was a sugar farmer’s son (hyperthyroid)
I knew who was just like Nemorino,
And a girl at the Everest Milk Bar
Whose tits rubbed the cold of the ice-cream churn
As she reached down with her cheating scoop –
You saw more if you asked for strawberry –
She had a cold Christ hung over that defile
Crucified in silver, his apotheosis
In dry ice fumes. She was just like Bel’ Adina
‘Homage to Gaetano Donizetti’
After nearly forty years, given the openness of the poems and the wholeness of what he tries to grasp there, Porter’s Australian experience may turn up at any moment. Most metaphors, as a late poem puts it, are ‘home-produced’, and poems are a place where time and tense have as little relevance as in dreams. In this sense, Porter never left Brisbane at all. In this sense too, he is, for all his eclecticism, as Australian as any of us. Which is only to assert that he is entirely himself:
Sparrows acclimatize, but I still seek
The permanently upright city where
Speech is nature and plants conceive in pots,
Where one escapes from what one is and who
One was, where home is just a postmark
And country wisdom clings to calendars.
The opposite of a sun-burned truth-teller’s
World, haunted by precepts and the Pleides.
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’
That, thrown off with so much wit and flair, is an assertion, a cheeky one, of his right to be his own sort of poet and his own sort of Australian, an unrepentant stayer-away-from-home, whose being away makes ‘home’ an ambiguous but obsessive term in his work; like the life he escaped and the ‘I’ he evaded by going. It is one version – there are more than twenty million others – of what it means to be an Australian, and one example of how growing up Australian might hurt you into poetry and send you howling to your art.
‘In the New World happiness is allowed,’ a local reviewer asserts. Porter replies:
No, in the New World, happiness is enforced. It leans your neck over the void and the only recourse is off to Europe …
The Australia Porter left in 1951 was a colonial backwater. Still recovering from two wars and the Great Depression, still lost in a dream of empire and half-living elsewhere, deeply puritanical and conservative, bellicosely anti-intellectual, it was the dull and decent place that some Australians now look back to with nostalgic regret; before migration and the various Libs. Most of all, before television, talk, Vietnam, cheap airfares and the Common Market changed us all for ever. It remains, for Porter, one of the circles of hell.
But if Martial got to Rome, and Gustav Mahler out of his flea-ridden garrison town in Galicia (one of the ‘poet-killing provinces’), why shouldn’t a bright boy from Brisbane get to London and out of his Edwardian nightmare into the 1960s? Not all the barbarians who flocked to Rome were mercenaries and drunken louts. A few of them were bright young provincials who would one day be administrators, and some of them even emperors.
Porter has an affection for this version of London as late-imperial Rome; in one whole collection, he makes the Spanish-born satirist Martial his spokesman.
Late-imperial capitals are glittering assemblies of ex-colonials, deeply drawn to the dream of the ideal city and living in the real one with a mixture of contempt, disappointment, awe, gratitude for the escape it offers, anger at its cruelties, and sheer delight at the parade of follies it presents.
Lateness is essential to Porter’s vision of the time he lives in. Anger and sadness; these are his mixed emotions, as the poems – their passion laced always with wit – mix satire and elegy. He does not always write from the Roman point of view, but the Roman experience is often there to provide a classic instance.
When Martial writes to his fellow-poet Juvenal back in Rome, ages and continents slide in and out of one another like the double-exposure in some old Hollywood film:
… you’re likely
at this moment to be tramping round
that speculator’s mile, the loud Suburra
where Empire ticks are sucking blood (called rental)
from families, and young provincials slink
home at evening clutching half a kipper;
… I’m lazy
here, a toff, I raise a spade just
to let it fall (the Government stroke we say);
I make friends in Boterdus and Platea
(I give you two whole pentameters
to laugh at these our Celtiberian names).
‘After Martial’, XII, XVIII
There is affection here for the outlandish ‘other place’, as there is in ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’ for Boeotia and the kind of poet it produces, although it is not the sort of poet Porter himself wants to be. The poet he is, is remarkable.
Brisbane made him: so did his sullen after-life as the latecomer in a late marriage, with ‘a family tree sited in hell; for whom the early lesson is “once bitten, twice bitten” and “nothing crooked is made straight and no rough places plain”.’
His mother’s death when he was nine made him. The sadness and guilt of it are in poem after poem.
His awful schooldays and his awful headmaster at Toowoomba made him, as described in ‘Mister Roberts’ and ‘The View From Misfortune’s Back’. That and the train-journeys home in ‘carriages full of Glennie and Fairholme girls’ – he ‘the boy with something wrong reading a book’.
Reading books made him: Auden, Pope and Donne. So did music: Mozart (at twenty-one he could reel off all the Köchel numbers from K. 1 to K. 626), Donizetti, Verdi, Bruckner, those 107 Bach cantatas.
London and advertising made him, the frustration we see in ‘John Marston Advises Anger’ and the half-comic torments of getting a girl. Then marriage. Then Italy. Then the death of his wife, in which the sadness and guilt he so often turns to are brought to their highest pitch in a set of poems that stand at the very centre of his achievement and are some of the most passionate and moving works our ce
ntury has produced.
Most of all, language made him. English – the complex, protean, hybrid, slangy, ever-inventive English of the late twentieth century that he moves in with so much dash and assurance, so much colonial cheek.
As for Australia – along with anthology pieces like ‘Phar Lap in the Melbourne Museum’, ‘Sydney Cove’, ‘1788’ and the thread of childhood misery that runs through all his most personal poems, there is this. It is too disturbing a picture, and his own response to it too complex, for brief analysis. It is a picture we need to live with:
Here’s a vision may be painted on a wall:
a man and a boy are eating with an Aborigine
in a boat, the sun turns up the tails of fish
lying beside the oars; the boy wipes surreptitiously
the bottle passed him by the black man.
Rain strums the library roof. The talk tonight
is ‘Voluntary Euthanasia’. Trying to be classical
can break your heart. Depression long persisted in
becomes despair. Forgive me friends and relatives
for this unhappiness, I was away from home.
‘In the New World Happiness Is Allowed’
Weekend Australian, 1988
A LAST FLING
THOMAS MANN BEGAN THE novel he would refer to variously over the years as The Confessions of a Confidence Man, The Memoirs, and finally The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, in 1909. He was already, at thirty-four, the acclaimed author of a dozen short stories or novellas, including one masterpiece, ‘Tonio Kroger’, and two novels, Buddenbrooks, 1901, and Royal Highness, 1909.
After the ease and assurance of Buddenbrooks, this second novel had been slow in coming, and for all its comic high jinks proved too knowingly self-conscious to be much admired. In March 1910, Herman Hesse, who was never really a friend, though he and Mann did grow close in the years of their exile in the thirties, had this to say of it:
It is only because we love and respect Thomas Mann that we must take a severe view of his mannerisms. A lesser writer might make capital of the same tricks and subterfuges that irritate us in Mann, but it seems to us that an artist like Mann, whose intellect stands so high above all prejudices and delineates with such purity, ought in a seriously planned and seriously undertaken work, to dispense with this playing up to the public, witty and amusing as it may be, and whatever satisfactions he may derive from it. With such methods, unintentionally of course, he gives the average reader a certain sense of superiority but in turn cheats him out of all that’s fine, serious and worth saying, for these things are said so softly and without emphasis that the average reader fails to notice them … A philistine can read this book and actually feel entertained … while subtlety after subtlety escapes him … We should like to read a book by Thomas Mann in which he doesn’t think of the reader at all, in which he makes no attempt to seduce anyone or make anyone the butt of his irony. We shall never get such a book and our wish is unfair, for this cat and mouse game is essential to Mann …
This, coming from such a quarter, must have hurt. Hesse’s evocation of the average or philistine reader would have hit home.
Mann took himself very seriously. Flattered as he had been by the success of Buddenbrooks, its popularity had also worried him. ‘“Am I so soft, so insipid, so mediocre,” he had written to his Lubeck friend, Ida Boy-Ed, ‘I have more than once asked myself, “that I should be loved like this?”’ The mixture we get here of only half-hidden self-satisfaction and nagging self-doubt is just one of the ambiguities in Mann’s complex nature that made him acutely sensitive to what his fellow writers, and a very alert and aggressive commentariat, thought of him.
Mann had seen himself from the beginning as the heir to Goethe, and like Goethe a darling of the Gods. But his assurance of being a chosen one was undercut by the fear that for all his natural talent, and his capacity for scholarship and hard work, he might not be recognised, in properly German terms, as a representative of the highest mind and thought. His formal education was limited. He had no academic qualifications. As a writer and thinker he was essentially self-taught.
Then there was the conflict he felt, as a son of conservative Lubeck, between his need on the one hand to maintain his status as a member of the high bourgeoisie – a worthy descendant of merchant forebears and himself a paterfamilias (in 1905 he had married into a rich family of Munich Jews, the Pringsheims) – and on the other hand his ‘nature’: an affinity with what he thought of as the irregular, the transgressive, the ‘forbidden’, and a suspicion, in line with the latest psychological thinking, that the many shifts and disguises that Eros and the erotic could assume, as perversity, or as illness, might be essential to what was most alive and personal in him, and to whatever authenticity he might lay claim to as an artist.
But however struck he may have been by Hesse’s advice to ‘desist from playing up to the public’, he had already, in the new book he had embarked on, rejected it.
The Confessions is an exercise in seduction; the unapologetic apology, very direct and intimate, of a practised little poseur and flirt, who takes the reader warmly into his confidence (what else does it mean to be a ‘confidence man’?), and, while openly admitting that he is a double-dealer – and even, yes, a thief – still takes it for granted that he will be forgiven, because he is such an engagingly witty and well-bred one: a creature of his own imagining, his own making, and a demonstration of the superiority of spirit, of what the French (Krull also of course has a good grasp of French) call esprit, over mere circumstance or facts.
Young Felix is the son of a Rhineland champagne-maker who is not above doctoring his product to lower the price. A high-school drop-out, a dreamer and devotee of what he calls ‘The Great Joy’ (masturbation), he is also an artist of a sort – the left-handed sort, a con-artist – very adroit at changing his costume, changing his story, changing his skin, and turning any situation he happens upon to his own advantage.
For Mann at his most playful and parodistic, Krull, another darling of the Gods, is his perfect surrogate and alter ego. This is Mann’s sprightly portrait of the artist as showman, trickster, illusionist, in which the shameful facts of his own life are very cheekily transmuted and his darkest secrets, as he tells us, are on open view. A cat-and-mouse game indeed!
With its naked eroticism and joy in the ‘forbidden’, Krull was from the beginning the most confessional of Mann’s books, a form of exuberant and liberating play; yet on three occasions over the years he set it aside, as if he had seen all along – or it did – that for all its heady youthfulness this was in the end to be a consolation of the author’s unguarded and unbuttoned old age.
The earliest of these interruptions was in 1911 when Mann abandoned the Confessions for a story that had broken in on him all unexpectedly on a trip to Venice with his wife, Katya, and his brother Heinrich. This was the novella Death in Venice, which was to be a breakthrough work for Mann, one of the first clear masterpieces, in any language, of the new century. Then a year later, after a brief stay at a sanatorium at Davos, where Katya was undergoing treatment for TB, he was diverted a second time – briefly he thought – by an idea for a story that would be, as he tells us in a contemporary letter, ‘a comic satyr’s play to the tragic novel (Death in Venice) just written’. Mann was thinking of the satyr or goat’s play that in the classic theatre restored an audience that had experienced the full range of pity and terror in Oedipus or The Trojan Women to the realm of the flesh, and sent them home purged a second time by Dionysian ribaldry and laughter.
As so often happened with Mann, the story grew under his hand as ‘a whole world’ revealed itself to him in what he calls ‘a polyphony of themes’: the body’s power, through imagination or infection, to transform itself; forbidden (that is, homosexual) love; the lure of death; the education of his unlikely hero, the young Hamburg engineer, Hans Castorp, into ‘the struggle for the new, after he has thoroughly savoured its components, Christianity an
d paganism’. (The important word here, given that it is Thomas Mann we are dealing with, is ‘thoroughly’.)
Then, with so much in prospect but a pan-European catastrophe looming, this work too, ‘The Magic Mountain’ as he called it, was laid aside while he devoted himself – again briefly, as he thought – to an article on nationalism, the virtues of the military life and war. Except that the article too had a will of its own. As the war began and brutally unfolded, it too became a book in its own right, The Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, a vast work of over 500 pages that would occupy Mann for the next four years and lead him from his original position as a right-wing Nietzschian anti-democrat, through a whole rainbow of political opinions and affiliations – as anti-capitalist Social Democrat, uneasy Communist sympathiser and every point between – to his stance in the twenties as liberal pacifist and one of the leading supporters of the Weimar Republic. Meanwhile ‘The Magic Mountain’ joined Felix Krull in Mann’s storage cupboard.
Then, on September 11th, 1918, with The Reflections already in the press, the Armistice about to be signed, the old Reich collapsing about him, and Munich, where he lived, on the way to becoming the capital of a Communist republic, Mann’s thoughts returned to fiction: ‘Will proceed to work,’ he tells us in his Diaries, ‘on the Magic Mountain [it was still at this point a novella] and the problem of its conclusion.’
In the event six months went by. Only on April 19th, 1919, does Mann note at last: ‘After breakfast cleared my storage shelves somewhat, unpacked the manuscript of The Magic Mountain and took a look at the material’. Then, on April 30th: ‘After an interval of four years began work again on The Magic Mountain.’