Where Have You Been?

by Michael Hofmann

  There is something rickety and moving about these poems of the 1960s and ’70s, even the most stodgy and naturalistic of them, that for me “The Nightfishing” didn’t have. A Graham poem is as unconventionally homespun as a Cornell box or a Calder mobile. He writes English like someone working with coat hangers, sometimes three nouns in unpredictable concatenation, sometimes three verbs, sometimes even—certainly, it feels like it—three prepositions. The very short two- or three-stress lines that are his most characteristic form contribute to this impression of language being bent:

  In fact last Tuesday afternoon

  I locked myself in my coat and closed

  The door and threw myself on the mercy

  Of rainy December, a new month.

  One step two steps three step more.

  Four step five step I went falling

  Into the outofdoors world

  To give myself a shake to shake

  The words I live on up a bit.

  I see an old tin can in a hedge.

  It is not speaking. Here I am

  On Tuesday the of December

  At five o’clock walking the road

  Between the whining, beaded hedges […]

  Now as the blinders whistle for dusk

  And my simple sophisticated boots

  Clip on the road as my metrenome

  You should look out for me coming up

  Soon to be seen from your side.

  Every (absent) comma has been thought about. More naïvely trustworthy than Cummings, less learned and more dignified than Berryman, this shows what can yet be done with simple English. The poem is made of next to nothing and takes place in real time. It reminds me of what Graham says somewhere in the letters, that he most likes writing when there is nothing particular requiring to be said. There is a terrific economy of effect here, without any of the reaching in “Gigha” or even “The Nightfishing.” And yet the poem offers the Joycean coinage of “metrenome,” the echo of Horace in “simple sophisticated,” the childish counting chant, the doubling of “shake,” the quiet surprises of “locked” and “falling,” the beautifully supplementary (past and present, active and passive) participial adjectives “whining” and “beaded” (the sort of thing one might hope to find in Heaney), and the humble and still somehow grandiose last line. The whole thing is its own envoi, exquisitely self-making and self-born. It is characteristically self-involved, and yet its ultimate gesture is toward the reader.

  Even in this “outofdoors” poem, with its oddly rackety title “Nature Is Never Journalistic,” there is something fetchingly minute and what I would call interstitial. It is where Graham habitually exists in his poems. It is what allows him to say—he has been all round it—“It is not speaking” of the old tin can in the hedge, and to speak of it, and perhaps for it. (It is his version of Whitman’s “Look for me under your boot-soles.”) Graham likes to cast himself nestling between and behind the words, “Why did you choose this place / For us to meet? Sit / With me between this word / And this, my furry queen. / Yet not mistake this / For the real thing.” In “Private Poem to Norman MacLeod,” he writes: “My dear Norman, / I don’t think we will ever / See each other again / Except through the spaces / We make occur between / The words to each other.” At the end of the extraordinarily beautiful London poem, “The Night City,” he writes: “Between the big buildings / I sat like a flea crouched / In the stopped works of a watch.” A recurring word in his work is the Cornish term for a wood louse: “grammarsow”:

  Landlice, always my good bedfellows,

  Ride with me in my sweaty seams,

  Come bonny friendly beasts, brother

  To the grammarsow and the word-louse,

  Bite me your presence, keep me awake

  In the cold with work to do, to remember

  To put down something to take back.

  It is the least likely of appeals—effortlessly outperforming the echo of Burns’s mouse—the punning coinage, “the word-louse,” stoutly underwriting the “grammarsow,” which satisfyingly links his own name and—via grammar—the language. (The “sweaty seams” of course are also those of language.) These and other small deft creatures are the agency by which Graham obsessively imagines the benign burrowing movement of address in and out of language, through to the other side, the reader’s. “To put down something to take back.” “Soon to be seen from your side.” Coming to a theater near you.

  The miniaturism in such passagework—and I mean the Benjaminesque pun—is really why I love Graham. My word “falsetto” was a not quite adequate attempt to suggest the smallness, the tenderness, the maneuverability, and the unconventional resourcefulness of his writing. Here is a late poem from 1980, “The Fifth of May”:

  This morning shaving my brain to face the world

  I thought of Love and Life and Death and wee

  Meg Macintosh who sat in front of me

  In school in Greenock blushing at her desk.

  I find under the left nostril difficult,

  Those partisans of stiff hairs holding out

  In their tender glens beneath the rampart of

  The nose and my father’s long upperlip.

  The subject couldn’t be more banal; people exist who would put poems on shaving on the Index. It’s pretty much straight multum in parvo, which I suppose is an increasingly important part of what I think poetry is for. Time and space—the history of the Clearances, maybe, the landscapes of “glens” and “rampart”—are, as it were, compressed or dissolved into this tiny piece. It reminds me of a poem of Zbigniew Herbert’s, “Mr. Cogito’s Face in the Mirror,” which does much the same thing. Again, it takes place in a slightly accelerated real time, moving through past (“I thought”) to present (“I find”) to a sort of sostenuto or slow motion (“my father’s long upperlip”), which is held at the end. It exhibits the most striking and lovely balance, between the two four-line sentences, between past and present, between large and small, between shaving and blushing. It is probably more obvious in its charm than other poems of Graham’s, but I still find it impossible to take against. Repeatedly, incrementally, it defies expectation. There is a surprise (but not a calculation) in almost every line—“my brain,” “wee,” “I find,” “partisans,” “tender glens,” “my father’s long upperlip”—that seems to carry it effortlessly beyond itself, which again, I suppose, is poetry.

  There is another class of Graham poem, which is—well, as they say in England, different class. He was anxious not to privilege them himself, but they escape his egalitarian tutelage. “Some of the poems,” he wrote, “for me have more emotion in them than others. The Bryan Winter poem shatters me still although it is mine and I just made it up out of my head. Also the Hilton poem and my father’s poem. That maybe is to be expected. But that is the kind of poems they are. They are not better for loosening a tear from the eye.” Actually, I think they probably are, as I imagine Graham very well knew. “They” being “To Alexander Graham,” “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch,” and “Dear Bryan Winter”:

  This is only a note

  To say how sorry I am

  You died. You will realise

  What a position it puts

  Me in. I couldn’t really

  Have died for you if so

  I were inclined. The carn

  Foxglove here on the wall

  Outside your first house

  Leans with me standing

  In the Zennor wind.

  And so on. One can understand Graham; to someone who makes things out of words, all one’s successful productions are, so to speak, equivalent. They are all, as it were, one’s children, and one loves them all. Everything written about is ennobled—an island, a fishing expedition, a walk, a shave, a friend. But the costliest, and perhaps the hardest of these, is the friend. It is like a jeweler standing by all of his work, even if some of it is from semiprecious materials and some from rubies. Still, it is very rare to have feeling in poetry talked about directly a
t all. No less an authority than Ezra Pound—and in some ways no more unlikely an authority than Ezra Pound—knew that what matters in poetry is emotion.

  * * *

  One of W. S. Graham’s most passionate and prominent supporters was Harold Pinter. “I first read a W. S. Graham poem in 1949,” he writes on the jacket of the Collected. “It sent a shiver down my spine. Forty-five years later nothing has changed.” They are the oddest of pairings, but yet it makes fascinating sense. Both are their own creations. There is Pinter, the liberator of undertones in—especially British—English, of sinister aggression and hatreds, and Graham, who dwells in pleasantness and eerie brusqueness, who talks to himself as I suspect no one else—not even Yeats—has ever talked to himself, and who creates in words gossamer, almost theoretical attachments, to the absent, the sleeping, the dead, the speechless. It is almost Jekyll and Hyde. But none the less persuasive for that.

  Pinter puts in an appearance toward the end of The Nightfisherman, as an admirer of Graham’s work, as a public reader and supporter of it, and as a private patron. God knows Graham needed him, or needed such a figure, his life was one of the most poverty-stricken of any of the great twentieth-century British poets’. First and foremost, I think the letters should be read as a chronicle of this poverty and its effect—and indeed, lack of effect—on the man who so unquestioningly bore it. Near the beginning of the book we find Graham in Cornwall. It is 1943, and he is twenty-five: “It’s raining now on the roof. I’m living in a caravan a friend’s lent me in Cornwall, lonely and by the sea. I fish and gather mushrooms and write and cook.” He was to stay, under only slowly evolving circumstances, for more than forty years. The caravan, punningly, is later referred to as “my poor arkvan.” Finding a usable lemon on the beach rates a couple of mentions. He writes to friends—often the painter John Minton—to borrow money or to discuss the modalities of its repayment. The sums are often tiny, and it is an indication of his poverty that he is driven to ask for loans only at some future date, to be certain that the money will be spent on whatever thing he has in mind, often bills or medicine. (If it came earlier, it would just be spent.) He seems always to be cheerful; he is, after all, at some level living the sort of uncompromised life he wants. “I’m writing every day and the good weather’s begun and we have a goat.” That’s some sentence. To go to London or Scotland, he has to hitchhike. He asks friends for old boots and clothes. They move to a condemned coastguard house on the north coast of Cornwall. “I measure out my life in paraffin gallons,” he writes in 1958. A visitor records: “We lived on flour-and-water pancakes cooked on a primus stove, and, when the paraffin was finished, over a driftwood fire. Sydney and Nessie [Nessie Dunsmuir, his wife] also used to collect limpets [mussels?] off the rocks and cook them, but only the cat would eat them, and even then not always.” Graham visited Iceland in 1961, and Crete in 1964. In 1965, a friend offered them the use of a small cottage in the town of Madron, rent-free. When Graham won a literary prize in 1970, he used it to get an indoor toilet put in.

  At many turns, the life of Graham reminds me of that of Malcolm Lowry (1909–1957), which is something I never thought I’d be able to say of anyone. Lowry, admittedly, was (in the British sense) middle class and occasionally received remittances from his family, but in the 1940s and ’50s, his life in the squatter’s shack in Dollarton, British Columbia, resembled Graham’s, remote from metropolitan centers and “civilization,” a life lived often outdoors, among simple people, without money. Like Lowry, Graham was heavily influenced by Joyce—again, I never thought I’d come across anyone who would match Lowry for Joycean puns, “too-loose Lowry-trek,” “Lowry’s and Penates,” “delowryum tremens,” but Graham does—and, like Lowry, he liked a drink. From time to time, I even had the ghostly sense I was reading Lowry: “Yes, somehow, Robin, assailed by our acquaintances and a friend here and there, and dodging the sometimes too-thoroughly felling arms of Bacchus and the baying slavering hounds of angst that howl from the hydrophobic dark and——” It was life in the wilderness, for the sake of writing. In Lowry’s case, it was crowned with brilliant triumph and tragedy; in Graham’s, a more bearable and sustained slower-burning success.

  As well as this story, you get a very good set of a very good writer’s letters. Graham was bracingly frank to his correspondents about their work, and, to some extent, his own. The blunt criticism of David Wright (“I find the last seven lines thin for you to be writing”) and of a shoddy review of his own work, late on, by Michael Schmidt (who publishes the book, and publishes the letter, brave man) are quite shocking. The sentences are often wonderful, whether one run together on Tibet (“Tibet is a strange place and I read a lot about it”) or two split off about the United States (“The drink here is fantastic. What strange people.”). There are fine puns (“tritametre,” “grahamiphone”) and not such fine ones (“The bard will have flown”). Above all, in a group of letters to Roger Hilton, now recognized as having been among the best postwar British painters, there are some extraordinary documents of friendship and solicitude. Hilton was alcoholic and severely depressed in the mid-1960s when Graham met him, a tormented and tormenting man. In 1966, he was sent to prison for drunk driving. Graham sent him an astonishingly, almost insanely boisterous letter. It seems like bad taste at first, but then one sees in the manic punning the utmost expression of personal devotion in mimicry, distraction, banter, affection:

  Can you hold this paper with your manacled hands? Shall I parachute down to see you from the flying machine and say hello? Shall I start an underground tunnel here from Gulval? Shall I drop you a case of blondes? […] What terrible drivel from so great a poet as me. Forgive me, Rog. The juices of dusk are flowing and the autumn rooks are calling like breaking stones. Lift me your eyebrows. Count a hundred. Santa Claus is coming doon the chimney. Could you maybe get your various veins seen to and your divers wounds of your rough life and Daniel Druff and your hammer-claw toes? My fetishes are sweating in the darkened ward of my brain. I face the stretching Rogerless night. […] O hogtied friend, keep the fort. I can’t think how to write properly to you yet. Be tolerant. Take it easy (How easy to say). Are you allowed to write back? If you can reply reply.

  When Hilton died in 1975, Graham was given his watch. He wrote “Lines on Roger Hilton’s Watch.” Like a lot of Graham’s work, the inspiration is communication, is dialogue. Sometimes the poet speaks, sometimes the watch:

  He switches the light on

  To find a cigarette

  And pour himself a Teachers.

  He picks me up and holds me

  Near his lonely face

  To see my hands. He thinks

  He is not being watched.

  The simplicity of this, the heartbreak, the jokey puns, the tenderness, the chugging tch sounds, the successive sentences all beginning “He,” you might think of a Paul Klee drawing or something, but I don’t know of anything like this in poetry. It is—was (“Tenses are everywhere”)—the sound of W. S. Graham, 1918–1986.

  ZBIGNIEW HERBERT

  Zbigniew Herbert died in 1998. He was a very great and idiosyncratic poet—something in me wants to say a peerless poet—and, it is reported, a perennial Nobel bridesmaid. It was ironic—and no doubt wounding—that during the period of his expectations, in 1980 and 1996, two other Poles of, as I see it, manifestly lesser gifts and importance, Czesław Miłosz and Wisława Szymborska, were chosen by the academy and decorated by Carl Gustav.

  I had been waiting for his Collected Poems from the time of Herbert’s death, if not even longer. Frankly, in view of some bruited complications (related below), I thought it would take rather longer than it did, and its eventual coming caught me by surprise—as perhaps things do when you wait for them hard. While waiting, I kept my hand in by buying up spare copies of his individual volumes, Report from the Besieged City (1985), Mr. Cogito (1993), both Selected Poems (the one from 1968 and, confusingly, a completely different book from 1977), and others; if nothing else, it was handy
practical instruction in the ways of the price-supply curve. I have the German translations and read them. I can’t read Polish, but I have Herbert wherever I go. He is the first poet I ever read. The poem was “From Antiquity”; I was eight. Probably he is as near to sacred to me as anything in or out of poetry is.

  And now I have a book that I wasn’t expecting at all. Herbert has a new translator, someone I have never heard of. Even that drafty, echoey thing the Internet (our very own updated version of Ovid’s cave of rumor) has barely heard of Alissa Valles. This, by the way, is to register my surprise, not some snobbish impulse; Herbert, after all, is surely a sought-after commodity, somewhere near the pinnacle both of Polish poetry and the twentieth century; anyone taking him on should probably come with some sort of track record, not least for their own peace of mind—and even then of course it would be no guarantee of a successful outcome. It’s pretty much the last thing I would press upon a young poet looking for a start in life or career, or a middle-aged one looking to diversify. I must now enter certain caveats. As I say, I can’t (“can’t” seems more honest, more regretful than “don’t”) read Polish. My information from the great publishing centers of London and New York is vague and unattributable and thirdhand. It’s not a nice thing to bash a young—or an old, or a middle-aged—translator, least of all when one is unable to read the originals. But it remains the case that my strongest feeling about this book is a sort of helpless and bewildered regret.