Heresies and Heretics

by George Watson

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  The vogue for Grand Theory faded a generation ago not because foundations were seen to be insecure but because no foundations were found.

  No stated and agreed foundations, that is, and it goes without saying that they would be of little use unless they were stated and agreed. No use saying you know but cannot tell; no use, in any case, unless your view is widely accepted. Hence the mood of resigned bafflement that haunts literary studies in our times. A London cab-driver, on recognising Bertrand Russell, once remarked: ‘You’re a philosopher – what’s it all about?’, and the story is sometimes told to first-year students to moderate the extravagant expectations of youth.

  Perhaps they should be reminded too of Hamlet’s soliloquy, or of Orsino’s embassy in Twelfth Night where Olivia, the cruel fair, mocks Viola: ‘Item, two lips, indifferent red; item, two grey eyes, with lids to them’. Everyone knows beauty cannot be inventoried. To make a list is to make fun, and the butt of the joke is anyone who confuses knowledge with account-giving. You know Olivia to be beautiful not by describing her features or by naming the criteria of beauty but by looking at her.

  It does not follow that accounts should never be given, even of love. It can relieve pain to make mock of it, even the pangs of desire. Clapham’s paradox, and Whitehead’s, may be taken further. The search for fundaments may be boring, but boredom can be consoling and even salutary. Any advanced intellectual enquiry is likely to have its longueurs, in any case, and that is not in itself an objection to attempting it.

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  Aristotle had an answer to the bafflement of modern critical thought, and oddly enough it is not in the Poetics but in the Physics. In Book Two he praised the silent possession of habitual knowledge (heksis) – wordless knowledge born of experience, like a cyclist on his bike, a concert pianist at the keyboard, or anyone cooking a familiar dish in the kitchen. No full account can be offered in such cases, but then none is needed. An occasional remark can still help. I once heard a grandmother explain that she added sugar after stewing fruit to avoid caramelising. I was too young to understand the word and still do not altogether understand it. But I took the advice, which was theoretical, because it was confidently offered by an experienced cook, and that is surely a sufficient reason.

  All of which leaves Russell’s cabbie nowhere, and Grand Theory is in much the same place. It flourished a generation ago in Paris and at Yale, and there are rumours it later took refuge in suburban Los Angeles and in even remoter places, dropping out of vogue not because it was implausible but because it was boring. No literary activity can long afford to be boring, and criticism has long been a kind of literature. Samuel Johnson demonstrated that in The Lives of the Poets – an enduring masterpiece that has lasted better than his poems, his only play and his solitary novel – and critics have laboured ever since under the double obligation of writing well and looking acute at the same time. No scientist has to worry about both, and theorists like Jacques Derrida who thought nothing of lecturing for several hours at a stretch were always likely to start a bolt for the door even before they had uttered dread words like deconstruction. People do not want foundations. They want a penthouse view.

  Worse still, the foundations proved to be nothing of the kind. Those on the prowl for the stated and agreed foundations of literary judgement were the victims of a brutal paradox, since any formula could be sustained only by something other than itself. What lies under the basement? So the search for foundations was conceptually as well as practically impossible. Self-exempting claims are always self-refuting, and the assumption that all truth-claims, in the last analysis, need theoretical justifications easily refutes itself.

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  Reports of the demise of Grand Theory, however, are probably exaggerated.

  There will always be those like Russell’s cabbie who want to know what it is all about. Marxists and National Socialists once offered that, and since their spectacular failure hardly anyone believes that history is class war or that it is all the fault of the Jews. That offers those who teach literature a chance worth taking: a fortunate age where contending ideologies have called a truce, where problems are welcomed because they are complex and solutions doubted when they are simple. It is a moment of hope. The world, in any case, would be duller as well as nastier, as anyone can see, if the view from the basement had been proved right.

  4. The Virtue of Verse

  Is poetry dangerous? The question hardly sounds worth answering until you recall with a start that there have been times and places where it was. In the China of the Gang of Four, according to Kang Zhengguo in his Confessions, poetry was ‘the most dangerous career you could possibly choose’ – or so his father, a man of letters, once told him. It was like working as a circus acrobat without a net.

  Poetry today is widely seen as harmless for other reasons: not because of free laws and institutions but because great poems, when first encountered, look triumphantly achieved and effortless. A pebble is smooth because of the slow action of tides, but a Shakespeare sonnet or an ode by Keats is seldom seen as the fruit of a process of forethought and revision. ‘A line may take us hours, maybe,’ said W.B. Yeats in ‘Adam’s Curse’, and the curse God laid on Adam was work. But a great poem, first met, does not feel or look like a place where anything laborious ever happened.

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  That makes poetry tough to teach. Philip Larkin, who was a university librarian as well as a poet, used to insist that poems are there to be read rather than studied; but since they are studied it matters how it is done. In a 1979 talk entitled ‘A Neglected Responsibility’ he called on British libraries to acquire and preserve poetic manuscripts, hopeful that a corrected draft might persuade the young that a poem is the end of a deliberate process rather than a spontaneous act. A recent poet laureate, Andrew Motion, echoing Larkin, has told how an edition of Wilfred Owen’s poems with a facsimile of a corrected draft of the sonnet ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ changed his life as a teenager by vividly showing a poet in the act of revision. It was a salutary lesson, but the problem runs wider and deeper.

  Poems are not nowadays seen as dangerous because their truth-content is little regarded. It is not widely believed that it matters whether a poem is true or false: it is only a poem. That is because many confuse a sense of truth with the notion that this would involve an assumption that only true propositions are worth considering. Nobody makes that assumption in reading prose or in listening to people talk. We often listen eagerly to people getting things wrong, in public and in private life, and delight in stories about the U-turns of party leaders. Somehow that does not work with a page of verse. Dante’s views, or Milton’s, of divine providence, or Shakespeare’s of the divine right of monarchs, are widely dismissed as little better than embarrassing, and I suspect poetic meaning is not taken seriously because there is a silent assumption that to be interesting it would have to be believed.

  There are cheering counter-instances of worldly success. A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad appeared in 1896, and in the last decades of his life, which ended in 1936, it is said to have sold some 16,000 copies a year. T.S. Eliot and Dylan Thomas did not have to wait long for public acclaim. W.H. Auden once rejoiced to hear that a prostitute in a prison near his home in Greenwich Village had quoted his poem ‘First Things First’ as she marched to the communal bathhouse: ‘Thousands have lived without love, not one without water.’ That is the sort of thing poets like to hear.

  But do they? Poetry in recent generations has dramatically shrunk. Explanations have been offered for the shrinkage, and one of the earliest and best was Macaulay’s in his 1825 essay on Milton: it was the rise of science, he believed, that made it inescapable, and the triumph of the Enlightenment. ‘The vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical,’ he wrote sadly, contemplating the rise of the natural sciences, and Milton could only justify the ways of God in a great epic because language in the seventeenth
century was still in a rude state; in an earlier millennium Lucretius could expound a theory of atoms in verse because prose barely rivalled verse as an expository tool. Such achievements now seem out of reach. It is rather as if a poet today were to write an epic about the global economy, the cosmic Big Bang or the crisis in the Middle East, and it is enough to try to imagine such a thing to realise its stark impossibility. Robert Bridges, laureate to George V, tried something like it in the 1920s with The Testament of Beauty, which deals (among other things) with the moral life under the shadow of evolutionary theories – an act of spectacular daring dedicated to the King and without successors. But there are no great philosophical poems now, no epics, almost no verse tales.

  There may after all be a connection between preserving poetic manuscripts and reviving the status of the art. Manuscripts have been called the engine-room of the creative act, and an age that values the self-expressive might easily interest itself in that. Or perhaps too easily. The catch is that self-expression is widely seen as spontaneous, and the shock of discovering it is not can be severe and even fatal. I remember expounding Dylan Thomas’ ‘Fern Hill’ to a highly intelligent sixth form, explaining how assonance differs from rhyme, among other technicalities, and what difference that difference makes. The reception was ambiguous. ‘The trouble is,’ one bright teenager said, ‘it takes all the spontaneity out of it.’ The task now, and a formidable one, is to persuade people that there is no spontaneity to take. Writing verse is not like playing with a rubber duck, and the myth of poetic spontaneity only promotes contempt. No one is likely to respect an utterance of any kind – a law of physics, an oration, a public policy – that is not born of reflection. ‘It must puzzle us to know what thinking is’, Lionel Trilling once said, ‘if Shakespeare and Dante did not do it.’ The myth of poetic spontaneity implies a refusal to look hard at what great poets have painfully achieved. Nor is revision confined to drafts. Much that is spoken and written in verse was revised in the mind before it was spoken or written at all.

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  Revision, what is more, can be practised on others. Wordsworth remarks in a letter of 1843 that he had spent a lifetime revising great poems as an exercise. None of these exercises has survived, but any attentive reader of Shakespeare or Milton might think of improvements as he read. Revision is a friendly and loving act. Eliot gratefully heeded John Hayward’s advice to improve the Four Quartets, and though students can be shocked and startled to be asked to improve a famous poem they seem to settle happily to the task.

  Nor do more recent poets mind. When Stephen Spender was teaching at the University of London in the 1960s he was so captivated by a class for aspiring poets that he thought of submitting his own poems, and did. ‘We could all do with it,’ I recall his saying, with enthusiasm. ‘Hard deeds, the body’s pains,’ said John Donne in his third satire, mindful of the sheer sweat of composition: ‘Hard knowledge too/The mind’s endeavours reach.’ The poet, he believed, has a moral duty to get it right: ‘Keep the truth which thou hast found.’ You discover what you mean progressively, by saying and resaying, and with much sweat and a little luck you end with something that looks good enough to have been written by somebody else.

  Revision can disimprove, and poets can bother to the point of being bothersome. Auden’s publisher used to complain how hard it was to choke a new edition out of him when he was endlessly intent on revising; Wordsworth spent half a lifetime rewriting The Prelude without improving it; Milton dictated Paradise Lost when blind, but the surviving manuscript of Book One is corrected and some of the corrections may be his. Perhaps he had it read back to him, with interruptions. Shakespeare seldom even hints at creative process, which he would have thought no business of any reader or audience; but his 77th sonnet recommends keeping a commonplace book laid out with page-headings – a practice usual enough in his age and one he may have used himself:

  Look what thy memory cannot contain

  Commit to these waste blanks, and thou shalt find

  Those children nursed, delivered from thy brain,

  To take a new acquaintance of thy mind.

  Prose writers did it too, and John Aubrey tells how Hobbes scribbled in a notebook on the quays of Paris during the Civil War when he was writing Leviathan. It is advice to profit from. Anyone who does it knows what Shakespeare meant by new acquaintance, and only those who do.

  Second thoughts permeate authorship, even writing a letter. In The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare has his heroine writing to her husband to tell him Tarquin has raped her. Dear Collatinus…But the task is inherently delicate, and she gets it wrong:

  What wit sets down is blotted straight with will.

  This is too curious good, this blunt and ill.

  One knows the feeling. Lucrece’s problem is every author’s problem, and you do not have to be raped to know it. Spontaneity does not come into it, if only because (as Samuel Butler once remarked) everything written has a sayee as well as a sayer – whether spouse, friend, publisher or solitary reader. Wilfred Owen’s corrected sonnet was a road to Damascus for one future poet, and weak drafts are nothing to be ashamed of. Second thoughts, like third or fourth, are commonly better. You can only do it at all by doing it badly, and a poem as it emerges is about as spontaneous as a Ming vase. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read’, Yeats announced in 1932, introducing some of his poems, ‘and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.’

  The news has hardly travelled, however, and beginners can agonise needlessly about an inadequacy that is not there. Part of the problem is a fear of discussing technicalities. Fantasies in adolescence about creativity see it as a single act, and talk about metre and syntax is easily felt to be alien. That is a monumental misapprehension. Poets talk about metre endlessly – ‘if it’s not money it’s metre’ – and the English tradition is pre-eminent in poets who are critics and critics who are poets. They include Ben Jonson, Dryden, Samuel Johnson, Coleridge and Eliot. If we murder to dissect, which I doubt, the long record of poet-critics suggests otherwise. Some people are too easily alarmed. Charles Lamb tells how he was so shocked at seeing a corrected Milton manuscript in a Cambridge college that he swore never again to enter a poet’s workshop, which seems odd. After all, he had written poems himself. Johnson, a more experienced poet, dissects till the cows come home, and in the Lives of the Poets he commends Pope’s practice of putting down first thoughts in the words he first thought of, later to ‘amplify, decorate, rectify and refine’. Creativity is an exciting word, but it is a wildly misleading one if it encourages anyone to think a poet is like God in the Book of Genesis. The God of Scripture was not a reviser, but his creatures are.

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  Another failure is to know poems only in silence. Other cultures speak them aloud. Years ago, on a visit to Iran, I sat on the floor of a private home watching a game of dominoes played by squatting figures in a language I did not understand. Then one man straightened and began an incantation; his friends considered it in silence and resumed the game. It was a poem by Hafiz, I was told, a contemporary of Chaucer who died in 1389. That is a scene hard to imagine in any English-speaking country, for apart from limericks we resent the sound of verse. As a social interdiction I reluctantly observe it, most of the time. But poets put things better than other people – that is what they are for – and it is a pity not to use them.

  In teaching, oddly enough, it works the other way. To know a poem by heart is a show-stopper in a lecture, and Auden used to raise his eyes to heaven as he spoke, perhaps to make you wonder where it all came from. It excited awe, which is hard to understand. It is easy, after all, to learn a poem and often hard to forget one. In his letters Macaulay tells how he once thought his way through the whole of Paradise Lost one dark and sleepless night on the open deck of a ship crossing the Irish Sea: ‘I have never enjoyed it so much.’ That is no doubt a mark too high to shoo
t at, but it shows what memory can do, and any poem is likely to be better in the head or on the tongue than on the page. Graham Hough once found a class unresponsive to a poem by Robert Browning, so he read it to them, with startling results: ‘If you’re going to make it sound like that…’ They had never heard a poem, apparently, and knew nothing of the heartbeat verse can have. Rhythm can inspire. Housman told G.M. Young it was the beat of Samuel Johnson’s ‘Short Song of Congratulation’ that had prompted him to write A Shropshire Lad:

  Wealth, Sir John, was made to wander,

  Let it wander as it will.

  So a poet can begin with a beat that echoes in his head, much as composers are said to do.

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  A monopoly of silent reading is the more surprising when you consider that everybody has songs in the head, from the national anthem to Tin Pan Alley, and everybody knows they are there to sing. So the educational neglect of metre must be an affectation. It is easy to pretend you do not care, difficult not to care. Popular ballads are heavily crafted, after all, and need to be: ‘I love you’ in 32 bars is the classic formula – the first eight bars repeated, then a middle eight, and finally the first eight repeated. When I lived in New York there were said to be people who made a living writing middle eights, although I never met one. Nobody seems to want to talk about this, and an interest in metrics is widely assumed to be the business of pedants and beyond what ordinary people care about. They care about it more than anybody.

  If we are deaf to metre, or pretend to be, the deafness is recent. In a high-tech culture you expect solutions to be instantaneous, like switching on a light; it is not like lighting a taper or trimming a lamp. Talking about stanza-forms or middle eights is like trimming a lamp, and by the 1960s a lot of people were noisily despising it, in poetry and elsewhere. The tempo of debate changed, in politics and in the arts. Douglas Adams, author of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, whom I remember as an unstudious student of English more than thirty years ago, wrote a satire shortly before his untimely death about a sage who was asked for the secret of the universe and solemnly answered ‘Forty-two’. There is still a tendency to suppose that knowledge is a light switch. If you do not have a quick answer, you do not have an answer. David Hare of the National Theatre has told how at Cambridge he once asked a lecturer how he knew some books were better than others, and lost faith in literary studies when the answer failed to satisfy him. To know, it was assumed, was to give an instant account. Paris was the epicentre of that brand of nonsense, and I used to annoy audiences there by asking them what a banana tastes like. In the shadow of Jean-Paul Sartre you were supposed to distrust the incommunicable and deny to the intuitive any right of place or cause to be.