Whips and scorns
PATRICK ANDERSON
A Clip of Steel Thomas Blackburn (Mac- Gibbon and Kee 25s) Mr Thomas Blackburn was the victim of a nightmarish upbringing in clerical circum- stances occasionally reminiscent of The Way of All Flesh. His father, a canon and rural dean, had come from Mauritius, spoke with a French accent and nursed guilt feelings be- cause of a suspected Eurasian taint; his branch of the family were all stridently white and im- peccably orthodox, although there were cousins not merely figuratively beyond the pale. He projected his insecurity upon his wife, of whom he was ridiculously jealous, and also upon the small son in whose features he detected an alarmingly chronic sunburn. As a result he would sit each evening beside Tom's bed, dabbing his cheeks with lemon-juice and peroxide. In addition he encouraged A, manly Anglo-Saxon appearance and manner by getting the boy to do exercises to strengthen his chin, redden his cheeks and develop the frank, astringent hand-shake which would be appre- ciated by a visiting bishop. On special occa- sions he attached him to an electric battery and charged him with the latest thing in animal magnetism.
Meanwhile Tom's mother, the daughter of a prosperous family of Weardale farmers and in- dustrialists and herself also emotionally damaged in childhood, acted as a kind of hugging-machine, enveloping her 'darling boy' with quasi-incestuous embraces too stifling for love, hate or genuine relationships. She was, however, usually unable to prevent the endless whippings (preluded by chases, scuffles and screams) with which her husband sought to mould Tom's spirit into the religion of love. Adoring the child she did not try to understand, she had learned to support her husband by letting him win at tennis and by praising his masterly handling of the parish council, and it was only now and then that she beat upon the torture-chamber door.
In view of all this it is not surprising that Tom had an unsuccessful career at prep school and minor public school, the grander variety being regarded as altogether too sodomitical. He was a withdrawn, dream-haunted boy— 'intolerant, snobbish . . . dour, prickly,' as he puts it—who none the less had a violent and delinquent streak; for a period his aggres- siveness found an outlet in boxing and rugby football. From an early age the repressions or his parents, and their refusal to accept his imaginative vitality, had made him aware of the trolls and giants of the unconscious: some- thing rumbled beneath the floorboards or glowered beyond the trees on the lawn, 'a dimension of being . . . independent of space and time.' At sixteen he ended his father's bullying by shooting at him with his .22 rifle and scoring a deliberate near-miss. Still un- happy at Cambridge, for which he had to be crammed and where he passed his time in an alcoholic haze as a second Lord George Hell, he put an end to the proceedings by bombard- ing the master of his college with that gentle- man's collection of china dogs. A severe nervous breakdown followed and then the course of psychoanalysis through which, although it was nearly thirty years ago, he still appears to see and judge his tormen- tors.
A Clip of Steel, named after an implement provided by his father to prevent nocturnal emissions, is a short book and depends on analytical generalisations rather than on re- living the experience with the imaginative ex- pansiveness of a Denton Welch, Jocelyn prooke or Richard Church. If I find it less than totally satisfying this may be because I know Mr Blackburn as a charming companion and share with him not only certain incidents in his story—the long wait before a head- master's thrashing, for instance—but also several other points: we are the same age, hold precisely similar academic posts, work on the same committees, have both won prizes for poetry, and remember dominant mothers who led us unwittingly to the clinic and the couch. I cannot help thinking that the rich material of Mr Blackburn's life, together with his evi- dent interest as a personality, deserved much fuller treatment, but perhaps I am only arguing for my own brand of autobiography. Romantic against classic? As it is, he has given us an exceedingly intelligent and elegantly structured case-history, familiarly sex-ridden (but boyish sex is beginning to be a bore), which may be of additional use as a footnote to his poems.
Apart from such things as a brief but splen- did image of a sycamore tree, and some nice bits of comedy in the description of the prep school dormitory and the luxurious rest home for alcoholics, Mr Blackburn's world tends to be a claustrophobic one: dry and hard with retrospective bitterness, fitfully illumined by sardonic scoffing and here and there a knife- gleam of real cruelty. No politics, no atmo- sphere of the 'thirties, little social background, not much landscape and practically no places or buildings, and scarcely any general ideas which are not psychological. Very few human beings are recalled with affection or evoked by an endearing or just an enlivening particu- larity. Even a favourite dog is reduced to the priggish-sounding, 'I delighted in taking the creature for walks.' In age, admittedly, both mother and father softened, the first into some understanding (her death is movingly told); the second into sexual senility—I am not easily shockable but I cannot remember having read of a more disgusting old man. The thesis is everything. We must face up to our daimons or we spiritually die.
This analytical hardness or tidiness extends to some but by no means all of the writing. Some sentences are stilted or humourlessly pompous, 'the dubious crown of inversion was snatched from me'; some of the dialogue makes a point rather than catching a real human voice. But, intermittently, the true poet's eye is there: 'From the dithering grains of the moorland stream a slim shape twitched and arrowed.' One hopes that Thomas Blackburn will continue to explore the resources of prose but that his daimon will leave the lecturer's rostrum for the workaday world.
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