Fifty Fifty

Dear Michael,

I hope this won’t be a literary letter, but I have a thing in mind that I want to release, and, rooting round for responsive recipients, I thought of yourself. You’ll know how I worry, that the books of mine, which you publish, sell so seldom; and that I’m improperly sensitive to adverse reviews, when they’re mean-spirited and ignorant. Well, these past few days have cleared my mind as to a number of matters along those lines.

To a considerable extent, one writes from a ‘blind spot’ – and in obedience to impulses that come seemingly from nowhere. But I’m beginning to ‘see’. It probably started, this seeing, in Berlin: I had to give a reading at the American Academy, so wrote a brief preamble, indicating that I was a polite poet – that my language was polite, at least. I might have realized there and then, but did not, that politeness could be precisely what offends reviewers in England who, wittingly or not, mistake me for a ‘poshocrat’. Probably I should take a few steps back now.

The Thirties spawned those gallant pinko poets who, as tail-enders of a British bourgeoisie, wanted to disavow their class and join the proletariat. This entailed some ill-considered, but at the time commendable, vituperation against ‘individualism’: the Marxist jargon crammed the cortex of young poets who had no political experience, but could theorize freely about revolution, and all that. My generation had the task of extracting something fresh from the bourgeois rhetoric – or its lingo, its total linguistic horizon.

We saw the revolutions fizzle out, Stalinism prevail, dissidence a difficult option, or the only option. Our poets were not proles, but the victims, like Mandelstam, or else, for me, foreign poets such as Seferis or St John Perse, who’d never been subjected to the pinko fiddle-faddle of the English stripe: I was exogamic.¹

At the same time, the class structure was changing. ‘Larkin’ (I put the name in quotation marks because I mean a mood not the man) was on top: craftsman, depressive, catcher of the wry mood, a real downer, I suppose? And once the changes got going, my sort of English (developed entirely apart from Eng. Lit. and what my good contemporaries knew) became increasingly distinct from the utilitarian grey idiom of suburban intellectuals crouched over their pints. For me, Côtes du Rhône, pastis, & whiskey. For them the demotic, for me, I fear, the mandarin. – And isn’t English still divided along such lines? (Marius is Mandarin, anyhow; and Tomlinson, for better or worse, likewise.)² The political dimension, meanwhile, had become for yours truly anything but uninterestingly English: I got intrigued by Germany; my political education came through, say, Kunert, earlier through people at Bush House (Erich Fried, Christiane Hansen).³ And the gist was that transformations in society are apt to throw onto thrones the vilest Philistines, not philosopher kings; so the Hope was dashed, and one’s friends, if not on the run, were under interrogation everywhere.

I’m telescoping decades here. For I come to a certain truth now. Curse Bourgeois and Philistine as one may, the poetqua-artist (as a special and occasionally inspired human type) walked as a resistant individual through the century of revelation and massacre. The ‘vulgar Marxist’ demotion of the individual had its heat, historic necessity, no doubt, but it was proved wrong, a metaphysical error and, even, a misprision of the legend of history. What was in question was not the individual as Tom, Dick and Harry, or as artist, but the false sublimations that individualism had driven into social discourse. And, hereabouts, the sexual came into the picture, notably in England. If individualism, inspired by renaissance ideals and Christianity, was intent on sublimating sperm into spirit, the English hadn’t done a successful job of it, at least as regards some social implications. But the mess could not be cleared away by a team of homosexual bourgeois-individualist poets charging into the proletariat in search of lovers. That was rather a freakish phase (the Thirties) in a series of transformations still ongoing, and complicated enormously by the influx of Commonwealth citizens after 1950, whose mores didn’t rhyme with either working-class (now middle-class?) or upper-crust modes of repression. What a difficult story… But to cut it short: individualism underwent a deep mutation, and one symptom of that was the division internal to the grand or small outreaches of the English language. At least I now think that I was saddled with the language of high individualism, and that I’ve really tried to extract some honey out of it. (I’m aware that the mixed metaphor indicates what a paradox the task entailed.) Of course, everyone went his or her own way, all the ways being critically assessed, more often than not, on grounds not of an idiom as such, but of subjectmatter, orientation, content. Davie strikes me as a peculiar case here: how come he so seldom saw that poetry might be intelligent without being intellectual (or intellectualist)? Hughes hyperbolized and ferocified the language. Larkin cut it down to size; very parochial it became, as English folks prefer. Tomlinson is another intellectualist. Well, those were some of idiomata that were being extracted from an individualist discourse still untouched, really, by the ‘demotic’ now current, or only bouncing off it.

So the language track, snarled as it is from passage through the last fifty years, can be seen to be divided. Whatever else the other track entails, the one I’m on is ‘polite’, which doesn’t mean at all that it’s not bumpy. Certainly my immersion in other languages, other cultures, and my years in a foreign domain, have relieved me of pressure from shifting patterns in the British class-conflict; but my polite English is not the idiom of my detractors, which is precisely why they so viciously or vapidly deplore my endeavours (Reading in the TLS, Lovelock in Oasis).⁴

Perhaps I should keep this sort of meditation to myself? But no, this time I won’t. Because you just might, after all, appreciate a letter that has nothing to do with business.

I haven’t dressed these thoughts up in the magisterial complications, let alone the dialectical subtleties, of a regular essayist. Possibly, too, everything I’ve said is and already was as plain as a pikestaff, and I might have simply been slow on the uptake? It’s easy to forget about British history here. – I was only reminded of it, these past few days, by Frank Kermode’s lectures in History and Value: what a fine, patient and generous mind he has. Inexhaustible attention, and no fuss. What a gentleman! I hope he is still going strong. I’d like to send him my Twenty Tropes, but have no address.⁵

I’m wondering if I have omitted, from the above, a whole slew of burning issues? Was I only poking around in the ashes?

Dear Christopher,

I am terribly sorry for the long delay in replying to your excellent letter of 7th May outlining what you take to be the reasons for the response – or lack of response – to your work. We have had the Literatures of the Commonwealth Festival to deal with and it is now over with a hideous aftermath.⁶

I have been having thoughts not unlike yours though not quite so located in the reception of my own work. The reception of your work and that of a number of other writers inspired by continental and American modernism is extremely vexing. It is as though my generation has been succeeded by a generation without historical roots. My generation gave up God and this generation has given up history. There is very little to keep us on this planet now.

My concern at the moment is a simple one: will the usual pendulum swing occur or, as appears more likely by the day, will the swing towards populism and anti-intellectualism continue? As image-culture and TV continue to alter the nature of imagination in this country and, I suspect, throughout Europe and America, is there any chance for attentive readership to re-develop in any but the most marginal way? The loss of the Classics and in this country the loss of second languages are indications of a shift away from the philological in which the culture that you value and that I value is rooted.

There are no strategies for dealing with this I think. The only way in which one could increase readership would be to appeal to the mean and that, I think, would be a form of copout quite intolerable to any real writer or artist.

I owe you another letter and I will write it soon.

In 1991 Christopher Middleton described most of the poems in an anthology he was reviewing as ‘dilated anecdotes’: ‘Whatever can have happened,’ he asked, ‘to the understanding that poetry – and not only at outer limits – universalises words, or works and plays words up to a condition of clearest starlight?’ Most of what he wrote in prose underlines the difference between his ‘polite’ sense and the prevailing demotic as outlined in his pained and candid letter here.

He was a prolific writer, and Carcanet published many more of his books than we could sell. At the launch of his Collected Poems, I presented him with an early copy of the 720-page tome. He took it with one hand and with the other handed me the manuscript of his next collection. Collected Poems was not a monument, a final payment as it were. In 2014 Carcanet repeated the monumental gesture with a Collected Later Poems (440 pages). Again, there was more to come. Sheep Meadow Press published Nobody’s Ezekiel (2015), 48 further pages.

When I first published him in Poetry Nation in 1975, I wanted to see whether I liked the work. The best way to do that was to edit and print it and see how it stood up. When he submitted work for book publication in 1974, I asked other poets for advice. They urged against it. He was eccentric, Germanic, experimental. I kept re-reading The Lonely Suppers of W.V. Balloon and could not bring myself to reject it.

John Ash, The Anatolikon & To the City

John Ashbery, Chinese Whispers

Patricia Beer, As I Was Saying Yesterday: essays, edited by Sarah Rigby

Sujata Bhatt, A Colour for Solitude

Caroline Bird, Looking Through Letterboxes

Anthony Burgess, Revolutionary Sonnets and Other Poems, edited by Kevin Jackson

David Constantine, Hermione Lee and Bernard O’Donoghue (eds), Oxford Poets 2002: an anthology

John Donne, Selected Letters, edited by P.M. Oliver

Antony Dunn, Flying Fish

Elaine Feinstein, Collected Poems and Translations

Ford Madox Ford, Critical Essays, edited by Max Saunders and Richard Stang

John Gallas (ed), The Song Atlas: a book of world poetry

Jorie Graham, Never

John Heath-Stubbs, The Return of the Cranes

Malcolm Jack, Sintra: a glorious Eden

Dawson Jackson, Selected Poems, edited by Nicola Simpson

Elizabeth Jennings, New Collected Poems

Gabriel Josipovici, Goldberg: Variations

Sidney Keyes, Collected Poems, edited with a memoir by Michael Meyer

Mimi Khalvati, The Chine

Edward Lucie-Smith, Changing Shape: new and selected poems

Chris McCully, The Country of Perhaps

Andrew McNeillie, Now, Then

Robert Minhinnick, After the Hurricane

Edwin Morgan, Cathures

Edwin Morgan (trs), Beowulf

David Morley, Scientific Papers

Sinead Morrissey, Between Here and There

Les Murray, Poems the Size of Photographs

John Henry Newman, Selected Writings to 1845, edited by Albert Radcliffe

Mary O’Malley, The Boning Hall: new and selected poems

Laura Riding and Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry & A Pamphlet Against Anthologies, edited by Patrick McGuiness and Charles Mundye

Michael Schmidt (ed), New Poetries III

Peter Scupham, Collected Poems

Joe Sheerin, Elves in the Wainscotting

Jon Silkin, Making a Republic

Gregory Woods, The District Commissioner’s Dreams

William Wordsworth, The Earliest Poems 1785–1790, edited by Duncan Wu