Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago

“HEMLOCK AND AFTER” by Angus Wilson (first published in 1952)

           

         Aged 57, the famous and severely intellectual novelist Bernard Sands has managed to get a government grant to take over Vardon Hall, a stately home, as a retreat for young authors, where they can develop their talents without any censorious oversight. Bernard Sands, foe of the commercial bourgeoisie, regards this as a great blow against philistines. He sees his enterprise as upholding what he considers to be “humanism”. But before the opening day of Vardon Hall, which will be attended by the great and the good, Bernard Sands discovers things about himself that alter severely his world view. He becomes more melancholy, the opening day of Vardon Hall is a fiasco, and in the aftermath of this and other events, Bernard Sands, after settling various matters, doesn’t resist dying of a heart attack.

            There now. In one paragraph I have summarised the essential thread of “plot” in Hemlock and After. I do so unashamedly, not only because the novel is now nearly 70 years old and will be well-known to the cognoscenti; but because I think any good novel always has an essential, simple narrative arc like this – the backbone that holds together its various various interests, digressions and divagations. And Hemlock and After is certainly a good novel, with many divagations.

            If you go to what is now the Essential Source of Truth for the Superficial, namely Wikipedia, you will find that the first thing it says about the novelist Angus Wilson (1913-1991) is that he was  “one of England’s first openly gay authors.” So, apparently, Angus Wilson’s homosexuality, at a time when homosexual relations were still a criminal offence in Britain, is the main thing that defines him as an author. I do not agree with this reductive view of the man and his work. In both fiction and non-fiction, Wilson had many interests other than homosexuality. But it is one major focus of Hemlock and After, his first novel, published when he was nearly forty and after he had already produced two volumes of short stories.

To elucidate, Bernard Sands is married with two adult children, but after years of marriage, he is now admitting his homosexuality to himself and actively seeking male lovers. His wife Ella is, understandably, now chronically depressed and suffering from (by implication, psychosomatically-triggered) ill health. For most of the novel, Ella is under-characterised and left in the background, but Wilson clearly sympathises with her situation. If you are the type of person who interprets this novel solely as a piece of advocacy for open acceptance of homosexuality, then you might take this situation to mean that a homosexual man marrying a heterosexual woman can lead only to mutual unhappiness. Bernard Sands’ son James has political ambitions and is afraid that his public reputation will be damaged if his father’s proclivities are made public. James’ wife Sonia is particularly reproving. Bernard Sands’ journalist daughter Elizabeth, wasting her life writing trivial fashion columns, is also rather reproving, though not as vehemently as James and Sonia.

So much for Bernard Sands’ family situation. With the very many supporting characters, we also get a panorama of the homosexual underworld as it was in England seventy years ago. Angus Wilson is aware of the blackmail to which homosexuals were then vulnerable, and he sees much injustice and much harrassment of homosexuals by the police. In the character of Eric Craddock, he also shows how a young homosexual man can have his life blighted by an ambitious and over-protective mother. But Wilson also presents much that is either sordid or repellent in the homosexual mileu. Not all homosexual men in this novel are sympathetic characters. There is the Cockney rent-boy Ron Wrigley, permanently on the make and ready to compromise his male clients if it suits him. There is, late in the novel, the vicar who attempts, in a very old-fashioned way, to seduce a young man who is not seeking such attention. There are also the seedy and corrupt settings in which some homosexuals are involved. After all her faux gentility is pierced, a Mrs Curry is shown to be basically a procuress, making illicit connections for men of all sexual tastes, including homosexuals. She is Bernard Sands’ enemy, in part because she wanted to gain ownership of Vardon Hall herself, apparently to convert it into a sort of discreet brothel. By novel’s end, we understand that Mrs Curry has also been planning to facilitate an extreme case of paedophilia in the violation of a young girl.

In the novel there is also much conversation and interaction that can only be called “camp”, and we are gradually made aware that the sort of bitchiness this often involves is to the taste neither of Bernard Sands nor of the author. In a largely middle-class, theatrical and arty milieu, everyone is always acting a role rather than being sincere, and trying to come up with the next witty thing (or put-down) to say. Surprisingly, Angus Wilson gives it to the reproving Sonia to say (Book 2, Chapter 1) of one character who was at a performance of an Ibsen play “He probably didn’t see very much of it. He’s always too busy thinking of what he’s going to say.”  This is a fitting comment on much of the novel’s “camp” conversation. Such conversation is banter and falsity…. But then, of course, the whole novel is about play-acting, inasmuch as Bernard Sands, and other men in his situation, are constantly having to pretend to be what they are not. (And how often did we used to hear the observation that there are so many homosexuals in the acting profession because their lives are play-acting?)

In the course of all this, what is it that changes Sands’ view of both himself and his Vardon Hall enterprise? Almost halfway through the novel (at the end of Part One, Chapter 5), Bernard Sands realises that he is a moral and intellectual coward when he witnesses a young man being arrested for soliciting. Not only does he do nothing to prevent the young man’s being punished, but he positively enjoys the spectacle of the young man’s suffering. He realises he is worse than the police who at least are following some sort of law, flawed though it may be, in rounding up homosexuals on the street. “Truly, he thought, he was not at one with those who exercised proper authority. A humanist, it would seem, was more at home with the wielders of the knout and the rubber truncheon.” He understands that in his own heart, there is much vindictive sadism. As a haughty intellectual who belittles many acquaintances and sees them as his inferiors, he has enjoyed humiliating people. He is already in this embittered mood of self-awareness before the opening day of Vardon Hall. Instead of giving a positive speech about Vardon Hall’s prospects for budding writers, he gives a very negative speech. For a variety of reasons, the opening is a disaster. But at least one reason is the fact that many of the bright young men, who are the prospective writers, occupy the top floor of the stately home and proceed to have a sort of homosexual orgy (discreetly, but nevertheless clearly, indicated in this 1952 novel). So, it is implied, Bernard Sands also realises that in this Vardon Hall project, his concern for literature was really as much fired by his interest in a “camp” sort of young man. His intentions were not altruistic.

All this explains the title of the novel, Hemlock and After. Socrates took hemlock and died after he had been condemned for corrupting the youth of Athens. Bernard Sands metaphorically takes his killing hemlock, and dies, when he understands negative things about himself, including the way he has corrupted some youth.

But what is the “humanism” Bernard claims to uphold, and berates himself for not upholding? This question brings me to the “period” aspect of the novel – the way it is very much a product of the specific time in which it was written.

In the 1930s in England, it had been the vogue for young middle-class people getting a university education (including Oxford-educated Angus Wilson) to assume that the extreme left (i.e. Communism) represented humanist ideas, because Communism was then apparently in contention with Fascism. For some, joining the Communist Party was like joining an exclusive club, in rebellion from conformity; and this particuarly appealed to at least some homosexuals (one thinks of the Oxbridge-educated Soviet spies Burgess, Maclean, Blunt etc.), who saw themselves as an excluded group. It was the era in which E.M.Forster made his fatuous statement “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” One’s mouldy old country wasn’t as important as one’s pals. But by the early 1950s, when Hemlock and After was written, not only was the USSR no longer a wartime ally, and not only was the Cold War in progress; but it was already blindingly obvious to all but the totally committed, that, far from being the embodiment of humanism, Communism in practice meant a totalitarian state with none of the liberal freedoms. “Humanism” had to be re-defined, not only as loyalty to friends, but as a responsible sense of social duty in a humane society. In Hemlock and After, Bernard Sands pointedly rejects religion – and remember, this was at a time when there was a revival of Christianity in literature, with T.S.Eliot as the most esteemed poet in Britain. But Bernard Sands also rejects the extreme left, in scenes where he contends with his left-wing sister Isobel Sands, a stale and worn-out academic in English literature, implicitly lesbian; and Isobel’s more extreme colleague Louie Randall, who talks revolution. Greater decency in the world will not come from a Marxist revolution any more than it will come from a closed clique where one is concerned only with one’s immediate “pals”.  There has to be a social dimension. Having finally worked this out in himself, Bernard Sands, autocrat, snob, patroniser of his intellectual inferiors, at last does something genuinely altruistic. He leaves funds to help Eric Craddock pursue his studies, without in any way connecting this to romantic and sexual ambitions he had regarding the young man. He also helps to bring down, and set the law on, the paedophile activities that the reprehensible Mrs Curry facilitated.

And so I have done it again, haven’t I? I have “explained” what this novel is about by taking apart its ideas, like a good little high-school teacher – for notoriously, high-school teachers of English think that “meaning” is detachable from text, and in the process reduce all literature to propaganda. I have neglected to consider Angus Wilson’s great skill as a stylist.

Wilson’s prose is dense with physical observation of the appearance, habits, tics and modes of speech of each of his characters. He has the skill to make memorable figures of even those who inhabit only a few pages. I would have to reproduce many long paragraphs of his text to show how precisely Angus Wilson delineates the spiv quality of the rent-boy Ron; the walrus-like stupidity and self-pity of Bernard Sands’ brother-in-law the failed writer Bill Pendlebury; the shop-soiled “respectability” of Mrs Curry; and the stifling, wheedling, self-centred ambitions of Eric Craddock’s mother Celia Craddock. Each is more than a generalised Theophrastian “character”. Each has his or her precise individuality. Even so, some take on a universal quality and represent a general trend in society and culture. When Bernard Sands’ academic sister Isobel, lecturer in English literature, is introduced, Wilson describes her in ways that show her complete dienchantment with literature, which no longer moves or inspires her after years of teaching. “Though she never quite admitted it even to herself, she had ceased to respond to any work of literature soon after she began her academical career.” (Part 1, Chapter 4) I have seen these two pages fittingly extracted in an anthology of satirical pieces (Stephen Potter’s The Sense of Humour, published in 1954), whererin Isobel stands for the sterility of much academe. Like a Dickens or a Balzac, Wilson has created a large, varied and credible, even if sometimes grotesque, supporting cast. It is no coincidence that he was a lover of capacious 19^th century novels, in which a large cast of characters is allowed to display eccentricities. (Wilson wrote studies of Dickens and Zola among others.)

There are less successful qualities to the novel, however.  The longest single chapter of Hemlock and After (Book 2, Chapter 3) comprises 40 pages dramatising the fiasco that is the opening day of Vardon Hall. So many characters are introduced, representing all sides of the community Wilson has created, that the effect is very confusing. I found myself referring frequently to the list of characters – conveniently printed at the beginning of the battered old Penguin edition I was reading – to sort out which character was which. Such a list was often provided at the beginning of those nineteenth century novels Wilson clearly admired. Even so, Wilson’s attempt to picture a whole intellectual community in one event is far more successful than P. Wyndham-Lewis’ tedious attempt to do the same thing back in the 1920s in his The Apes of God.

There is another major flaw in Hemlock and After.  In the last two chapters (Part 3, Chapters 1 and 2), Wilson goes uncharacteristically didactic on us, in the long conversation between Bernard Sands and his wife Ella as they amicably sort of the problems between them, and mutually define a new sort of “humanism”. This strikes a very false note and sounds more like the characters in a Shaw play who conveniently preach what GBS himself wants to say. Then in the “Epilogue” after Sands’ death, we are neatly told of the fate of the main characters and have the pleasure of seeing some villains punished. Wilson himself admitted that this ending was “Dickensian” – a quick tidying-up after the novel is really over.

Despite this, Hemlock and After still stands up as a sophisticated piece of work which, while it reflects the specific time and place in which it was written, can still be read as a believable view of human flaws. I say this in spite of my knowledge that, by common consent, Angus Wilson’s career as a writer went downhill badly after the mid-1960s, when he failed to adjust to changed times and views, and came to seem the remnant of a past age. But I am judging Wilson’s first novel, not the products of his later career.

Two random and unhelpful footnotes: (i.) I am not a connoisseur of novels by or about homosexuals, but I have read enough in my reviewing years to make some comparisons. Hemlock and After is refreshingly frank after one has read something like Christopher Isherwood’s Mr Norris Changes Train, where the implicit homosexuality is hidden in a sort of camp code. I would also make a little comparison with Philip Hensher’s TheEmperor Waltz (reviewed on this blog in 2014). Over sixty years after Angus Wilson distanced himself from Marxist views, Hensher does the same thing when he has the owners of a gay bookshop finally kicking out a pair of gay Trotskyites who think a revolution is going to create a compassionate Utopia. Clearly Hensher doesn’t agree. (ii.) Just a silly thought here. Was the name “Vardon Hall” a hidden camp joke, given that in the camp-cant language Polari (made public by Julian and Sandy on radio), “vada” figures strongly as the verb “to see”?

Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.

GENEALOGY

Speaking in strictly biological terms, and ignoring the matter of adoption, we all have two parents. Therefore we all have four grandparents. Therefore we all have  eight great-grandparents. Therefore we all have sixteen great-great-grandparents. Therefore we all have thirty-two great-great-great grandparents. Therefore we all have sixty-four great-great-great-great-grandparents. Assuming each generation to be between 25 and 30 years, this takes us back only somewhere between 150 and 200 years. Take our ancestry back 500 or 1000 or 10,000 years, and we all have thousands and ultimately millions of forebears.

Considering this fact should be a good tonic against biological racism. Ultimately, we are all connected in one human race. In some way, the body of each of us is the product of the whole of human history, despite all the ways, over thousands of years, that different ethnicities have developed, at least partly as the result of long-term adaptation of peoples to different climates. All of us have ancestors in common with Asians, Africans, Native Americans, Australian Aborigines, Europeans, Semitic Peoples and Pacific Peoples.

Considering the genetic inheritance of each of us, dominant or recessive genes will determine if we do or do not have a certain colour of skin and eyes, a certain colour and type of hair, a certain size and shape of body and perhaps a certain level of intelligence. Matters of temperament (are you mainly melancholic, choleric, sanguine or phlegmatic etc.?) seem to be as much a matter of environment, upbringing and social influences as of biology. Yet the specific genetic inheritance of each of us will be unique. Allowing for the rare phenomenon of the “genetic throwback”, siblings will probably have a family likeness. But even as the offspring of the same parents, they will not be identical – and even identical twins have their physical differences. Having exactly the same forebears does not mean being exactly the same sort of person. None of us is produced by a cookie-cutter.

As well as warning us against racism, all these considerations should be a good vaccine against any neurosis concerning what we have genetically inherited. To discover that one or two of our ancestors had severe defects in character or behaviour, or even mental competence, does not mean that any of us is predestined to have the same traits. Biologically, we do not inherit exactly the same characteristics as one or two of our forebears. Can madness run through a family? Possibly – but it does not mean that all members of the family will be mad.

Why am I delivering this dead obvious and platitudinous sermon?

Because not too long ago, I read a book in which a woman worried about two of her biological forebears who, she discovered, had severe character defects and medical problems. She feared that she might have inherited some of their mental and physical weaknesses. Yet in the end, she came to undertand that what she was, was as much the product of her – very good – upbringing and environment as of her genetic inheritance. And besides, the two (deceased) forebears who worried her were only a small part of the genetic jigsaw that she herself was.

I write all this to refute the pseudo-science of eugenics, which is making a comeback in new guises. Eugenics would mechanically damn and/or destroy human beings for their supposed inherited defects, in the absurd quest for only “perfect” offspring. Often eugenics has been, and still is, allied to hard biological racism. And it is ultimately nonsense. The existence of each of us is not the result of the sort of hard determinism that eugenics always presupposes. We are each unique. And we are all part of the human family.

Something New

We feature each fortnight Nicholas Reid's reviews and comments on new and recent books.

 

“ENDURING LOVE – Collected Poems” by Robert McLean (Cold Hub Press, $NZ 40); “WALKING HOME” by Michele Amas (Victoria University Press, $NZ25; “TWO OR MORE ISLANDS” by Diana Bridge (Otago University Press,  $NZ27:95); “HERE WE ARE” by Graham Swift (Scribner, $NZ32:99)

Nearly seven years ago in late 2013, I reviewed on this blog under the heading The Poetry of Robert McLean, three collections of the poet’s work, For Renato Curcio ( first published 2010), Goat Songs (2011) and A Graveyard by the Sea (2012). Later, in 2018, I more briefly reviewed McLean’s collection Figure and Ground.

Enduring Love is subtitled “Collected Poems” of Robert McLean, but the word “collected” does not mean complete. Enduring Love gives a selection from McLean’s works, but with the addition of 30 new poems under the heading Postcards from Atlantis. Presumably McLean has gathered here what he now considers the best from his earlier collections. For example Enduring Love includes only 5 of the 17 poems in For Renato Curcio, only 5 of the poems from Goat Songs, and a more generous 19 of the 26 poems in Figure and Ground. If you wish to see my views on these collections, look up my earlier postings.

A Graveyard by the Sea is published in Enduring Love in its entirety, except that McLean has revised the earlier version, rewording some sections and dropping four of the original 62 stanzas. Reading this recension, I am even more impressed than I was in my reading of the first edition, and I herewith withdraw a few slightly carping comments I made in my 2013 review. A tour de force, at once an hommage to Paul Valery’s Le Cimetiere Marin and a very New Zealand poem, written strictly in the same metrical form that Valery used – sestets (six-line stanzas) with a regular a-a-b-c-c-b rhyme scheme – but more discursive than Valery. McLean’s A Graveyard by the Sea is now 58 stanzas compared with Valery’s 24. The sheer compositional skill impresses as much as the sentiments and the wide-ranging imagery.

So in this review, I will look only at those of McLean’s works which I am encountering for the first time in Enduring Love.

To begin with, one very obvious point has to be made, as it is always made when McLean’s poetry is discussed. McLean, running against current fashion, is a Modernist. He may, as I said in an earlier posting, be fully au fait with Postmodernist theory and practice; but he takes it for granted that his readership is literate and will be comfortable with the many cultural references he makes, and with his many allusions to canonical (or non-canonical) writers and their work. There are no end-notes or footnotes to help the reader along. As the back-cover blurb of Enduring Love correctly puts it “Robert McLean is a defiantly modernist poet who often uses traditional metres and rhyme to explore the complexities of history and selfhood.” It is appropriate that David Howard provides a back-cover endorsement to Mclean’s work. Howard (whose The Ones Who Keep Quiet I reviewed on this blog and whose In-Complete Poems I reviewed for Landfall Review Online in August 2012) is one of the few New Zealand poets who writes with the same intellectual intensity as McLean, although their philosophical stances and choice of thematic matter are quite distinct.

So to those sections of Enduring Love which I have not reviewed previously.

For the Coalition Dead was one of McLean’s earliest productions, appearing in 2009, before all the later collections mentioned above. Nine poems from For the Coalition Dead are included in Enduring Love. Some of McLean’s persistent preoccupations are already here – his admiration of another modernist poet (“A Valediction for C.N. Sisson”); love and the course of a relationship read in the sky and harsh weather (“Appassionata”); a very stark and pared-back poem confronting mortality in the carcass of a dead seal (“Inexorable, Thus”); and mental disorientation (“Lunatic”). Written in nine neat quatrains, “The Second Life” is one of McLean’s stateliest poems, distinguished in its brilliant opening:

“Animated by wisps of zephyr,

wind-chimes clatter pentatonic Zen.

My presence is de-emphasised: just

a plastic chair on the veranda

contrived to hold opinions”

Superficially, it is little more than reveries while seated in a backyard (“My universe is shrivelled - / it’s compacted into my backyard”). But the inevitable, slow tread of nature, the flourishing of weeds, entwines the present moment with a vaster time-scheme. It becomes a genuinely philosophical piece. Time and eternity are here together.

It is clear that much of For the Coalition Dead was a response to current events at the time it was written. McLean dwells on war and some of its horrors in a number of poems. For a soldier, killing can become a numbing, boring, perfectly routine job (“A Norse Assassin Struggles with Ennui”). A captive in a torture chamber is mentally as well as physically tormented, in a poem whose hysterical insistence is underlined by its drum-beat rhyming scheme, with just one rhyme for each of its nine-line stanzas. (“The Patriot”).

What war has inspired such poems? The six sections of this collection’s title poem, “For the Coalition Dead”, give us the answer. This is a response to the war in Iraq which the United States was then waging together with some allies. Rather than being a direct critique of the conduct of that war, “For the Coalition Dead” is an analysis of the American psyche, or at least the psyche of American elites that seek self-aggrandizement on the world stage. It is hard to believe that McLean was not at least in part inspired by Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”, which is similarly written in quatrains and offers a critique of American mores.

And what of the 30 poems collected together for the first time in Enduring Love under the collective title Postcards from Atlantis?

I admire the persistence of McLean’s thematic interests – his dedication to a particular vision and a particular version of what poetry is. He will always deal with history, Western culture, and poetry itself in a critical voice redolent of Modernism, even if his techniques sometimes revert to other styles. In a set of “Epigrams” given here, he declares his aesthetic with one called “On Conceptual Art”:

“Its imposition fades on second-thought –

I’ll take the urn: cold, empty and well-wrought”.

Consider the poems here on ancient wars and violence. “Three Views of Agincourt” is a poetic tryptich which gives a very un-Shakespearean view of the late medieval battle, stripped of rhetoric and seen in a wider perspective. “Terror” indicts terror both Biblical and revolutionary. In “Marmont Dying”, one of Napoleon’s marshals takes a pragmatic, resigned look as his own life as a warrior, speaking (as some others of McLean’s personages do) very much like a dramatic monologue of Browning.

Consider other eminent persons from the past. “Machiavelli in Hell” again has a resigned, world-weary tone like a Browning monologue. “Schweitzer’s Progress” uses the term “progress” with a degree of irony, given that motives of the Alsatian philosopher-missionary are held up to severe scrutiny. “Nijinsky’s Last Dance” has the ballet dancer torn between impulse and social constraint. Some eminent – or notorious – figures from the past take some time to declare themselves. Who is the subject of “A walk around the world”? Only an O. Henry-like punchline tells us at the end of a long poem.

Consider poems on art and architecture. “Failure” gives only two cheers for Andrea del Sarto (a reprodction of whose “Head of a Woman” adorns the front cover of Enduring Love). “On Carolingian Sculpture” senses cultural decay in its view of early medieval Europe.

And, of course, consider all the poems about poets. “The Afterlife of Drummond Allison”, about a promising young English poet killed in the Second World War. “Sapience Angelical”, with the Earl of Rochester poised between libertinism and repentance. “Exiles”, which yokes together Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound and Henry James.

“Last Visit to Mallarme” captures perfectly the detached, non-materialist, linguistic idea of that poet in this stanza:

“Flooding back into my mind

came all those precious evenings,

soirees during which I ceased

entirely to believe in things,

even in ideas. Qualm and scruple

were Pentecost to this Priest

of the Absolute.”

In matters of both history and High Culture, however, McLean often digs deepest when he is looking at New Zealand. It is fitting that this volume ends with “At the Sign of the Packhorse I Stand Like a Tree and Sing My Song of Joy”, a discursive poem on the history of Akaroa, its settlement and its French connection. There is a ten-part sequence of poems “The Passion of William Colenso”, viewing from many perspectives the Anglican clergyman, printer, explorer and controversialist, with his initial loyalties, demeanour and faith undermined by the call of the erotic. In a way, I wish this sequence had more to say about Colenso’s ripe crankiness (well documented in his letters to the press – see Give Your Thoughts Life, reviewed on this blog), but at least McLean does give us some disaffected witnesses who describe the older Colenso (in section 9) as “a testy gadfly in minor office” and “tactless, prolix and obscure”.

As for New Zealand poets, “Here and Now” is an elegy for the late Allen Curnow, with a final line that could be a fitting epitaph. Rather more recherche is “The Apotheosis of Charles Spear” with its decorative vocabulary to present a poet whose thoughts were always in Europe. It is in some sense a jeu d’esprit.

Speaking of jeux d’esprit, and wondering if at least some of it is tongue-in-cheek, there is “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell”. Presumably from the grave, Cresswell bemoans his soiled reputation, he being an eogtistical chap who, in the judgement of his poetic New Zealand contemporaries (Curnow, Fairburn et al.), had a much more modest talent than he thought he had. More recently (see the writings of the late Peter Wells) he is the gay poet who is hated by gays because, in the 1920s, he dobbed in the covertly-gay Mayor of Wanganui. McLean’s Cresswell says “my efforts got disparaged as claptrap, / charlatan doggerel” and “my verse earned brickbats from the status quo”. Again, McLean displays a complete mastery of traditional form. “A Fantasia in the Voice of D’Arcy Cresswell” is a sequence of 15 sonnets in the Shakespearean form (i.e. ending in a rhyming couplet), but sometimes borrowing Samuel Daniel’s trick of linking the last line of one sonnet to the first line of the next.

You have by now, I hope, read enough to know that Enduring Love is an outstanding collection, the best single-volume of a poet who runs vigorously against current fashion and scores more hits than misses.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

            You are probably aware that in the midst of the Coronavirus lock-down, the German-based Bauer Media Company decided to pull the plug on those very many New Zealand magazines which it owned. Among other worthwhile publications thus killed was the New Zealand Listener, for which I had been a frequent freelance contributor for well over 15 years. For the last two-and-a-half years, I had added to my other book-reviewing a column called Poetry Picks where, every three or four weeks, I would choose, as worth reading, a new collection of New Zealand poetry. I was allotted only 250 words for each of these columns, so I could do little more than signal my  pleasure for each collection in very general terms. When the Listener ceased to exist, there were two Poetry Picks columns I had submitted that had not yet run. So, in all their brevity and inadequacy, here they are:

           

FIRST, Michel Amas’ Walking Home:

This collection might sadden you, but not because the poems are sad. It’s the circumstances of their publication. Still relatively young, Michele Amas died of cancer in 2016. Her second collection, Walking Home, has been assembled from her papers by her husband, playwright Ken Duncum. In his foreword he suggests that Amas might have edited or altered some poems had she lived to see them published.

In the poem “Standing”, another poet tells her “You can disguise the autobiographical / in the third person”. This is advice that she resolutely ignores.

Her poems are first-person and unashamedly confessional. They read like good spoken monologues, fittingly as Amas was an actor. Some are lightly ironical, like her view of the city where she lived, “Wellington’s Running Late”. Some recall childhood, as when she notes you really can’t go home again in “Home Town”.

            But her main interest is the immediate family. The excellent monologue, “Morning Noon and Night” has an anxious wife telling her husband she’s not perfect. “Oestrogen Makes a Break for it on Thursday” is a wildly comical vignette of a mother running after a daughter who is developing too quickly. The centrepiece is the loose cycle in three parts, “The Tender Years”, which gradually becomes a reflection on Amas’ relationship with her own daughter.

Then comes the sad part – the cycle “Walking Home”, where she confronts her cancer. “I want to read this disease / backwards / to get back to the top” she writes. But there was no going backwards, and going home meant something quite different.

THEN, Diana Bridge’s Two or More Islands:

            When some poets make references to mythology or high culture, I feel they are faking. Their erudition means they’ve looked up a Wikipedia entry or two. Not so with Diana Bridge. In her seventh collection Two or more islands, she shows that she knows intimately Chinese and Indian mythology and culture as well as Classical western mythology. Not only that, but she can make meaning of these things. Two or more islands is not a display of learning, but a book of poems that show us how ancient concepts still have resonance for us.

            Poems take in the I Ching; women from Greek legend like Antigone, Penelope, Ariadne and Demeter; the bloody mess of Shakespeare’s history plays; and, in a closing eight-part sequence The Way a Stone Falls, a long reflection on Angkor Wat and Hindu sites in India. We are enlightened, uplifted and feel solidarity with ancient times.

But there is another side to Bridge’s achievement. In a section of pithier, shorter, specifically New Zealand poems, she gives more colloquial motherly and grandmotherly advice, especially in Pierced Ears and the delicate balance of A pounamu paperweight.

Any future anthologist if this decade’s great New Zealand poems would have to include Among the stacks, about the obsessions of bibliophiles; Light came from the other side, almost a philosophical warning against taking a superficial tourist’s view of things; and Was there ever an Avernus?, which modernises Virgil’s underworld and becomes a lament for the great Seamus Heaney.

I can only give superlatives to this sane and satisfying collection.

There now. That is what I wrote for the Listener. To Diana Bridge and (the estate of) Michele Amas, I can only apologise for the brevity and terseness of these notices. There is much more than could be said about each collection.

*   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *   *

And now for something more bizarre. A couple of months back, a publisher generously sent me a copy of the English novelist Graham Swift’s new novel Here We Are. For a number of reasons I was not able to read it until very recently, which is why I am only now considering it on this blog. I am fully aware that it has already been reviewed by every other reviewer in this country, with particularly perceptive reviews by Siobhan Harvey for the Stuff network and Anna Rogers in the (now gone) Listener. So here I am coming up the rear and I will say only a few things.

Here We Are is about magic, time, getting old and regret.

At the end of the 1950s, Ronnie and Evie, a magician and his “lovely” assistant, are the star attractions on the Brighton pier during the summer season. Ronnie and Evie are engaged to be married. Compere of the show which they headline is Jack, or “Jack Robinson” as he bills himself, with his well-rehearsed cheery patter and singalongs and eye for the girls. More than one reviewer has already noted that he and his style of entertainment are very reminiscent of John Osborne’s Archie Rice in The Entertainer, and that is part of Graham Swift’s design. The tawdry glamour of the Brighton pier and cheekie-chappie comperes were forms of entertainment that were already dying in the late 1950s as television moved in and the little box at home killed variety shows and magic acts.

We’re not far into this short novel (Graham Swift’s novels tend to be lean) when we learn that Ronnie’s and Evie’s engagement goes wrong, and Jack moves in on Evie. Indeed the events of 1958-1959 are only one part of a complex story, for much of it has the aged Evie looking back with regret fifty years later in the 2000s, and much of it concerns Ronnie’s formation as a young magician. As a Cockney kid he was evacuated from the Blitz, taken out of an awful East End home and boarded with a loving middle-class couple in rural Oxfordshire. His life was changed. His loyalties were changed. He discovered the power of magic. Like many evacuees lifted out of the slums, he didn’t want to go back home.

I could dig for all sorts of profundities in this novel, even though I enjoyed it mainly for its power as a story, its ability to make us wonder what will happen next, its clear and clean prose and Graham Swift’s pitch-perfect dialogue, appropriate to the times and places where the story is set. This is a story about retrospection and regret. It is about the social disruption in Britain, and for some, shifts in class-consciousness, brought about by the Second World War. It is about a dead world and about nostalgia and about the delusions of nostalgia that are exposed when the past is truthfully examined. And it is also about love and how it can be derailed. I flinch a little at the denouement, which I think pushes credibility near breaking point and strives to make magic a metaphor for the mystery of life itself, but I’m not the chap to provide spoilers about this.

The tone is elegaic, as it often is in Swift’s work. Swift is now in his 70s, but this tone cannot solely be a sign of his age. Remember, he was only in his 40s when he wrote his best-known (and Booker Prize-winning) novel Last Orders, which is about old men looking back on their imperfect lives. As for that title Here We Are – as is pointed out a number of times in the novel, it’s a standard English colloquialism, uttered when something is proferred (“Here we are – your tea”, that sort of thing). But as a title, Here We Are points to the human condition. Here we are, here we end up, here we can’t help being, after all our experience of life.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“THREE SOLDIERS” by John Dos Passos (first published 1921)

            Only once before on this blog have I dealt with the works of John Roderigo Dos Passos (1896-1970) (See posting on Number One). He was a highly-esteemed American writer in the first part of the 20^th century, but his name has tended to be eclipsed by other American writers of his generation (Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Steinbeck etc.). Author of 88 books, best known for his USA trilogy, Dos Passos probably wrote too much that had immediate topical appeal, but that now looks like dated journalism. More worrying for some readers (and for his reputation in academe) was his gradual shift from left-wing positions to a very firm conservatism.

Published in 1921, when he was 25, his second novel Three Soldiers was the book that first gained him a large readership. It is a direct reaction to America’s role in what we now call the First World War, in the last year of which Dos Passos served in the medical corps in France as an ambulance driver. Overwhelmed as we often are by British (and to a lesser extent French and German) works written during or after that war, we often forget the pivotal role of America. The French Army was always the major force on the Western Front, with Britain as its chief ally; but it is clear that the war would not have been won without American intervention in the last crucial year 1917-18. With Russia knocked out of the war by revolution, Germany no longer had to fight on two fronts and was able able to rush more troops into France and Belgium, in the hope of striking a decisive blow against the Allies. But this was countered by the fact that, by early 1918, over one million American troops had arrived in France, the balance of forces was radically altered, and Germany’s last major offensive was stopped dead.

Three Soldiers deals exclusively with America’s Great War experience, but it is not what might be considered a conventional “war novel”. There are a few brief scenes of battle, but the focus is on the training and discipline imposed upon ordinary soldiers by the army. The Armistice occurs almost exactly halfway through the novel, so the second half is post-war. Dos Passos’ aim is always to show the army as a fearful machine which crushes individuality out of men and alters their thinking, even in peacetime.

The title Three Soldiers is a little misleading, as one character alone comes to dominate the novel. We are introduced to three privates early in the novel. They are all in their early twenties. Daniel Fuselli is an Italian-American clerk from San Francisco, always angling for promotion and having the ambition to become a corporal or even a sergeant. His attitude towards the war is purely opportunistic, but he is singularly inept in reaching his goals and gradually becomes the enemy of the officer class that harrasses him. Chrisfield is the more naïve hayseed from Indiana, with simplistic patriotic views that are gradually knocked out of him. He becomes insubordinate in the most extreme way. Then there is John Andrews, the college-educated New Yorker, whose well-off family came from Virginia. Andrews is the intellectual who reads high-brow literature and hopes to become a composer. He is also clearly the character with whom Dos Passos most fully identifies, and whose experience (especially his post-Armistice life in Paris) has a strong autobiographical element. The fact is that Andrews takes over the novel, and the other two privates become minor characters in the background. Indeed, other troopers sometimes have more importance in the narrative than either Fuselli or Chrisfield. There is, for example, the soldier Henslowe, who influences Andrews in the later parts of the novel when he is trying to find means of escape from military servitude.

Three Soldiers is very much a grunts’-eye-view of the army. (Maybe “doughboy” would be the more era-appropriate word for American soldiers than the later “grunt”; but to my surprise I found the word “doughboy” used only twice in this 383-page novel). Apart from one sympathetic sergeant, officers and NCOs are seen as officious or threatening or effete. There are scenes of unnecessary punishments for small misdeameanour and scenes of well-turned-out officers enjoying better meals than the troopers, swanning around in staff cars and casually breaking rules for which the rankers would be put on a charge (absenting themselves, getting drunk etc.) It is interesting that in this environment, even the naïve Chrisfield dreams of being court-martialled or fighting with the sergeant.

The first thing that strikes you in reading this novel is its documentary realism. The army is deglamourised from its earliest chapters. Still in America before embarkation for France, John Andrews has to clean windows around a military camp.

The repetitive rhythm of his work makes him think of army life thus: “It expressed the vast, dusty dullness, the men waiting in rows on drill fields, standing at attention, the monotony of feet tramping in unison, of the dust rising from the battalions going back and forth over the dusty drill fields.” (Part 1, Chapter 2) The journey across the Atlantic is particularly vivid. As men descend into the stinking hold of the troopship to find their sleeping quarters, and squabble over who will get the best bunks, a disgruntled private remarks: “It’s part of the system. You’ve got to turn men into beasts before you can get ‘em to act that way.” (Part 1, Chapter 4) And once in France, there is the grind, grind, grind of five weary months drilling and training before the troops are sent anywhere near the battle front. Typical is a route march described thus: “Men’s feet seemed as lead, as if all the weight of the pack hung on them. Shoulders, worn callous, began to grow tender and sore under the constant sweating. Heads drooped.  Each man’s eyes were on the heels of the man ahead of him that rose and fell, rose and fell endlessly. Marching became for each man a personal struggle with his pack, that seemed to have come alive, that seemed something malicious and overpowering, wrestling to throw him.” (Part 3, Chapter 1)

            Given that army life is so deglamourised, there is much in this book which would doubtless have shocked many of its first American readers. There is the fact that many soldiers are very sceptical about the war and some (such as the minor character Eisenstein) harbour very radical, anti-establishment ideas. There are examples of loudmouth, boastful soldiers, such as a doughboy nicknamed “Wild Dan Cohen”, who build up heroic stories about themselves which clearly have no basis in fact. There is a frank admission that soldiers readily resort to whorehouses – not that Dos Passos dwells on this in any salacious way. It is simply one of the realities he ticks off. In one sad episode, Private Fuselli, despite his sentimental memories of his girlfriend back home, foolishly believes he’s in love with a French girl, but she proves to be on the make and willing to sell her assets elsewhere.

Perhaps most shocking (for the novel’s first readers) is the way Dos Passos debunks wartime propaganda. In training camps in America, fresh recruits are shown (staged) films of spike-helmeted German troops bayonetting babies, raping women and shooting children and old people. Some of the more naïve soldiers take this to be documentary truth. But in France, such illusions dissolve. New soldiers get annoyed when a more experienced man says the Germans dropped leaflets, warning in advance of the bombing of a civilian area. They do not want to believe their enemies could be so considerate. The more experienced man also introduces the innocent ones to a nasty aspect of the war when he goes on to say: “It was where we took the shell-shock cases, fellows who were roarin’ mad, and tremblin’ all over, and some of ‘em paralysed like… There was a man in the wing opposite where we slept who kept laughin’  ”  (Part 2, Chapter 3)

Trying to keep up the morale of soldiers who are tired or becoming disillusioned, there are what the novel calls “Y” men – meaning men from the YMCA, attached to back-area units, who distribute chocolate and cigarettes and offer advice. But as the novel sees it, their advice rings hollow as they attempt to instill propaganda. When he is resting and out of uniform, Andrews says what he thinks about the prospect of resuming army duties: “I feel so clean and free. It’s like voluntarily taking up filth and slavery again… I think I’ll just walk off naked across the fields.” A “Y” man sternly rebukes him, saying “Do you call serving your country slavery, my friend?...You must remember you are a voluntary worker in the cause of democracy… your women folks, your sisters and sweethearts and mothers, are praying for you at this instant.” (Part 3, Chapter 3)

It is almost exactly halfway through the novel, when a “Y” man is trying to ginger him up, that Andrews makes what may be the novel’s key statement. He is responding to the “Y” man’s patriotic take on the war: “How these people enjoyed hating! At that rate it was better to be at the front. Men were more humane when they were killing each other than when they were talking about it. So was civilization nothing but a vast edifice of sham, and the war, instead of crumbling, was its fullest and most ultimate expression.” (Part 4, Chapter 1) The sentence I have underlined has very much the same sentiment as Siegfried Sassoon’s poem “Blighters”. It represents the disgust a soldier feels towards civilians who make big patriotic statements, and jeer at the enemy, without ever having experienced the reality of a killing ground.

There are other moments that could have shocked readers in 1921. An officer tells troops directly not to take prisoners – the army can move faster if it doesn’t have to look after enemy soldiers who have surrendered or are wounded. (Part 3, Chapter 4). Soldiers often slow to a reluctant dawdle as they near the battle front, and there is much insubordination. Private Chrisfield has trouble with a Private Anderson, with whom he once brawled. Anderson is later promoted to sergeant, and bullies Chrisfield. In Part 3, Chapter 5, it is implied, without being directly stated, that under cover of the chaos of battle, Chrisfield takes the opportunity to kill the sergeant.

Moments of battle do occur in this novel, but they take second place to the grinding routine of army life. John Andrews’ encounter with battle ends swiftly when a shell explodes near him, knocking him unconscious and landing him (after an uncomfortable, bumpy ambulance ride) in hospital with damaged legs and suffering from delirium. The hospital is a large, old, re-purposed Renaissance hall. It is here that he has ideas of writing a great piece of music, inspired by reading Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine and conceiving sensuous images of the Queen of Sheba. He tries to realise his inspiration when he manages, after the Armistice, to wangle admission into a student course in Paris and is granted leave from the army.

Post-war, however, there comes the big let-down of expectations, chronicled in the second half of the novel. Dos Passos ultimately attributes this to the long reach of the army and the mentality war has instilled in both soldiers and civilians. In Paris, even the officers are on the booze; soldiers are chasing whores or talking about Prohibition back in America and the possibilities of the Russian revolution. Some are being drafted into the Army of Occupation in Germany. Others are trying to desert. There is a brief glimpse of Private Fuselli, who has achieved none of the promotion he sought and who appears to be on permanent KP. As for Andrews himself, his hopes for personal freedom are trumped in various ways. He thinks he has found love with a French woman. He mixes briefly with French and American intellectuals, lovers of literature and of the type of music he aspires to write; but they turn out to be superficial chatterers and dilettantes, many of them with conventional views about patriotism and the war. When he is caught by the military police without identity papers, he is forced into a work battalion for some months. He deserts and for a few weeks he thinks he has found, in the country, freedom to compose. But he is finally thwarted as he is grabbed back by the army and the last image of the novel is of his composition papers being scattered by the wind. Against the Juggernaut, you cannot win.

A couple of obvious things occurred to me as I read the second half of the novel. One is that Dos Passos anticipated, by a number of years, Hemingway and the self-pitying “lost generation” American crowd, who went to Paris in the mid-1920s and claimed to be suffering existential angst. Note that Three Soldiers appeared in 1921, five years before Hemingway’s “lost generation” novel The Sun Also Rises (1926). I also noted that Three Soldiers contains a scene where its main character escapes authority by jumping into a river and swimming for it. A similar scene occurs in Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1929) and I can’t help wondering if Hemingway didn’t get the idea from Dos Passos’ novel.

That said, there is an almost monotonous emphasis in Three Soldiers on the dehumanisation of men under military orders. The novel’s six parts have titles suggesting men as machines – “Making the Mould” (dealing with training in America); “The Metal Cools” (boredom and routine in army life in France); “Machines” (how the soldiers act in war); “Rust” (Armistice and weariness of war); “The World Outside” (glimpses of post-Armistice life outside the army); and “Under the Wheels” (which is where John Andrews eventually goes). Again and again the novel speaks of men as either slaves or machines.

Early on, Andrews reflects of the army: “It was only slavery that he had not foreseen. His race had dominated for too many centuries for that. And yet the world was made of various slaveries.”(Part 1, Chapter 3) When Andrews is in hospital in a Renaissance hall: “He felt at home in that spacious hall, built for wild gestures and stately steps, in which all the little routine of the army seemed unreal, and the wounded men discarded automatons, broken toys laid away in rows.” (Part 4, Chapter 1) When he thinks he has found freedom: “The exhilaration of leaving the hospital and walking free through wine-tinted streets in the sparkling evening air gave way gradually to despair. His life would continue to be this slavery of unclean bodies packed together in places where the air had been breathed over and over, cogs in the great slow-moving Juggernaut of armies. What did it matter if the fighting had stopped? The armies would go on grounding out lives with lives, crushing flesh with flesh.”  (Part 4, Chapter 2)

At the very moment that he is about to make love to the French girl Jeanne, and when he is about to take off his uniform: “Andrews thought suddenly of all the tingling bodies constrained into the rigid attitudes of automatons in uniforms like this one; of all the hideous farce of making men into machines. Oh, if some gesture of his could only free them all for life and freedom and joy.” (Part 5, Chapter 3) When sitting opposite a chateau, he thinks of the glories of the Renaissance and asks himself “…would the strong figures of men ever so dominate the world again? Today, everything was congestion, the scurrying of crowds; men had become ant-like. Perhaps it was inevitable that the crowds should sink deeper and deeper into slavery. Whichever won, tyranny above, or spontaneous organization from below, there could be no individuals.” (Part 5, Chapter 4)

In the end, his views become fatalistic. He comes to see himself as “A toad hopping across a road in front of a steam roller.” (Part 6, Chapter 4) He says to Genevieve, one of his French intellectual friends: “It seems to me… that human society has always [been]…and perhaps will always [be] organizations growing and stifling individuals, and individuals revolting hopelessly against them, and at last forming new societies to crush the old societies and becoming slaves again in their turn…” (Part 6, Chapter 4)

In the end, it is individualism and the freedom to be one’s self that Dos Passos most cherishes. In the 1930s, with Fascism and Nazism as the most obvious enemies, it was inevitable that Dos Passos would have stood with the Left, which seemed to align itself with liberal freedoms… but after exposure to Stalinism in the Spanish Civil War, Dos Passos turned Right and lost the friendship of those who took the “Popular Front” at face value. (See postings on this blog about Paul Reynolds’ Writer, Sailor,Soldier, Spy and  Stephen Koch’s Double Lives). As Paul West put it in his 1960s survey The Modern Novel, Dos Passos “gradually proves that the unaided, unscheming individual has little chance against any collectivity.” I do not think Dos Passos’ final, very conservative, political stances were an aberration. They were in direct line of descent from John Andrews’ rebellion against the crushing military machine.

I could say many negative things about Three Soldiers. It is repetitive and very insistent about its guiding ideas. Compared with what other novels have told us about horrors endured by soldiers and civilians in both World Wars, the trials and problems of John Andrews and his buddies seem light. Even so, this novel was for me a great corrective to the ancient, jerky black-and-white newsreels of marching doughboys, usually accompanied by an added soundtrack of “Over There”, which we have so often seen in documentaries about the First World War. Reading Three Soldiers, I felt the hard realities of these soldier’s lives, rescuing them from historical oblivion. Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is often cited as the best-known American novel of the First World War. But Three Soldiers is a far more historically-honest account of the American experience in that war than the tough-guy romanticism of Hemingway’s novel.

One final point – Three Soldiers was a “first” in many ways. With its initial attempt to show a group of soldiers coming from different backgrounds (even if it fades into the story of one soldier), it is the ancestor of all those American war novels – such as Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead – which present a mixed company of soldiers from different parts of the USA. And how many Hollywood movies were made in the Second World War in which every company seemed to have an obligatory hilllbilly, an obligatory Jew, a rich boy, an Irish kid , a Hispanic and somebody from Brooklyn…? (No blacks, of course, because the US Army wasn’t desegregated until 1948.)

Three Soldiers also came most of a decade before the rush of novels and memoirs that debunked the war or were sceptical about it or even pacifistic. Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928), Robert Graves’ Goodbye to All That (1929), Remarque’s Im Western Nichts Neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) (1929), Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero (1929) etc.etc. In his attitudes, Dos Passos was ahead of them all.

Two irrelevant and silly footnotes: (a.) Here is the best deadpan joke in Three Soldiers: When John Andrews is in hospital and says he wants to read Flaubert’s La Tentation de Saint Antoine, another soldier at first thinks it’s a spicy French novel, and then asks what it’s about . Andrews replies “Oh, it’s about a man who wants everything so badly that he decides there’s nothing worth wanting.” To which the other fellow replies “I guess youse had a college education.” (Part 4, Chapter 1). Sounds like the perfect response to me.

(b.) Elsewhere in the novel, the soldier Henslowe dreams of going to various exotic places and suggests to Andrews “What do you say you and I go out to New Zealand and raise sheep?” (Part 4, Chapter 3) I guess this means that in the First World War, American doughboys saw New Zealand as a distant paradise, far from armies and battles.