Review: Cenotaph South by Chris McCabe (Penned in the Margins 2016/17)

   The notion of poetry’s immortality is one of its most abiding and validating tropes, originating in its earliest manifestations both as sacred utterance offered up to the gods and as a repository of oral myth and tribal history. In both cases it was the musical, formal qualities of poetry which endowed it with the memorable (and indeed memorisable) property of transcending the flux of everyday speech and living on into subsequent generations. With the advent of printed books in the 15^th Century, the poet was able to construct him or herself even more concretely as a kind of vatic time-traveller projecting their works forward into a posterity that would outlive their own precarious moment of acclaim. This aspiration became a rhetorical device itself, employed most famously in Shakespeare’s Sonnets and made the motivating theme of Edwardian poet James Elroy Flecker’s ‘To a Poet a Thousand Years Hence’:

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

    But what of today’s far faster-scrolling cultural landscape, where we barely find time to read a poem before the next newly discovered, media-hyped prize-winner demands our skittish attention and where – with libraries and bookshops rapidly disappearing - half the poetry we encounter doesn’t even exist as print upon a page but is floating in a cloud somewhere on the vast hypothetical repository of the internet? Our sense of history and time has blurred, hardly helped by ominous global events that seem to undermine any concept of a secure futurity. Within such a flickering maelstrom of fake news and the otiose verbiage of social media, what body of poetry can stake its claim to survival into the next generation, let alone what used to be known as “immortality”?

  Such anxieties seem to haunt the margins of Chris McCabe’s ongoing project to investigate the obscure poets buried in London’s Victorian cemeteries, hoping to uncover a “mute, inglorious Milton” who has somehow (in Pound’s phrase) “’scaped immortality”. The opening instalment, In the Catacombs: A Summer Among the Dead Poets of West Norwood Cemetery (Penned in the Margins, 2014), initiated an alluring prose-hybrid form that collaged documentary, literary criticism and autobiography in a multifaceted narrative which owed something to later works by Iain Sinclair (eg. London Orbital and Edge of the Orison), tracing intersections in time and location that eventually forge a deep-rooted, almost occult coherence.

    What gave this launch of the project a further edge and scope was McCabe’s collaboration with visual artists who were creating a “site-specific art-trail” within West Norwood Cemetery during 2013, so that the book and its dead poets could be experienced in a concrete, physical dimension. Interested readers could visit the cemetery (as I did that summer) and follow the trail with McCabe: he also deposited small oval stones printed with words from each of the poet’s writings at the sites of their burial (some now overgrown or displaced) and there was also a limited edition anthology of the poets placed in the columbarium. The leaving of poem-stones seemed a gesture in keeping with the overall project of seeking a perpetuity for poets’ words: one wonders how many of the stones are still there in West Norwood Cemetery today?

    Cenotaph South is a more personally-invested book, interspersed throughout by McCabe’s diaristic notations of his mother’s cancer-scare and memories of his dead father, lending the sense of a poignant self-pilgrimage to McCabe’s investigations, albeit often counterbalanced by the redeeming innocence of playful interactions with his son Pavel. There is also a more writerly level whereby McCabe strives to validate his place within the historical continuity of poets by constantly scanning  his surroundings for links with his antecedents, eventually elaborating a “coffin-shaped” path on the map of Nunhead, Dulwich and Peckham Rye which demarcates the area of his dogged psychogeographic research.

    The network of associations he traces is remarkably rich and diverse: he initiates his enquiries by trying to locate the tree on Peckham Rye in which Blake had a vision of angels as a boy, then visits Dulwich College, where Barry McSweeney did his last poetry reading in 2000, before visiting the house where Robert Browning lived on Telegraph Hill and the site of a pub in Dulwich Village where BS Johnson used to attend poetry events in the 1960s. He also comes across the grave of Henry Mew, brother of the poet Charlotte, who wrote a vivid monologue addressed to her brother called  ‘In Nunhead Cemetery’.

    By invoking such outsider-poets as Blake, Mew and McSweeney (significantly it’s the proto-Modernist Browning of the experimental Sordello he’s drawn to rather than the later renowned man of letters) McCabe seems to be attempting to delineate his own alternative poetic history, an idiosyncratic “historical grammar of poetic myth” perhaps modelled on one of the many books he cites, Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. This is underlined in the chapter ‘At Home with the BBC: Reconsidering the Canon’, where his reflections on a BBC documentary suggest how the poetry establishment typified by TS Eliot and Faber worked with the BBC to endorse a particular narrow canon of mostly white male mainstream poets.

   As for Nunhead Cemetery itself, the buried poets McCabe identifies (with the help of historian Tim Stevenson) are a motley selection: mostly Victorians, like the once widely-anthologised ‘Laureate of the Babies’ William Cox Bennet, their often staid, sentimental verses hardly stand the test of time, although McCabe is a generous and knowledgeable enough reader to find at least something positive in all of the poets, especially George Thornbury whose documentary prose about London seems a precursor of McCabe’s own.

   Despite its potentially dark subject-matter, Cenotaph South culminates on a positive note, with news that McCabe’s mother is in recovery from her chemotherapy and that a new poetry-scene seems to be flourishing in the gentrified environs of Peckham and Nunhead, reminding us that “this is how the dead poets still speak – through the living”. An undiscovered poet of genius is yet to be unearthed from the tangled undergrowth of Nunhead Cemetery and therefore McCabe’s quest must continue to another of London’s Victorian cemeteries, leading the way for the next instalment of what is becoming a compelling and highly original sequence.

Memories of John Heath-Stubbs

   An entry from my journal, dated 19^th March 2001: ‘First meeting with John Heath-Stubbs. I entered the tiny flat – dark, shabby, with singed wallpaper – feeling diffident and over-awed. Extraordinary head looming out of the shadows, silver hair on end, cavernous cheeks. He greets us, a little distantly. Then the bulky frame hunches over, head in enormous hands as Guthrie goes through appointments, times, dates with him like a solicitous mother with a teenage son. He answers in bewildered tones – has forgotten to do this, can’t remember what time he’s supposed to do that, has lost such and such an address.’

    ‘I thought he was in bad spirits and felt dreadfully de trop, but it was obviously just the practicalities dismaying him– as the others got up to go he said (obviously having heard I was interested in poetry) “Wait, I wanted to speak with Oliver” and asked me to sit quite close beside him as he is not only blind but deaf now in one ear.’

   ‘His manner changed instantly to a sort of quizzical charm, a scholarly meandering warmth, as soon as we touched on his reality: poetry, words, music. The subjects he ranged over seem like Keats’ description of Coleridge’s rambling conversation on Hampstead Heath: his own composition, done on tape recorder then transcribed and redrafted; emendations of manuscripts of English poets, best examples being Milton and Keats -  problem more complex in Shakespeare, what with quartos, folios and ambiguities of Elizabethan handwriting eg. “O that this too too solid flesh” could also be “sallied flesh” or “sullied flesh” ; then Peter Russell (prompted by my rather nervously-random question, seeing a book of PR’s on the shelf), John had known him a little after the war when he was editor of ‘Nine’, too close an adherent of Pound’s views, maybe his anti-semitism as well; Pound an important poet, despite his disgraceful later politics; foolish to disregard his earlier poetry because of them eg. ‘Sestina: At Altaforte’ does not extol violence but is a dramatic monologue about a violent man; had not met Pound but knew friends who had, John Wain had visited him at St Elizabeth’s and found him “not all there”, disjointed and inconsequent; a great translator, though, esp. his Chinese poems; comparing ‘Cathay’ with Arthur Waley, one says “Blue, blue is the grass” the other “green, green”, in fact blue is the more correct; analysis of colour-terms in different poetries, more ancient verse uses words more for the effects of light than the colour or pigment itself eg. Anglo-Saxon poetry has very few colour-words; one poet who was very disappointed in Pound was Montale, whom John met in Italy – why hadn’t Pound come over to the Hermeticists?

But Pound not really interested in contemporary Italian poetry, too besotted with romanticised view of the past etc. etc.’

    The entry trails off, no doubt unable to reconstruct any further involutions of John’s extraordinary conversational flow. Even these few inadequate jottings, however, may serve to give a flavour of what an audience with him could be like: the vast range of reference, drawing on a profound erudition not just within literature but also across a diversity of other disciplines; the breadth of notable contacts and collaborators stretching back to the Forties, always mentioned casually and never in a name-dropping way; the startling connective-leaps and yokings of heterogeneous elements John’s memory would habitually encompass. What’s missing from this account, however, is the affable humour that was also an integral component of John’s conversation – the anecdotes, asides and quiet laughter he would use to deflate his more earnest pronouncements.

    After being introduced to John by Guthrie McKie - John’s tirelessly loyal and helpful friend, long-term advisor and Watts-Dunton-like organiser - and living as I did only five minutes away from the flat in Artesian Road, I became a fairly regular visitor over the next five years, frequently reading to John in the evenings and later transcribing some of his taped poems, as well as typing drafts into fair-copies on my computer. If Guthrie was away, more practical assistance was sometimes required: opening and reading out mail; shopping for books or stationery; unearthing something John had mislaid in the cluttered flat.

   John was well-known as a supporter and encourager of younger writers (recent poets who have benefitted from his guidance include Jeremy Reed, Matthew Sweeney and Christopher Hope), and it was not long after our initial meeting that he asked to hear some of my own poems. I remember sitting outside the pub almost opposite his door, The Cock and Bottle, apprehensively downing a few pints and scanning my paltry stanzas, wondering how I had the temerity to be reading my work to a genuinely famous poet, someone who had known TS Eliot and been friends with Dylan Thomas and Geoffrey Hill. Beer-emboldened, I eventually went through with the reading, rendered somewhat bathetic by John’s inability to hear my nerve-wracked voice properly – he kept saying “I’m sorry, I can’t hear you, you’ll have to come closer”, until it seemed I was practically shouting my lines only feet away from his good ear, hammering out any subtlety or melopeia I fancied they might have possessed. Although John nodded his assent and made a few helpful suggestions about language and form, I went away feeling my poems had been damned with faint praise. The next time I saw Guthrie, however, he said that John had in fact liked them, thereby (it felt to me) conferring a sort of implicit acceptance.   

   My subsequent visits invariably followed a set pattern of events. I always phoned in advance, to avoid clashing with the numerous other friends and carers who would call on him – evidently he had another acquaintance with the same name, as he would always ask “Which Oliver is this?” John never mastered his building’s intercom system – if you buzzed his flat, he would usually have to navigate his way out into the landing to open the front-door for you, which could take some considerable time and no small effort on his part (attested to by the repeated sighs of “Oh God! Oh dear!” you could hear through the door). When, towards the end of his life, John was obliged to use a frame to move around with, this became even more impractical, and it was much easier to borrow Guthrie’s key and let oneself in.

     You would often enter the flat to find John in darkness, hunched forward listening to the radio turned up loud; either classical music or a documentary programme. You would have to switch the lights on for your own benefit and call out clearly “Hello John!” before he would look up and emerge from his reverie. Moments like this forced one to reflect on the condition of blindness – the shadowy isolation it imposes, the abstraction from physical reality, but in turn the compensatory sensitisation to auditory and verbal signals it seems to allow, obviously a decided advantage for the writer or musician. Despite the hardships entailed in such an impairment, traditions of blind musicians, bards and soothsayers seem to demonstrate a status of cultural respect that is all too often withheld in society from those with other disabilities. (It should be added, however, that John – like Borges - only became completely blind later in life; prior to this he would have been classed as partially-sighted or visually-impaired.)

    After greetings, there was usually the question “Would you like a drink?” Even after many visits, John would always describe the particular cupboard (“down the hallway, on your left”) where his booze was stored, seemingly implying there might be a fair amount to choose from. In my experience, there was invariably very little left – perhaps a half-bottle of red or a little sherry – small wonder, no doubt, in a flat often frequented by poets and with a host largely unable to keep tabs on how much was being consumed! Unfortunately, by this stage, John’s health prevented him from drinking much alcohol (unlike his bohemian Fitzrovia days), but he would always ask for a small tipple as I poured my drink – largely symbolic, I think, as it usually went untouched.

    John’s choice of reading-matter was remarkably eclectic, and reflected the diversity of his intellectual interests and the compendiousness of his knowledge. Although he was obviously concerned to keep up to date with the poetry scene, and would like to hear readings from magazines he subscribed to such as PN Review, Agenda and Poetry Review, he was just as likely to select one of the other periodicals he received, concerning subjects such as folklore, Christianity, history or ornithology. One book I recall reading through to John was an abstruse study of Japanese shamanism written by a friend of his; another was an analysis of symbolism in Sufi poetry. (There were, however, occasional gaps in John’s reading – apart from Joyce, whom we shared an enthusiasm for, he seemed to know little about the modern novel, and avowed that his favourite work in this field had always been Clarissa.)  

   John continued to compose poetry right up until his final illness, producing two full-length volumes (The Return of the Cranes and Pigs Might Fly) in his eighties. While even his most enthusiastic admirer would concede that these contain little that matches up to his best work, the characteristic amalgam of learned wit and reflective stoicism is still apparent, leavened by a fair quantity of occasional and light-ish verse. Yet John’s ear for poetic form remained punctilious and he would often ask for a piece to be read through a good many times – with often very subtle alterations of diction or cadence being insisted upon – before he was satisfied with it. One recalls what an accomplished and sought-after reader of his own work John had been at poetry events in the past, partly due no doubt to this sensitivity to the acoustic properties of English speech-rhythms, and his ability to match these to the measured tones of his sonorous delivery.

    During his last years John became noticeably frailer and, largely immobile, was confined to his flat. Although his memory for Latin and obscure lines of poetry remained undimmed, he seemed increasingly confused and forgetful about everyday matters. I saw less of him at this time. On my last visit, when he had been moved into a hospice near Harrow Road, John no longer recognised my voice. He passed away shortly afterwards, on Boxing Day 2006.

     Lengthy obituaries spoke of a rich and energetic career as a well-known author, translator, critic, editor and teacher always wedded to what he called (to the Queen, when collecting her Gold Medal for Poetry) “the ingrained habit” of writing poems. Since his death, however, there seems to have been no attempt to assess John’s significant contribution to our cultural life, and the gap his absence leaves. His poetic roots were in that generation – numbering Dylan Thomas, George Barker, WS Graham, David Gascoigne and Thomas Blackburn among his closest associates– who were in many ways “the last Romantics”, the last to hold on (precariously enough, given their historical milieu) to the notion of poet as vatic seer – a full-time, perhaps life-threatening commitment to the Muse, not just an academic’s hobby. John’s later development saw him look beyond the late Romantics he had written of so originally  in The Darkling Plain to Augustan models like Pope, consolidating a style of wryly elegant neo-classicism which – like that of Robert Graves – strives to counter the debased currency of modernity with a hard-won, highly-wrought personal mythology. This finds its fullest expression in Artorius (1972), perhaps the only fully-formed epic any contemporary poet has essayed, and a memorable testament to his ambitiousness, linguistic range and imaginative scope. In a contemporary scene notably lacking in these qualities – and indeed in deeply-read, generous-minded, Coleridgean figures like John, devoted to his craft and its lore but always prepared to share knowledge, pass on traditions and foster less experienced poets - a careful revaluation of his reputation and achievements is due.                         
                                                                                First published in PN Review, 2009

Ephemeral Stones: West Norwood Book of the Dead 2

 Having made a visit to West Norwood Cemetery about two weeks ago in glorious sunshine, I followed the Curious Art trail, of which Chris McCabe's Clotted Sun project is part. It was a wonderful forage through the overgrown labyrinth of this remarkably serene, unspoiled trove of Gothic Victoriana, which some of the installations provided startling new perspectives on. (Others, it must be said, added little to the memorials or the green spaces of the cemetery.) 

  However, Chris's trail of deceased poets seemed under-represented, showing itself only in the anthology of the 12 writers he has deposited in the eerily moving store-house for cinerary urns, the Columbarium (beautiful word with a beautiful etymology: originally it had the meaning of a dove-cote or pigeon-house but - because it also included many small "pigeon-holes" - came by extension to denote the reliquary-room for such urns.)

 

  I commented about this on Chris's blog and since others had apparently said the same, he offered to conduct a tour of his site-trail linking the twelve forgotten poets. Colin Fenn, head of the Friends of West Norwood Cemetery and custodian of a history as intricate and convoluted as the graveyard itself, would assist.

   The tour went ahead last Thursday, with Chris's diligent research (partly from the Poetry Library, where he works) and poem-readings offset and contextualised by Colin's amazingly detailed factual knowledge of the cemetery and its other noteworthy occupants. He told us, for example, that in Victorian times West Norwood was thought of as "the millionaire's cemetery", which explains the preponderance of large-scale, grandiloquent monuments and mausolea here, often giving it the feel of a necropolis, a microcosmic conurbation resisting the flux of the bigger, noisier city which surrounds it.



  

  Such thoughts keyed in with one of the themes of Chris's project, which is to explore the concept of posterity in regarding poets and their works: by what criteria do certain poets survive and endure, their books lasting centuries after their own deaths, whilst other writers - even those perhaps celebrated and widely-read in their own lifetimes - become as forgotten as these twelve whom Chris has painstakingly unearthed? What meaning can posterity possess within our increasingly attention-deficited,digitised world where the physical entities of books themselves are beginning to be superseded and our memory-spans - rendered jittery by a constant drip-feed of subsidiary data - can hardly stretch to recalling what we read this morning, let alone memorising whole poems, as was common practice until comparatively recently? 

 

   The desire to attain the "immortality" of posthumous renown is a consistent theme throughout the history of poetry, of course, Shakespeare's Sonnets providing only the most obvious locus. From a liberal-humanist perspective, the giftedness or "genius" of the poet was usually thought to be the guarantor of a poem or volume's longevity but a more nuanced reading might question whether other factors weren't in operation: gender, class, ethnicity and political/religious affiliations are clearly recurrent issues impacting on both the publication and readership of poetry, as indeed they remain now. Even Gray's 'Elegy In a Country Churchyard' from 1742, ambivalent within its orderly Augustan stanzas, flags up the link between "Penury" and the obscure, unpublished status of a dead poet - the "mute inglorious Milton" I alluded to in my previous West Norwood post.

  A nice example arose when Chris and Colin directed us to the grave of Menella Bute Smedley, the only female poet of the twelve although in terms of the quality of her writing, perhaps one of the more noteworthy. Her grave was actually obscured by brambles and undergrowth and the poem-stone that Chris had given her was just visible in the grass, fittingly inscribed: SUN UNSEEN.

 

 

  A further resonant irony around the theme of permanence and memorialising was that in several cases the poem-stones that Chris had laid at the beginning of the summer had already migrated or in some cases gone missing: perhaps dislodged by a mower or even taken home by a curious child. Our party was at times engaged in a heads-down search among the grass of a particular area, as though for a lost purse. As Colin suggested, and as the tilting, crumbling, subsiding state of many of the headstones attested to, "Stones can be ephemeral".

 The final poet of the tour was Theodore Watts-Dunton, more famous for taming the wilder proclivities of Swinburne than for his own writings. Synchronicities often suggest the presence of energies that persist and can influence us: the next day I was rushing through Putney on my way to an appointment when absolutely by chance I came across The Pines, which Chris had mentioned, a large house with its blue plaque commemorating that it had been the home of Watts-Dunton and Swinburne.

      Thanks to Chris and to Colin for the tour. I've just realised that today (28th July) is the last day that the Curious Trail is up so if you haven't seen it go and take a look.

      I hope that Chris's poem-stones endure a little longer.



Another Reading/Daft Punk

  So another reading to let you know about, this one on at 7 pm on Tuesday 23rd at Beaconsfield Library with Claire Trevien and Sarah Hesketh. It's World Book Day apparently but I don't know what that means (also b.day of the Bard, of course):

http://apps1.buckscc.gov.uk/eforms2005/events/edetails.aspx?ev=96456

All I know about about Beaconsfield is that it's 20 mins out of Marylebone and that it was Robert Frost's first place of residence when he came to England in 1912. (Although, Matthew Hollis tells us in Now All Roads Lead To France,  (Frost) " took no pleasure in suburban Beaconsfield.")

 

To enliven this dull post (and don't try and tell me Robert Frost isn't the most boring poet ever to attain putatively major status), here's Daft Punk's marvellous new production. "The present has no rhythm", is the first line of the second verse. Like it.

Words of Mercury

   Loves Labours Lost, a play first "presented at Christmas", is perhaps the most disruptive and bittersweet of all Shakespeare's comedies. As a text centred on language itself - especially the "lover's discourse" of Elizabethan romantic rhetoric - the earlier scenes burst with comic brio as the conventional hyperboles of the four amorous would-be sonneteers (as well as the suspect gender politics their words enshrine) are pulled apart and parodied by their female counterparts.The pantomimish minor characters such as Don Armado "the braggart" and Holofernes "the pedant" are equally abusers of language who contort English into scarcely-intelligible but nonetheless amusing opacity (Shakespeare here joins the tradition of "mock-learned wit" ie. Rabelais, Swift, Sterne, Joyce, Nabokov).

   But the final scene is the play's master-stroke, undercutting and undoing all the erotic intertwinings that have developed before. The abrupt incursion of news of the Princess's father's death means the comedic resolution of the play will have to be deferred, and the tone suddenly veers from anticipated accord towards something more muted and provisional, something more perhaps like the disappointments and postponements of real life.
    The two ambivalent final songs of the Cuckoo and the Owl - seeming to question spring's promise of fulfilled desire in favour of the necessary acceptance of winter - modulate this tone into a beautiful wavering between loss and gain, tragedy and what's left of comedy. As one critic put it ( and with obvious resonance at this post-festive juncture, which is possibly how Shakespeare actually meant it): "It is a teasing thought, yet appropriate; perhaps the ending of Love's Labour's Lost is the more genuinely warm because it is more wintry, more real than the easier resolution that a fuller comic pact would have allowed."    
   The play's closing words, again equivocal in their meaning, are spoken by Armado: "The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo". Is Shakespeare saying that Apollonian poetry (eg. the elevated rhetoric of sonnets) always needs its counterpoint in the language of witty, subversive mischief? Or - more plaintively, and in keeping with all of Shakespeare's plays- that the ideals embodied in lofty poetry must always be brought down to earth by the "harsh" reality of what the two final, mercurial songs speak of?

Scribbled Form

   Received the new edition of PN Review over the weekend with my review of James Byrne's excellent volume Blood/Sugar within its pages.  It still feels an honour to see one's own writing within such a prestigious publication - and furthermore the contributor's cheque enclosed brought my literary earnings for the year to the princely total of £20!
   Michael Schmidt in his editorial makes a comparable point about US culture - the blatant erosion of religious tolerance and pluralism - as I did in the previous post although in a far more considered and eloquent way.
   Finishing King John the other morning - one of the most under-appreciated of Shakespeare's history plays - I came across this astonishing image:

             I am a scribbled form, drawn with a pen
             Upon a parchment, and against this fire
             Do I shrink up.  (V, 7, 32 ff)

Is there a more resonant metaphor for death in all poetry, especially for the writer who at the end of the day might have hoped to embody his or her life in their writings - how imperfect this always is (only "scribbled") and how perishable is the medium of paper we have written on (especially when books - whether the Koran or a Salman Rushdie novel - can be deliberately burned).