Michael Daniels, Poets House Pamphlets, 2022, 26 pps, £7
LIAM GUILAR admires an evocation of the eroding East Riding
This is Michael Daniels’ first collection – the traditional slim pamphlet. The publisher, Poets House Pamphlets, of Oxford, has produced a fine object, printed on good paper, with understated, subtle artwork to enhance the text.
The story of Ravenser Odd deserves a poem. It was a settlement which lasted less than two hundred years at the mouth of the Humber on Britain’s eastern coast. A sand or gravel bank was created by storms at the mouth of the estuary in the early 13th century. By the 1230s, there is documentary evidence of people living and trading there and it was granted a royal charter in 1299. It became a very prosperous sandbank. At one point there was a chapel, warehouses, a jail and a windmill. There was a weekly market and two fairs a year. The town sent two MPs to Parliament.
The town suffered from a growing number of floods from the 1320s onwards, and the wealthier families began to move themselves and their money out. By the winter of 1356-57, Ravenser Odd had been abandoned. Then the land on which the town had stood was swept away in a final tempest in 1362. The storm, which inundated land on both sides of the North Sea, was so bad the Dutch gave it a name: the Grote Mandrenke[i].
It’s the stuff of folk tales, made better by the fact it’s true. An internet search reveals its continuing fascination. “Yorkshire’s ‘lost Atlantis nearly found’ after 650 years under water” reads one strange headline from 2022[ii]. As a story it can obviously be read in different ways: the contemporary enemies of the settlement might have seen its destruction as divine retribution. Today, it’s easy to see it as a symbol of nature’s indifference to human concerns, or a warning for those living along the same coast which in some places is being eroded at 30ft a year[iii]. Rather than pushing an interpretation, Daniels lets the story speak for itself.
The booklet is a sequence of linked poems that move chronologically through the history of the settlement. They are all written in terza rima. A note tells the reader this was chosen because “Dante’s development of terza rima was contemporaneous with Ravenser Odd’s highpoint”. If this seems an odd reason to choose a form, anyone who voluntarily writes in terza rima must be admired for making his own life difficult. The success of Daniels’ attempt is evident in the way the rhymes don’t intrude. The poems move smoothly, and there’s no sense that a rhyme has been forced or the lines padded to fit the form. The verse is spare, in keeping with the feel of medieval chronicle or folk tale.
From the start, the sequence announces that the specifics of the settlement’s history are also being used to contemplate the claims the dead have on the living. It begins:
What is it to be held in mind
by someone else, to dwell as ghost
or presence there? The drowned recline
in chambered mud, yet still we host
them in our heads, subdued and dim.
It isn’t us who need them most.
The link to The Divine Comedy inevitably evokes Dante’s concern with the dead, but it also illustrates an important difference. Dante’s dead are individuals with names and histories; Daniels are the nameless dead who remain undistinguished. “The dead know things we’ve never learned- / how hard it is to stay alive”.
The gardens they had tended went.
The cabbage rows were heaved and sloughed
as if the aching care they spent
to sow and plant was not enough,
as if the tilled and tidied beds
were cheap as salt and air. The rough
sea came and went all spring […]
Playing on the name, Ravenser Odd produces Odin’s ravens; thought and memory, who provide a bird’s eye perspective. They also appear as tiny pictures at the start of each poem.
The bird’s eye perspective means the poem deals with people, not individuals – the dead, not specific corpses. There is an unnamed feudal Lord; “…life was his to make the worse, / he was their breath, their bread, their meat”. Like most modern depictions of feudal lords, this one’s a sadist, but the strength of the writing means it’s unclear whether his story, and the story of the fishing vessel The Silver Pit which follows it, are retellings of chronicle events, or inventions of the poet.
The sea is the individuated character in the poem, and its restless power runs through the collection. When the end comes it ignores
such mortal dreams, but saved its breath
to asset strip the sinking town
of shattered timber, nail and lath-
The two ravens see the final calamity:
The people’s final prayer rose up,
petitioning their lonely god.
The ravens read their trembled lips
to scavenge scraps of uttered word,
then spat them back as raucous noise,
disemvowelling all they heard.
The pun in that last line is impressive, standing out in a collection where the diction is mostly conversational. The ruined voices of the dying and the dead are reduced to sounds the poet has been trying to hear, but which having been converted to noise, are lost. Even the final devastation of the land on which the town stood is a minor incident in a much larger tragedy. There is no conclusion, and if there is a moral to be drawn from the story Daniels thankfully leaves it up to the reader.
This is a small, impressive collection. The poet’s website (https://www.michaeldaniels.co.uk) contains files of him reading his work, with evocative visual images to accompany the readings.
Franz Kafka, Ross Benjamin (trans.), Schocken/Penguin, 2023, hb., 670pp + xxiv, US$45
ALEXANDER ADAMS welcomes an overdue and sensitive English-language edition of Kafka’s journals
There could hardly be a better paradigm of existential modern man, locked within his psyche, struggling to making meaning of a brutal and mechanical world, than Franz Kafka (1883-1924). The most interior form of writing is the private diary. Thus, Kafka’s Diaries should be the epitome of angst – and indeed they are – and of self-conscious fashioning of literary forms – and that is also true. But they stubbornly explain little about what drove the writer.
In 1909 Kafka – doctor of law, employee of an insurance company, lifelong resident of Prague and aspirant writer – opened a quarto notebook and began writing a series of short entries before describing watching a Russian dancer who had recently performed in Prague. This was the beginning of a diary that he kept on and off until his death in 1924 from tuberculosis. The diaries would be his laboratory for writing. Aside from describing his day, notable events in his life and thoughts that had occurred to him, he would draft letters, test out poems, summarise plays he had seen and write fiction. He would also make some fetching faux-naïf drawings patterned on those in the German literary-satirical journal Simplicissimus (1896-1967).
This hybrid character proved an impediment to his editor and friend Max Brod, who took it upon himself to alter the diary text for the first edition, published in 1951. He tidied up the style into plain Hochdeutsch, removing Bohemian Germanicisms, and correcting slips. He cut all of the fiction published elsewhere in the novels and stories, which substantially shortened the text. He also sought to protect his friend’s reputation by removing critical remarks (including about Brod) and any mention of sex, pornography, and visits to brothels. This had the effect of making Kafka seem more unworldly and abstemious than he really was.
The new version translated by Ross Benjamin, based on the Fischer Verlag Critical Edition of Kafka’s complete works, removes these interventions. Reading this edition is not like reading a new book, it is reading a new book. The text has been radically altered, the character changed, and many new aspects have emerged, all of which make it feel fresh. Benjamin has been unable to render into English Bohemian German deviations from standard Hochdeutsch, wisely not trying, but the inclusion of slips in spelling (“Newyork”, “Newyort”) and capitalisation gives the text a much more fluid, impromptu character. We see a tired writer making mistakes and changing his mind as he wrote the only draft of this text. Included in this translation are the notations from the Fischer complete text, adding a great deal by way of context and identification.
We encounter a handful of notable figures Kafka met personally – an audience with polymath eccentric Rudolf Steiner, a letter from novelist Robert Musil, a description of Alfred Kubin’s pornography collection. But Kafka’s diaries are not a glittering rollcall of intellectuals. Kafka lived in Prague rather than Vienna, after all. The few writers he knew well (Franz Werfel, Willy Haas, Brod) have all been eclipsed by Kafka himself.
The diaries dwell on Kafka’s fraught responses to his body. His vegetarianism and constipation were related to his fastidiousness. These were also a reaction against the gruff uncouthness of his portly father; it was a torment for Kafka to spend time with his family, especially his father. It must have been equally trying for his family in return. (For much of his adult life, Kafka lived with his parents.) The pathology of Kafka’s food obsession appears in the entry of 30 October 1911:
This longing I almost always have, once I feel my stomach is healthy, to heap up in myself fantasies of taking terrible risks with food. I satisfy this longing especially in front of smokehouses. If I see a sausage labeled as a an old hard Hauswurst, I bite into it in my imagination with all my teeth and swallow quickly, regularly and heedlessly like a machine. The despair that this act even in the imagination has as an immediate result increases my haste. I shove the long rinds of rib meat unbitten into my mouth and then pull them out again from behind tearing through my stomach and intestines. I eat dirty grocery stores completely empty. Fill myself with herrings, pickles and all the bad old sharp foods. Candies are poured into me like hail from their tin pots. In this way I enjoy not only my healthy condition, but also a suffering that is without pain and can pass immediately.[i]
On 13 August 1912, Kafka accompanied Brod on a social call, where he met a young woman. “Bony empty face, which wore its emptiness openly. Bare neck. Thrown-on blouse. […] Almost broken nose. Blond, somewhat stiff charmless hair, strong chin.”[ii] Not a flattering description of Felice Bauer, who would become his fiancée. Indeed, it turned out to be (how could it not?) a tortured relationship, which resulted to two breaking-offs of the engagement, and ultimate estrangement. Relatively little of Kafka’s doubts made it into the diary, at least, not directly. He did write a list of pros and cons of marriage, conceived in the abstract and somewhat detached from the specifics of Felice.
1) Inability to endure life alone […] 3) I must be alone a great deal. What I have achieved is only a result of being alone. 4) I hate everything that doesn’t relate to literature, it bores me to carry on conversations (even if they relate to literature) it bores me to pay visits, sorrows and joys of my relatives bore me to my soul. 5) The fear of connection, of flowing across. 7) Alone I could perhaps one day really give up my job. Married it will never be possible.[iii]
If she had seen the list, it would have filled her with foreboding. This mood would not have been leavened by another observation. “Coitus as punishment of the happiness of being together. To live as ascetically as possible, more ascetically than a bachelor, that’s the only way for me to endure marriage.”[iv]
To be fair, in his letters to Felice, Kafka did repeatedly write of his doubts about his suitability as a husband. It was not as if they were unprepared for Kafka’s fastidious selfishness – which did encompass concern regarding Felice’s marital happiness – to ultimately doom their plans. When a diagnosis of tuberculosis finally intervened (in 1915), it simply proved correct Kafka’s comment “I lack any propensity for family life except that of the observer at best.”[v] Fate had intervened to confirm the correctness of his path of literary solitude. In his last year, Kafka did wish to marry the teacher Dora Diamant, whom he would live with in Berlin, but let us overlook that untidy fact. The diaries end a month before Dora’s arrival in his life; or rather the notebooks mentioning her were later confiscated by the Gestapo and have never reappeared.
The inclusion of drafts of Kafka’s fiction transforms the nature of the diaries. No longer a ‘pure’ journal, it comes the laboratory and workbook for a writer always looking to turn observation into fiction. There are versions of stories “The Judgment”, “Memories of the Kalda Railway”, “Wedding Preparations in the Country” and short pieces from his first book of short pieces Betrachtung (Meditation) (1913), as well as sections of his three novels The Man Who Disappeared (1911-4), The Trial (1914-5) and The Castle (1922). There is an aborted opening to The Trial, in which Josef K. is accused of theft, which he has committed unconsciously. “’Thief!’ he shouted and sprang out of the office. ‘I haven’t stolen anything’ was the first thing I said, but the five-gulden bill was in my hand and the till was open.”[vi] (Tellingly, Kafka thought of Karl Rossmann (protagonist of The Man Who Disappeared) as innocent, and Josef K. (of The Trial) as guilty.[vii]) There are attempts at story beginnings that never developed and patient rewritings of texts that never took on independent life. Some paragraphs were reworked although they never seem to amount to more than asides, without potential for publication. This is Kafka testing the veracity of his thoughts, clarifying his expression, practising his craft.
Letters loom large in Kafka’s thoughts. He frets over letters unsent and ones he cannot reply to. He drafts letters to Felice and his publisher. Letters to Milena and Felice are at first lifelines, then they constrict him, binding him into relationships and promises that impede him, that force him to compromise his work and deplete his time. Another drain on his attention – his work duties – does not come up much, other than as passing observations on colleagues. As the Office Writings revealed, his work life was actually very varied and meaningful; it took him across Bohemia as he attended conferences and inspected factories. Far from being a lowly clerk, as we sometimes casually imagine him to be, Dr Kafka was a serious and respected professional. We lose out from not hearing more about this part of his day, although one can hardly blame him for wishing to escape into literature when free.
As so often observed, acting as places of emotional expression without the speaker encountering moderation, reproof or reason, diaries frequently become repositories for anger and private score-settling. They can be ugly places, where we see a person at their most selfish and unbalanced. One can hardly blame an editor, especially one such as Brod, who knew the author, for taking off the edges. The diaries lack continuity, with breaks of many months, and suffer as a narrative from having figures mentioned only fleetingly. We do not get a feeling for recurring characters. As expected, Kafka explains little, as he was writing for himself.
We might ponder on the ethics of publishing not only anything by Kafka, bearing in mind his instructions to Brod to destroy all his writings, but particularly this journal. Ultimately, if an author is great enough and demand great enough, then everything will be published and gathered into complete editions. Kafka is no exception. He read such editions; he read the letters and journals of the Russian novelists, German Romantics and Gustave Flaubert. He would have understood the impulse to publish everything available and knew that everything he had not personally destroyed was liable to reach the public to some extent. He himself had committed to flames unsuccessful work. (March 1912: “Today burned many old disgusting papers.”[viii])
Do not think that the Diaries are tough reading. Although there is plenty of despair – at his writer’s block, his family, his inability to escape the office – Kafka’s humour flashes through most poignantly when he makes fun of himself.
When the Doktor, reading the contract aloud, came to a passage that dealt with my possible future wife and possible children I noticed opposite me a table with two large chairs and a smaller one around it. At the thought that I would never be capable of filling these or any 3 chairs with me, my wife and my child, I was overcome by a longing for this happiness so desperate from the very start that in this agitated state I asked the Doktor my only remaining question during the long reading, which immediately exposed my complete misunderstanding of an extensive section of the contract that had just been read.[ix]
As tuberculosis made inroads into Kafka’s stamina and expectations, the entries do grow tersely short. Sometimes they are little more than the name of a person or book or the recording of the temperature of a fever bout. What the diaries (dwelling as they do on inactivity, dissatisfaction and anxiety) fail to convey is how much Kafka did achieve despite the demands on his time: three unfinished novels, a body of brilliant short stories, some parables and a large quantity of letters, aside from the diaries themselves. This does not include lost or destroyed papers nor the technical reports written for work, which cannot be counted as creative work, despite its value and quality.
The Diaries are an essential addition to the Kafka canon in English, but we still await two major additions: The Fragments (a group of unfinished stories, parables and dialogues) and the collected correspondence. Both contain many texts that have never appeared in English. Those Anglophones who love Kafka cannot rest easy until these two bodies of work are added to the already translated critical editions of the novels, stories, parables and (now) diaries.
ALEXANDER ADAMS is an artist, art critic, novelist and poet. His most recent book is Artivism: The Battle for Museums in the Era of Postmodernism (Societas/Imprint Academic, 2022)
MICHAEL YOST finds a collection of original religiously-inspired verse rather forced
There are two major traditions pertinent to verse literature that are seldom engaged in, but for all that are the more interesting when an artist does make use of them: the theological and imaginative Christian tradition of faith, and the much more practical tradition of formal verse craft.
In most people’s minds, the two probably go together; one thinks of the Anglican John Keble’s Christian Year, the Roman Catholic James Matthew Wilson, or the American Protestant Longfellow, all of whom reward the interest of their readers. However, the major religious tradition of the West is less often engaged today, and many Christian poets take the outward and visible signs of form as Luther and Zwingli took the outward and visible signs of the Eucharist: conventional, and unessential.
T.S. Eliot suggested in his essay Religion and Literature that what was needed was not religous literature in the obvious, propagandizing manner of a Keble or Chesterton, but rather the unconsciously religious literature of a Dante or a Joyce. As I have suggested in another essay, Eliot’s idea of the relation between religion and literature also is true of any set of first principles, or overarching metaphysics; the reason Eliot sought for an unconsciously religious literature was because he wished religion to inform the bones and marrow, the form and substance of literature, not merely decorate it with the furniture of, say early-mid-twentieth century Anglo-Catholicism. In brief, the law of craft is the law of belief, or philosophical conviction, or more often, the lack of those things.
This is not to say that formal verse is always the work of deists. But it is per se the work of people who have some stake in things as ordered, even if the order is conventional, or merely conservative in character. Here we come to Clarence Caddell’s The True Gods Attend You, a chapbook published by Bonfire Books, the Australian press. What makes Caddell interesting is that his poems do often address religious themes; but in each case they are pitched with a deep and seemingly impenetrable irony. In reading them, I cannot help but place them in the category of consciously religious.
This is largely because the primary concern of the poems is, as in a devotional poem, religion and religious experience. The difference is that the religious poems are counter-propaganda; they are devotional poems in reverse. Not much to their credit, the poems’ engagement with religion largely draws from the fragmentary and derivative gnostic texts of the Church’s early period, as well as two books that each propose a conspiracy-theorist’s account of the origins of Christianity. There are poems of some formal merit, such as Initiations, The Golem, Passover Feasts of the New Covenant, Elegy With an Omen, and A Mobius Wedding Band; as well as a long blank verse narrative poem, The Candidate. These I would single out among the collection as poems whose ideas are engaging, but more importantly, solidly executed. In many of the other poems, there is a distinct lack of metrical control. Cadell’s hand is often shaky as he tries to unpack complex situations, parallels, and resonances within a brief space. Trochees, eye rhymes, weak rhymes, (such as the anachronistically signaled elision “o’er” that exists in order to rhyme with “floor”) and awkward syntax abound, marring an energetic idea, crippling a final stanza, and perhaps most difficult, undermining the authority of Cadell, the poet and speaker. On one or two occasions the concrete situation of the poem is nearly impossible to discern.
There is also a distinct difference between the poems that rely on history, the re-formulated symbolism of the Gnostics, or the tendentious and ludicrous thesis that Christianity was a political invention of the Flavian dynasty, and the poems that seem to draw from Caddell’s own experiences of life, love, and loss. The aforementioned poems can be by turn, difficult, energetic, and reliant upon an imaginative world inherited by Caddell. When they succeed, they succeed because Caddell unlocks their complexity, which pours out in a torrential fashion reminiscent of the metaphysical poems of John Donne. This is the case in the Blakean Initiations. But where they fail, it is because that complexity has failed to materialize in an ordered way. Caddell’s more intimate poems, by contrast, work precisely because that same intricacy is in play, but in a context that is both familiar, tender, and surprising, such as A Mobius Wedding Band. But even here the shield of irony is raised. I wish to turn to that particular poem as a success: an English sonnet that treats of married love; a love that is painful and yet inseparable, desired and feared. It plays with the same themes of distance, suffering, betrayal and desire that another of his poems, Vicar of Christ, engages; but with a more perfect union between form and content, a clearer direction and drive moving through the entire poem, and a perfect complication of the symbolic ring of marriage. Here, the symbol seems to truly mean something, even in its reversal. The Candidate, the longest poem in the collection, details the conversion and reversion of a family man to and from the Roman Catholic Church, or at least, a parodic vision of that church. Throughout the poem, the sincerity of his spiritual search is pushed back against, and ultimately revealed as an expression of his own narcissistic quest for “religious experience.” The heavy-handed moral is that the candidate should avaunt church-shopping and return from its distractions to his wife and family. It is singular insofar as it depicts an often undepicted subculture within Catholicism. But it does not ascend above the level of caricature.
Earlier in the review, I suggested that “the law of craft is the law of belief, or philosophical conviction, or more often, the lack of those things.” How does this apply in Caddell’s case? The True Gods Attend You stands half within the world of traditional religious expression (if ironically so), and half out of it. Likewise, Caddell has difficulty fully achieving coherence and rigor of poetic expression. His poems are indeed “formalist” as the blurb of the chapbook declares. But often the poems are (it seems unintentionally) rumpled. In both cases, it is hard for a Christian reader not to suggest that both constitute a falling away – an imperfect or misunderstood discipline. In sum, there is something to commend the originality and force, as well as the wit behind The True Gods Attend You. Caddell has skill, and an idiosyncratic vision. What remains to be seen is whether both, in time, develop.
MICHAEL YOST is a poet and essayist living in rural New Hampshire with his wife and children. His essays and poems have been published in places like Modern Age, First Things, The University Bookman, Dappled Things, The Brazen Head, and others. He substacks at The Weight of Form.
Tim Stanley, Bloomsbury Continuum, October 2021, 272 pages, £20
KEN BELL finds that banished traditions can come back in new ways
The central theme of Tim Stanley’s Whatever Happened to Tradition is that tradition in the West has been demolished by its great enemies of liberalism and enlightenment. That is not to say that enlightened men cannot also be conservative and traditionalist – and Stanley doesn’t claim that – rather that liberal, enlightened values are so dominant that they have taken over for the present their conservative opponents. Thus, writes Stanley, “Conservatives, most already economically liberal, have become more socially liberal; the left, most already socially liberal have become more economically liberal.”
So what we have in the West is not a debate between liberals and conservatives, but rather a managerial dispute as to which faction can increase the size of the state to better meet the demands of the populace. This is made worse by the fact that the elites “keep cocking things up,” which they do time and time again as we may be reminded in the winter of 2023 when we undergo power cuts.
Time was when the growing and increasingly authoritarian state would have been opposed by Tories who drew their inspiration from the ideals of the ‘freeborn Englishman’, with his pot of beer and his plate of roast beef. However, today’s Tories are just as much opposed to those notions of responsible individualism in an ordered society as any liberal New-Labourite. One can make a good, Tory position out of support for the miners during the Great Strike of 1984/85. Stanley reminds us that the miners were men who were not fighting to overthrow the established order. Instead what they wanted was to defend their position within that order; a position that involved decent pay and conditions backed up by a strong union. An old-style Conservative could hardly argue against the mines on the basis of economics, especially when the foundations of his beliefs are the monarchy, the Anglican Church, and the legitimacy of the established order. Few of those will bear close scrutiny from an accountant with a balance sheet.
Yet, the Tories are a pragmatic bunch as evidenced by their wholehearted acceptance of what used to be called the Gay Liberation Movement. When I was a young man, the homosexualists allied themselves with the broader Labour movement. We tolerated their predilections, and they took on board our view of how the economy should be run. It was the perfect alliance, with both sides getting something out of the deal. But by the end of the last century, the radical gay pride events had run their course and were attracting fewer and fewer supporters each year. This was especially true in London where the Pride Festival organisers found themselves at the door to the poorhouse. Corporate capitalism came to the rescue and transformed “a protest into a party endorsed by Tesco and Lloyds Bank… nowadays there are probably more middle-class heterosexuals at Pride than gays or lesbians.” Given that the Tories were only recently the party that introduced legislation that banned the promotion of homosexuality in schools, their transformation is a sight to behold.
It is also a very traditional Tory path to take. The party’s aim is the maintenance of the socio-economic status quo: everything else is just tactics. So, the Tories can ditch the anti-homosexualism and a few voters amongst the lower-middle-class in places like Nuneaton, and become pro-homosexual and get votes in Putney. Furthermore, a liberal line on gays does not cost money, unlike, say, levelling-up.
Tim Stanley does give traditionalists some glimmers of hope for a radical future, one coming from a very unexpected quarter. Fox hunting was a pastime of the old established order and was on its deathbed until New Labour gave it a boost by banning it. Hunts began to set their hounds to chase scents laid on the ground, which sounds rather desperate at first glance. However, the hunts became a focus of rural opposition to everything that rural people felt was wrong with the society at large. So thousands began to turn out to support their local hunt, with numbers increasing as urban people decided to go and support this traditional event.
The end result was the metamorphosis of the hunt from a minority interest to a mass event with an overtly political character. Hunt masters became the staunchest of Brexiteers and often provided the leadership for the Brexit campaign in their areas. Tim Stanley is surely correct when he speculates that all traditional values need is a little bit of state repression to give them a new lease on life.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
STODDARD MARTIN remembers a dedicated litterateur’s late works
One can hardly think but with affection of Harold Bloom, addict of the Word, historic lover of literature, and coiner of the phrase “anxiety of influence” among other more recondite tags.
It would be invidious not to feel that affection when considering his final books, compendious and repetitive though they may be, composed or compiled as they were during bouts of convalescence between the illnesses that led to his corporeal silence in 2019, aged eighty-nine. It is likely that more words from the indefatigable commentator may be stored up yet to come, editing angels and publishing deities willing. The prospect is daunting, to some perhaps dismaying, for after seven decades of pronouncements, more Bloom may seem less.
Of the supreme enunciator of literary rankings in recent times – “probably the most famous literary critic in the English-speaking world” of his day – posterity might require for a tidy canon. But tidy Bloom is not. In his 2019 book Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism, the idealiser of Falstaff and his perceived form of “heroic vitalism”[1] tacitly put faith in excess. Bloom’s object, insofar as it ever went beyond an exuberant autodidact’s self-revelations, was to provoke more than to instruct (Possessed, p12 – all subsequent page numbers refer to this book). “I am a Nietzschean,” he declares in the last of his provisional last words (p79) after a lifetime of enthusiasm for the philosopher’s kindred spirits, such as W. B. Yeats. Thus at the end, like the author of Ecce Homo when approaching fatal dispersion into madness, Bloom eerily claims: “Something in me speaks for multitudes around the globe.” (p11)
“Oh my brothers!” is Zarathustra’s refrain, and Bloom never tired of projecting that he was carrying on a dialogue with colleagues and students, whether at Cornell, Yale or Cambridge where a boy from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant family earned degrees, or at the same or similarly distinguished institutions where a publicity-loving adult would ultimately profess. First person plural is the mode. Bloom’s method as critic was conversational, sometimes ingratiating, especially in books where he might indulge in a lifetime’s penchant for having the last word. Why argue with him? Listen. Admire. Reflect. Then, perhaps, carry on a silent conversation of one’s own in the watches of night – those insomniac hours in which, as he tells us, Bloom had his most fertile ideas and, when not idealizing, lay awake reciting favourite works to the shades – incanting, as if a religious at prayer.
This is the milieu. And it determines content. Bloom’s canon finally includes, from the beginning, what he considers to be the great literary passages of “the Hebrew Bible” (Old Testament), for as he says, beyond having become Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale, Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard, recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Belles Lettres and Criticism, etc., he is “a literary and religious critic” (emphasis mine), whose “tradition is dying” and whose dying wish is “to rally a saving remnant”(p11). Again, a note of Nietzschean messianism, if perhaps with a hint of the disingenuous tendency of that other heroic vitalist (“the Fat Knight”) to humour and guff, “nimble believing and disbelieving”.
The lifelong lover of Shakespeare ascribes these qualities to Hamlet, whom he sees as “his own Falstaff… a consciousness so enormous that it contains all of human self-otherseeing” (p112). It might be a description of what Bloom aspired to be himself; it is also what he finds lacking in the Hebrew God – Yahweh, a dislikable presence for him at almost every turn, despite his Jewish roots. Here the old Bloom, whose early literary critical self started with Shelley, returns to youthful insurgency. Something is wrong in the heavens, as it was for the renegade Romantic: Prometheus punished by Jupiter is dealing with a false God or at least a faulty one – there is better beyond, in the pleroma. Gnosticism is in the air, and Bloom inhales it, lauding the work of his late “mentor” Gershom Scholem and concentrating passing attention on Scholem’s special study, the Kabbalah. “I have spent part of a lifetime,” Bloom states, “trying to work out a pragmatic relationship between Kabbalah and literary criticism” (p20). The provisionality implied here is matched by an achievement that is opaque and fragmentary. Bloom links Kabbalah and poetry both to “heretical subversions of orthodoxy”, “salvation by transgression”, “the frontier between the sacred and the profane” and no requirement to complete the Great Work but no freedom to desist in the attempt (pps23-5).
From here it is small distance to Blake, Whitman and others of Bloom’s un-Leavisite “great tradition”, grounded in English literature fundamentally not only on Shakespeare but more portentously on Milton’s Satan. However – and here is an essential, perhaps under-recognised element in Bloom – heresy is only a pretext for a new/old orthodoxy and God. For Bloom’s ultimate standard is breadth and depth of vision, a vastness of sensibility and inclusion, reminding one perhaps of what a critic once complained of in the French symboliste Mallarmé: a sense that anything less than the all-embracing might be presumptuous[2].
Bloom, in short, disliking the Yahweh of tradition, sets out in effect to descry a truer God – humane, non-vindictive, invisible but glimpsed beyond Demogorgon up in starrier heavens. Like Shelley’s Prometheus being liberated from his bonds, the tireless yet mortally ill individual must rely on a bevy of maidens to help him complete the job – seven female assistants are named at the start of Possessed by Memory. This could be interpreted as Kabbalistic in the sense of Bloom’s contention that the proper mystical Yahweh can only function with aid from the Moon Queen or female spirit that resides in Malkuth, foundational pod of the Sefiroth [EDITOR’S NOTE: The Sefiroth are ten attributes of emotion, intellect or will in Kabbalistic esotericism]; it might also bring to mind accusations of “inappropriate” attention to female students that marked the professor’s later years.
Be that as it may, the inclusions in his excursion towards a summatory roundup of values betray composition by many hands: sketches, bits of lectures, notes from seminars are the basis, even in one case a funeral address. The authorial scholar gives way to the genial teacher, whose mission is foremost to enthuse. Possessed is designed to tell us why a dying man has recalled this passage or that poem and what is outstanding about it. It is a trawl, a last judgement on the canonical, as per a decent God’s instincts. And why not? Many an ailing scholar would love to engage in such a pastime, and Bloom’s range is such that he is almost always engaging at it – almost being the lively interlocutor’s operative word. In difference lies interest, in qualifications glided over or simply not made, in enthusiasms too grandly stated.
Falstaff, for instance, is not for this reader the exemplar that he is for Bloom, nor do the plays in which he appears seem the Bard’s best. Bloom has little time for the Marlovian in Shakespeare, speaks dismissively of Hotspur, and ignores the coruscating soliloquies of that supreme Machiavel, Richard. He is intriguing about the bastard Faulconbridge in the oft-neglected King John, but says little of comedies which now may strike the ear as warm-ups for Blackadder. As to Milton, he admits with Dr Johnson that few read him with pleasure (p176); re Johnson himself, he forgives eccentric pomposities. Bloom is of a generation of American Jewish scholars who began in awe of English literary tradition. He does not rate the deviations of Pound and Eliot towards Europe, attention to Dante excepted. The superior art of Baudelaire earns from him no more than an aside in a discussion of Swinburne (p301).
Much else is missing. Where for instance is Wilde, save in apt citation of a quote from ‘The Critic as Artist’ as the book’s epigraph? As for Wilde’s countryman Yeats: is he quite understood? In these summatory pages, how much space does old Bloom accord to a signal figure of his youth? His trajectory now, whatever it was in journeyman days and however much he may remain haunted by Shakespeare and Shelley, is towards fellow Americans – those who, unlike Eliot and Pound, did not “beat out [their] exile” but stayed home to “make [their] pact”, to borrow from the latter, Whitman-as-internationalist, as Bloom resolutely won’t. The god who stands at the head of American poetic tradition is for Bloom the seminal incantor – psalmic “transumptor” – of Leaves of Grass. Whitman the untidy, the vastly inclusive proto-Zarathustran – in him the professor finds a lodestone more congenial than in an Irishman whose attention to craft moved George Moore to depict him coming down to lunch at Coole Park to report to Lady Gregory that his morning’s work had consisted of removing a comma which he later restored[3]. Whitman’s incontinence, like Falstaff’s, if wilder, exposes another facet of “heroic vitalist” genius chez dying Bloom. Might we conclude that, in the light of his disintegration, a coherence strained for in youth seems no longer essential – analogous to how for the late Turner a glimmer of sun through vague clouds became preferable as subject to the detail of ship and sail? One suspects it to be partly the case. Bloom alludes en passant to Yeats’ “Byzantium poems”, but the exactitude of “hammered gold and gold enamelling” is hardly seen as a destiny. Bloom may live on as critic or at least enthuser: penning fifty-odd books suggests aspiration to transcendence beyond mere bodily existence. But if he lives on, Bloom is liable to do so as the critic permissive rather than the critic precise.
Again, why not? The third of four parts of Possessed by Memory begins to judder and creak as it extends Anglo tradition to snippets from the canonical Browning and Meredith; but the fourth part, commencing with its long devotion to Whitman, moves to some eye-opening appreciations, not only of the predictable Stevens, Williams and Crane, but more appealingly of the less obvious Edward Arlington Robinson and Conrad Aiken among others. With Aiken, comparison to his Harvard classmate Eliot leads to a fuller understanding of why Bloom felt antipathy for the most celebrated Anglo-American voice of the past century. That said, Bloom’s account of Aiken’s work falls short of full praise, and his explanation for why Aikens failed to reach “the eminence” of “Robert Frost and Wallace Stevens, Thomas Stearns Eliot and Hart Crane” seems partly to tell against itself – “Associative rhetoric was both Aiken’s mode and, sadly, his weakness. He did not try to make it new but to augment the foundations by relying upon the major poets of the Romantic tradition.” (p393)
Might this not be a description of Bloom’s own approach as critic? Might one even go so far as to see it as either a veil drawn over a latent, counter-canonical preference for poets of Aikens’ pitch or a subconscious admission of Bloom’s own less than supreme rank as critic? These are not idle questions. Somerset Maugham once famously quipped that his status as writer was in the first rank of the second rate. The false modesty hardly strained to disguise a popular novelist’s healthy antipathy for experimental modernists whom a cognoscenti lionized, but the common reader found unreadable: Woolf, Joyce and so on. Bloom, when set alongside the Derrida-ists, Deconstructionists, Structuralists and such fashionable ‘critics’ of his epoch, might strike one analogously as among the first rank of the middle-brow.
Like Maugham in The Summing Up, Bloom laces his learned observations with recollection. His remarks on one of two women included in a 500-page book, May Swenson, pivot on their meetings at a café in Greenwich Village in the 1960s. His discussion of the original and vitalist ex-soldier Richard Eberhardt stems from a lecture tour at the University of Florida, where Eberhardt frightened him with the campus alligator. Bloom’s account of the master of negation, Weldon Kees, begins with an encounter at a jazz club in Harlem. Longer pieces on lesser-knowns such as Archie Randolph Ammons or Alvin Feinman are founded on yet closer association, as is the inclusion on John Ashbery, with whom Bloom’s “friendship has been continuous these sixty years… I have just phoned him at the Whittier Rehabilitation Center where he is recovering rather slowly from double pneumonia” (p431). Illness and age are constant companions in these last works, not notably cheerful ones, rather ones with whom Bloom struggles manfully to come to terms, never quite achieving reconciliation with, let alone joy in, observation of their processes – intrinsic to life, after all, thus a subset of the “heroic vital”. Bloom resists falling back into angry, non-accepting “rage, rage against the dying of the light”; rather he strives to win from these ultimate confrontations a revitalised urgency and heightened appreciation. He can still read, or be read to, and hear. He can still idealize and recite in the watches of night. Most of all he can remember. Which brings us to the ‘coda’ of the book, Proustianly entitled “In Search of Lost Time”.
Before one arrives there, one must be reconciled with Bloom’s subjectivity. One has to accept that his judgments have often to do with where he could most comfortably locate himself; that his “we” posits a community both transitory and presumptuous; that his lordly opinions, such as that Hart Crane is the great American poet after Whitman and Dickinson, may pass as gospel without being convincingly preached; that he gives himself grace to make errors and to speculate beyond what accords with known facts; that he settles scores on occasion – against Saul Bellow, for instance (p416) – and will not always refrain from resorting to guff.
What, say, is the sense of a sentence such as “His consciousness was a plenum that could have created a heterocosm, where space and sun might have made another world” (p430)? From here it is not far to complain of Bloom’s cherished inventions such as “self-othering” or “transumptive”. But let it pass. Bloom is a character in his literary universe. He is too Shakespearean not to put a high, perhaps excessive, value on personality. That he has a big one has been part of his “body of fate”, to use a Yeats term; Bloom has embraced and cultivated it, and created a space for it to exist in and flourish and suffer. Irritating this may be, but one can also be glad for it. Bloom himself becomes a standard, not just what he says: a brand, an embodiment of forces to reckon with, if not revere – something of a god. Apotheosis may not be a fate he has worked for entirely nakedly, but he has certainly flirted with it often, notwithstanding the trademark baggy garb of being “human, all-too-human”.
God incarnate in Bloom? Will He live on as Holy Ghost? Close to his physical end, Bloom muses: “When we die, our own survival will be the extent to which we have changed the lives of those who come after us… I have to consider how little I know of time to come. Doubtless it is better that way. Foretelling can be destructive.” (p507) His coda to Possessed begins in this way to evince a becoming humility. Before sojourning with Proust, he recalls Saint Augustine’s conversations with his mother about God’s eternal light. The aptness is to what Bloom characterises as Proust’s “sublime lucidity”, which transcends Jewish and Christian roots to be “closer to Hindu philosophy”. While admitting that Proust probably never read the Bhagavad-Gita, Bloom invokes it.
Shortly afterwards, he qualifies a roving meditation by confessing, “I have the realisation or fantasy that simultaneously I know everything and nothing” (p481). This precedes recollection of moments of “sudden radiance” in early childhood, which “seem now to be heretical intimations of a lost gnosis” (p487). Proust’s similar epiphanies, Bloom muses, may stem from “worship of an unknown God who is yet knowable” (p492); in any case, the novelist’s truth “is compounded of perception, involuntary memory, impressionism, a search for spiritual meaning, and a kind of aesthetic mysticism” (p497). Is this not Bloom’s “truth” in a mirror? The presiding return of “childlike vision” is for him, as for Proust, “allied to phantasmagoria and to the world of dreams… modified delirium” (p501). Here one might end, or with association of “the survival of the inner self with a world founded upon benignity” (p503), or with a largeness that “could be at once atheist and mystic” (p505). But Bloom actually concludes by reverting to Dr Johnson, whose wisdom allows for ebb as well as a flow that chez Proust is continuous. Bloom has indeed already undercut his paean to In Search of Lost Time by stating that he would choose Richardson’s Clarissa in preference to it. Why? Because the heroine and her rapist lover are “more vital”.
One trusts this no more than one might accept Mozart’s sympathy to be with the survivors rather than with the deposed libertine at the end of Don Giovanni. Bloom’s coda, brave as it is in conveying what remains at the approach of his earthly dissolution, conveys one back towards his penultimate book, which occupies a more preliminary stage in the process and thus may constitute a more reliable summing-up of a career of concentrated literary contemplation.
The book is less given to reminiscence and enthusiasm, though some is ever present. There are no chapters devoted to lesser talents such as John Wheelwright, James Merrill, Jay Macpherson or Amy Clampit, with whom Bloom ends his pre-coda trawl in Possessed. Among those, notably Merrill, Bloom remains ready to deviate back to consideration of his traditional greats: he cites phone calls “in which we explored W. B. Yeats’s A Vision, the Gnostic religion, and the relation of Yeats to Shelley and to Blake” (p449). Reader, take note. Bloom subsumes the Irish poet here to two English Romantics whom he has consistently ranked as the foremost. He glides from A Vision to Scholem’s topic as if Yeats’s mystico-historic text were self-evidently Gnostic. He considers the matter no further except to say “I suspect that Yeats would not have taken to James Merrill’s poetry” (p453), then somewhat conversely he postulates that in Merrrill’s poetry “the Byzantium of William Butler Yeats hovers and is deftly evaded” (p456). Deftly seems a loaded adverb, not least in a context where the Irish poet’s full name is iterated, as it is in most other scattered allusions to him throughout this book. Why? Shelley almost never requires “Percy Bysshe”. Is there some other Yeats that Bloom fears we may think of, or is there some more telling nuance at play??
Looking at this penultimate work, so boldly entitled Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: the Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death, and among chapters Bloom devotes to the usual titans – Shakespeare, Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Frost, Stevens, Crane, Freud (eccentrically) and Dante (again, lone continental) – we find “William Butler Yeats and D. H. Lawrence: Start with the Shadow”. The title seems tricksy – it matters little: tags chez Bloom and others of his generation of academics often do. What does matter is the shadow of doubt that pervades. Bloom invokes an American favourite to contrast “three modes of mastery. In Lawrence it is chthonic. In Yeats it is occult. In Stevens it is massive acceptance of things as they are.” (p474) Proceeding to quote from one of the American’s poems, Bloom wonders if it is not “a critique by Stevens of the endless series of questing wanderers in Yeats” (p476). Endless series? “William Butler Yeats,” we are told (entire name again) “had the good fortune and the vital temperament to refuse any despair of his own quest” (p479). Are we to infer that a less “occult” sensibility should have despaired? Later, in parsing “All Souls” Night”, Bloom informs us that “the magnificence of gesture, metric, diction overcomes what could be judged sheer silliness” (p483); later still, in relation to Yeats’s alleged “pagan purpose”, we are told that “The force of his diction and metric brushes argument aside” (p485). “Devoted readers of Yeats learn that for him God and Death are one,” Bloom states, “a Gnostic formulation” (p486). This is of course arguable and reflects what Bloom is finally obliged to confess: “More than ever I have a mixed response.” (p490). He lauds “Adam’s Curse” in part to question the quality of what comes after; and when he reaches “Under Ben Bulben”, he decries a “farrago… much of it of a badness not to believed” (p497).
Old Bloom clearly had a problem with old Yeats. From a concluding phrase one might take it that he continued to rate or anyway grapple with the Irish master mainly out of an older loyalty: “The daemon in Yeats, as he acknowledged, was Shelley” (p499). This is arguable too and, at best, partial. But then, as I have indicated, partiality is characteristic of critic Bloom, in age as in youth. He is, to repeat his claim, a Nietzschean, as he fancies it: a “provoker”. A windbag like his beloved “Fat Knight”, he is more than a touch averse to fine concision. He is also no dedicated traveller in realms of magic and dream, however insomniac his nights may have been. Baudelaire comments somewhere that it would be impossible for a poet not to contain a critic but it would be prodigious for a critic to contain a poet. Harold Bloom adored poetry: of that there is no doubt. What may be lacking in him – one leaves it to weigh up – is a thoroughgoing sense of the poetic.
Harold Bloom bibliography (partial)
Shelley’s Mythmaking, 1959
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, 1961
Blake’s Apocalypse: A Study in Poetic Argument, 1963
Yeats, 1970
The Ringers in the Tower: Studies in Romantic Tradition, 1971
STODDARD MARTIN is the American-born owner of the London-based publisher Starhaven, a cultural critic who has taught at Harvard, Oxford, Lodz and Warsaw universities, and the author of books including From Wagner to the Wasteland and Monstrous Century
About Britain: A Journey of Seventy Years and 1,345 Miles
Tim Cole, Bloomsbury Continuum, June 2021, 384 pages, £18.99
KEN BELL drives down a northwestern Memory Lane
The Festival of Britain in 1951 was intended to show that the war was over and Great Britain was back on her feet. As an ancillary to the Festival, a series of motorists’ guidebooks were written which covered all the regions of Britain. Each one of the thirteen guides contained several motoring tours that allowed the visitor to explore the country’s highways, gave advice on where to stop for food and drink, and contained plenty of photographs to keep the non-motoring public happy. Tim Cole, Professor of History at the University of Bristol, collected these guides and decided to follow a dozen of the routes. The book he wrote is a lyrical, yet sadly depressing, account of British decline since 1951.
It is interesting that none of the journeys include much information about the great cities that often start and end a journey. Newcastle is dealt with in a sentence or two about the football ground and the barracks, with the road out of the city being one of ‘unimaginative industrialism’, according to the 1950 author. It is unlikely that any modern guides would so dismiss the cities, but in 1951 the bourgeois motorist probably only saw them as starting points on his journey into the real land that was rural to his mind.
The chapter dealing with the Northwest interested me the most, mainly because as a Mancunian I am from that region. The original guide took the visitor through Preston and the mill towns, and was obviously intended to show Britain’s industrial might as well as offering nice views and decent eating houses. Some of those roadside hostelries are still in operation, by the way, but now they offer Indian and Italian foods rather than the meat and two veg of 1950. Preston in 1951 was a major port for the export of cotton and the mill towns of Accrington, Blackburn, Burnley and Nelson form a string of towns on the guide that the visitor would have driven though on his way to the Pennines and the wool towns beyond.
This is where the depression sinks in, as the Preston docks closed not long after the guide was written, just as Accrington and Blackburn lost their role of makers of cheap, thin cloth for the peasants of India and Africa to wear. Burnley no longer made ‘narrow cloths for printing’ and Nelson ceased to make patterned fabrics.
As Tim Cole points out, the 1950 author really did believe that the wartime boom would remain, and he then goes on to trace the sad decline from that optimistic year. He looks at the increasingly desperate attempts to introduce manmade fibres into the Lancashire spinning process, often using fibres that had been invented in Britain. Those new processes did not need an army of skilled or even semi-skilled workers: what they needed were a few unskilled machine minders, but even so, tariffs and competition from abroad quickly rendered the mill towns uneconomic. Each mill town brought over cheap labour from Pakistan to reduce the wage bill as a final throw of the dice, and when that failed, one by one the companies that had brought them to Lancashire shut up shop and left the towns to sink.
Tim Cole takes the reader out of Burnley, along the road to Colne, via Nelson and then up to the Pennine Hills and on into Yorkshire and the relics of its woollen past. I have made that journey myself many times and Cole’s sympathetic portrayal of the region shines through. Sadly, it is a journey from prosperity to aching poverty in a few short miles that took seven decades to complete.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
Various authors, edited by Alexander Adams, foreword by William Clouston, London: Bournbrook Press, 2022, pb, 55pps, £12.50
Bournbrook Press is an offshoot of Bournbrook Magazine, founded in 2019 to offer a “primarily British audience with traditionalist, socially conservative argument and entertainment”. This venture’s newest publication is something unusual, and unlikely to be financially profitable – an anthology of original poetry put together specifically to appeal to small-c conservatives, a subset of the population not noted for their interest in new verse.
Poetry written for political purposes always runs a risk of being bathetic, just as other arts can easily become ‘artivism’ – a point amply understood by this collection’s editor-contributor, who has written an informative book on this subject. I have a 1900 anthology on my shelves, Heroic and Patriotic Verse, and while much of the verse is excellent (it includes Byron, Goldsmith, Gray and Shakespeare), some has dated less well, including ‘Of old sat Freedom’ (one of Tennyson’s windier effusions) and the frankly indigestible ‘The Roast Beef of Old England’. The verse in Sunken Island is similarly uneven, but when it is good, it is, as Social Democratic Party leader William Clouston notes in his Foreword, “both serious and enjoyable”.
Clouston also points out that this book’s eight contributors are not “blind to the country’s flaws”, and this gives this collection both muscle and a certain wryness of outlook notably absent from some patriotic poets, like Rupert Brooke or Henry Newbolt. There is no bombast to be found in Sunken Island, nor sentimentality, nor Patience Strong-style platitudes. The two prevailing emotions are love, plus loss – an odd echo of Hugh Kenner’s A Sinking Island (1988), which concluded that “there’s no longer an English literature”.
Kenner’s gloom is to some extent gainsaid by the poets in here, who suggest that a kind of distinctively English literary sensibility may still be discoverable – or at least a British one, because one of the poets included (the pseudonymous ‘Columba’) is Scottish, while another (Rahul Gupta) is a noted exponent of traditional alliterative verse. This does not mean that the other six contributors are stodgily suburban, nor even a hundred percent English. Alexander Adams is a justly well-regarded artist whose work is in the V&A (several of his drawings are used in Sunken Island). Benjamin Afer calls himself an “authentic reactionary”, but authors futuristic novels. Daniel Gustafsson is a bi-lingual (Swedish) doctor of philosophy, as well as a highly-regarded poet. A. Robert Lee taught in America and Japan, and lives in Spain. Nicholas Murray is a biographer of Kafka and Chatwin, and a Fellow of the Welsh Academy. S. D. Wickett is an aficionado of Lovecraft and Phillip K. Dick, and affianced to digital media.
The poems vary greatly in style. Nicholas Murray’s six short contributions feature everyday vexations, from standing on a train station concourse to being bitten by someone else’s dog (for which he apologises, the most stereotypically ‘English’ moment in the book). He notices small things, and honours the 19th century clergyman-diarist Francis Kilvert, who did too – “…the man of God whose fine gift / for seeing things lights the day / As sunshine after sudden rain”. He looks into a painting of a Lancashire landscape, and remembers its departed artist. He is abashed by the force of nature, in the form of a night wind which blew away rooftiles, and “glib proposals”. He then eavesdrops on an imagined conversation between James Joyce and Percy Wyndham Lewis, as verbose Irishman and Vorticist Englishman consider quantity, and the urgent need to stir things up, to dissolve “the solid shell”.
A Robert Lee’s contribution, ‘From…’, addresses Englishness, coherent but complicated, encapsulated by the “multi-there” and “multi-then” of his own odyssey from 1950s Manchester via London, America, and Japan to 2022’s Spain. “The initial from takes on lengthening distance…” while everything changes and he changes with it, but remains in some ways strangely the same. ‘From…’ is more impressionistic jottings than verse, yet it ably conveys diverse textures and odd connections – between Manchester, Lancashire and Manchester, New Hampshire – between London periods and London postcodes – between the Kents of Chaucer and supermarkets – between the island mentalities of Britain and Japan, and the “inside outsider” status of being a Spanish-speaking Englishman in Spain. In him, national nostalgia seems in permanent tension with what Germans call Fernweh – ‘farsickness’, a wish to see far-off places – and perhaps he needed to get away to understand where he had come from. As Kipling asked, “what should they know of England who only England know”? Lee at least has come “to relish the from and the to: England’s away-day, England’s away-life”.
Adams’ poem ‘Roadside Diner, Shropshire’ is less sanguine, a contrast between the heartbreaking hills of Housman, and the plastic-bottle spotted county Adams and companion view from a bleary café window, downing terrible food while “vital, indifferent” traffic dashes by, heading nowhere purposefully. This England is, he repines, “an absent people, a civilization surrendered”, and sometimes he feels like a “lone journalist remembrancing a defeated land”. Lack of legacy nags and nags at him, as he sees sunning girls arising and going “back to life, leaving nothing of themselves” – fewer traces than even the evanescent, underestimated flowers of May.
Daniel Gustafsson’s ‘Bulbs’ strikes a brighter botanical note, reminding us that even the gnarliest corm in the coldest ground pushes green spears upwards each spring, offering potential for beauty and self-realisation. His work is rhizomed in Yorkshire, a county whose notoriously crumbling Holderness coast offers plentiful metaphors for erosion of substance. “The guards have let us down”, Gustafsson warns, political leaders and opinion-formers mere “architects of entropy”, letting everything slide into the abyss out of sheer carelessness. “We’ve seen our footings fall / to sludge… have seen, through slurred decrees and sleights of hand, / a state of blank forgetfulness / usurp the patterned sand.” Spurn Point at the northern tip of the Humber could be nationally emblematic, a sandy spur soon to be an island, near where the great port of Ravenspur once saw kings land, and monks build monumentally. The East Riding’s erosion is symbolic to him of a country’s “great diminishing”, as a former “common ground” is washed across by shallow sloganeers, who impose their views on others like some postmodern Morality Police.
Gustafsson’s lyrical wistfulness is given a more combative edge by Benjamin Afer, whose ‘Lines on an English Street’ express feelings of inner exile, the author feeling alienated from his ancestral domain by demographic changes as symbolized by ethnic restaurants – “a surfeit of whiffs”, from an alphabet soup of eateries in High Streets that have somehow become Grand Bazaars. “It’s a solitary walk the Englishman beats / In the swelling crowds of the English streets”, he insists bleakly, notwithstanding possible economic upsides: “The happy ringing of tills and drumming feet / Make a merchant at home on the English street.”
The collection closes on an unexpected crescendo, with four extracts from larger works by Rahul Gupta. The author, who holds a doctorate in alliterative verse, and is undertaking a major translation project from Old Norse, is alive with logophilic intensity, pouring torrents of words onto pages as if upending some wonderfully capacious cornucopia. Familiar words are deployed in unexpected ways, unfamiliar ones summoned from OE word-hoards where they have lain too long asleep, and new ones are smithed – and all are marshalled to striking mythopoeic purpose.
Gupta’s chief area of operations is the post-Roman, pre-English world, when Angles, Celts, Jutes, Saxons and Scandinavians moved across claimable spaces between downfallen towns, where horse-masters could be kings and stones sacred, and ravens battened on bodies at real battles whose locations we have lost, and which we barely now remember even as names. This is ‘Matter of Britain’-territory, Gog Magog-country, the Logres that lies under even the ugliest parts of everyday England, giving the least imaginative modern Englishman some vague sense that he belongs in some continuum. This epic subject – so liable to be conventionalised and sentimentalised – gains vastly in vitality at his hands.
‘A Norse Étude’ is a combat scene condensed from all the hyperboreal epics, from Heimskringla and Orkneyinga to Beowulf and the Battle of Maldon, imagining “horny-nebbed” hooded crows descending on men falling under a hail of “Flanged arrows as flinder- / fledges leapt from edges / over shields, bows shrilling, / when shank-deep was dankness / of gore”. Poems were – and are – also weapons in these wars of all against all, as tribal minstrels interpret and invent legends, weaving words “from that web of swords”, trying to forge the future by capturing the past.
‘The Turn and Fall of Leaf’ could be a title from Tolkien (to whom Gupta has been likened), a lambent disquisition on autumn, its colours and significances, its glories and sadness, as the glowing greenwood goes glorious, then brown and blighted. Winds pick up and shiver the timbers, and their chlorophyll clothes weep to the far-below floor. Secret glades are shockingly made naked, and rides are mounded deep in dry detritus – “pathways choked, by parched masses: / crinkled chamoisy, crunched underfoot / as shuffling drifts. With shift and ruffle / They enswathe the sward”.
Time for ‘The Onset of Winter’, with clouds and winds as “sky-skirmishers, obscure armies / of ill omen”. The Wild Hunt passes, baying and foaming hounds headed by Herne, antler-masked “wood-warlock of the warrior-band”, in elemental pursuit of white harts from heraldry, while berserkers and whippers-in howl and scream and “chew the shieldedge” in frenzy. And then – the chase passes and the thrumming hoofbeats recede into infinity. Nature exhales, and all is suddenly motionless. Overhead, “Hunter and Hound are hovering still” in a sky diamonded with stars and a moon of mother-of-pearl.
At other times, winter deals harsh hail and sleet to punish the patient earth – “gravel-grain that grows no harvest”. Yet other days, snowfall hushes all noise, subdues all striving; a giant Cold Genius walks the whitening land with his finger to his lips, casting crystals of infinite variety indifferently over the quick and the dead, obliterating boundaries, ivorying all the colour-fields. “All wear his harness: / ironhardened earth” and “The ice tightens / Wonderfetters”.
But there is release at last, as even in winter there is the possibility of warmth. In ‘The Midwinter Sun’, the “all-tending orb” suddenly rides high and reaches down with effortless sensuality. He “…drives the spore: he inspires the bud, / as the twig whitens, to untwist her whorl: / he parts her petals; the pollen to smoulder / from flaunting catkins”. Blinking, yawning animals emerge from hibernation, hungry for the starting grass, conscious of urgent impulses that make the male hen harrier seek out multiple mates, send hares careering across champaigns, adders intertwine Gordianally, and unsettle cattle in crew yards. The poet tracks Phoebus lovingly through his golden ascents, then Wheel of Fortune downturns, as the “traitor-barons…eclipse the glory of his lion’s mane”, as so often before. The uncertain sun sinks into the sea, and troubled men set out in tiny boats, “travailing westward /… on benighted tides, / In search of the dawn.” Like all his others, this is a virtuosic performance, a welcome reminder that there is still blood in the tradition.
The contributors to this volume could all be seen like Gupta’s metaphorical sailors, navigators of unknown waters, seeking Sol-ace in a gathering dark, reaching for verse to reverse eclipse. If sometimes their reach falls short, at other times it does not, and always they are honourably-intentioned. This public-spirited Parnassian project can be judged a success if even a few of the many other anxious among the English are inspired to poetry in their turn.
DEREK TURNER is the editor of The Brazen Head, as well as a novelist (A Modern Journey, Displacement, and Sea Changes) and reviewer. His first non-fiction book, Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire, was published June 2022. Some of his writing may be found at www.derek-turner.com He is also on Twitter – @derekturner1964
The Last Emperor of Mexico: A Disaster in the New World
Edward Shawcross, Faber & Faber, January 2022, 336 pages, £20
KEN BELL reflects on a Mexico that might have been
Mexico has only ever had one ruler who cared about the Indians and he was shot by order of an Indian. Mexican humour always has a deadpan kick. How that ruler, an Austrian, ended up in Mexico only to die there is the subject of Edward Shawcross’ book, and a very good account it is of the whole ludicrously tragic event.
This disaster came in three acts, with the first being set in Mexico and created by the local politicians. The country became independent of Spain in 1821 and within 20 years had gone through 11 presidents, only one of whom had completed his term in office. Mexico had also managed to have an emperor who didn’t last long, either, before being shot [EDITOR’S NOTE: Agustín of Mexico, reigned 1822-3]. In the 1840s a lost war with the United States had stripped the country of its northern territories, and a decade later a civil war had added to the nation’s woes.
The author overstates his case by putting most of the blame on the United States, and ignoring the role of Mexicans as the authors of their own misfortunes. For instance, Mexico could probably have fended off America’s ambitions in the 1840s by recognising the independence of Texas, which they had lost in 1836. Britain quite liked having a free trade republic that bought British goods and sold cotton to Lancashire, and with a bit of prodding from Mexico would probably have guaranteed the independence of the Republic of Texas, thus giving Mexico a buffer state. Mexico was not prepared to do that as politicians outdid each other in their bombastic determination to promise that Texas would be restored to la patria. It is perhaps not surprising Texan politicians preferred the embrace of the United States, but with a bit more Mexican astuteness it might have been averted.
At root, Mexico’s problems came about because of the internal divisions in the country, divisions intensified by the fact that political factions organised themselves within the secrecy of Masonic lodges. Thus politics became a kind of conspiracy, fought out by factions behind closed doors. Politicians outdid themselves in promising to rain hellfire down on the United States and those who would betray the nation by compromising with Washington, before trotting off to the American embassy to try and negotiate some backroom deal. Shawcross shows that out of this chaos, two political factions emerged. The first was the conservative-monarchists who had managed to lose the War of Reform in the 1850s and were gagging for revenge. The others were the liberal-republicans who wanted a federal republic in Mexico based upon the example of the United States.
For the second act, Shawcross looks at events in Europe, a factor often overlooked, especially by Mexican historians who often seem to treat the French intervention as just another act of colonialism when actually it was far more. Catholic Europe by the 1850s had become afraid of the rising power of the Protestant United States. Napoleon III was an autocrat, but of a very modern kind, who believed in constitutions and science. He was a great fan of the newly developed science of statistics and his statisticians told him that the two million people in the USA in 1763 had become ‘32 million in 1863 and calculated that in 1963 it would be 512 million.’
It was fear of the growing USA that led the French to conjure up the notion of Latin America, with themselves as the head of a Pan-Latin movement to connect Catholic Europe to Catholic America and fend off the rising USA. Thus, Mexican conservatives who wanted an empire in Mexico found a very sympathetic listener in Napoleon III and the French intelligentsia and military. Having settled on the Austrian Archduke Maximilian, it only needed a small French army to land at Veracruz, move inland to Mexico City and hang around until the new Emperor arrived to take charge in the interest of France. What could possibly go wrong?
The final act showed just how badly things could. The Mexican republicans managed to defeat the French at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. Actually, the French were only a part of the army as much of it was made up of Mexican conservatives, a fact which Mexican historians tend to overlook. Another factor in the defeat was that the bulk of the French officers and men were suffering from the affliction known as the ‘MexicanRevenge’. It is very difficult to load and fire a musket when squatting down because your bowels have turned to jelly.
Eventually, the French did manage to install Maximilian in Mexico City, which was when the Mexican conservatives discovered that they had been lumbered with a liberal who was not willing to turn the full, reactionary forces of Catholicism against Protestant heresy. Maximilian often wore traditional Mexican dress, learned some of the native languages and was quite happy to promote American-Indians to high office, with General Tomas Mejia commanding his light cavalry. Mejia was actually a brilliant cavalryman who saved Maximilian’s fortunes on several occasions before dying next to him in front of the same firing squad in 1867, but for those ultra-conservatives who wanted a reactionary empire he was an example that Maximilian was rather too modern for their tastes.
Having alienated the conservatives, Maximilian was unable to reach an understanding with his liberal enemies, headed by Benito Juarez, who was also an American-Indian, because they did not need to compromise. Divisions grew in the conservatives’ ranks and having an Austrian on the throne meant the liberals could crank up Mexican xenophobia to its fullest extent. Juarez orated about freeing the country from all foreigners while at the same time negotiating with the United States for arms and supplies. As soon as the American Civil War ended, Washington was only too happy to keep its side of the bargain, leaving unspoken the fact that Mexicans were dying to get the French out of their country only for American business to move in.
The French abandoned Maximilian for the same reasons that the American would abandon South Vietnam: it was costing them far too many men and far too much money to continue the contest. Maximilian hung on for longer than anyone expected, until eventually one of his most trusted generals crossed the lines and betrayed him for $30,000, which admittedly was rather a lot of money in those days.
During his time on the throne, a tomb began to be constructed for Maximilian, but after his death, the body was returned to Austria and the tomb was then completed and used for the body of Benito Juarez in 1872. About 25 yards away from Juarez’s tomb, is the grave of General Tomas Mejia, who died with his Emperor in 1867. After all the slaughter that had taken place, it is perhaps fitting that those two mortal enemies became neighbours in death: they were both Mexicans when all is said and done. It fell to Porferio Diaz, a liberal general, to seize Mexico by the throat following the death of Juarez and install the ‘liberal dictatorship’ that Maximilian should have created. His 35-year rule lasted until 1910, when everything fell apart again.
Shawcross has given us a solid account of this turbulent part of Mexico’s past, that surely merits a place on the bookshelves of anyone interested in the history of the Americas.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
Max Hastings, William Collins, September 2022, 576 pages, £30
KEN BELL recalls the Cold War’s most dangerous moment
2022 has been the sixtieth anniversary year of the Cuban Missile Crisis so a lot has been written about the event, with Max Hastings’ Abyss: The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962 being the year’s final offering. It is also one of the better works, especially since it is aimed, as Hastings notes, for ‘the general reader’. Thus the work assumes no prior knowledge of the events, so the first three chapters consist of an explanation of the interaction between Havana, Moscow and Washington in the decades leading to the Missile Crisis. I confess I found that a little tedious, but I suspect that I am not one of the target readers. That said, the work is footnoted throughout and comes with a very decent bibliography, so it will feature on a lot of student reading lists.
As the KGB archives were opened fairly recently in Ukraine and Serhii Plokhy mined them assiduously in 2021 to produce Nuclear Folly: A New History of the Cuban Missile Crisis there may not be much new material that is awaiting discovery. Given that, Hastings has produced a synthesis of the existing knowledge in a wonderfully readable form. Good historian that he is, he also manages to put new interpretations on much of this material.
For instance, Cuba managed to liberate herself from the American informal empire in 1959, and then went on without any outside help to destroy the American-sponsored attempt to bring the country back into Washington’s orbit at the Bay of Pigs. The USSR sent a delegation, headed by Deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan to investigate what was going on, and Fidel Castro whispered to him that he ‘had been a closet Marxist since his student days’. As Hastings points out, ‘this fragment of autobiography’ was really nothing more than a ploy for Soviet support against the USA, but Mikoyan took the bait and returned to Moscow in a state of euphoria. The USSR had waited for a country to free itself from capitalism without the Soviet army forcing it on them, and here was Cuba doing just that. As Mikoyan later exulted to Dean Rusk, Cuba made the Soviet leadership ‘feel like boys again’ with the glory days of 1917 returning in a hot climate.
In other words, Havana made the running in the relationship with Moscow and Castro had the Soviet government exactly where he wanted it, doing his bidding. That, more than anything kept Cuban independence alive down the following decades as together the USA and USSR gave Cuba ‘the right friends and the best enemies’ that she could ever hope for.
The Soviet Union could probably have signed an agreement with Cuba that would have led to the former openly placing her missiles in Cuba, just as the USA had done with Turkey. The American reaction would have been the same, but it is possible that western Europe would have shrugged and a serious division might have been created between the United States and its European clients. That did not happen because of the mercurial personality of Nikita Khrushchev, who was a born gambler, not to say outright chancer.
Khrushchev was probably the worst man to put in charge of any foreign policy, because he invariably neglected to plan for contingencies. He thought that if the missiles could be installed in Cuba then the Americans would accept the situation just as they had accepted the Berlin Wall. When Washington refused to play along, Khrushchev was caught in a bind and had to find a way to get out of the situation that his failed gamble had created.
John F. Kennedy was willing to negotiate, but he was faced with a military that seemed to be basically insane as it egged him on to war. As one such lunatic said, if there were two Americans left standing at the end and only one Russian, then America had won. It is a tribute to his patrician sense of self-belief that he was able to ignore such madness and keep the negotiations with Moscow going until the other side finally blinked.
One wonders what would have happened had America been led by a Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush during that time, instead of a man who could take time out from looming Armageddon to order an underling to smuggle a young typist who couldn’t actually type into the White House to provide him with an evening’s entertainment. Say what you like about JFK; this was the era of the Imperial Presidency, he reigned at the height of the Pax Americana and he knew how to prioritise and ensure the obedience of those around him as well as any emperor during the Pax Romana.
The world came through the crisis in 1962, which is why I am able to write this in 2022. For the reader who wants to understand the sequence of events that led to that near catastrophe I cannot praise Max Hastings’ work too highly.
KEN BELL is a Mancunian who fetched up in Mexico, and who now lives in shabby retirement in Edinburgh. He writes as a hobby in his twilight years; a fuller biography can be found at his Amazon author page
STUART MILLSON enjoys some neglected gems of British music
Why does the spiritual toll of the Great War seem to have been harsher for Britain than for any of the other European combatants, asks organist, scholar, music-writer Robert James Stove, in commentary for a booklet which accompanies a new CD on the Australian Ars Organi label. His answer is clear and convincing: ‘… the innate stability of British political institutions meant a lack of opportunities for citizens to work off their war-neuroses by revolutionary activism, as agitators did on the Continent.’ Only in a marginal way did iconoclasm and an avant-garde spirit affect Britain, post-Passchendaele: for every Vorticist there was a Vaughan Williams offering benediction, although few realised that the composer’s Pastoral Symphony of 1922 was inspired by his own experiences of service on the Western Front. (Listen more closely to the ghostly, wordless voice in the unsettling final movement…)
The new recording, a superb audio curation of British music made in the magnificent acoustic of Our Lady of Victories Basilica, Camberwell, Victoria, Australia, assembles less-well-known names from the canon of Albion’s musical renascence. Alongside John Ireland and Vaughan Williams, for example, are Thomas F. Dunhill (excerpts from his ThreeChiddingfoldPieces), Sir Walter Galpin Alcock (Westminster Abbey organist at three coronations during the high-tide of Empire) and Alan Gray (successor to Stanford in the organ loft at Trinity College, Cambridge).
All works and composers chosen by the Ars Organi Recordings for this collection have in common a profound attachment to English tonality (although Norman Fulton, at CD track 11, is a Scot). It is as if the music of our islands is a mirror-image of the (physical and psychological) architecture of the very institutions that have long-governed us. The slow-breathing, hushed voices of churchgoers, a ray of wintry light, piercing through a cathedral window like a gimlet; a sense of eyes being drawn toward the pinnacle of a Norman arch – these are some of the feelings and imaginings inspired by many of the works, some of which are ethereally-enhanced by the participation of singers Elizabeth Barrow (soprano), Brigette De Poi and Emily Tam (mezzo-sopranos), Leighton Triplow (tenor) and bass, James Emerson.
John Ireland’s TheHolyBoy and a George Herbert setting (TheCall) from Vaughan Williams’s FiveMysticalSongs are probably the best-known pieces in the entire collection. Peter Warlock’s old English carol, Adamlay Ybounden, also finds an occasional place in concerts and Radio 3 schedules. But who knows the music of the composer, whose work concludes the CD: Geoffrey Turton Shaw? A near-contemporary of Vaughan Williams, he served as a school inspector and was himself schooled by that master of church music, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Setting Milton, Ringout, yecrystal spheres/Onceblessourhumanears… Turton Shaw embodies all the virtues of his genre and world, confirming the past, present and future solidity of English music.
The music of a Welshman, Daniel Jones (1912-1993) makes up another important collection of lesser-known music from our shores, in a well-presented four-disc set from Lyrita Recorded Edition. Many will remember the remarkable ground-breaking Lyrita vinyls of old: symphonies by Bax and Rubbra, John Ireland songs, TheMagic Island by William Alwyn, and a record that particularly caught my eye when I first came across it in the record department of Foyles, some 40 years ago – Ireland’s Forgotten Rite, Legend, Mai–Dun and Satyricon – with its strange, haunting cover-artwork; a picture which hinted at the form of a landscape, with dotted colours and distances just out of reach. In fact, if I were to try to find a simple, neat description of Daniel Jones’s music, it would come close to those suggestions inspired by the Ireland graphics – although this enigmatic composer (a code-breaker during World War Two) never really embraced, at least self-consciously, folklore and the symbolism of place. He tended to think of himself as a composer who happened to come from Wales, rather than an artist who had a civic responsibility to proclaim a culture – although he did write a major choral-orchestral piece, TheCountryBeyondthe Stars, which – post-Festival of Britain – seemed to have an ambience of dreamy peninsular coasts, beacons and Black Mountains.
Perhaps the nearest he came to a home-spirit, an imprint of Welshness, was in his DanceFantasy, performed at the 1982 Proms by the (then) BBC Welsh Symphony Orchestra under Bryden Thomson – although the work still seemed somewhat set apart from Welsh dances and Celtic legends by fellow-countrymen Hoddinott, Mathias and Arwel Hughes. And it was at this concert that I briefly met the musician… As I walked around the hall at the end of the evening, making my way back to the tube station and suburbia, I spied the bespectacled composer (this one-time friend of Dylan Thomas) at the Royal Albert Hall Artists’ Entrance. Venturing over, I asked for an autograph, which was cheerfully forthcoming and written in a neat, methodical hand, with a fountain pen. An avuncular, slightly diminutive figure, Daniel Jones seemed very pleased by the performance of his own music at the Proms. (It has to be said, the Proms Planning Department has been less than generous to the composers of Wales.)
Lyrita’s new CD collection puts the music of Jones and Cambria very much on the map. Pianist Martin Jones has spent many hours in the National Library of Wales, painstakingly uncovering an almost Bach-like progression, cycle, abundance of piano works, from a neatly-crafted Capriccio of 1934, to the much more ambitious (“big stride”, was the composer’s own description) Theme, VariationsandFugue in C-sharp minor, dated 1945 – the year of Britten’s PeterGrimes and the advent of the Attlee era. Tonal, but sometimes wandering away from those clear lines; meditative, but never obscurely introverted, Daniel Jones created, it seems, pure music, for its own sake. Rigorous, never arduous, and always making the listener wonder what the next piece will bring.
A great deal of the composer’s character is also suggested by some of the photographic portraits featured in Lyrita’s CD booklet, not least the final black-and-white plate: Dan Jones, with benevolent eyes and a grin, partly concealed by the pint of bitter he is bringing to his lips. A good Welsh brew, no doubt.
CD details
Undertones of War, British Organ and Vocal Music After 1918. Robert James Stove, organ. Ars Organi, AOR004
Daniel Jones, Rediscovered Piano Works, Martin Jones, piano. Lyrita, SRCD.2396
STUART MILLSON is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists. After more than two decades living in a Kent village, he crossed the River Severn and the Black Mountains, and now writes from West Wales.