Poetry Notebook

by Clive James

  Cumulatively, in the course of decades, it emerges that Pound’s measures for architectural monumentality, and its relation to landscape, were all archaic, like one of those Japanese temples that are rebuilt once a decade but are always the same. Some twentieth-century artists in various fields showed up in The Cantos (Brâncuşi, Gaudier-Brzeska, George Antheil, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings) but it was always numbingly apparent that the built world of modern times meant nothing to him poetically. He could respond to an old palace but not to a new skyscraper (Manhattan was of more interest to Whitman than it ever was to Pound), and the Wright brothers might as well never have bothered.

  In Canto XLVI there are a catchy few lines about snow and rain:

  Snow fell. Or rain fell stolid, a wall of lines

  So that you could see where the air stopped open

  and where the rain fell beside it

  Or the snow fell beside it.

  Some actual perception has gone into that, but it’s not often that he makes the effort. By the time one of the work’s generally accepted great lines arrives – in Canto LXXIV, first of the Pisan sequence – its strategy and components are familiar: ‘To build the city of Dioce, whose terraces are the colour of stars.’ But unless we are looking through a telescope, what colour are stars? Doesn’t the line just mean that the terraces are as bright as the stars? And why would it be a good thing for terraces to be that bright, except in Las Vegas? Further into the work, up into its last published phase, Drafts and Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII (after mysteriously disappearing during the Thrones sequence, the Roman numerals had just as mysteriously returned), the spasmodic reflex action of his strategies suggests that they had always been mechanical, even in their heyday. Feeble gestures like ‘as of mountain lakes in the dawn,’ sounding like the last flourishes in an old manner, can’t help reinforcing one’s suspicion that there had always been a manner, and not much more. A few hundred gleaming specks in the pan: not a lot of pay dirt after sluicing a whole hillside.

  Pound would have called all these little fragments ‘particulars’. The deliberately non-mellifluous rhythm (supposedly all the more inexorable because rarely iambic) is meant to sweep them all along in the cumulative dynamism of an impressive congeries – a word much favoured by Pound and Poundians. (‘Juxtaposition’ was another – a fancy way of claiming weight for the practice of bringing incongruous objects together and waiting for a compound meaning to emerge: the hope and faith of every crackpot who creates elaborate wall charts with fragments of evidence joined together by string.) But you eventually realize that if even the bigger assemblages of bits and pieces were not being carried forward in the sluggish flood, they would look, separately, pretty much like flotsam and jetsam, not to say junk.

  Despite the emphasis he had put on the isolated perception since his first phase as an Imagist, Pound in The Cantos isn’t really very good at being evocatively singular about things seen, and mainly it is because the things seen are seen generically. In the gloom, gold does indeed gather the light against it, but so does Indian costume jewellery. The unshakeable particulars are in fact amorphous, and his best technique for firming things up is to produce a tangle, like the one brought into being at the end of the same canto with the solemnly isolated clinching line ‘Sunset like the grasshopper flying.’

  But isn’t that just what a sunset isn’t like? Brought up in the South Pacific, I’ve seen some quick sunsets in my time, but they were all left standing by even the most moribund grasshopper. Or is the reference not to speed at all, but just to evanescence? And why are we left asking?

  The answer, I think, is that his main way to leave you wondering is to leave you puzzled. Even the statements most obviously aimed at creating an impression of limpidity (a loudly trumpeted limpidity, if such a thing were possible) raise the question of whether very much is going on at all. A typical moment of stentorian tranquillity is ‘and with hay-fields under sun-swath.’ It means, when you peel back the appliquéd anachronism of the vocabulary, that the hayfields are in the sunlight. It is important to register how commonly he uses this trick of defiant obviousness, because the avowedly compressed moments, his proclaimed quiddities, are a deliberate escalation of it, and we had better be sure that what is supposedly being intensified actually exists:

  The sun is in archer’s shoulder

  in crow’s head at sunrise.

  This comes in Canto LII, in a passage marked with his favourite tag – flatteringly delivered to the reader as if one Renaissance prince were advising another – about the necessity of calling things by their right names, lest misrule ensue. (In various English forms and in other languages, including Chinese, this incontestable exhortation recurs throughout the work, decade after decade, with never a concession that some of Pound’s heroes, notably Mussolini, misruled whether they called things by their right names or not, and were often enough numbered among their own victims, a pretty convincing indication of wisdom’s absence, one would have thought.) But I can’t see how the sun being in the archer’s shoulder, or even in the crow’s head, or in both, tells us much more than the contention that the ant’s a centaur in its dragon world.

  Robert Conquest was the first critic ever to dare question the centaur status of Pound’s Pisan ant, but in the early sixties it was still too soon for Conquest to shake even the Soviet Union’s reputation, let alone Pound’s. Nor did Randall Jarrell, who could appreciate the best of Pound but used that as the exact measure for finding The Cantos a mess, ever manage to put a big enough dent in the masterwork’s reputation to hamper the academic attention that gathered against it like light against pyrites. The less precise Pound was, in fact, the more he invited explication. But if we don’t know, and can’t know, what one of Pound’s more arcane pronouncements means to us, we are left with the obligation to be impressed that it means a lot to him. It’s just a bad gag when he assures us that ‘ZinKwa observed that gold is inedible.’ ZinKwa, or someone like him, crops up frequently, straight out of an episode of Kung Fu and always making an observation that nobody in his right mind would ever try to rebut. A proclivity for Confucius-say-style, potted wisdom was high among Pound’s worst habits, almost on a level with his admiration for the monetary theories of the Social Credit pundit Major Douglas. The two kinds of verbal tic were particularly deadly when connected, like a scorpion’s double tail. In Canto LXXVIII there is a passage meant to get Pound’s economic theories into a nutshell:

  taxes are no longer necessary

  in the old way if it (money) be based on work

  done

  inside a system and measured and gauged to

  human

  requirements

  inside the nation or system

  Or, indeed, inside the space station of Battlestar Galactica. Every economic system features money based on work done inside a system and gauged to human requirements. The question is about whether it is based well or badly. But no amount of exhortation and incantatory repetition can make a guide to conduct out of hot air. In Section: Rock-Drill, Pound’s faith that a sufficiently gnomic utterance will yield an unswerving truth reaches absurdity with such lines as ‘The arrow has not two points.’ Well, it certainly shouldn’t have one at each end. Usually these cracker mottoes are adduced as translations of Chinese characters floating on the page in isolation. For too much of his life, Pound was convinced that his grasp of Chinese was improving proportionately with the length of time he would spend gazing at the form of a character. But reading Chinese involves a lot more than looking at the pictures, just as understanding an economic system involves a lot more than analysing the metallic composition of its currency. Pound was convinced that he could assess whole countries, periods, empires, and eras by whether and how much their gold and silver coins were debased. Even as late as Canto 103 of Thrones he can be heard saying, ‘Monetary literacy, sans which a loss of freedom is consequent.’

  He was always convinced that he possessed monetary literacy. With better
qualifications both by heredity and on paper, the same conviction was later to be shared by Bunker Hunt, who tried to corner the market in silver, and found out the hard way that money is a lot more than chunks of precious metal. But it was certainly true that Pound never possessed much literacy about the loss of freedom, even his own. The Pisan Cantos are correctly regarded as the height of the work, the best it ever got, and even the admirers of his epic historical sweep would admit that they are because they contain the most of his personal story, at a time in his life when not even he could dodge the obvious about what had happened to a world which had been ravaged by some of his theories having become actual.

  Yet The Pisan Cantos, the strongest examples of his favoured form, are surely at their weakest when they presume to deal with his personal despair. There is the total and crippling failure to realize that his own personal despair doesn’t rank very high against the personal despair of many others whose fate he never cared about, and who were not, like him, fed, looked after, and given reasonably humane treatment when they fell into the hands of their enemies. (To be fair, it should be noted that much later, in his last years, he was ready to admit that anti-Semitism had been the ruin of his mind.) There is also his incomprehension of ‘the Dream’ he had been mixed up in. A line like ‘Not getting it about the radio’ is shorthand for his contention that the diatribes he broadcast on behalf of Fascist Italy had been wilfully misunderstood by his own countrymen. The facts, alas, proved that his accusers had found no difficulty in ‘getting it about the radio’; that he had been locked up for a good reason; and that he was very lucky to be still alive. It was mightily impertinent of him to suggest that to condemn him for his broadcasts was a denial of freedom. Since his broadcasts had not only proclaimed the irrelevance of democratic freedom, but had also suggested the desirability of its being denied to the politically helpless, this stuff has to be called the ravings of a crackpot in order to save him from the consequences of calling it a reasoned argument.

  Though we might question the putative greatness of a poet who can’t get much out of his own spiritual disaster beyond a display of self-pity occasionally energized by spite, there could have been an excuse for his solipsism. He was undoubtedly miserable, and misery is not relative. The conditions he was kept under were calculated to make him realize that he was not in a hotel: he can be excused for feeling lousy. But to excuse him for being vague is harder. After all, the poems in Personae had boasted of their precision, and he had supposedly left the smaller forms of those poems behind, and got into the limitless form of the poem, The Cantos, mainly in order to be precise on larger scale. In the Pisan sequence there is an admission that something has gone wrong: but what has gone wrong, he would have us believe, has gone wrong with the world, not with his view of it. Perhaps because so narrowly personalized, his recorded anguish is curiously unspecific in the detail: the abiding fault of the whole work is, in its best part, brought to a head along with all its virtues:

  When the mind swings by a grass-blade

  an ant’s forefoot shall save you

  But if the ants hadn’t got into his pants, he would still have been done in by the bees in his bonnet, and one of them was his unquenchable conviction that every image was an epic in embryo. To the end of his life, he went on believing that if he could just define every aspect of existence clearly enough, it would all add up. Not all that far in the future, his central belief would be echoed all over the Internet, and really The Cantos is, or are – or perhaps was or were – a nut-job blog before the fact. But there were considerable poets who were inspired by him directly – Bunting, Logue – and there is no modern poet who has entirely escaped his influence, if only through the salience with which he raised the question of whether there can be any worthwhile poetry beyond the poem. And I, for one, owe him for that first blaze of his enthusiastic example. Reading his absurdly confident critical prose, I could scarcely catch my breath when he talked about poetry as if it were the most exciting thing in the world, which indeed it is.

  Interlude

  One of the many dangers posed by the academic study of poetry is that the student might be encouraged to worship giants. And indeed if the history of poetry were like the field of study we usually call history, Ezra Pound would loom like Bismarck. But a collection of big names would give us only a skeletal account of what has happened to poetry in modern times. There were things the lesser names could do that the greater names couldn’t. If you were looking for a major poem about the anxious political and cultural texture of the late 1930s, for example, a batch of Pound’s Cantos would tell you drastically less than Louis MacNeice’s Autumn Journal. For one thing, MacNeice had the flexibility of technique to make a plain narrative into a medium for every shade of both the factual and the lyrical. For another, he was sane: storms of enthusiasm were confined to his love life, and in his social views there were no radical fashions that he fell for. At his creative best – which came both early and late in his career, but not, alas, quite so much in the middle of it – he was the necessary counterweight for W. H. Auden. Unfortunately Auden was the more newsworthy, and in the long run MacNeice’s reputation always had to be fought for by his admirers, and could never be taken for granted. I never forgot how I had been spellbound by his early poems, several of which I learned by heart; and in my later years I have made a point of mentioning his name to the young. Some of the Irish poets of my generation also admired him as a recent ancestor, but for them, because he was born in Belfast but lived in England, there were often complex questions of nationalism and loyalty. My own affection was unencumbered. So when the National Literacy Trust organization Reading for Life asked me to introduce him in a few words, my only task was to arouse curiosity. With a poet so inventive, you can do that with a few quoted phrases: a powerful hint that the energy of a poem saturates its every component.

  MEETING MACNEICE

  As is only proper, we go on forever hearing about W. H. Auden. But we never hear enough about his friend Louis MacNeice, although there were things MacNeice could do that even the prodigiously facile Auden could not. One of them was Autumn Journal, my favourite long poem of the 1930s, an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail. There is no long poem like it for its concentration of the pre-war atmosphere. But there are short poems that give the same flavour of threatened tranquillity, and most of those, too, are by MacNeice. The pick of the bunch is ‘Meeting Point’, which the poet included in the 1936–1938 section of his Collected Poems 1925–1948. (It’s the ‘collected’ to have, if you can find it second-hand: the later, posthumously edited one weighs like a tombstone.)

  ‘Meeting Point’ is the poem that every young man should learn to recite by heart if he wants to pull classy girls, and every classy girl should have on the tip of her tongue when she bumps into a scruffy poetic type that she feels the urge to civilize. ‘Time was away and somewhere else’ runs the refrain. The two lovers are alone together in a public place. It’s a coffee shop, expensive enough to have a waiter, but fortunately he does not show up to interrupt them. (‘The waiter did not come, the clock / Forgot them and the radio waltz / Came out like water from a rock.’) By the power of their combined imaginations, the little table in between them becomes all the world. (‘The camels crossed the miles of sand / That stretched around the cups and plates . . .’)

  The camels remind you of Auden’s reindeer in ‘The Fall of Rome’, but MacNeice’s vision of the faraway animals comes from his close-up on the human beings in their prosaic local setting. Compounding achingly self-conscious gentility and torrential lyricism, he has precisely tapped into the perennial British conviction (stand by for Brief Encounter) that heterosexual love between adults should reach its emotional apotheosis at a public meeting point where the most intense thoughts must stay unspoken, with the world crowding around to stifle the passion. Trevor and Celia, though, are nowhere beside these two. There was never a more burningly focused romance, so vast a d
rama with so few props. (‘There were two glasses and two chairs / And two people with the one pulse . . .’) Almost fifty years have gone by since I first read the poem, and it still thrills me to bits. If you can find a copy of that excellent Penguin anthology Poetry of the Thirties, edited by Robin Skelton, you can see what the poem looks like alongside some of its competition. There is some terrific stuff there, but ‘Meeting Point’ still reaches out: a Brief Encounter without Rachmaninov, but with its own, tenaciously lingering music.

  Interlude

  In MacNeice’s poem ‘Meeting Point’, the two tables and two chairs are reportage, but the camels that cross the miles of sand are an image. The image could be usefully posited as the key component of any lyric poem if only there were not so many successful lyric poems that have no images at all. But usually they do. Rarely, however, does the first image of a poem shift the reader into a layer of enriched oxygen quite as thoroughly as Gerard Manly Hopkins manages with the thrush’s eggs in the first few lines of ‘Spring’ – a straightforward poem for him, although for the reader who is just making a start with him it is likely to have a revolutionary impact. The revolution might not always be welcome, however. In the case of Hopkins it has to be admitted that such a thing as an informed dissent might occasionally be possible. One of the most justly praised among the British poets today thinks that Hopkins is mainly noise, and early in my life I was startled to find that A. D. Hope, the dominant figure in Australian poetry at the time, and wide-ranging in his appreciations, said that while he enjoyed most of Hopkins, he thought that the ‘academic rage’ for Hopkins had gone too far, and that Hopkins had tried to elevate constipation to the role of a poetic muse. On top of his critical views on the subject, Hope wrote a parody of Hopkins that expressed outright hatred. So Hope had mixed feelings at best, and perhaps any readers of Hopkins can forgive themselves for feeling the same. But to have no feelings at all would be simply a mistake. As always, the proof is in the way the phrases stick. In the case of Hopkins they stick like burning phosphorous: there are flashes of fire that can only be his.