Bad lines
Andrew Crozier
The Memoirs of Uncle Harry, Tony Connor (Oxford University Press £1.50) New Confessions, Anthony Thwaite (Oxford University Press £1.50) Eight Sections, William Radice (Seeker and Warburg £2.20) Ways of Approaching, John Riley (Grosseteste Review Books 54p) Taken as a group these four books register something of the confusion about the nature of poetic language now prevalent in England. I'm not attributing blame entirely to poets however; much of it rests with publishers who appear to think that an abnormally figurative diction, larded and flabby, cut up into roughly equivalent units to lend it the lines to squeeze showily into a flimsy formal corsetry is the beginning and end of the matter. Significantly up-market from the kind of stuff advertised beside the escalator, this sort of writing has the mystique of the prestige product, but isn't really up to being seriously promoted. Blurb writers for poetry don't presumably write down to their meagre audience, but the disparity between claims made on the packaging and the actual contents of most books of poetry, issued by even the more reputable of our general publishers, is so astounding that I assume the editors responsible for poetry lists are either incompetent or uncaring, and that the blurb must often be a desperate last-minute attempt to mitigate disaster.
This state of affairs would be had enough were it a circumstance of publishing only, but the package is part of the product, and there are more than enough poets who show themselves to be adept packagers, offering work that is abstruse without being difficult, affected but without feeling, abetting and perpetuating an audience which is a lazy and bogus elite. I tend to think that poetry is one of the authentic high arts, and that one can in consequence speak of its audience in terms of an elite, but as such it will be an elite of attainment, with the intellectual and emotional fibre to sustain its alertness in reading. I'm not ignoring of course those ways in which poems themselves constitute experience. But the poetry I'm complaining about doesn't offer the stimulus to keep alive the mind of a gnat.
Tony Connor's work has always been a modest exception to this state of affairs. The foreword to The Memoirs of Uncle Harry indicates that their eponymous subject was an actual relative who died in an insane asylum some years before the author's birth. The text itself makes little direct reference to this person, instead its one hundred and forty or so sections are governed by a rather indefinite "He" who is made the subject of a variety of situations. His predicates tend towards the precarious and the sordid, and could be read to evoke a specific social milieu, but I am inclined to see this book as more directly concerned in a parabolic way with themes of relationship and identity. The writing relies extensively on a series of defining qualitative abstractions (indignities, mediocrity, loyalty, remorse and so on) which are deployed in. a rather simple and predeterminate fashion.
The norm of the writing is the prose period, and the language is able to be clean and unadorned largely in consequence of this interior mode of organisation. The linear division of the sentences is fundamentally a means of rhetorical pointing, so that emergent irornes are not to be seen as functions of a complete verbal situation. Rather they occur locally, so that specific ironies can be situated and controlled from point to point. Despite the vigour of its local inventiveness the writing is beset by its static psychology and a refusal to allow dramatic characters to generate them selves autonomously. One gets the feeling that the poet himself is the unadmitted hero of these poems, and that he has secured maximum freedom for himself, as dramatis persona rather than writer. Connor's position is, of course, radically anti-heroic, and it is possible to recognise the rationale for his procedure while believing that it tends to involve him in an activity which is essentially accretive and arbitrary. There is a dogged persistence running through the whole book which .constitutes its eventual imaginative shape; it can be accepted and even admired a little because it asks so little for itself.
But whereas Connor is elusive within the terms of domestic-and family circumstance, so that we can feel a quite powerful genetic bond between himself and Uncle Harry, and his language is non-personal and utilitarian, Anthony Thwaite's New Confessions adopt theiroccasion from the Confessions and flaunt a classy personal eloquence. This book is almost completely spurious, The Augustinean text is not used but. exploited as a commodity or prop with which the author performas a series of not particular ly deft feints in a setting he has made his own, a vaguely exotic North Africa cluttered with the derelict and portable remnants of a noble past which now, untenanted by the inhentors of the tradition it represents, serves as the occasion forprivate ironic reflections. As this is a place entirely of the mind the reflections are unmotivated and constitute rather an unmediated expression of a tradition's spiritual decadence. Peeping coyly from behind its Augustinean mask, then hurriedly reapplying it, the writing crumples beneath its load of pseudo-significance into a series of desperate attempts to manipulate an 'interesting' verbal surface, in the fixed belief that language and meaning can be separate activities.
William -Radice's Eight Sections on the other hand possesses a superficial energy
which is largely the product of vigorous manipulation. He evidently thinks of language as a finite set subject to non-verbal mental operations, but lacks the tact and discretion which come from an awareness of the substantial qualities of words to make arrangements that are other than turgid and bombastic. There is . a deal of adolescent sexuality topically submerged, and in fact these poems smack of a certain orianistic experimentation and are bad as experimental poetry is always bad. Each of these three books offers a version of the poet's power over language, and in each case the language as well as being alien is made out to be a pretty feeble medium. In John Riley's Ways of Approaching, one of the ma jor concerns is with language as speech, so that the poet's actual possession of language is made one of the definitions of his powers. This is a releasing and enlarging rather than a limiting contract, and enables the poet to engage with the difficulties of his situation as a writer in ways that are more than personal. Riley's poetic material is essentially the precision with which realities are registered in his writing by an act of naming which is virtually transparent. We are shown the problematic character of eloquence in the present conditions of human culture while not being denied the availability of a world that is substantially whole. I take these poems to be an act of devotion in the face of desire for such a possibility, modest, undeceived, and passionate. Riley is a serious and skilful writer whose work, over and above its other attainments is a valuable demonstration of these two qualities in the best poetry.
A.T.K. Crazier is a lecturer in modern English and American literature at the University of Sussex.
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