Echoland: Derek Attridge on Finnegans Wake

  While writing a review of the fascinating collection brought out recently by Tears in the Fence's new publishing imprint, Knitting Drum-Machines for Exiled Tongues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani, I was researching multilingual poetry on the internet when I came across this essay on portmanteau words in Finnegans Wake, probably the most illuminating I've read on the subject: 

https://www.maramarietta.com/the-arts/fiction/james-joyce/

Homage to Joyce, Dedalus and Kate Bush

 To celebrate the centennial of the publication of Ulysses, here are three very different responses to that astoundingly multifarious and kaleidoscopic masterpiece, whose lasting resonance has yielded generations of notable epigones, byworks and intertexts. Firstly, the modernist composer Luciano Berio (1925-2003) with his Thema: Omaggio a Joyce (1953), startlingly ahead of its time in taking a recitation of Chapter 11 of Ulysses by Berio's then-wife Cathy Berberian and - using tape-manipulation techniques - subjecting it to a "reorganization of the phonetic and semantic elements of Joyce’s text".

  Secondly, I've been reading Chris McCabe's novel Dedalus (2018), a beautifully presented edition created by Henningham Family Press. At first I thought the concept behind this project was too ambitious to work: a sequel to Ulysses? Which writer would think they could manage a continuation of the greatest novel ever written? But in truth I've been won over by McCabe's wildly imaginative take on the day after Bloomsday, very much his own revisioning of the interweaving stories and themes and characters of Ulysses born of an intimate knowledge and passionate enthusiasm for the novel. Years ago I did a Poetry School course lead by Chris on "Ulysses as Poetry" and as well as some chapters that stand as worthy imitations of Joyce's interior monologue prose-style, other chapters metamorphose into visual or sound poetry in a way which feels much in keeping with Joyce's ludic approach both in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.

  Finally, the wonderful video for The Sensual World by Kate Bush, which memorably uses the words of Molly Bloom's soliloquy in 'Penelope'. As we know, KB is having a moment this month thanks to Netflix's Stranger Things, which I'm a big fan of particularly for the nostalgia-drenched soundtrack and a plethora of references to tropes from early 80's TV and movies. It's great to see a resurgence of interest in 'Running Up That Hill', which will hopefully send people back to the marvellous Hounds of Love album - and indeed The Sensual World in all its far-reaching, haunting beauty.

Happy 100th Birthday, Ulysses

  A dedalian bloom of internet articles and radio programmes to celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses in the past week or so, which coincided with Joyce's 40th birthday on 2.2.22 (I'm sure, as a lover of Dante, he was drawn to that rhyming of numbers too.) Due veneration and recognition of its pivotal importance somehow still seem tempered in some quarters with bafflement or peevish contempt for its supposed "impenetrability," as though holding it up as a great cultural monument absolves you of the need to actually read it. Even Anne Enright in The Guardian, while showing some regard for the novel and for Joyce, repeats the notion that "it's a novel in which nothing happens" whereas surely the opposite is the case:

"It is an epic of two races (Israelite — Irish) and at the same time the cycle of the human body as well as a little story of a day (life). […] It is also a kind of encyclopaedia."

This is an excerpt from a letter Joyce wrote to his friend Carlos Linati, quoted in the most fascinating of the articles I've come across, "Deadline Ulysses" by Phillip Keel Geheber in the LA Review of Books, who makes the point that up to a third of the novel was added at the final revision stage in 1921 including some of the most original, innovative material.

   Just as Ulysses repays frequent re-readings throughout a lifetime, because its kaleidoscopically multiple perspectives and layers will yield a intrinsically different novel to the reader at different points in their own timeline, so does it morph and undulate in its wider valency to history and society. What I keep noting on my current re-perusal is how much a novel for own rancorous, divided times this is. Most of the other high Modernist classics   - from Hugh Selwyn Mauberly and The Waste Land to A La Recherche, The Man Without Qualities and The Magic Mountain - counterbalance a fraught vision of fragmentary modernity with plaintive nostalgia for a more stable age d'or when high culture supposedly held societal values in place and liberal humanist sensibilities had not begun to suffer dissociation. Joyce - a life-long socialist (in distinction to almost every other major Modernist) - was more inclined to celebrate the bustling, interactive heterogeneity of the modern city than deplore it, in particular foregrounding the rich linguistic buzz of different registers and idiolects weaving in and out of one another. 

   However, in choosing a second generation Jewish inhabitant of Dublin as his wandering mock-hero, Joyce hones in on the potential prejudice and ostracisation caused by what we now call "othering". You might miss them on a first reading, but the early chapters involving Bloom (especially 'Hades') are subtly dotted with moments of "micro-aggression", of slights and shrug-offs, nothing overt but enough to mark him as an outsider within the bluff, jokey discourse of Dublin street-life. This rises to a mock-heroic climax in his encounter with The Citizen, a one-eyed Cyclops who demonstrates that nationalism of any kind (even the anti-British, Irish nationalism with which Joyce had some sympathy) invariably masks a xenophobic agenda - as we have seen disastrously writ large in the age of Brexit and Trump. But Bloom's rejoinder to the antisemitism of the grandiloquent myope sums up the novel's underpinning ethos: 

    "Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life (...) Love"

   This is why Joyce's encyclopaedic epic of the human race, of the human body in all its fallibility and persistence, culminates in a small act of kindness between two apparent outsiders - Bloom the intinerant Jew, continually on the run from thoughts of his wife's adultery and his son's death in infancy, helps out Stephen Dedalus the malcontent poet, in flight from the nets of state and religion and thoughts of his mother's recent death. Nothing happens in Ulysses the way it does in War and Peace or A Tale of Two Cities or even Middlemarch - but if a profoundly rich and detailed celebration of the ordinary "life for men and women" and an unlooked-for action of support for another human being is nothing then we need to keep reading and re-reading the novel for another hundred years.

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Hen Ogledd

  A song from one of my favourite albums of the year ("an ambitious, progressive, intelligent and experimental take on pop music"*) based on a richly sonorous sound-poem by Edwin Morgan. This was one of the first Morgan poems I ever came across and on rereading I'm sensing a Joycean multi-layering of possible and/or invented language-elements in Morgan's monster-ese, a polyglot speech-act reminding us through a bastardised, fictive symbol of Scottish nationhood of the cultural promiscuity and slipperiness of any state-imposed national language. How Morgan and Ian Hamilton Finlay operated as vivid components of the international Concrete Poetry scene during the late 60s and 70s while much of British poetry weltered in a parochial post-Movement conservatism is another story (and one that leaves out the underground streams of the "British Poetry Revival" emerging at the same time).

  I'm also drawn to the historically (and politically) resonant name of this "prog-folk" group: Hen Ogledd is Welsh for the Old North, the region of northern England and southern lowland Scotland inhabited by Celtic Britons who spoke an ancient dialect called Cumbric. It became a kind of mythic realm from which Welsh bards such as Taliesin and Aneirin traced their lineage. Like Morgan's poem, and in a year when the supposed "levelling up" agenda between Northern regions and the South-east morphed into a kind of managed impoverishment as the government imposed month after month of high-tier restriction on already stretched cities like Manchester and Liverpool, Hen Ogledd seem to speak of an undermining of southern, metropolitan hegemonies, a reaching for the "tentacular roots" of alternative cultural traditions.

* The Quietus 100 Albums of the Year 2020 - always a great place to discover new and overlooked music 

Neo-Nietzschean Clatter: The Neophyte as the Letter N

  The best projects find us, rather than we finding them. I've always believed in that Ballard line "Deep assignments run through all our lives; there are no coincidences". I spent much of last year engaged in writing a book on Nietzsche, a journey of rediscovery which turned into the opening of a whole new area of enquiry and fascination.
  Nietzsche has been a key member of my personal pantheon for as long as I remember; perhaps for nearly as long as I began discovering books for myself around the age of 16, encouraged by a particularly imaginative teacher and the creative exploration of poems on my A-Level English syllabus she initiated.  It may have been the mention of "übermensch" in the opening chapter of Ulysses, or the strange phrase "neo-Nietzschean clatter" in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley or even, a little later, the line  "Nietzsche in Basel studied the deep pool" in Wallace Stevens's 'Description without Place' which sent me to the library (unbelievably there were no one-click Google searches in those days) to research this often-invoked forerunner of many of the Modernist writers I was voraciously absorbing at the time. 
    Equally, to unearth the fact in the briefest of biographical accounts that Nietzsche had "gone mad" at the height of his writing career and never recovered seemed to align him with the lineage of doomed 19th century Romantics and bohemians I was also obsessively drawn to, the sicker, more unhinged and more thwarted in their personal life the better.
   The first book of Nietzsche's I chanced across in the secondhand bookshop in Horsham where I acquired almost all of my reading matter was Ecce Homo. This bizarre experiment in tangential autobiography (written, as I now know, on the brink of mental collapse and scattered with sentences betraying delusion, megalomania and a generally shaky grasp of reality) cemented the overlap between N's life and his philosophy in my callow mind, a blurring which in spite of my later immersion in critical theory and the Intentionalist Fallacy, has always seemed to me inescapable. 
    Most philosophers, as Nietzsche spent a good deal of time wittily deploring, are dry academics so deluded by systems of baseless abstractions and the "will to truth" that they take whole books proving - through the counter-intuitive circumlocutions of reductive logic and the lumbering shire-horse of syllogistic prose - that they themselves exist, a ludicrously muddle-headed example of the "falsification of the evidence of one's own senses". By aligning themselves with mathematicians, believing they were delineating objective truths through the factual, transparent medium of language, these metaphysicians merely compounded their own errors. Apart from Plato - wise enough to use the dramatic framework of Socratic dialogue to problematise any simplistic interpretations of his wisdom - Nietzsche was the first philosopher to grasp that philosophy is writing, first and foremost, and that the form and style of its language are what constitute its claim to the truth, no longer by the 19th century a monolithic, God-bestowed tablet of laws and more a writhing, many-headed Hydra. 
    Trained as an academic philologist in the historical analysis of words and steeped from an early age in music and literature, Nietzsche saw all too clearly the need to develop a new way of writing philosophy that - like poetry - prized concision, ambivalence and multi-sidedness rather than the long-winded, dogmatic expositions of the German idealist tradition he was heir to. Equally, as part of this rejection of academic philosophy, he replaced the serious, supercilious tone of Hegelian sturm und drang with a playful, self-mocking spezzatura, embracing the sense of cosmic irony Kierkegaard (in 1841) had identified as "the absolute infinite negativity". If the initial part of Nietzsche's project is deconstructive, "philosophy with a hammer", acerbically debunking the entire history of western metaphysics, Christianity and nearly all of western culture along the way (particularly German culture, in fact), the second, complementary aspect is a "revaluation of all values", a dauntingly ambitious endeavour to single-handedly replace this toppling tradition with his own ecstatically affirmative vision of human potential, summed up in the figure of the übermensch and the cosmic driving force he called "will to power".

    Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the book in which Nietzsche most cogently embodied these central concepts of his mature philosophy, both his Sermon on the Mount and an allegorical gospel dramatising his struggle to communicate his message to a largely unresponsive world. To go back to my own engagement with N.'s work, Zarathustra did turn into a kind of Bible for me when - as an almost Aspergically bookish and insular 23-year old -  I read into its rhapsodic pseudo-poetry the key to my own "self-overcoming", the highly-changed narrative of how I too could come out of my solitary cave and through sheer will and determination turn myself into a positive, empowered new version of myself, if not quite a Superman then perhaps at least the successful writer I knew I had it within me to become. 

   A dog-eared Penguin edition of Zarathustra was lodged into my small, Army Surplus rucksack that summer (almost entirely crammed with books and notebooks rather than spare clothes) when I went off travelling across France with my brother Laurence, starting off in Paris (busking on the Metro, staying in a squat, scribbling some half-baked translations of Baudelaire and Rimbaud) and then hitching down to the south to do grape-picking. I have a vivid memory of sitting in the porch of the church at Libourne, near Bordeaux, where I think we ended up sleeping that night. It was the end of the summer and the sky was the most incredibly intense, deep, vertiginous blue. We were drinking cheap red wine from the bottle and smoking horrible throat-grating Gitane Jaunes (horrible to me even at the time but all part of the bohemian "deregulation of all the senses" I was bent on). Caught up in the moment we began taking it in turns to recite passages from the book, joining in to intone the phrase "Thus spoke Zarathustra" after each paragraph as though we were members of a religious order conducting a strange, illicit ceremony. 
    You could attribute this to the naive follies of youth and I would be the first to agree, but at the time it felt enormously inspiring and almost revelatory to do so, as though the words of the book perfectly embodied the sense of exploratory liberation our travels in France had emboldened us with, as though somehow Nietzsche's writing and our experiences had fused in what felt like a transformative new synthesis.
   Who the Hell is Friedrich Nietzsche? is available here.

Dialogue with Ian Pindar

                                                             

 

At risk of sounding ungracious or curmudgeonly, I don't get excited about a lot of contemporary UK poetry. It may sound paradoxical to then go on to state that I feel the general quality and range of British poetry is in many ways stronger than it was 30 years ago, when I first became interested in literature. It seems that most poets of today are open to a far wider diversity of influences and formal approaches than the rather conservative, narrow gamut of styles employed by 70s/80s poets. If you look at the recent output of  Faber and Faber, for example, it sometimes seems as though the avant garde (or a version of the avant garde) has become the mainstream. It may be that many of these contemporaries have honed their skills in Creative Writing courses and workshops; yet for all the skill and sophistication on display, its as though this has been won at the cost of other elements, with too many poems sounding like showy exercises or assignments, well-turned or adroit or clever but often somehow hollow at the core.

   Ian Pindar's Constellations (Carcanet) was a book that stood out for me as distinct from this tendency, full of the ambitiousness, craft and scope of earlier 20th Century Modernists, a genuine poetry of ideas which also manages to be remarkably sensuous, lyrical and often moving. Equally, from reading Ian's blog, I had the sense of a writer I shared a broadly similar outlook and tastes with. Last autumn we began an email correspondence which slowly ("glacially", as Ian says) formed into a dialogue touching on his poetry and its contexts, writers we're both interested in and other relevant concerns. I print it here now with Ian's approval (and editorial contributions).

OD: I have been re-reading Constellations, which was as you know a book I was immediately drawn to when it was published in 2012 and one which I wrote about very enthusiastically on this blog. I have to say the pleasure of reading these poems for me has not diminished on revisiting the volume. They have several qualities which mark them out from pretty much all other contemporary British poetry: firstly, a tone of exuberance and delight, of "luxe, calme et volupte" which can only be called celebratory.

IP: Thanks, Oliver. I think ‘celebratory’ is quite right. While I was working on the book my young son was diagnosed with autism and this had a big impact on me. Rather than wanting to be some kind of poète maudit (as I once did) I now wanted to affirm life and love and all the good things we can find if we look hard enough. Looking back, I see it as the work of somebody who is burning bright before they go out, somebody heading for a fall or driving at great speed into a wall, because soon after Constellations was finished I cracked up a little, as Scott Fitzgerald would say. So that’s me burning brightly before it all turns to ashes. That sounds melodramatic, but on another level it’s exactly what happened.

Another quality which makes Constellations distinctive  is what seems a conscious design to recapture a mode of mellifluous lyric beauty that has all but disappeared from British poetry but which connects with both an earlier poetic lineage in English and with traditions in other languages less hampered by "the gentility principle" than ours.

Well, it wasn’t a conscious decision to go beyond the gentility principle. Nobody has ever accused me of gentility. Maybe it’s a class thing. Although I was at Oxford, my father was a builder. I worked on a roof with him during the Long Vac. So I just don’t fit in anywhere. The Movement never interested me much. Larkin a little. But my first love was T. S. Eliot. In the end I found American poetry more congenial. It woke me up to other possibilities. Not just the founding fathers of modern American poetry, Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, but the New American Poetry, the New York School, especially Ashbery, and the Beats and the Black Mountain poets, especially Robert Duncan and Charles Olson.

Constellations is also intriguing in its format as a book-length sequence rather than just a collection of individual poems. Can you say something about the concept behind the book: did you conceive of it, for example, as a single long-form composition (perhaps in the tradition of those American Modernists you just cited, who all wrote extended texts of one kind or another) or as a poem-cycle?

 I was very taken by Robert Duncan’s idea of an endless poem. He rejected the obligation to write tidy lyrics with beginnings, middles and ends. His Structure of Rime and Passages are never-ending poems. Constellations isn’t quite like that, because there is a sort of ambient narrative and the collection ends with the end of everything, eternal night/winter and the heat death of the universe. Where Duncan saw poems as areas, I saw them as constellations, assemblages, word-clusters. There are 88 constellations in modern astronomy, so there are 88 poems in five sections. The first section is a sort of fanfare, introducing the seasons. The second touches upon a seaside love affair. The third is darker and suggests some kind of economic crash and a war. I was suffering personally from the recession and I felt I was writing in the face of these two forces working against me, autism and austerity. A losing battle, of course. The fourth section is broadly philosophical. It ends with a poem about the Plane of Matter, an attempt to explain an idea that came from my reading of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. I dropped out of a PhD on Deleuze many years ago, but he stays with me. The fifth section is about poetry itself. I wanted to argue for a poetry distinct from prose. The last section is a general closing down as winter comes, then night, and all the stars going out, planets becoming uninhabitable and cold. The heat death of the universe. It’s only a hypothesis, of course, but it puts out all the constellations in my book.    

 Fascinating answer - returning to the book with a sense of how the parts form a kind of loose narrative-arc has lent it even greater depth and continuity for me. I also love the idea you took from Duncan about a kind of never-ending poem and I can see how this informs the loose syntax (or parataxis?) of the poems and the way you build up clauses without any need for a linear momentum or 'argument' to the poem, juxtaposing these clauses without verbs or connectives almost more like musical phrases. Were there other poets who particularly influenced the musicality of your style here?

   Wallace Stevens, a poet who continues to infuriate and fascinate me, is the biggest influence here, not so much a source or a model but a mood. I was also very taken by H.D.’s decision to just number the poems in Trilogy, rather than giving them titles. So I suppose in Constellations I was doing everything you’re not supposed to do: no titles and word-clusters rather than conventional lyric poems (although as you say, they are lyrical). Constellations doesn’t really fit in anywhere, but I’ve always liked that Robert Frost thing about being a lone wolf.

   As a young man I loved HD as well - or at least her short Imagist works. I remember trawling through Hermetic Definition, Helen in Egypt and the Trilogy with feigned but actually waning enthusiasm - Eliot hit the mark when he said her work "lacks the element of surprise". The highly-wrought, highly-strung manner which works beautifully in a 6-line lyric fails to hold the interest over a book-length poem all in the same elevated style. However, I can see what Duncan was responding to in her in The HD Book - it is her mythopoeic intensity (delivered in a much less egocentric, masculine, heroic way than, say, The Cantos) that he brought forward.

 If we turn from Constellations to your debut Carcanet volume Emporium, there is a marked difference in both tone and form. The mood is darker, touched with surrealism and with a frequent satirical edge to the poems. The main influence seems to be the Eliot of Poems 1920 and particular the quatrain poems with their almost Augustan sharpness. Can you say something about this dramatic contrast between the two books?

It’s odd because as you say Emporium is darker, but when my life actually became very dark my poetry brightened up, hence Constellations. I can only put it down to having learned humility or something. Humility before life, but also before poetry. The first big poetic influence on me as a teenager was T. S. Eliot. He seemed everything a poet ought to be. Now I don’t read him so often, haven’t read him for a long time. It’s not that I don’t think he’s a great poet, because he undoubtedly is. I think perhaps discovering other American poets broke the spell a little. I can see why William Carlos Williams, for instance, thought that Eliot represented everything one ought to resist. Williams no doubt hated those Frenchified quatrain poems, but I just wanted to try writing one once!

Your first book was a biography of James Joyce. Could you say something about how this project came about and to what extent your interest in Joyce relates to your enthusiasm for Eliot and other Modernist poets? To me, many passages in Ulysses contain the most densely poetic language of the 20th century and have always been an important inspiration for my own writing and I'm wondering whether it's been the same for you.

The Joyce book came about because a friend asked if I’d write a short biography for her new imprint. I chose Joyce because he was always a favourite. I studied Joyce and T S Eliot under Terry Eagleton at Oxford and wrote a little thesis on Finnegans Wake. Anyway, the book is aimed at the ‘general reader’ not academics – and while writing it I kept thinking of that Auden line: ‘A shilling life will give you all the facts.’

I remember most of all the tortuous negotiations with the Joyce Estate over permissions and copyright. My wife was expecting our first baby, so it was a stressful time. I have a file full of correspondence with James Joyce’s grandson, Stephen James Joyce, the executor of the Estate. He was helpful, although we didn’t always see eye to eye. I’m grateful to him for one detail that he told me does not appear in any other Joyce biography: in his final months, while in Zurich, Joyce would walk through the snow with his grandson and every now and then he would stop and produce a little black notebook to record some thought; he would ask Stephen to turn round and he would place the notebook on the boy’s back and write. That notebook has never been found – a great pity as it would have given us some indication of where Joyce was heading after Finnegans Wake. 

One aim of my book was to make Finnegans Wake less intimidating. It has a reputation for being either gibberish or impossibly erudite. I wanted to demystify it and show that it is in fact terrific fun to read. I am satisfied with Joyce. I feel in a funny kind of way that I did right by him. One reviewer said I had made Joyce and his work “funagain” – that’s good enough for me.

I can’t say Joyce has influenced my poetry in any way. I once attempted to write in a kind of Finneganese and it was awful. I think ‘Loon’ in Emporium flirts with being Joycean, although its presiding spirit is Samuel Beckett. I may be wrong, but I thought your poem ‘Local History’ from Human Form had something Joycean about it (‘stomps sockfoot’). 

As for Modernism, it’s interesting how Modernism became almost a dirty word in Britain after the Second World War. In A Sinking Island Hugh Kenner quotes Donald Davie: ‘the silent conspiracy which now unites all the English poets from Robert Graves down to Philip Larkin, and all the critics, editors and publishers too, the conspiracy to pretend that Pound and Eliot never happened.’ Immediately post-war, Pound was out of the picture: a fascist and a traitor (this, I think, helped greatly to discredit Modernism in some minds). T S Eliot survived in British affections – aided by his practical cats – but did he maybe help to bury Modernism when he executed his reactionary turn, abandoning the avant-garde and reinventing himself as ‘an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics’? Then along came Larkin, an insistent enemy of Modernism and of ‘difficult’ poetry generally. He famously attacked Modernism – the 3 P’s: Pound, Parker and Picasso (and he hated Finnegans Wake).

So in post-war Britain we were left with a lyric tradition based on the triad of Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas and Philip Larkin. Things have changed a lot recently. British poetry is always playing catch-up and only now is it assimilating post-war American poetry, especially the New York School. Everyone sounds like Frank O’Hara.

Corbyn as Joycean

  Another good thing about Jeremy Corbyn is that - as revealed in today's Evening Standard - his favourite book is Joyce's Ulysses. One would hardly expect the Standard to be awash with Corbynistas, but the way they wheel out some faux-academic who clearly hasn't read the book to beat the embattled Labour leader over the head with it is shameful.
   The blatant inaccuracies come thick and fast, more demeaning to Joyce than they are to Corbyn. How can anyone think Ulysses "a novel without a single working class character", that most of the text "is about sex and crapping" or that Leopold Bloom is "an old man who is disappointed in life"? John Sutherland, a Professor of Modern Literature at UCL who hasn't read the key novel of Modern Literature, wants to imply that Jeremy Corbyn's choice of reading-matter is as overrated as his performance as leader of the Opposition and somehow unconducive to his leftist political agenda. However, anyone who has seriously engaged with Ulysses will understand the novel as a profound embodiment of Joyce's life-long socialism in theme, form and linguistic range, an unparalleled celebration and vindication of the lives of the ordinary working people Corbyn has always spoken of defending.

Coffee With Joyce

  As part of a camping trip to Istria in northern Croatia, I discovered this tribute to my favourite writer James Joyce at Cafe Uliks (Croatian for Ulysses) in the beautiful Italianate town of Pula. The bronze statue seems a substandard second-cousin of Gaudier-Brzeska's head of Ezra Pound - whether that's a deliberate reference given their connection I'm not sure.
   Pula was the first place Joyce lived in after he had eloped from Dublin with Nora Barnacle in late 1904, then called Pola and part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He taught English here at the Berlitz School for some months before moving on to Trieste, the first city of the famous peripatetic trio of locations cited on the last page of Ulysses. It seems a suitably multicultural, polyglot meeting-place for a writer who incorporated so many languages into his prose: I recall there being Serbo-Croat and Hungarian words melded into Finnegans Wake from the time I studied it intensely although the references escape me now. The head of the Berlitz Schools in Pola and Trieste, the euphonious Almidano Artifoni, is immortalised in Ulysses by lending his name (somewhat improbably) to Stephen's music teacher, to whom he speaks Italian in the 'Wandering Rocks' chapter.
    I also came across an allusion to Pula in Dante, Joyce's favourite writer:


"As at Arles where the Rhone sinks into stagnant marshes,
   as at Pola by the Quarnaro Gulf, whose waters
   close Italy and wash her farthest reaches,
the uneven tombs cover the even plain..." 

                                                 Inferno, Canto IX, tr, John Ciardi


  Basically Dante's drift is that Pola was the site of an extensive Roman cemetery (ie. a pagan sepulchre comparable to the one he finds in the City of Dis). Pula today still boasts some impressive Roman monuments such as the amphitheatre and Forum.

The Text Will Start Talking To You

  I was really taken by something I read in an interview with the American short-story writer George Saunders in The Guardian on Saturday, as it chimes with an intuition I've often felt about my own poetry-writing but haven't able to articulate before:

   "...my whole schtick is, doing short fiction is like trying to suspend your conceptual understanding of the story for as long as possible...Donald Barthelme has this great essay called 'Not Knowing' where he says that your job as a fiction writer is to keep yourself confused for as long as you can. And the text will actually start talking to you. If you can keep your own designs a little quiet."

   The short story is a form I'm increasingly drawn to, whose guiding principles of concision and ultimate indeterminacy - that sense of being left equivocally hanging after the briefest glimpse into a rapidly-sketched fictional world we encounter in all the seminal practitioners from Chekhov and the Joyce of Dubliners to Helen Simpson and Lorrie Moore - seem to overlap beguilingly with those of poetry.The recent spin-off "flash-fiction" or short short stories are indeed often hard to tell apart from prose-poems: at their best fragmentary, skewed narratives that thwart their own progress.
 
    Although I wouldn't extrapolate generally-applicable rules from it, my experience of approaching the poem I'm trying to write is precisely akin to Saunders' sense of willed ignorance in the face of the story, a struggle to suspend my conceptual understanding of the lineage and parameters of "the poem" - never a given, always something to be rediscovered in the very process of writing. (Two Robert Frost insights spring to mind: " I write to find out what I didn't know I knew" and "No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader").

   Somehow, out of a paradoxical double-think, I have to get myself into the condition of not knowing how to write a poem before I can write one. Of trying to sidestep all the rational directives I might have made the other day about writing more like So-and-So or avoiding closed forms or "using the page" more (though these might eventually emerge). It's almost the feeling of beginning afresh each time the inceptual word-cluster for a poem suggests itself and - having wrong-footed my conscious mind with a menial task or a distracted reverie while, say, listening to music or staring out of the window on a train - what I call the formal imperative for the poem tentatively starts to take shape. Chance - another element beyond my conscious control - operates in tandem with patience, therefore, to mediate this rare, crucial entry-point into the poem.

    If I approach the writing in a more thought-out, head-on way, it feels like I'm merely repeating myself and writing the same poem again and again (which of course many poets seem happy to do) or liable merely to write in the predictable manner I've gleaned from a mishmash of all the other recent poets I've been reading. But as I say this is less a conscious strategy than the only way I seem to know how: it's partly, I think, a ceding of a good deal of the compositional process to the unconscious, an acceptance that rational control will only take you so far when you are working with such a rich complex of internal and external materials as a poem worthy of the name arises from. But on the other hand it's certainly not automatic writing: perhaps you can only loosen the reins in this way if you've read and reflected and worked at the craft of poetry for years.

      And this is only the way-in to the poem: now the real work, the drafting and deleting and redrafting until you stumble upon something that finally satisfies that initial blindly-groping instinct, can begin.

The Kaleidoscope of Sounds

    When I mentioned Hope Mirrlees in the previous post it reminded me that I'd planned to re-up the review of her Collected Poems which appeared on Eyewear earlier this year but which got only the briefest of showings before another post superseded it. Here it is (apologies for repeating myself if you've already read it):

    TS Eliot’s assertion, in Tradition and the Individual Talent, that genuinely new works of art force us to readjust our sense of the whole tradition that lies behind them, so that “the past (is) altered by the present as much as the present is altered by the past”, is equally true of genuinely innovative editions of non-contemporary poets, jostling our preconceptions about a period or movement and obliging us both to reassess what we assumed we knew of literary history and to question the criteria by which that history has been formulated.  Peter Robinson’s illuminating Complete Poetry and Translations of Bernard Spencer (Bloodaxe) from early last year was one such edition, reshuffling our awareness of mid-century English poetry ( all too often dominated by what might be termed the Auden supremacy) by elevating a figure whom Edward Lucie-Smith once described as “the type of the excellent minor poet” to definite major status.

    Sandeep Parmar’s enthralling Hope Mirrlees: Collected Poems(Carcanet) forces a similar re-evaluation of in fact several different areas of critical interest. Mirrlees’ long experimental poem Paris (1920) is perhaps the nearest any English poet has come to negotiating the vortex of continental High Modernism, yet prior to this edition the text has been all but unknown despite its startling, kaleidoscopic brilliance and its presaging of both The Waste Land and Mrs Dalloway. It also jolts us into a reappraisal of the role of female authors in the inception of Modernist advances, contra the well-established tradition of lauding Joyce, Eliot and Pound as heroic, exiled pioneers. Paris may be located within a context of other ‘vers libre’ poets like HD and Mina Loy (on whom Parmar has also written), the non-linear, ‘stream-of-consciousness’ prose of Dorothy Richardson,  Katherine Mansfield and Gertrude Stein and the intellectual endorsement of Mirrlees’ friends Jane Harrison and Virginia Woolf, who with her husband Leonard first published the poem under their Hogarth Press imprint.

    The fact that, after Paris, Mirrlees didn’t publish another full-length book of poetry until 1976 - just two years before her death and  written in a far more traditional, formal style - might be seen to point towards the seemingly anomalous nature of her Modernist experiment but equally begs questions about the hostile reception its publication was met with and the poem’s subsequent burial from any sort of readerly access – ironic, when only two years later The Waste Land (also published by Hogarth) found acclaim from within the literary establishment Eliot was already a part of.

   Such questions, among others, are amply addressed in Parmar’s lengthy and insightful Introduction. Careful to locate Paris “within the context of (Mirrlees’) wider oeuvre, her life, and her networks of influence”, Parmar examines the biographical backdrop to the poem, detailing her progression from Classics undergraduate at Newnham College, Cambridge, to sometime member of the Bloomsbury set. Indeed, prior to this edition, more readers will be familiar with Mirrlees’ name from footnotes to the Diaries or Letters of Virginia Woolf than as a writer and one wonders if the association with Bloomsbury (often slighted for what has been seen as its dilettantism and snobbery) might be another factor in Mirrlees’ later critical neglect.

      It was at Newnham that Mirrlees first met the anthropologist and “first woman intellectual” Jane Harrison, who was originally one of her tutors but who rapidly became the key influence in her development.  Parmar is tactfully circumspect about addressing the nature of their relationship, although by revealing the private codes the couple used when talking about each other (eg. Elder and Younger Wife, both betrothed to a totemistic Bear-figure) she leaves us in little doubt that there was what Virginia Woolf called a “Sapphic” element to their long-standing co-habitation. But equally it was an intensely intellectual partnership, with the two women learning Russian, attending academic conferences and travelling throughout Europe together.

   Harrison’s ideas about the primacy of ritual as a bridge between Art and Religion, derived from her study of Ancient Greek culture, powerfully inform the structure and movement of Mirrlees’ long poem from the use of Harrison’s anthropological term “holophrase” in the opening line onwards.  Paris can be read as an improvisatory striving to discover an underlying ritual within the flux of quotidian urban life: “I want a holophrase” (defined by Parmar as “a primitive linguistic structure that expresses a complex concept in a single word or short phrase”, a description which tellingly resonates with Pound’s characterising of “ the image” as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time”) signals an attempt to encapsulate the teeming diversity of a single Paris day into a patterning of imagistic and linguistic flotsam inclusive enough to dismantle poetic hierarchies and find as much value in adverts, street-talk and signs as in the official high culture of the Louvre and the Arc de Triomphe.

   As such, Paris is both marvellously attuned to the cross-currents of pre-1920s Modernist movements – its collage of disparate perspectives and registers seeming to point towards the Cubist principles of Braque and Picasso, its enthusiastic embrace of urban multiplicity holding parallels with Futurism and Vorticism – and also astonishingly prescient of later open-form poetries, particularly the kinds of “process-poems” which attempt to plot unstable ontologies across both a timed duration and the typographic space of the page, from the psychogeographic London-forays of Iain Sinclair right up to the disjunctive Language poetry of Armantrout, Silliman and Howe. Sandeep Parmar and Carcanet Books can only be congratulated for making widely available for the first time this seminal, groundbreaking poem, a suddenly-recovered piece in the Modernist jigsaw.

     Based on her research into the Mirlees archive, Parmar does a good job of tracing some of the other, less obvious intertexts for Paris, such as two French poets Hope was acquainted with personally – Madame Duclaux(also known as Mary Robinson) and Anna de Noailles – both salonnieres and interesting re-interpreters of the flaneuse-figure in their poems. Parmar also cites Cocteau and Mayakovsky as plausible influences. Her own persuasive reading of the poem is as an assertion of the individual, female voice – “the breaking down of identity and individual experience in favour of the life of the city that threatens to destroy the ‘I’” – attempting to find itself within the conflicting onrush of modern Paris (both Classical and demotic, filled with symbols of Religion and Art but also the ‘dreck’ of the contemporary) and ultimately – paradoxically - discovering that “Paris liberates the speaker from individual life and experience...The self returns to its private, secret tongue.” (Julia Briggs’ Notes at the end of this edition are also invaluable signposts for elucidating Paris.)

     After participating in the exhilarating dérive of Paris, it feels like quite a jump to turn the page onto Hope Mirrlees’ 1976 collection Moods and Tensions, so different in form, tone and subject-matter as to seem written by another poet. While it might be futile to entertain the “If only...” hypothesis of wondering what kind of work Mirrlees might have produced had she built on the style of Paris, there must surely be a sense of loss involved in considering that such an exciting and momentous poetic masterpiece – moreover, by a female English poet – remains a one-off, a youthful tour de force by a writer who later turned to novels, biographies and academic essays, as well as these technically-conservative late poems.

    However, Parmar is alert to this kind of denigrating of Paris as a mere flash-in-the-pan period-piece and argues for meaningful links between the early poem, the later ones and the prose-works. She posits that the major turning-point of Mirrlees’ life was the death of Jane Harrison in 1928 and her subsequent conversion to Catholicism, entailing a long-term repudiation of the life she had previously lead, including perhaps the intellectual daring and iconoclasm that had engendered Paris. The late, overtly academic poems – rhymed and metered in most cases, and heavily reliant on literary and Classical allusions – often pivot on the opposition between the resolved stasis of Christian faith (associated with cultural tradition and book-learning) and the enticingly sensuous but less than worthy (or at times “pagan”)appeal of love and desire: an opposition also apparent in a Victorian poet Mirrlees sometimes here resembles, Christina Rossetti. There is a significant passage in ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’- a poem which begins “I have no wish to eat forbidden fruit” – where the strategy of Classical reference seems to encode more worldly sexual temptations :

        “I can watch the droves of little singing maids

         (They are so close, just out of reach!)

         Turning Aeolian lyres upon the Lesbian beach”

  Old-fashioned and generic as these poems undoubtedly are, there are enough well-crafted, resonant lines (“Unharrassed by the voracious dead”, for example, reminds me of early Geoffrey Hill) to make their wistfully ironical tone of reminiscence work effectively. 

 

    Equally, the essays which Parmar places at the end of the book often find Mirrlees both brooding over the past and postulating why she is so drawn to do so – in ‘The Religion of Women’ she concludes that, more than men, “women are the slaves of Time” through being more physically attuned to seasonal cycles. Yet her memories are not necessarily regretful ones: ‘An Earthly Paradise’ is a lively, witty recounting of part of her time in Paris with Jane Harrison and affords a glimpse into the colourful swirl of new experience which fed into Paris the poem. In ‘Listening In to The Past’, again a ludic piece rather than a plaintive one, Mirrlees confesses to being “haunted by the Past” and explores how history can be made to live again through imagination. Her final, brilliant image for this process, of a kind of “ kaleidoscope of sounds” containing one’s own “collection of scraps”, brings us back to the pattern-making ritual of Paris where history and the here-and-now are so strikingly conjoined.

A Kind of Assignment: Rabbit is Rich

John Updike, steeling himself for more metaphysics on the golf-course

   A couple of years ago I wrote a laudatory post about John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. Now I’ve just got round to completing the third novel in the tetralogy, Rabbit is Rich. For one thing, it’s certainly a more successful, assured novel than the second book, Rabbit Redux, which – while having its own anguished virtues – is lumbered with such major problematics no amount of prose-brilliance can redeem Updike on this one: chiefly a jive-talking blaxploitation-stereotype of a black character he makes a calamitous (not to say tiresomely-longwinded) bodge of exploring race issues through, and an Edie Sedgwick-stereotype of a doomed female character who’s little more than a shared sexual puppet for the male characters, even it seems Rabbit’s 13-year old son.

      To be fair to Updike’s long-term project, however, we should be careful to read each novel within the context both of its preceding decade and of the stage of his life at which we find Rabbit each time, so that the sequence is as much a record of American social history as it is a biographical  narrative. As in Joyce’s A Portrait, shifts in maturity and world-view are reflected both in prose-register and the tenor and texture of Rabbit’s interior monologues: the first book, set in the optimistic 50s and the most poetic of the three, evinces a young man’s verve and impetuous unknowing; Redux parallels the failure of the 60’s hippy- dream with the falling-apart of the nuclear family, and is attendantly dark and troubled; Rich finds Rabbit a beneficiary of the prosperous 70s and settled into a complacent materialism which issues from his past conspire to undermine.

     Rabbit’s thoughts, then, in this third instalment are ostensibly never far from money and what he can buy with it: now a worldly, overweight car-salesman rather implausibly back on good terms with the wife who left him in Redux, there is a Leopold Bloom-like mundanity to his domestic musings which is often the source of rambunctious humour but also juxtaposes less well with Updike’s characteristic riffs of lyricism than in the previous books. Unlike Bloom, Rabbit has become prone to some fairly portentous metaphysical broodings, such as “ By the time they finally get out onto the golf course, green seems a shade of black. Every blade of grass at his feet is an individual life that will die, that has flourished to no purpose. The fairway springy beneath his feet blankets the dead...” Surely no-one has actually thought this while out playing golf; but of course this is no longer Rabbit, Updike has interpolated his own showboating prose-stylism (and writerly weltschmerz) in a way that jars against any sort of continuity of character we had previously believed Rabbit to possess.

    Although the family dramas of his son’s wedding and attempts to re-contact the daughter he’s never known are subtly, vividly handled, with throughout the familiar sense of muddling-through the big events of life, of “playing grown-ups”, my other reservation about Rabbit is Rich is its episodic, almost saga-ish linear narrative, keeping us updated about the characters we recognise from the previous books and moving them forward in not too resolved ways to prepare us for the next novel. Perhaps it is the relentless present tense Updike has chosen to stick with that doesn’t gel so well with Rabbit’s new preoccupation with memories and ghosts.

   But equally the main motor of the rather chugging plot is the  succession of sex-scenes the novel seems all too reliant on to hold our interest; not that they are not well-done for the most part, just that they seem rather gratuitous, functional rather than erotic in a way that lovemaking between a middle-aged husband and wife must often be - and ultimately reflective of an almost seedy and certainly sexist prurience on the part of Rabbit/Updike( there, I have finally conflated the two!), as when he pries into the bedroom photos of the couple he’s just had dinner with.

    By the time we get to the wife-swapping episode, weirdly positioned as the novel’s culmination, we find the two major problematics of the novel (incommensurate over-writing/ pervy phallocentricism) conjoined in one monstrously bathetic and unintentionally hilarious scene. Without giving the game away for potential readers, I will let perhaps the most jaw-droppingly awful sentence of the novel speak for itself: 

     “He dares confide to Thelma, because she has let him fuck her up the ass in proof of love, his sense of miracle at being himself, himself instead of someone else, and his old inkling, now fading in the energy crunch, that there was something that wanted him to find it, that he was here on earth on a kind of assignment.”

     Actually, no amount of prose-brilliance can redeem Updike on this one, either.

Edge of the Orison

                                                                 
 If London Orbital was Iain Sinclair's first foray outside the urban centre he has obsessively explored and excavated in previous books - albeit in this case a lengthy circumambulation which was in fact a strategy for adducing the city's secrets from its margins, from everything it had pushed outwards - Edge of the Orison tracks a journey out of London (re-enacting John Clare's exodus from a mad-house in Epping Forest back to his home in Helpston, Northamptonshire) which keeps doubling back on itself and inevitably concerning itself with the inner workings of the metropolis.
   The trackings Sinclair encompasses, furthermore, forge deeper than he has done before into a complex layering of thematic materials, richly offsetting and rebounding against each other, triangulating personal,historical and spatial nodes. Research into John Clare and his Northamptonshire lineaments leads Sinclair and his rogue-ish set of sidekicks (Renshie Bickshall, Brian Catling, Alan Moore etc) in two main directions: firstly, into Sinclair's own family history and autobiography, since his wife Anna's forebears were also from the Northampton region (could there even be an overlapping with Clare's somewhat murky family-tree?); secondly, into an extended meditation on English Romanticism and the seemingly self-defeating arc of its visionary proponents - not just "mad Clare" but also Shelley, Blake and Byron - within the social context of an England already in the early 19th C. swallowed up by the Industrial Revolution, agricultural Enclosure and voracious mercantilism. While Shelley and Byron turned into deracinated exiles, Clare was caught between the equally disillusioning poles of his rapidly-changing rural origins - the defunct idyll of his childhood - and a London which beckoned him with largely-spurious promises of literary success and esteem:

   "He had to learn the difficult thing, in different places we are different people. We live in one envelope with a multitude of voices, lulling them by regular habits, of rising, labouring, eating, taking pleasure and exercise: other selves, in suspension, slumber but remain wakeful. Waking confirms identity. We are never more than an extension of the ground on which we live...Poetry is a form of going away. Of holding landscape, and its overwhelming particulars, in the float of memory."

    (Interesting to note here an echo of Robert Creeley's famous assertion that "Form is never more than an extension of content", quoted also by Olson in his 'Projective Verse' essay, an important influence on Sinclair's 'open-field' approach.)
    One further 20th C narrative is set up in parallel to Clare and the Romantics: focussing on the fact that James Joyce's daughter Lucia, also diagnosed as insane, lived much of her later life in an asylum in Northampton, Sinclair pieces together a further subplot featuring both the novelist (another exile) and his sometime amanuensis and lover of Lucia, Samuel Beckett. An example of how subtle the interweavings of imagery are is that Sinclair returns to memories of first meeting his wife as students in Dublin within the context of discussing the two Irish masters.
    To my mind Edge of the Orison is Sinclair's masterpiece, at once his most personal book and the most fascinatingly rich and probing in its investigations of memory, history and identity. It also invents its own protean form, switching fluidly between factual accounts of walks and visits, historical research, lyrical insights, autobiographical remembrance and often hilarious satirical and comical descriptions, all delivered in Sinclair's most pointedly vivid prose. 
  

C-Words

                      
The current buzz around Tom McCarthy and his recent novel C strikes me as fascinating. Here is a novelist who deliberately aligns himself with the Modernist legacy of Joyce, Kafka and Beckett and furthermore openly admits to the influence of continental Post-Modern Theory on his approach. As if this weren't heretical enough, in the conversation between McCarthy and Lee Rourke (another interesting novelist) in last Saturday's Guardian:

( http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/sep/18/tom-mccarthy-lee-rourke-conversation#start-of-comments) 

he goes further in denouncing the traditions of "sentimental humanism" and its cult of the individual which still inform so much of our critical discourse, and in enthusiastically citing a whole raft of other coolly transgressive names ( Cocteau, Heidegger, Blanchot, Pound, Celan, Ballard, Mark E Smith) almost in the manner of an early 80's NME piece by Paul Morley - though needless to say with rather more substance than Morley ever managed.
    This is hardly an original stance, of course (one wonders in fact whether McCarthy has his tongue at least half in his cheek when making some of his more ponderous statements); the blanket demonisation of "liberal humanism",for example, is one of the corner-stones of any undergraduate Literary Theory course. Yet because of the scant credence ordinarily granted to such intellectually-weighty pronouncements, their very abnormality coming from the mouth of an English novelist - that endemic retroist and rester-on-laurels, staunchly averse to ideas, theories or formal experiment - McCarthy comes across as remarkably refreshing and forward-looking.   
     Moreover, the fact that C has not only been nominated for the Booker Prize, but is 9/4 Favourite to win, speaks perhaps of a groundswell of dissension among general readers, an inquisitive inkling that it might still be possible to do new and exhilarating things with the haggard old British novel.
    All this is immensely heartening for writers like myself who also invariably take their bearings from the cross-currents of international Modernism and its later forms. Within the sphere of poetry, Identity Parade seems to indicate a similar desire to challenge and redefine the parameters of mainstream taste, although in McCarthy's terms we might still point to out-moded tendencies - default realism, autobiographical disclosure, a belief in 'personal voice' - which need debunking in British poetry as urgently as in the novel.

Rabbit 2

   Finished Rabbit, Run last week with a sure sense that this is among the most important novels ever written - while disliking the contemporary fad for lists and charts as much as the next (grumpy old) man, to me any sort of critical enterprise involves making comparisons and distinctions and I haven't much time for the school of levellers who suggest that Eminem's rhymes should be read as poetry that stands comparison with, say, Wordsworth, Eliot or Muldoon.
   Locating Rabbit, Run within the lineage of other 20th Century novelists is intriguing. My reading is that as well as being benched in Joyce Updike is also setting up a dialogue with DH Lawrence and that in fact the whole novel could be read as a complex interplay between  what Joyce represents (both stylistically and epistemologically) and what Lawrence (ditto) does (wasn't it Richard Aldington who originated the antithesis between the two in the Intro to DHL's Collected Poems?) In some ways Rabbit is like a Lawrence character living off his impulses and the pull of sensual/sensuous pleasure: the familiar rhythm and diction of Lawrence's prose (as well as his questionable gender-politics) burst through in this sentence:
   " He knows only this: that underneath everything, under their minds and their situations, he possesses, like an inherited lien on a distant piece of land, a dominance over her, and that in her grain, in the lie of her hair and nerves and fine veins, she is prepared for this dominance." (p. 206, Penguin Modern Classics)
    But Updike (although he sees the appeal of this vitality when set against the moral staidness of small-town American society) shows what Rabbit's impetuous individualism can result in within the context of the Joycean priorities of family and social kinship: the tragic denouement is however saved from being the punitive comeuppance of a Victorian novel by an ambivalent ending unfolding (like that of Joyce's  A Portrait ) on a future to be returned to in subsequent fiction. As Updike says in his Afterword: "the book ends on an ecstatic, open note that was meant to stay open, as testimony to our hearts' stubborn amoral quest for something once called grace".
   One more example of the marvellously-precise, subtly-embedded poetry of Updike's prose. When Rabbit supports his toddler son to use the toilet at night, "wee-wee springs from the child's irritated sleep and jerkily prinkles into the bowl" - surely eliding the s here and converting "sprinkles" to the coinage "prinkles" (with its connotations of smallness and pinkness and its onomatapeic rightness) is an act of genius - it is absolutely the "mot juste".