A Little History of Literature (33 page)

On an early October morning in 1800 the poet William Wordsworth went for a walk on his beloved Lake District moors and hills. It had stormed and rained all night but now the sun was shining. It was a new day and a new century. At thirty, William was in the prime of life. To his joy the poet saw a hare running, sending up glistening rainbow splashes of water from the night's puddles in the grass not yet shrivelled by winter. He heard a skylark warbling invisibly. He felt infused with what he liked to call ‘joy’. He was as ‘happy as a boy’.

It was good to be alive. But then, as often happens, Wordsworth sank into gloom (‘dim sadness’, he calls it). What caused the sudden change in mood? He had begun to think about the poets of his time and the sorry ends most of them had come to. ‘We poets’, he reflected,

He was recalling his close friend, Coleridge (drug-sodden and, for all his genius, incapable of finishing a poem of more than a few lines); Thomas Chatterton, who while still a prodigiously talented teenager had killed himself after being found out in forgery; and Robert Burns, who had drunk himself to an early death. Was this the grim destiny awaiting all poets, the price to be paid for their genius?

Wordsworth's poem goes on to pose a central question in poetry. Are the greatest works conceived and written in ‘joy’ (‘gladness’ as Wordsworth puts it, to find a convenient rhyme) and serenity, or in despair – madness even?

It's not easy to come up with a quick or simple answer. It depends where you look. The most recited poem of our own time, for example, is that which is the anthem for the 500 million members of the European Union: Schiller and Beethoven's ‘Ode to Joy’. This is how it (rather awkwardly) translates from the German:

The less joyful among us might be inclined to think that the greatest poetry springs not from high spirits, but low. Think, by contrast, of the figure of the poet in T.S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
(Chapter 28). Tiresias is an onlooker on life, doomed never to die but to grow forever older. He has outlived sex (he is androgynous – both male and female). He has seen everything, in its full dreariness, and is doomed to see it over and over again. There is not much
joy in Eliot's image of the poet. The implication is: such is life. But while most people (as Eliot put it in another poem) cannot bear very much reality, it is the duty of poets to face it.

The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud thought that great art was born of neurosis, not psychic ‘normality’ (if such a thing exists). It could be compared to the irritant grit in the oyster's shell which produces the pearl. This belief has inspired many poets of the last half-century to investigate, rather than try to escape, what Wordsworth called ‘despondency and madness’, to drill down through the layers of pearl to find the speck of creative grit at the centre.

These explorers of breakdown (‘crack-up’, as the novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald termed it) consciously transgressed what Eliot laid down as a golden rule for poetry: that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’. Impersonality was the filter through which poetry should be delivered, the author of
The Waste Land
believed. W.B. Yeats prescribed something along the same lines – namely that the poet must write from behind a mask or ‘persona’ (an assumed personality). He must keep himself out of it. Or become what in Latin is called an ‘alter ego’ – an ‘other self’. The most basic mistake in poetry (particularly modern poetry) is to assume the speaker is the poet. It is also the most commonly-made mistake.

‘The man (or woman) who suffers’ – that is, the poet's own self – is wilfully the subject of the connoisseurs of breakdown who came to prominence in the late twentieth century. This is poetry without persona. Robert Lowell (1917–77) was an acknowledged pioneer in this exciting, new and dangerous field. One of his very best poems is ‘Waking in the Blue’ (an
aubade
, or dawn poem). It records the beginning of his (not some Tiresias figure's, or a persona's, but Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV's) day in a closed ward of a New England lunatic asylum. The poem opens with a night nurse, a Boston University student. He has been studying one of his textbooks, and is now doing his patrol of the ward before clocking off. He has been reading, dozily,
The Meaning of Meaning
by I.A. Richards – a critic who, like Eliot, encouraged absolute impersonality in poetry. It's an ironic inclusion, because
in this poem Lowell is as personal as can be. It is him in the hospital, already awake, witnessing the breaking day through azure windows. They are blue-glazed to keep out the sun, and strengthened to stop patients breaking them and doing themselves mischief. Lowell looks around the ward at his fellow inmates. The poem concludes:

The razors are locked, because none of the patients can be trusted not to kill themselves with ones that are open.

Another of Lowell's poems is called, simply, ‘Man and Wife’. A dashingly handsome and wholly unstable man, Lowell went through three marriages, all of which broke up messily. The poem begins with the married couple lying in bed in the morning. The rising sun (it's another
aubade
) bathes them in garish red sunlight. They are calm because they have taken Miltowns a heavy-duty tranquilliser. This is not, we understand, a joyous couple who have enjoyed a romantic night together, but a man and wife on the brink of painful separation. Red, here, is the colour of anger, violence, hate. The drug is the only thing keeping them together.

Lowell taught an inspirational creative writing class at Boston University (where the ‘Waking in the Blue’ night attendant is a student). One of his most distinguished pupils was the poet Sylvia Plath (1932–63). Her poetry, particularly the extraordinary group she wrote in the period after her traumatic separation from her husband and just before her suicide, take Lowell's ideas about what he called ‘life studies’ to more of an extreme than even he did. Typical is her poem ‘Lady Lazarus’, written in her last months. It opens:

The ‘it’ referred to here is a suicide attempt. Lazarus, in the Bible, is the man brought back from the dead by Jesus. Plath was thirty years old when she wrote the poem, and had, she says, attempted to kill herself three times. The fourth attempt would be successful. The poem, less a ‘life’ than a ‘death’ study, was published posthumously. It is impossible to read it without a chill to the soul.

Plath was an American who, after her marriage to the poet Ted Hughes, lived and wrote in Britain. Both countries claim her. The English poetic tradition – from Tennyson, through Hardy – is often infused with a broad strain of melancholy. It is gentler than the extremity we see in the work of Lowell and Plath (Wordsworth's ‘madness’) and more in line with what Wordsworth calls ‘despondency’. The laureate of modern poetic despond is, by general agreement, Philip Larkin (1922–85). His English gloom is eloquently expressed in his poem ‘Dockery and Son’. It is a poem with a narrative. Larkin returns to his Oxford college in middle age. He is told about one of his contemporaries, Dockery, whose son is now studying there. Larkin has never married and has no children – it would, he bleakly says, have meant not ‘increase’, but ‘dilution’. The poem ends with a magnificently glum meditation on the meaningless of life: it is first boredom, then fear, and whatever you do, it goes. And you die, without the slightest idea what it was all about.

Larkin's ‘breakdown’, so to call it, took a distinctly Larkinesque twist. Long before his death he stopped writing poetry altogether. It was a sad thing for his millions of admirers. He was asked why he had given up poetry. ‘I didn't,’ he replied, ‘poetry gave up on me’. Call it suicide of the creative spirit.

To return to Wordsworth. At the end of his poem he concludes that what the poet needs, above all, is ‘toughness’. He calls it ‘resolution and independence’ (the poem's title). There has always been that defiant ‘I will survive’ strain in British and American poetry, – writers who, despite knowing the worst, will not give in. As Dylan Thomas put it, they refuse to ‘go gentle into that good night’, but fight every inch of the way.

The Yorkshireman Ted Hughes (1930–98) is the toughest of this
tough modern school. He accepted that ‘the inmost spirit of poetry … is at bottom, in every recorded case, the voice of pain’. But that voice, he believed, should not be one of surrender or acquiescence, or even too much interest in that pain. This philosophy is expressed vividly in his collection of poems called, simply,
Crow
. The crow is an unlovely bird (no skylark, thrush or nightingale – the birds that inspired Keats, Shelley, Hardy and Wordsworth). The crow is a kind of British vulture. It lives on carrion, rotting things, but is resolutely alive and aggressive (in Britain the birds are commonly seen picking up their food amid the litter alongside thundering motorways). One would back a crow's survival chances against any skylark.

There are many other poets we could bring into the discussion about ‘the voice of pain’ and how poetry should use it. John Berryman and Anne Sexton, for example, friend and pupil of Lowell respectively, both of whom committed suicide and wrote poetry clearly signalling the act. Or Thom Gunn, more of the Hughes persuasion, one of whose poems thanks all the tough-guys in history, from Alexander the Great to soldiers, athletes and even the rough kids who Stephen Spender was sheltered from as a child, as he explains in his own poem ‘My Parents Kept Me from Children Who Were Rough’. But Gunn's poem in its entirety – all his poems, one might argue – are a rejection of passivity and what he thinks of as a spirit of defeat in the work of, say, Philip Larkin. Larkin, on his side, saw Hughes and Gunn as a couple of blowhards, wannabe ‘hard men’. He was contemptuous of them in his private letters and conversation. He nicknamed Hughes ‘the incredible hulk’ and ‘Ted Huge’, and wrote hilarious parodies of his violent verse. Since Larkin's and Hughes's deaths, however, material has emerged that shows they read each other's work and, from time to time, even used it creatively.

In poetry, then, there is what philosophers call ‘dialectic’: a clash and a coming together of opposite forces, two schools with very different sets of belief. On the one side are those whom I have called the connoisseurs of breakdown, writers like Lowell, Plath and Larkin, who dig deep down into themselves to mine
the pain within. On the other side are those who believe that action and engagement with the external world, and on what Gunn called ‘fighting terms’, are the proper route. There is searing, powerful poetry to be found on either side, but, it has to be said, little joy among the connoisseurs of breakdown.

CHAPTER
35

Colourful Cultures

L
ITERATURE AND
R
ACE

Race is a subject which raises tempers. So too in literature, and discussions of literature. It's something that takes us to uncomfortable places. Is Shakespeare's depiction of Shylock anti-Semitic? Or is it, at heart, sympathetic to a victim of racial prejudice? Those who go for sympathy will quote the lines

Those who think
The Merchant of Venice
is, at heart, anti-Semitic, point to the fact that at the end of the play half of Shylock's property is threatened with confiscation, his daughter is given to a Christian in marriage, and he, Shylock, is forced on pain of losing all his property to convert to Christianity. The image of the Venetian Jew, knife poised to plunge into the heart of a Christian and
extract his ‘pound of flesh’ (a phrase which has entered into common usage), usually tilts the balance towards anti-Semitism. But Shakespeare, we say by way of apology, was no more prejudiced than most in his time and probably less so than many. True, but it is still uneasy-making.