In Goodwin’s world, every poem is a caution, every stanza a warning, every line a piece of advice, and every word a note to self. ‘The Compassionate Fool’ by Norman Cameron is therefore not a poem in which the scheme of rhyme and half-rhyme, the sound of the words and the weight of the stanzas, is the better part of the message; only an elitist would say that the shape of the poem somehow carries the sense of ambush and psychological game-playing the speaker is describing. And if it does, who cares? Who has the time to work with that? Cameron’s poem, for Goodwin’s readers, is more immediately accessible, though we might ask ourselves what exactly is being accessed. ‘This brilliantly subtle poem,’ Goodwin writes, ‘was recommended to me by a friend when she heard I had been promoted at work. She said it was a reminder that because I was now a boss, I was fair game. “No one,” she said, “will hesitate to stab you in the back.”’
Goodwin’s poetry column in the Mail on Sunday has more than three million readers, and her fans argue she is the best thing that ever happened to British poetry: she is making people aware of modern poets they’d never heard of and informing ‘the average reader’ of poetry’s relevance to their lives. Good-winisation means that poetry has a chance to survive, though it might also mean that difficult writing does not. Defenders argue that scansion doesn’t matter and difficulty can cry Rapunzel-like from its ivory tower: so long as people are ‘getting something’ out of poetry, improving their outlook, then nothing else matters. Like the positive, hi-energy mantra that accompanies most self-help, this is almost exquisitely patronising. It’s as if Goodwin were being lined up against William Empson, only to emerge as the people’s champion, spurning Mount Parnassus’s windy summits for the moonlit shores of ordinary feeling and good sense. Nothing I could muster in my attempts to patronise Goodwin could match her own sweet skill in patronising her readers, her assumption that people will settle for tinctures of elderflower cordial.
These are tough times for elitists. Display will always win out over privacy, as if seriousness was boring, as if contemplation was excluding, as if understatement was underhand, and as if difficulty represented a kind of dishonesty. In this climate, the ‘democratisation’ of poetry is just another phoney enterprise, like open government, a sop to that element in the national atmosphere which says inclusion is everything. Poetry is often difficult, and its difficulty is part of the richness of what we have; it is a crime to make the unobvious obvious, an act of vandalism to render it trite, like turning Mozart into ringtones while calling attention to its improving qualities. Some people, of course, will call that democracy, but what does it leave you with? An increased audience for Mozart? A bigger sale for new volumes of poetry? No, I’m afraid not. Poetry sales haven’t budged in the UK for years, though ‘old favourites’ are taking up more and more space in the bookshops, at the expense of new poets. But Daisy’s picks are selling – Daisy’s happiness-seeking audience is happy.
Self-help is often enough a flowering of self-pity, and those who propagate it are always ready to see the road to wisdom as one which must traverse the palace of excess emotion. And though its forms and its centrality in the culture are new, the tendency is old. Writers have often wished to brutalise the notion that poetry is not for everybody. Here’s Cecil Day Lewis in 1947, trying to get them young:
‘Poetry won’t help you to get ahead in life.’ This is the sort of thing superior persons say, or men who think the main object in life is to make money. Poetry, they imply, is all very well for highbrows and people with plenty of time to waste, but it’s no use to the man-in-the-street. Now that’s a very new-fangled idea. The man-in-the-street in ancient Greece would never have said it: he flocked in crowds to watch poetic drama; and so did the Elizabethan man-in-the-street, to see the poetic plays of Shakespeare and other dramatists of the time. Then think of the medieval minstrels and ballad-singers, who drew great audiences in village or castle to hear them recite poems. Think of the peasants in Russia, in Ireland, in Spain, in many other countries, still making up their own poems.
In his ‘Lecture on the Uses of Poetry’, William Cullen Bryant, the great American editor and poet, argued, a hundred years before Day Lewis, that poetry might exist as a pattern of thought and invention which works best when resisting the lure of a person’s immediate concerns. ‘One of the great recommendations of poetry,’ he wrote,
is that it withdraws us from the despotism of many of those circumstances which mislead the moral judgment. It is dangerous to be absorbed continuously in our own immediate concerns. Self-interest is the most ingenious and persuasive of all the agents that deceive our consciences, while by means of it our unhappy and stubborn prejudices operate in their greatest force. But poetry lifts us to a sphere where self-interest cannot exist, and where the prejudices that perplex our everyday life can hardly enter. It restores us to our unperverted feelings, and leaves us at liberty to compare the issues of life with our unsophisticated notions of good and evil. We are taught to look at them as they are in themselves, and not as they may affect our present convenience, and then we are sent back to the world with our moral perceptions cleared and invigorated.
The old ‘Treasuries’ were collections of poems presented for their own qualities as opposed to a series of specified emotional utilities. Volumes called 101 Poems to Get You Through the Day (and Night) or 101 Poems to Keep You Sane are more cynical objects, dreamed up by people who understand advertising and know how to make hay out of the culture’s deficiencies. One would feel able to admire their ingenuity were they not now becoming set texts, defining, in a brand-new way, the function of poetry in British and American life. That is what plucks the comedy from this dark drama: it is a story that shows dumbing-down in free fall.
Peter Forbes edited Poetry Review between 1986 and 2002, so you’d be right to label him a friend to modern poetry. His magazine never shifted many copies but it always exhibited high standards: make way, then, with sniffles and genuflections, for All the Poems You Need to Say I Do, a scrofulous little collection targeted at people who think poetry comes into its own at funerals, or, in this case, weddings. Maybe Forbes has been Goodwinised; at any rate, he has obviously been persuaded of the self-helping role poetry has taken up. Last year, he edited something called We Have Come Through: 100 Poems Celebrating Courage in Overcoming Depression and Trauma, a title not only suitably long but pertinently broken-backed by that shameless colon. ‘If you’re in the first throes of a new excitement,’ Forbes writes here, ‘or need to put a new relationship to the test, or put a failure behind you, or have reached the point of the great affirmation, you’ll find a poem here for the occasion.’
As with Goodwin’s new book, there’s hardly a bad poem in Forbes’s anthology – that’s not the point. These books are full of excellent poems which suffer only by being corralled together under a nauseating rubric. Forbes has exercised taste and judgement in the matter of his choices (no one could argue with Patricia Beer’s ‘The Faithful Wife’ or Norman MacCaig’s ‘True Ways of Knowing’), but what cultural moment, or commercial hunger, is being serviced by the publication of such sky-blue and touchy-feely anthologies of variously thoughtful poetry with their invariably thoughtless introductions?
We’re only a step away from the felicities of Patience Strong and Helen Steiner Rice, from verses on greetings cards, words intended for the heartsore and the nostalgic, words to soothe and lull and never question. And that’s the rub with all this pukey anthologising: a certain kind of poem self-selects, a form of address that offers a clear reflection of what the lovelorn, the sinning, the abandoned, the bereaved already know. The self-help poetry anthology likes Auden and Yeats, but nothing too early and strange in Auden and nothing of Yeats and his gyres. It likes Wendy Cope and Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, Robert Lowell and Thomas Hardy and the lullabies of Housman. It prefers poets whose speakers say how they feel, and feel what they say, while never running out of rhythm and never speaking in tongues. It likes Philip Lar
kin, the unlikely patron saint of self-help, though it’s amusing to consider how untouched he would be to find his effusions on hopeless love, coming death and boredom deployed in a continuing effort to floss the minds of the readers of the Mail on Sunday.
I have now read a great many of these anthologies. There is no T. S. Eliot to be found in them. No Ezra Pound. No Wallace Stevens. Everything floats down to a gentle paradox, and here is ours: anthologists who sell emotional progress to their readers hate poetry that constitutes progress in itself.
*
It’s tough news. I know it’s tough.
Let me protect you.
Like the hard shells on Morecambe beach.
There, there.
We always get through stuff.
Together. Don’t we?
My Grandfather’s Ship
MARCH 1997
The early railways were rough maps of Victorian fancy. Trains and human hearts, in those days at least, were similar engines, chugging along on fresh steam or dank air. The Victorians cared about going forward: they meant to conquer all the worlds beyond their own, and no matter of geology, or history, or finance, was too big for their ambition, or too small for their genius. The story of the great railways is also the story of minor lives, and how they were made, or altered, or destroyed, with the coming of the new machines. People have been travelling from one great place to another for ever, in their heads, but to move over the distant world – to be carried quickly on wheels, or propelled fast over water, or carried supersonically through the air, or through space, to some faraway place – must count for a lot in what it means to be modern. The carriages that carried us, the sustaining vessels, have a central role in our recent tales. We are intimate with our modes of transport. These vehicles are now close to us by nature, by desire and by design. Transport promises a future, just as it carries the remembrance of selves and places and things passed. Ours is a world of pictures coming and going at speed. Few of us now live, or would care to live, with the guarantee of being in one place for ever. But the British live with these thoughts of expansion and speed just as their empire is shrinking to nothing.
Canada always seemed like a fair place to end up – the scramble westwards hastened by the demand for furs, and by the unholy business of the Gold Rush. The Great Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, was to bring ‘Western Civilisation’ to the simple parts of North America, and from there to the even simpler parts of the Orient. In 1887 the Earl of Harrowby reported that the Canadian railway was ‘perhaps the greatest revolution in the condition of the British empire that had occurred in our time … It had brought the Pacific Ocean within 14 days of the English coast.’ The company that built the railway wanted to expand the world until it met itself on the other side, and said hello, in English. They began to invest in a fleet of ships, urgent vessels, that would bind the glittering trade routes between England and Canada. The Canadian Pacific Railway sent its first president to London: he, too, spoke of civilising Australasia and the Orient, and he found able listeners at the Post Office, at the Chamber of Commerce and at the Colonial Office. The man came back to his company and ordered ships.
SS Montrose had been built by a Middlesbrough company called Sir Raylton Dixon and Co., and was launched in 1897. It was a steel vessel weighing 5,431 tons; it was 444 feet in length and 52 feet wide. It was neither a big ship nor was it especially fast. It made about twelve knots. The steamer’s first owner was Elder, Dempster and Co., who ran it on behalf of a South African shipping company. The ship was intended to carry cargo, and was fitted out with giant refrigeration chambers, but these were replaced with berths and she spent her first few years carrying troops to the Boer War. In 1900 she carried the entire Dublin & Denbigh Imperial Yeomanry, along with their many horses, to the South African coast. The ship was later brought into service on the Beaver Line, a fleet of ships sailing between England and the prosperous shores of North America. The Beaver Line was bought up by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1903.
Canadian Pacific ran advertisements in British newspapers telling of the new life; it sent an agent to London to spread the word, to farmers especially, that things could be better if you upped and offed to Canada. At the turn of the century a travelling exhibition van used to drive all over Britain, high and low, to the remotest villages and the primmest suburbs, passing on the good news about emigration to Canada. The CPR company records, and Lloyd’s List for 1903, reveal the effects of this sudden drive over the hills and byways of pre-war British yearning: ‘Evidence of the great “trek” to Canada has been very patent in the streets of Liverpool during the last few weeks. Crowds of emigrants have been thronging the streets, and outside offices of the several steamship companies engaged in the Atlantic trade there have been large numbers of people waiting while their tickets were procured.’ A second-class cabin to Montreal, on SS Montrose, would have cost you seven pounds.
Nobody could claim the Montrose was especially plush. It was a steerage vessel: most of the passengers were quite content to bed down in loose bunks deep in the old refrigerators. The heating was fine, and people said the food was a version of adequate. The crossing could be rough. But the Montrose gained the reputation of being a worthy and serviceable little vessel: well run, trusty and as comfortable and quick as you’d get for the money. The passengers could pace the decks without fear of assault or disease (not as new a feature of the crossing as you might expect). Not long after it was bought over by Canadian Pacific, it had a Marconi wireless fitted on board. The man in charge of SS Montrose in 1910, Captain H. G. Kendall, had been second officer on another old Beaver Line ship, SS Lake Champlain, which had been the first merchant ship in history to be fitted with a wireless. Now the ships were not so alone at sea.
For several years after 1910 one of the popular songs in the music halls of Great Britain went like this:
Oh Miss le Neve, oh Miss le Neve
Is it true that you are sittin’
On the lap of Dr Crippen
In your boy’s clothes,
On the Montrose
Miss le Neve?
Had she not been the victim in the case, Mrs Belle Crippen, a music-hall chanteuse herself, would have been among those to sing such a song. As it was, she had the least fortunate role in that weird tragedy of unfortunates, the Crippen case, which is perhaps the best remembered of what Orwell once called ‘the old domestic poisoning dramas’. Dr Hawley Harvey Crippen, a bespectacled, respectable man who lived in North London, killed the lady, cut her up and buried her in the coal bunker. He then took up with his lover, a young thing called Ethel le Neve. Like many murders before and since, the one carried out by Dr Crippen came to be seen as a reflection on and of its time. All manner of local customs, fashions, ways of speaking, ways of believing, ways of wanting, seemed to come together in that horrible tale.
The Montrose was in port at Antwerp on 20 July 1910. It was due to sail to Quebec. There were reports in all the papers that a warrant had been issued for the arrest of Dr Crippen and his paramour. They had been spotted at a Brussels hotel, but were lost track of soon after. SS Montrose set off from the quay. Kendall, the ship’s captain, takes up the story:
Soon after we sailed for Quebec I happened to glance through the porthole of my cabin and behind a lifeboat I saw two men. One was squeezing the other’s hand. I walked along the boat deck and got into conversation with the elder man. I noticed that there was a mark on the bridge of his nose through wearing spectacles, that he had recently shaved off a moustache, and that he was growing a beard. The young fellow was very reserved, and I remarked about his cough.
‘Yes,’ said the elder man, ‘my boy has a weak chest, and I’m taking him to California for his health.’
The fairly Sherlockian Kendall retired to his cabin to scrutinise the Daily Mail. There he found Scotland Yard’s descriptions of Crippen and le Neve. He then arranged for ‘Mr Robinson and son’ to take meals with him at the top table.
He thought th
e boy Robinson ate things a little delicately. The Montrose dining room was considered a pleasant place to be, but the two passengers who’d caught the Captain’s eye seemed anything but easy. Kendall and the older gent roamed the deck together; the wind blew up once, revealing a revolver in Mr Robinson’s pocket. That was enough to confirm Kendall’s worries. He went below and gave his wireless operator a message to be sent to Canadian Pacific’s office in Liverpool. ‘One hundred and thirty miles west of Lizard …’ it said, ‘have strong suspicions that Crippen London cellar murderer and accomplice are among saloon passengers … Accomplice dressed as boy; voice, manner and build undoubtedly a girl.’ Kendall later recalled ‘Mr Robinson sitting on a deck chair, looking at the wireless aerials and listening to the crackling of our crude spark-transmitter, and remarking … what a wonderful invention it was.’
Inspector Dew, from Scotland Yard, got the message and jumped on a faster boat, the Laurentic. He expected to overtake the Montrose, and land at Newfoundland before the slower boat arrived. He wired Kendall to apprise him of his plan. There are two versions of what happened next. One has Inspector Dew coming onto the Montrose, being introduced to Mr Robinson by Captain Kendall and then grabbing the passenger with the words: ‘Good morning, Dr Crippen.’ Dew thereafter put the man, and his girlish son, under arrest. The other version of Crippen’s last moment of freedom on the Montrose has him cursing Captain Kendall, and placing a hex on the ship, as well as the spot they stood on. This version has something on its side: the Empress of Ireland, captained by the resourceful Kendall, sank four years later near the same spot, with great loss of life.*
The Atlantic Ocean Page 21
