Authors: Clive James
Above the cenotaph, stuck to the sky
As though on long thin pins, the cut-out shapes
Of kites tug at the wind and won’t let go.
Placed arrestingly in a poem called ‘Totenstadt’, such an apparently elementary moment counts among the most basic building blocks of an Edgar stanza. Even the
simplest registration raises a question of perception. You can see the kites, but you can also see how they might look as if they were stuck to the wind, and doing the tugging instead of being
tugged. But a whole stanza can be a building block too, raising, on a larger scale, another question about perception. In ‘Dreaming at the Speed of Light’, the narrator is seeing the
world from his viewpoint on a ray of light from Einstein.
The falling autumn leaves would stall
Above the lawn, their futile red
A stationary fire;
The dog erupting from the pond would spread
In hanging glints its diamanté shawl
Of shaken spray midair;
The blue arc of the wave would climb no higher,
A gauze of glare
And water that would neither break nor sprawl.
You might say that there are stretches of prose in Nicholson Baker’s
The Fermata
that give the same freeze-frame effect, but Baker didn’t do them in stanzaic
form. And when we pull our own viewpoint back to see how Edgar’s stanza is put together, we find that there are only four rhyme-sounds holding the fluent progress on course as it switches
between four different iambic meters, the whole thing seeming so spontaneous that it might have been a one-off. But then, when we pull back to see the whole poem, all four of its stanzas are built
on exactly the same pattern. Edgar often composes in free forms as well – he is a master of the blank verse paragraph – but an unpredictably varied yet precisely matching strophic
construction is his characteristic approach.
When I first read Edgar, and realized he was making up these elaborate stanzas and then replicating them throughout the poem as if to prove that his idea of formal freedom was all discipline and
vice versa, I thought immediately of Richard Wilbur in that sumptuous post-Second World War phase when he was producing the intricately articulated clarities of ‘Piazza di Spagna, Early
Morning’ and ‘A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra’. But at our first epic lunch the second bottle of Cloudy Bay had barely been broached before Edgar revealed that, much
as he admired Wilbur, for him Anthony Hecht had been the Man.
Either way, a foreign technical influence had been the right kind to suspect. If Edgar had read neither Wilbur nor Hecht, he might still have got the idea from Larkin, who was making up stanza
forms quite early in his career; and of course Larkin got it from Hardy and the later Yeats. Edgar might quite possibly have concocted the whole approach if he had read nothing but Keats’s
Odes. What is certain, however, is that there had been very little Australian poetry like it. If Edgar was getting his technical inspiration out of the air, it was out of the world’s air, and
not just the air of his own country.
The point needs stressing because in Australia the idea is firmly entrenched that any self-imposed formal requirement must be an inhibition to expression. The idea got a long way in America,
where to argue the contrary seemed undemocratic; and has caught on in Britain, where it is thought to be a useful instrument in wresting the control of creativity from a privileged class; but in
Australia it has attained the status of an orthodoxy. On the whole, by those who edit the anthologies and staff the prize committees, an apprehensible form is thought to be a repressive hangover
from the old imperialism; and all too many of the poets think the same. The view is aided by the unarguable fact that Les Murray (whom Edgar admires, as we all do) usually doesn’t write in
apprehensible forms either.
But at least Murray knows what they are. It isn’t his fault that the ruling majority of people concerned with poetry in Australia think that free verse is a requirement of liberty, and
anything constructed to a pattern must be leaving something essential out. Edgar’s steadily accumulating achievement has been of a quality too high to be buried by the attention of dunces,
and he has attracted some excellent criticism. But it is still quite common for his work to be belittled as if there was something unAustralian about it.
Indeed there is. Though his work teems with specifically Australian details, much of it would be intelligible anywhere; and there is a lot more that is not tied to his country at all. Two of the
poems in
History of the Day
are about the bad old days of lynch law in America, and one of them is among the best poems in the book. The poem is based on the notorious photograph taken at
the lynching of Rubin Stacy in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on 19 July 1935. As with so many of Edgar’s poems, it is hard to tear a piece loose, but try this:
And then you see her. At the left she stands,
Behind the awful focus of suspense,
Her hands crossed, mimicking his handcuffed hands,
On her frocked crotch, her naked face intense
And lit up with a half-embarrassed leer,
A girl of twelve, too unaware
To mask her downward grin . . .
But Edgar doesn’t need a non-Australian subject to be ‘international’ in the sense that was once used so longingly. (There were commercials that called John
Newcombe an ‘Australian International’.) There is a little poem called ‘All Rights Reserved’ in which I would like to think I play a key role, because it is set in the
Oyster Bar, and I am Edgar’s opposite number in the story he narrates. This time it was dinner: but the real subject, which goes right round the world, is the sky, which adjusts to the
sinking sun
Almost as though it hears itself discussed,
And flourishes its menu, from gold dust
Through peach to lazuli . . .
This range of colours at each end of the day is likely to be the first attraction for a new reader of Edgar: dawns by Charles Conder link to twilights by Whistler, with whole
vistas assembled out of textures and atmospherics. But there is nothing anachronistically fin de siècle about his palette, or not that siècle anyway: Edgar’s weather is the
weather of modern scientific observation, and quite often registered in a vocabulary that sends you to the dictionary, although seldom without first making you catch your breath at its
luxuriance.
It’s important to stress the enchantment of these subsidiary effects because this volume is a bit lighter on his primary effects than his previous one,
Other Summers
, which
contained the sequence called ‘Consume My Heart Away’, whose constituent poems are generally held to be his most intense things so far. Actually I think this is a false trail, because
there are magisterially personal poems, mainly to do with the lingering anguish caused by the death of his first love, scattered everywhere in his work; but there is no denying that a poem like
‘Man on the Moon’ – which stands out even in the luminous cluster of ‘Consume My Heart Away’ – makes you wonder where he might go next if he ever decided again
to give up some of his personal detachment.
He will never give up his control, which is of the essence in all his work; and he is unlikely to indulge in the confessional strain that Elizabeth Bishop was so right to find suspect in Robert
Lowell, much though she admired him; but there can be no doubt that Edgar set a new standard for himself when he turned an interlude of heartbreak into a sequence of poems that cut unusually deep
into his own equilibrium. So startling was the sequence that some of his critics have begun to use it as a stick with which to beat him, saying that the personal note put his earlier work in the
shade.
But that view will not hold up, because his big stand-alone poems so often range as widely within his own psyche as can be imagined. The only possible objection to this collection would be that
there are fewer of them than usual. But one of them is among his very best. Called ‘The Red Sea’, it is about three little girls playing with toy boats in the shallows of North West
Bay, south of Hobart. I only wish I had space to take it apart with something of the same diligence he expended on putting it together. The task here, however, is not to lay bare the ghost in the
machine, but to say what quality of ghost it is, as the children bend to their game.
Hard to conceive that they should be
Precisely who they are and here,
Lost in the idle luxury of play.
And hard to credit that the self-same sea
That joins them in their idleness today,
Careless of latitude and hemisphere,
Blind with ubiquity,
Churns elsewhere with a white uproar,
Or wipes the Slave Coast clean of trees . . .
And so on, all around the globe, as the ocean threatens the idyll. A poem about how there can be no such thing as a local vision, no matter how particular and intense, it would
alone be sufficient evidence that Stephen Edgar, in the fullness of his accomplishment, can be called an Australian poet only at the cost of slighting both adjective and noun. Even when his
approach to a subject is oblique, you always get the sure sense that he is trying to light it up, and make you listen to the music of what he looks at. Models of plain speech even at their most
eloquent, his poems are more sheerly beautiful from moment to moment than those of any other modern poet I can think of.
At the time of writing, in the first days of June 2009, it is still not clear why Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has not been declared winner of the election for the post of Oxford
Professor of Poetry, the other two candidates having pulled out, one before the election, the other after. As the only surviving candidate, surely he should have been given the job automatically.
Perhaps he himself resigned too quickly, having got the idea that resigning was the thing to do. The chair left vacant, the election was postponed until later in the year, and speculation has
already started about who might run. Names have been put forward. One of them, startlingly, is mine. How did
that
happen?
It started happening a few days before the election, when I was being interviewed, nominally about my latest collection of essays,
The Revolt of the Pendulum
, a book I mention here
because it wasn’t mentioned in the interview even once. My interviewer, Decca Aitkenhead of the
Guardian
, was charming, so when she asked me a question I did the thing I always do when
asked a question by a charming woman. I opened my mouth to its full extent and put my foot in it up to the knee. The question was about the Oxford Poetry Professorship election debacle.
‘Would you like the job?’ (Those might not have been her exact words, but that was the main thrust.) My answer (and these are far fewer than my exact words, but this is the thread) was:
‘I would love it, but not if I had to run in an election.’ She used only the first bit – that I would love to have the job – and the
Guardian
editors flagged it as
‘Clive James throws his hat in the ring’.
In reality, Clive James had already made it clear that he would rather throw himself off a cliff. But the thing had been said, the Australian papers had the story next day, a Spanish paper,
bizarrely, had the story the day after that, and within a week my supposed candidature in the postponed election was being discussed, with at least two pundits in the British broadsheet weekend
press allowing that I might not be a bad choice, in the absence of William McGonagall, E. J. Thribb, the giftless bardic voice of
Private Eye
, or Baldur von Schirach, the Nazi youth leader
who wrote a terza rima encomium to Adolf Hitler.
In my house on a Sunday morning, the major papers are read collectively by every female in the family including the cat, and very soon I was facing a tribunal. ‘Please say that not even
you could be that stupid.’ ‘You aren’t thinking about it, are you?’ ‘
You aren
’
t
.’ The cat was right: I wasn’t thinking about it. Not in the
sense of actually going for it. But I couldn’t help thinking about the job itself.
It is always a doomed effort to say ‘Let this cup pass from me’ when you have already pronounced it attractive. And I do indeed find the Oxford Poetry Professorship just about the
most attractive cup of its kind in existence. I would imagine that any poet who has spent his or her lifetime at the craft can only feel the same. The botched election might have made it a poisoned
chalice, but what a chalice it is. You have only to think of the string of poets since the Second World War – Day Lewis, Auden, Graves, Blunden, Roy Fuller, John Wain, Heaney, Fenton, Muldoon
– and think of how much you would have liked to hear them speak, summing up their knowledge, opening up whole fields of interest with the merest aside. You have only to think of how you would
have quarrelled about them. Was Graves certifiable, or merely potty? Wasn’t Blunden a dim bulb beside the candidate he beat into second place, Robert Lowell? (Perhaps: but it was Blunden who
wrote
Undertones of War
.) How could such an uneven poet as Wain be so fine a critic? You have only to think of one book: Heaney’s magnificent
The Redress of Poetry
, his richest
critical work, and nearly all of it based on the lectures he gave while he held the office. In that book, he joined poetry to the world. Read it, students, and begin your adventure.
But wait a second, what’s the name of John Jones doing in the list, as Poetry Professor between 1978 and 1983? Few remember him now, and certainly there is no lasting evidence that he ever
wrote poems. We should be fair to his literary competence and say that at least one of his books, a treatise called
The Egotistical Sublime
, was part of the general discussion for a while,
and that he had a proven record as a professor of English. But that was just the trouble. They had elected, as Poetry Professor, an academic professor of English. How did it happen? Contemporary
accounts remark on the campaigning skills of his wife. Apparently she knew how to win an election.