Not so much a review as a thought prompted by the introduction of 'Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets'

Roddy Lumsden, ed., Identity Parade: New British and Irish Poets (Tarset: Bloodaxe, 2010)

As soon as you make a decision that one thing as better and another worse, by however fine a gradation, and however footling the ideas or objects that are being evaluated, you acknowledge the existence of a hierarchy. You  suggest the existence, somewhere, of a ladder with the greatest at the top and the least at the bottom. And everyone does it about everything all the time. Wine-bibbers, sales-shoppers, flirts, holiday-makers, diners, minglers. And, of course, readers of poetry evaluate, compare, find some to exceed the mark and others to fall short no less than people who partake in any other kind of activity.

Why I find introductions to anthologies so fascinating is that they have to, in some way, justify the reason why (to paraphrase Coleridge) they are as they are and not otherwise. This inevitably involves a declaration, or at least a hint at, evaluative criteria. Scarce resources (bound pages and the labour and materials that go into producing, marketing and distributing them) must be allocated according to something as the quantity of raw material (poems) so vastly exceed what these resources are capable of supporting,

So where does the anthologist begin? I try to imagine a simpler, probably mythical, age when certain universally-agreed ideas could justify inclusion. ‘These poems’, the anthologist would write, ‘contain fine feelings, graceful images, moral sentiments and lofty ideals’. Everyone would agree that these were good things, and exactly the sort of thing poetry should contain. But just try pleading on their behalf now. What are you trying to pull?

Roddy Lumsden, editor of Identity Parade states that the poetry he has chosen for inclusion reflects the fact that poetry is ‘less dominated by men and more representative of this country’s ethnic mix’. He finishes rousingly: ‘it is the pluralism of contemporary British and Irish poetry which stands out in the pages of this book. Plural in its register – monologue, memoir, satire, comedy, complaint; plural in its regional and ethnic diversity; plural in its subject-matter and – moving from traditional metrics to fractured syntax, from dialect to diatribe, mirror poem to prose poem – satisfyingly plural in its form and style’. It seems that what justifies a poem’s inclusion is that it – or its author – is in some way different to other poems or poets that are included. This makes me uneasy because (this seems so simple I hesitate to write it) it does not acknowledge that it’s inevitable to like some poems more than others.

I write this (I even think this) with immense trepidation, self-doubt, and the expectation at every turn of a proof that I am Very Wrong. Two recent occurrences buttress me. One is hearing a student in a class I taught reading a line of Geoffrey Hill (‘September fattens on the vine’) and saying ‘That’s what poetry is for me, the sound of those words’. A large proportion of the others instinctively nodded their assent: it was what poetry was for them too. The second was an occasion recently at a friend’s house. My friend’s brother didn’t read poetry often, but he had studied Yeats at school. Did I know the poem about the house burnings? He meant ‘In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markiewicz’, one of my favourites. ‘The light of evening, Lissadell / Great windows open to the south’, I said. He asked if I would recite the whole thing. Reader, I did:

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.
But a raving autumn shears
Blossom from the summer's wreath;
The older is condemned to death,
Pardoned, drags out lonely years
Conspiring among the ignorant.
I know not what the younger dreams —
Some vague Utopia — and she seems,
When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,
An image of such politics.
Many a time I think to seek
One or the other out and speak
Of that old Georgian mansion,
mix pictures of the mind, recall
That table and the talk of youth,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,
All the folly of a fight
With a common wrong or right.
The innocent and the beautiful.
Have no enemy but time;
Arise and bid me strike a match
And strike another till time catch;
Should the conflagration climb,
Run till all the sages know.
We the great gazebo built,
They convicted us of guilt;
Bid me strike a match and blow.

He wanted to hear it again because he, like me, had at one point been entranced by it. Because for him, as for me, it is one of those works that (in the phrase of Seamus Heaney) connects the ear and the nervous system.

So do I think it’s wrong for the diversity of the backgrounds of the authors to be a criterion for inclusion? Actually, no. I think it is important to publish the work of people of all backgrounds so that all people can find something that answers their own experience in literature. A thought experiment: I pick up an anthology that has, like Identity Parade, eighty-five poets. Like Identity Parade, it has photos of the all of the poets smiling or brooding above their work. (An interjection: why photographs? Would an anthology showcasing new British short story writers have their photo over their work? Maybe it would. I’m not sure that makes it any better, though). Anyway, on with the experiment: I flick through and see that every last one of the eighty-five is white and male. Yes, reassuringly, I find that I would be horrified.  'The chauvinist', I would sneer at its editor, and I would think myself his more tolerant, more open-minded better. I am not critical of the identity of the author being a consideration; I am unsettled by the emphasis that is put on it. We should not be shy about saying that the sounds of poems exist and matter independently of almost all other criteria and that these, more than anything else, determine how and how long poems will live.

Review: John McGahern's 'Love of the World'

John McGahern

Love of the World: Essays (2009)

Edited by Stanley Van der Ziel

John McGahern was perhaps the greatest Irish novelist. His output was not prolific, but the luminous, unshowy clarity of his writing, and the perfectly cadenced sentences with which he built his worlds, justify comparisons with Gustav Flaubert. His two last, and most acclaimed, novels Amongst Women (1990) and That They May Face The Rising Sun (2002), are not driven by their plots, but instead gather momentum through their attentiveness to the subtle, variable ways in which human relationships are spun, and the cosmic reflection of these patterns in the changing seasons. It is this quality of slow intensity which perhaps explains why, for years after reading his works, his readers are left with the vivid pictures that they summon: a prospective son-in-law’s fumbled attempt at familiarity, or an old man playing a final, astonishing game of darts. McGahern did not seek out great events, but exalted the everyday through the steady, unquestionable power of his rhythmic sentences. During the course of this collection of essays and reviews, he frequently repeats Thomas Aquinas’s statement on the value of the image: ‘The Image is a principle of our knowledge. It is that from which our intellectual activity begins, not as a passing stimulus, but as an enduring foundation.’ There are few more certain ways to intuit the truth of this phrase than to read McGahern’s short stories and novels.

This collection will come as a revelation to all the readers who have loved his books. Those whose inner ear became accustomed to the penetrating sanity of his voice, and who have not found his equal since his death in 2006, now have a collection of his thoughts on literature, places, people, society and history.  Though there will be no more novels, the books McGahern reviews and the quotations he chooses guide the reader towards the writers that inhabited the novelist’s own mental landscape. Alistair MacLeod appears repeatedly, as does the vivacious, humane intelligence of John Butler Yeats. It is by such triangulation that the process McGahern described as ‘readers finding their writers’ continues.

Though McGahern was harmed by censorship – his second novel was banned and he lost his job as a teacher as a result –  the experience did not make him rancorous. The sanity of his approach to reading, learned from the negative example of the famously acid literary world of mid-century Dublin, is salutary for reviewers and critics today: ‘we [McGahern and his friends] were inclined to avoid the word “literature” like the plague. There were just books that were well written, that cast light and gave pleasure or solace. Even in literary circles of the time, there was a kind of didactic judgemental violence that I link with a censorship mentality. Surely the good manners of the mind require us to put aside a book we do not like with regret, not venom’ (pp. 97 - 98).

There is no need for such a caveat to apply to this book. The only question is whether, after his death, a new generation of readers will come to know his work. There are signs that his novels, so underappreciated for so much of his life, are getting the attention they deserve. A summer school takes place in Ireland each year and Hermione Lee’s recent essay on his work was given pride of place in the TLS. Although I do not think The Pornographer (1980), an examination of the quandaries, dodges and epiphanies of a young writer in Dublin, has yet been given its due as a novel, The Barracks (1963) is recognised as a precocious first work and his final two are acknowledged masterpieces.

When I sent a copy of That They May Face The Rising Sun to my grandmother, who lives near McGahern’s hometown, she praised the way ‘he captures the speech of the Leitrim people perfectly.’ Like so many other Irish writers in the twentieth century, McGahern’s renderings of the life of his area might be considered his defining achievement. The Leitrim that appears in so many of his works becomes an everywhere. A story from one of the essays, inspired by overhearing an Enniskillen barman’s mockery of the quietness of Leitrim, tells us at once about McGahern’s feelings towards his part of Ireland, and also about his own wide reading: ‘I like to remember and imagine John Walter Cross (whose cousin, Leland Duncan, took remarkable photographs of Leitrim in the late 1880s and 1890s), sitting in an Oxford tea-room soon after George Eliot’s death and overhearing a group of students mocking her seriousness. In their ignorance they might as well have been talking about Belcoo or Leitrim. As he left the tea-room, Cross approached their table. ‘Excuse me for intruding, but she wasn’t like that at all. She was serious but she was also great fun. I was married to her’ (p. 26).

Houses and creativity: an interview

This is an interview with the novelist Jenni Mills about how a house she lived in has affected her writing.

Jenni Mills – Palmers Hill

Palmers Hill is a house on a hill in a village called Hagley, quite a way beyond the outskirts of Birmingham in the Worcestershire countryside. When we moved there I was eighteen and though we didn’t live there for very long, and though it’s not a house I have ever written about, it informs a lot of what I write. 

Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca begins ‘Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again’, followed by this wonderful description of going along a long drive that’s overhung with rhododendrons. Palmers Hill was a bit like that – you went down a tiny little lane - there was no through road – and through gateposts and up a drive that wound up the hillside between great overgrown shrubs. You came out on a tarmaced forecourt and the house was in front of you, covered in whiteish stucco and looking very much like the grand 1920s house of a rich, self-made man.

It is a big, sprawling place with about five acres of grounds. It had a very thick oak door – a modern version of a solid country oak - with a little glass lozenge you could peer through. You walked into a tall entrance hall with an imposing staircase that went up to a sort of gallery. I may have this wrong, because it’s partly the house I’ve dreamed about for the last forty years.  When we moved there, there was a row of bells for summoning servants, but they didn’t last more than five minutes because my father had them all ripped out. My bedroom was a former servant’s bedroom. Originally there had been a green baize door at the side of the entrance hall where the servants came through. There was a cook who may or may not have lived in. There was a cook’s sitting room next to the kitchen, a tiny little sitting room my granddad would sit in when he came to visit. There was definitely a back bedroom where you could have put a maid. There was a chauffer, who lived over the garage in a room which became mine.

There was then a very big dining room which had an enormously long table in it, which we used to sit at one end of, looking fairly stupid as I recall. Then beyond that at the end of the hall was a beautiful light-filled living room which looked out the grounds of the house. There was a swimming pool in my day, though there isn’t any longer. I happen to know because I’ve seen the estate agent’s particulars. I haven’t mentioned the aircraft hangar.

The story is really sad and someone has written a book about it. I haven’t read it, but it would fill in a lot of the gaps in the story for me. What I’ve heard is the local legend, which probably isn’t true. The mythology my family inherited when we bought the house was that it was built by a wealthy Midlands industrialist, who I think had made his money in aircraft parts or armaments. It was definitely something warfare-related. He had two sons, both of whom flew in the war, and both of whom were killed in fairly rapid succession. And his daughter, who was devoted to these two lads, went mad and was eventually incarcerated in the local mental home. Their father couldn’t stand the sadness of it and shot himself in the wood at the bottom of the garden. We didn’t know this until we moved in, but as soon as my mother went to buy eggs from the local farm our neighbours took great pleasure in recounting the story of what had happened and saying ‘Of course, the house is haunted’. Which I think it was, in a funny sort of way.

'This is My House!': A Thought on Having, Habit and Habitat

'This is My House!': A Thought on Having, Habit and Habitat

The House That Made Me: Boy George, Channel 4

9pm, Thursday 9 December 2010.

In this television series, the production company return to the house or flat in which a celebrity lived as a child and re-create certain rooms by using photographs and the recollections of members of the celebrity’s family. For George O’Dowd (Boy George) they recreated a green-hued, shockingly wallpapered 1970s front room in a council-owned semi in Eltham. They could have got him to look through photographs, but the aim was something more Proustian. The programme’s format seemed to tacitly acknowledge that are formed of experiences that are received from all our senses – from the feel of objects, from the acoustics of rooms, from background noise. It was as if, to steal a line from Gore Vidal, they had set O’Dowd knee-deep in madeleines awash with tea. The moment I found most interesting was O’Dowd’s recollection of his father’s habitual yell of rage: ‘This is my house!’, then his memory of shouting the same words at a boyfriend during an argument. A lightbulb flicked on: he realised the source of this response.

I use the word ‘habitual’ to describe his father’s words deliberately as there seem to be very few forks on the etymological road between ‘habit’ and ‘habitat’. I also write ‘seem’ deliberately as the OED, spoilsport literalist that it is, has ‘habit’ as the descendant of habēre, ‘to have, to be constituted, to be’ and habitat as from a separate root - habitāre, ‘to dwell’. The parallels between being and dwelling have been discussed by Martin Heidegger and I can’t get sidetracked into writing about that here. (Though I do think I can now claim the world record for the swiftest leap between Boy George and Martin Heidegger). I also don’t want to be too easily put off the ‘habit / habitat’ line of thought by etymology. My interest in this moment came from two ideas. The first is the fact that a place prompted O’Dowd to a realisation of the origin of his own behaviour. The second is the idea that a state of life (owning a house in which another lives) brings with it unexamined, inherited ideas and – importantly – that with these ideas come words (‘this is my house!’). Does what we have control what we say? This carries the unsettling suggestion that possessions can make us the unconscious, and therefore the unwilling, re-creators of previous times, and even of other people. What is 'habit' but an action that does not require the pressure of will? A habit is not a million miles from being a form of automatism. What we own may shape our words and therefore our lives in ways we rarely consider: what we own may perform us. Elizabeth Bowen had something similar in mind when she wrote of ‘living under the compulsion of the furniture’.