Remembrance Day 2011: Podcasts, Publications, Poets Laureate

Over the past fortnight, discussions of war poetry have abounded.

The Guardian's excellent series of podcasts included an Armistice Day edition featuring Michael Morpurgo, Louisa Young and Andrew Motion. My usual complaint about Motion---a passionate advocate for war poetry--- is that he tends to reduce it to pity and waste. In Motion's hands, war poetry sounds strangely comforting; it is well behaved in saying what he wants to hear. Yet when he has the right subject, he is extremely eloquent, and he talks movingly and truthfully here about contemporary soldier-poets.

Michael Morpurgo is another whose absolute faith in the futility myth avoids inconvenient truths about the necessity of fighting in order to survive as a nation ('lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed', as Edward Thomas put it). Morpurgo argues in the podcast that our only way of approaching the war now is through the experience of an individual (whether it be a human as in Private Peaceful, or the horse of War Horse). This runs counter to Geoffrey Hill's argument in The Triumph of Love, which grotesquely parodies the Spielberg approach to genocide: 'refocus that Jew---yes there, / that one.' Morpurgo and Hill share a starting point: we can make sense of one death, not of millions. Morpurgo implies that we can extrapolate. Hill insists that the act of making sense falsifies the magnitude of the suffering. Thinking that we understand, we only betray. Hill's is the most discomforting assault on the easy sentimentality underlying so many modern-day representations of war. I wish that the Guardian would bring together Morpurgo, Motion and Hill for unflinching discussion: the podcast would be superb.

An earlier Guardian podcast examined rhetoric in the Iliad, and featured Alice Oswald whose Memorial is based on Homer's epic. I look forward to reading Oswald's book, which is the subject of a positive review by Simon Turner here. I am less persuaded by Oswald's comments in an interview given previously to the Guardian: 'That [Homer's Iliad] turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes–it's become a clichéd, British empire part of our culture.' So Oswald doesn't like public schools, glamorising war, or the British Empire: she is, after all, speaking to the Guardian. But does anyone really hold that 'public school' view about Homer? Because of Owen's influence, the misreading of Homer is likely to be in the other direction: that Homer is about nothing but the pity of war. I only wish that public schools did still teach Homer.

I must end with a few words about Carol Ann Duffy, accepting that the poet laureateship is an anachronistic public challenge which the incumbent can never win. Even so, when she remarks of a new anthology of soldier-poetry that it is 'humbling, allowing the voices of those whose lives have been changed by war to speak to us', I wonder at her use of 'allowing'. And when she serves up her annual slop of First World war clichés in the Guardian (which, on this occasion, really should know better), she would do well to remember that she is writing about something more significant than the latest royal engagement, or whether sherry tastes of the sea. This is Great-War-by-Numbers. Next year, expect to read about shell-shocked Tommies shot at dawn by General Haig.

David Jones: In Parenthesis

'To attempt to explain, in such a note as this, is futile.' Such was T S Eliot's warning when he added a laudatory introduction to David Jones's In Parenthesis (1937). I see no reason to promise more than Eliot, but in this blogpost I aim to gather some of the online resources which may help to guide readers through what Eliot considered to be 'a work of genius'.

Jones took several decades to find the right form for In Parenthesis. He had served during the War as a private in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, coming nearest to a fellow poet when (as the two men established many years later) his company once relieved Siegfried Sassoon's. In Parenthesis ends in Mametz Wood, where Jones himself was shot and wounded. After the War, he attempted to convey his experiences through visual art: 'Part of me, the artist within me, has never left the trenches'. But although he excelled as a painter and an engraver, Jones remained dissatisfied with his work until finally inventing a new literary form capable of such a task. The drafts record the drama of that struggle.

It has to be acknowledged that there are two major (and related) obstacles for Jones's audience. In Parenthesis is, from orthodox perspectives, a fiendishly difficult text; and it earns that overused label, sui generis. A contemporary readership is given few if any bearings. What sort of text are we wrestling with? Neither novel nor poem but held in parentheses between them, Jones's hybrid exposes the sameness and formal conservatism of all but a few subsequent writers. That tends not to be a successful career move. Wordsworth believed that great poets create the taste by which they are to be appreciated, and in that single respect, Jones seems to have failed, until now at least. Eliot could optimistically state in 1961 that In Parenthesis would be 'widely enough known in time'. The best reviewers of Jones today (such as David Wheatley and Alex Preston) repeat the mantra that Jones is scandalously neglected, and continue to hope for better.

Perhaps that hope is justified. Jones's work has always attracted a brilliant scholarly cult (although I agree with George Simmers, contra most scholars, that Jones's version of the modernist 'mythic method' is the least interesting thing about In Parenthesis, and blights his later poem, The Anathemata). However, his influence on creative writers has seemed negligible. The most significant exception is (as ever) Geoffrey Hill. A powerful advocate for Rosenberg and Gurney, Hill keeps such silence in respect of David Jones that even the least Bloomian of his readers ought to grow suspicious. A recent lecture by Hill praised Jones in passing, but to date Hill has published virtually nothing on Jones's work, despite passages like this:

The memory lets escape what is over and above---
as spilled bitterness, unmeasured, poured-out,
and again drenched down---demoniac-pouring:
who grins who pours to fill flood and super-flow insensately,
pint-pot---from milliard-quart measure.

This is pure Hill. Proto-Hill, I ought to say. It comes from Part 7 of In Parenthesis.

If Hill's prominence, and our increasing familiarity with his voice, offer one way of approaching In Parenthesis, so much the better. But In Parenthesis comprises multiple voices, sudden shifts in perspective, characters which appear and disappear --- the whole making a 'shape in words' as Jones called it, but a shape the like of which has never previously been encountered.

In Parenthesis has strong claims to be the literary masterpiece of the War. Read it, one part per day for seven days, and don't stop for what you don't understand. Ignore Jones's notes until you read it a second and a third time. Beyond that, I must admit as Eliot admits: 'All that one can say amounts only to pointing towards the book, and affirming its importance and permanence as a work of art.'

Isaac Rosenberg: 'Through these pale cold days'

As a new feature for the blog, I am going to publish a war poem each week. Copyright rules out much of the twentieth century, so my focus will tend to be the Great War and earlier. This week, Isaac Rosenberg's 'Through these pale cold days', followed by some brief notes. Do please post below any comments about the poem or my interpretation.




Through these pale cold days

Through these pale cold days
What dark faces burn
Out of three thousand years,
And their wild eyes yearn,

While underneath their brows
Like waifs their spirits grope
For the pools of Hebron again---
For Lebanon's summer slope.

They leave these blond still days
In dust behind their tread
They see with living eyes
How long they have been dead.

This was the last poem Rosenberg wrote. He sent it to Edward Marsh in a letter dated 28 March 1918, calling it 'a slight thing' and commenting that 'My vocabulary small enough before is impoverished and bare'. By the time the letter arrived in England, Rosenberg was dead. He had been killed while on night patrol on 1 April.

'Through these pale cold days' has always seemed to me to be among the greatest and most mysterious of Rosenberg's poems, notwithstanding his own reservations. It is rarely anthologised, perhaps because editors remain unpersuaded that it should even be classified as war poetry. Yet its long view of Jewish history pressing into the present, and the departure of these strange revenants in the final stanza, are powerful if idiosyncratic responses to current circumstances. 'Revenants' only in one sense, because these long-dead ancestors find their descendants among inhospitable terrain --- not the familiar pools of Hebron nor Lebanon's summer slope, but the 'blond still days' which are so hostile to Jewishness: in 'The Jew', written the previous summer, Rosenberg had complained that 'the blonde', 'the bronze' and 'the ruddy' all 'sneer at me'.

Geoffrey Hill in Speech! Speech! has written of Rosenberg that 'His last efforts / to survive---like THROUGH THESE PALE COLD DAYS--- / appear belated and timely acts / of atonement'. There is a typically Hillian paradox in 'belated and timely', and Hill's preoccupation with ideas of atonement risks turning Rosenberg into Hill avant la lettre. All the same, the similarities between Rosenberg and Hill provide reminders of a debt which Hill is always prepared to acknowledge. Rosenberg, in those pale cold days, is briefly at one with his ghosts; he sees with living eyes for them; they are dead and, through him, alive. However, their visit is necessarily short; with new understanding of the future, they turn away to resume their search for the lost Edenic home. The poet is left behind, abandoned even by his own people.

Drummond Allison

In a recent essay on Sidney Keyes collected here, Geoffrey Hill mentions in despatches a friend of Keyes and fellow soldier-poet, Drummond Allison. Hill contrasts Keith Douglas's reputation, 'now so patent and secure', with the relative neglect of both Keyes and Allison: 'Keyes has still to be fought for... so has Drummond Allison, killed in Italy in 1943, whose Fortune Press volume The Yellow Night, containing three or four poems of distinction, is his sole literary legacy.'

Ross Davies's recent biography of Allison (published by Cecil Woolf) takes up that fight. Allison died leading a daylight infantry charge on Monte Camino, aged just 22. His literary legacy, as Hill states, may be tiny, but it is also significant. I don't know which three or four poems Hill especially admires, but Davies quotes effectively and generously enough to give the impression of a considerable talent. Here, for example, is the opening of 'Come, Let Us Pity Death':

Come, let us pity not the dead but Death
For He can only come when we are leaving,
He cannot stay for tea or share our sherry.
He makes the old man vomit on the hearthrug
But never knew his heart before it failed him.
He shoves the shopgirl under the curt lorry
But could not watch her body undivided.
Swerving the cannon-shell to smash the airman
He had no time to hear my brother laughing.

'Curt lorry' is good, and 'undivided' sufficiently gruesome, but the shock of the passage comes with the reference to the airman as 'my brother': Allison's brother had been shot down early in the war. The poem taunts and outwits Death as expertly as one of Donne's metaphysical conceits.

Davies is adept at conveying the literary milieu at wartime Oxford, as friend after friend was called up and (in many cases) killed. Allison's own call-up was delayed by a term after an injury sustained while acting in Keyes's play, The Prisoners. One reviewer described the scene: 'When a young man stood on a stage in Oxford last night and talked passionately and wildly of love and idealism, with blood streaming down his face, and his hands dyed scarlet, the audience were a little taken aback, and inclined to the view that the ghastly sight he presented was carrying stage realism a little too far.' Allison was the young man in question, and the blood was real blood. The play required that Allison's character be struck with a revolver-butt. His assailant (thought to have been Keyes himself) had taken his role rather too literally, and severed a small artery in Allison's head.

Ross Davies's book is an excellent introduction to Allison. I hope that it will help create the market for a readily available edition of Allison's poetry.

Update: Here are the full publication details. Ross Davies, Drummond Allison: Come, Let Us Pity Death (Cecil Woolf Publishers), £9.95. ISBN: 978-1-897967-91-1