Wet thatch and Gaelic women poets
I am reading a book called ‘B’ait leo bean’, by Mairin nic Eoin (1998), so it is “aspects of gender ideology in the [Irish] Gaelic literary tradition”, but in Irish. (Gender is “inscne”.) This is not my field of knowledge, I am finding the Irish very difficult but it is also a good learning experience, so I want to persist. You don't find much writing which explores social divisions in the Gaelic world, as opposed to a kind of conservative blurred memory in which there were no conflicts and everyone could afford to pay their rent.
Nuala ni Dhomhnaill wrote that essay (1994) where she remembers being told often as a child “Three things you don’t want in a village: wet thatchers, close sowing, and a female poet”. The wet thatch is one put up badly so that it leaks, the wheat seeds have to be several inches apart or they will stifle each other and you won’t get any grain. As for the female poet, what problems could she cause? That was interesting but I have not been able to find any trace of this proverb anywhere else. I think the problem with female poets was that they had the ability to curse people and this left a bad memory. It is my guess that this anxiety stems from the ban-fhili’s power of curing (or admonishing and commanding?) and that the role of Gaelic poets was not simply to create poems to entertain and to please. I think this partly because of the Scottish analogies. But actually male poets could curse people (and humiliate them) so the issue isn’t cursing, in fact, but the fact that male poets had very strong alliances with the church and with (male) heads of land-owning families and this gave them status.
I forgot to record that this "cursing by proverb" didn't stop ni Dhomhnaill.
I saw a story somewhere about female poets in Scotland being buried face down so they couldn't come back to life; a quick Google search turns up this version of it: “Even as late as the end of the 17th and early 18th C, tradition records that at least two female Gaelic poetesses, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn, (of Mull) and Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh, (associated mainly with the MacLeods) when they died were said to have been buried face down due to having composed in metres that were the prerogative of the male poets.” (The source proposed is O’Baoill C, Mairghread nighean Lachlainn Song–maker of Mull, (2009, 20). I think the paraphrase has added the idea that it was using the wrong metres which brought the danger, I think this is a 21st century interpolation. I doubt O'Baoill said that.) Surely it was the ability to curse people which people were afraid of.
The website of Historic Environment Scotland has this about Mairi nic Leoid (circa 1615- circa 1707): “NicLeòid began composing while working as a nurse for the MacLeod Chief of Dunvegan in Skye but she was exiled to the Isle of Scarba because of her art. It is believed that the Chief banished her when she wrote a song that praised one of his relatives too highly. She was eventually allowed to return but on the condition that she stop writing songs."
The surname includes daughter of and is a female version of the name “Macleod”. Further: “NicLeòid is buried in St Clements church in Rodel, Harris, the village where she was born. She is thought to have been buried face down in the south transept of the church.”
(It is of interest that nic corresponds to nighean and in Irish is just ní, or Nic in front of vowels. The reconstructed Old Gaelic form is inigena, which is attested in an Ogham inscription and looks a lot more like Continental Celtic relations.) The form “nic Leoid” is standardised, but she was evidently referred to in daily speech as “Mairi nighean Alasdair Ruaidh”. Carmichael Watson's edition of her songs (the first ever to be printed) gives three versions from folklore of why she was exiled and adds a fourth which is his own speculation. The folklore is rich and we should doubt that she was literally buried face down: I guess that this was a standard tale about female poets and that as she was a female poet who had many stories told about her this one got attached along with the rest. However, we don’t know of any tales of male poets being buried face down!
Watson says “a third [version[] is that of Miss Tolmie, who suggested that it was due to fear that her over-praise of the young children of the house would bring ill-luck upon them.” He records “She directed that she should be placed face downward in the grave—" beul nam breug a chur foidhpe "; her burial-place is still known in the south transept of Tùr Chliamain, St. Clement's church in Rodel.” The phrase means “the mouth of the lies [to be] put underneath”, which could refer to flattery and over-praise. Again, the story is memorable but may not actually be true. (Variant “[Gus] beul na brèige a chumail dùinte”.)
Anne Frater did a doctorate on (Scottish) Gaelic women poets, and her essay on Mairi Nic Leoid is on-line. “Both Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh and her fellow poetess Mairearad nighean Lachlainn from Mull are said to be buried in a manner, which, in Norse times, was reserved for those believed to have been witches. Why they should have been treated in this way, when the only traditions that have come down to us about them concern their songmaking, is a mystery. Perhaps they were considered to have infringed on the domain of the bards, especially by daring, as women, to compose panegyric verse.” The story must be confined to those two poets, or Frater would have mentioned other instances of it.
In Nic Eoin’s excellent book we find matter on cursing or at least mocking. The role of cainteoir, apparently always female, is described in the Irish law codes always in negative terms. It is a role which the law does not institute or approve – we are likely to think that has a reality external to the law. Of course the idea of connecting a role in 8th C society with a proverb heard, reprovingly, in the 1940s, is rife with problems. The problem I have is that Nic Eoin records a marginal, even accursed, place being given to women poets (of the cainteor type) in the Irish law codes and this seems to connect to the “buried upside down” ruling. But the codes belong to the 8th C AD, in the text we have, and are probably older. It is very problematic to see an attitude, and correlated artistic activity, continuing for such a stretch of time. I badly need more evidence. It is fairly clear that cainteor, “woman satirist”, although literally identical with the word cainteoir “chatterbox”, is functionally a different word. It presumably comes from the “can” root, meaning “speak”. “Satirist” is a standard translation but pretty misleading, functions like cursing, humiliating, the evil eye, tell you more about the reputation of these women. (There is also a form ban-chainte.) It is frustrating that we don’t have any record of the verse they composed (or at any rate Nic Eoin does not mention it). Moreover, they were just one of a group of defined classes of poet who were disapproved of by the law.
A cainteoir deployed specialised language to fulfil functions other than that of creating beautiful verse for entertainment. If we had their verse in written form it might be hard for us to consume or even to interpret. I am also guessing that, however prominent their function of cursing, admonishing, or prohibition, this was just part of their range and might be only a consequence of a social status and associated power which they enjoyed. Verse form may have been a way of clothing significant speech– we are more interested in what that significance was than in the verbal form.
The role of priests is often to admonish, to prohibit, to condemn, and even to satirise. Surely the medieval sermon absorbed all the contents of satire as it was known in Classical times. Admonishing is just an aspect of social power. The cainteoir may have a pre-Christian origin and may have had access to supernatural forces in some form (associated with asarlaíocht, sorcery). We might think about translating the word as witch rather than satirist. A cainteoir might also have strong knowledge, eloquence, and even supernatural power – not just glittering malice.
I was expecting to find a discussion of the ‘wet thatch’ proverb cited by Ni Dhomhnaill in Nic Eoin’s book, but it is not mentioned at all. Certainly Nic Eoin is describing the ideology of gender in Gaelic literature, not in society as a whole. She does list a group of anti-female proverbs from Irish collections. I have been unable to find a context for the ‘wet thatch’ proverb.
John MacInnes (quoted by Frater) has another explanation which is bizarre and does not seem to fit well with 17th C conditions. He recalls that both poets mentioned are said to have had a female companion who accompanied them, and devised (wordless) choruses for the songs and set them to tunes. MacInnes suggests that this other women was a double, or fetch, and that they engaged in trances where the double was sent out to sea or elsewhere while the real person was unconscious, entranced. This may be part of the “face down” story without actually being true of the historical people to whom the stories got attached. (It also belongs with an RL Stevenson story called “Thrawn Janet”, which you will remember, I expect.) I like the idea that the double did not have articulate speech and so only composed the refrains, “ho ro hug o” and so on.
Nic Eoin does not quote any verse composed by (or, possibly composed by) a cainteoir. This is disappointing but it may confront us with necessary thoughts about the limited nature of the written record. This was certainly associated, very often, with monasteries, the church, and with the courts of lords and petty kings. Those were strongly male environments. We have seen that the law-codes represented a point of view which was different from what society as a whole thought, and which reproved certain professions which were apparently quite thriving. We have excellent evidence for bards passing tests, writing poetry of incredible technical difficulty and being patronised by kings and nobles. That is not to say that people who did not receive that formal training did not compose poetry – for other social purposes and in simpler, “folk”, verbal form. The point may have been that they did not compose panegyric, but other genres of poetry. The function of praise is symmetrical to the function of scolding or satire. In fact they are part of a single function, of assigning status and merit, and there is a single scale on which individuals are rated as good and bad. It is hard to imagine a person who could do honour but who could not dishonour. The symmetry breaks down when the scolding part includes cursing and laying spells on people. Obviously there is more money in writing praise poems; praise poets could become part of princely courts and their poems were able to be transcribed and collected and preserved by the families of the princes and lords. The scolding poems didn’t have the same propaganda value or the same chance of surviving in a recopied manuscript until modern times. Maybe the manuscript record, vast as it is, has specific points of view, as do the law codes and the Church.
There is a very interesting folk-tale about the Cliar Sheanchain, discussed by John Shaw. This describes an era when the Cliar (Seanchan was a 7th century Irish poet but bands of wandering poets were called Seanchan's in memory of him, Sheanchain in the genitive) used to visit land-owners, benefiting from the Gaelic laws of hospitality, and ate him out of house and home. A large and hungry band of these individuals descended upon a certain MacDonald of Clanranald one day (perhaps in the 16th century?) and demanded a feast of beef every night. Expelling them would have breached a quite fundamental law of Highland behaviour. “In any case Clanranald sent out an invitation to every bard and rhymer and lampooner on his lands, and even those on the adjoining bounds who were counted to be exceedingly sharp tongued, but nevertheless their cutting speech was only as the blow of a hammer on cold iron compared to the Cliar Sheanchain. By then they had been in Nunton for nearly a year and Clanranald was fully weary of them; they had humiliated and disgraced him, eaten and drunk up his store, his reputation was in danger, his stock diminished in the fields.” A female poet of the laird’s household caught the Cliar at a sensitive moment and composed a devastating short poem which wrapped up numerous true facts about their visit and ridiculed them in the most merciless way. A law for poets was that if they were humiliated without having the ability to reply wittily they had to leave. So that is what they did and the last food reserves of the laird were spared. What strikes me is the cursing and humiliatory aspect of the female poet’s utterance. Someone with such powers could well be a candidate for a face-down burial. What is also interesting is that the story shows a cainteoir in a favourable light, so in the way in which they would have considered themselves. To be exact the victor in the story I have just quoted is not a female poet, but the editor remarks of a whole group of such tales “Here, and in a number of other versions, it is made explicit that the poets were defecating al fresco when approached. The appearance of a woman–usually a poetess–as verbal challenger in the scenario seems to be geographically widespread and thus unlikely to be a recent innovation. In a variant recorded in 1968 from the renowned Tiree reciter, Donald Sinclair (Domhnall Chaluim Bain), the company is confronted by a woman whom he identifies as An Aigeannach, the eighteenth-century poetess, Mary MacDonald from Mull,[.]” The paper is titled ‘what Alexander Carmichael did not print”, referring to the folklorist of that name. John Shaw cites two versions of this story in which the victor is Mairi nighean Alistair Ruaidh.
The Cliar were wandering poets and the word is similar to the Welsh clerwr, a minor poet, and clera, go on a poetic tour. The word is agreed to be from a Latin word, which would be cleric or clerk in English. Perhaps literate individuals were simply called clerks in early Gaelic society.
It is fair to mention that Shaw, after collecting so many Scottish Gaelic versions of this story about the expulsion of poet-vagrants, traces the whole story back to a written Irish story, of which the first record is circa 1638. I am interested in the temporal spread (so from a manuscript in 1638 to a recital in 1968) and the story is likely to be older than the oldest (surviving) written record.
A web page on Lilias Adie, d. 1704, of Fife, says “Her intertidal grave is the only known one in Scotland of an accused witch – most were burned.” She died before coming to trial. So it doesn't look as if there are physical examples of witches being buried face down. Actually we know that Adie was buried under a huge stone but not what her burial position was. To state the obvious, convicted witches were burnt and not buried at all.
I should clarify that Nic Eoin does mention sagas in which poems by women characters feature. They are referred to as banfhaidhe, “female poets” not cainteoir. Faidh is cognate with the word vates which appears in Latin poetry and is a high grade of poet. The sagas are set in a fictional time, of late paganism, so that St Patrick can appear as a character in some. We have poems by Feidhealm in The Tain and others in texts known as Immacallam in druad Brain ocus inna banfhaitho Febuil and Tochmarc Treblainne. The verse which Nic Eoin quotes is remarkably archaic, very stiff and ornate.
Wednesday 17 April 2024
Wednesday 3 April 2024
On collapsing and spreading horizontally
sixth blog on new book
I had a spreadsheet which listed 1700 poetry titles (by single authors) coming out in 2019. I have checked the spreadsheet line by line and the total has shrunk to 1648. Which is a less pleasing number. Anyway the point is that thousands of people want to be poets, lots of them are good poets, and this makes it difficult to attack the people in charge. However tired the managers are, the atmosphere of the scene is attractive and this is such a good thing that other features slide out of view.
I have just finished proofing ‘Beautiful feelings of sensitive people’, my new book about 21st century poetry, and my feeling about it is that it is not attacking the way things happen. That sort of radical cultural criticism doesn't suit the current climate. The function of welcoming people into poetry, making them feel they have status in a real community, making them feel that they can say what they want to say, is more important. The idea that there is some much better way of doing things which is readily available and familiar to people enough that they could move into it without vast effort does not seem to hold true. The modernist thing is available, but after 50 years (or do we mean 100?) it is clearly a minority position rather than the future. Exposing people for not being properly modernist does not seem to be a convincing verbal manoeuvre. It has instead become clear that what people were really excited about, and hoping for, in the Sixties was derepression. This is quite different from modernism. And we now have it. It may look like chaos but the principle of derepression is actually a sort of module of design which has been applied everywhere to build the landscape we actually see. It is difficult to see how you can count 1650 titles coming out in one year and also complain that the scene is restrictive, conservative, repressive, elitist, etc. So if you abandon that line of argument you end up with something else. Quite possibly the ‘gatekeepers’ are tired and don’t want to defend standards, and the quality control is poor. Yes, but that is in keeping with the collective wish for derepression, and there are positive results which we can all appreciate.
That total is roughly twice the figure for titles coming out in the 1980s. The landscape was mature then, not underdeveloped, so this kind of growth is genuinely impressive. It does not argue for persistent blunders by the people with influence. The growth rate is probably understated by doing a count, because of the proliferation of Internet activity which does not use paper at all, and which would represent a much more rapid growth rate. I can't measure it but surely a lot of poets are bypassing the paper world. The count of titles does express the relationship of poetry to its budget controllers and its audience, so the economic basis. There is a relationship between the Basis and the ideology of the participants, but also it is hard to repress anything. That function is vacant.
I have just seen a post by Norman Jope where he says: "Overall, if we were to estimate that as many as 0.1% of the adult population might be writing poetry to a publishable standard – which wouldn’t be that far off the mark in Plymouth, given the extent of participation in local groups – and each of them produced, say, two poems a month (which has basically been the measure of my output since I can remember), then that would mean that, across the UK, there would be approximately 50,000 poets producing approximately 1.2 million publishable poems annually. I accept that this is a demented exercise, but it’s also an honest attempt to quantify the sheer amount of poetry that is out there now.
The extrapolation is unsecured and the category of "publishable" is shaky, but this is a valuable contribution. The level of books being published is vitally connected to the pressure of poets swarming up the beaches, and it could cause serious problems if the level of frustration rose any higher. It's very helpful to look at the pattern from the other direction and try to pick up how if 1700 books come out then that might still leave thousands of poets barred from entry.
I suppose 1650 books in a year might mean 100,000 poems. So maybe 90% of "effective" poems don't get printed in a volume? But if you add in anthologies, the percentage shifts again. And if you add magazines. I look forward to the other six parts of this promised series of seven posts.
I am reading Tim Shipman’s book on the Tory problems at the June 2017 general election. It was published in 2017 so it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. Shipman says (p.448) that “Labour won among voters with a degree by seventeen points, while the Tories won by a 22 per cent margin with those who left school at sixteen.” This is stunning, I had never seen this analysis before. Clearly Labour's later defeat at the 2019 election (down to 202 seats) was because they were struggling with the working-class vote. It is quite reasonable to think that the educated are behaving like a separate country.
The proposal is that education will make you more liberal, open your head to new possibilities, make you acceptable to a more diverse range of people, make new pleasures available to you, make you more tolerant and more perceptive. If you head in this direction you will get somewhere (and not just run out of space). That is the offer. Crudely, there is a Commodity, and poetry too offers this commodity. It is offering all the things I have just listed. They are part of the poetry Brand and we will be in trouble if poetry fails to deliver this commodity, or if something else offers more of it.
At the same time I think this group may be marching away from where the country is and I want Labour to be the party of the working class.
This puts anything I write about recent poetry into perspective. It makes the details invisible, I suppose. It means the differences between different parts of the poetic landscape are less important than a shared, if unconscious, sense of direction. Again, I think poetry is delivering what it has to deliver, and I wouldn't feel right attacking the scene for not moving in some different direction. It opens people up to a range of possibilities and that is a perfectly valid endeavour. So I can move back down to the detailed level and talk about individual books or poems. Of those books from 2019, dozens are interesting and start up lines of investigation and pleasure.
We have to ask “what does going to university” mean. I would rather leave this as a mystery than write it up as a supposedly known value. Students took over poetry in the 1960s. Other groups lost control, lost their stakes. In order to record the history of poetry you would also need to know the history of the student body and of university life. Of course that is a more complex question than just reading books full of poems.
If you accept that the artistically successful poetry is not confined to one stylistic area, but scattered over a large landscape, it follows that the audience is also divided and has different reactions to the same poem. Derepression means pursuing personal wishes, and being taught by them over time, and not accepting a social norm as the goal of artistic experience. This makes it difficult to write criticism, which after all presents one reaction pattern as a norm, or as success. So it is difficult to write down a consensus view. And pretty easy to annoy people.
I read a 1957 book called ‘Declaration’. It is statements about the state of culture by various English intellectuals, or supposed intellectuals. I went for a walk and paused in the pub in Mansfield Road and they had a bookshelf and ‘Declaration’ was one of the books. Lindsay Anderson's essay in it was striking because he was sure that he knew how people had to behave in order to be happy, he knew what films had to say, he knew the right way to make films, and he could relate the failure of English films to behave properly back to the financial structure of the industry and the interests of the company Board. He was absolutely granite in his certainty. It was impressive and you could also see why he was unemployed in the film industry. All that certainty is what derepression swept away. I can’t correlate one style with moral virtue and political progress. And the plurality of styles also implies a scattering of taste, which is why I can’t write criticism that a lot of people will not disagree with. I don’t even agree with Anderson, the kind of film he presses for is not my favourite sort of film. I can see that every time he saw a British film he rewrote the script to make it a much better film. This was his daily activity. But I also feel that he rewrote every person he encountered to be something else, not themselves, a projection of Anderson. That idea that the film can only be Good by symbolically destroying the people who had financed it, and redirected the script towards cliche, deference, and sentimentality (etc.), tends to produce bad films. Just in a different way. He was a critic writing, covertly, about the films he wasn't allowed to make.
If you grasp Anderson's sense of conviction, and moral authority, you grasp what "going to university" was supposed to do for you and also why educated people turned against that sense of authority and favoured something more diffuse and humanistic.
I am inclined to add Elizabeth David as a Fifties cultural voice imbued with certainty and authority. To be accurate, her comments on English cookery are just remarks made in passing but she makes it very clear that English cookery is hopeless and probably fatal. Her books were aimed at English cooks, almost by definition, so they were the subjects of attack as well as the recipients. I think this kind of thing can be addictive, so that people wanted cultural critics to be destructive and rigidly certain, they wanted to be told how culture had to be. But derepression released a hundred styles outside the central and worn-out style; derepression may have been a response to the convincing critique of hostile commentators, but it also made that critique obsolete. I suppose I miss it. Anyway I am not denouncing modern British poetry and I think it is too scattered to have a single point of failure. To denounce something, you have to have a cogent description of it first.
Anderson was strongly on the Left and David was, if anything, firmly on the Right and committed to an upper-middle-class lifestyle which was always surrounded by something unacceptable, lapsed, and ‘uncivilised’. But the sound they give off seems to be much the same sound.
Oh well. I certainly liked going for a walk, good for my blood pressure, and I certainly liked finding a book I didn’t know was there and being plunged back into the state of 1956. Maybe ‘Beautiful feelings’ will record some of the state of 2024.
I had a spreadsheet which listed 1700 poetry titles (by single authors) coming out in 2019. I have checked the spreadsheet line by line and the total has shrunk to 1648. Which is a less pleasing number. Anyway the point is that thousands of people want to be poets, lots of them are good poets, and this makes it difficult to attack the people in charge. However tired the managers are, the atmosphere of the scene is attractive and this is such a good thing that other features slide out of view.
I have just finished proofing ‘Beautiful feelings of sensitive people’, my new book about 21st century poetry, and my feeling about it is that it is not attacking the way things happen. That sort of radical cultural criticism doesn't suit the current climate. The function of welcoming people into poetry, making them feel they have status in a real community, making them feel that they can say what they want to say, is more important. The idea that there is some much better way of doing things which is readily available and familiar to people enough that they could move into it without vast effort does not seem to hold true. The modernist thing is available, but after 50 years (or do we mean 100?) it is clearly a minority position rather than the future. Exposing people for not being properly modernist does not seem to be a convincing verbal manoeuvre. It has instead become clear that what people were really excited about, and hoping for, in the Sixties was derepression. This is quite different from modernism. And we now have it. It may look like chaos but the principle of derepression is actually a sort of module of design which has been applied everywhere to build the landscape we actually see. It is difficult to see how you can count 1650 titles coming out in one year and also complain that the scene is restrictive, conservative, repressive, elitist, etc. So if you abandon that line of argument you end up with something else. Quite possibly the ‘gatekeepers’ are tired and don’t want to defend standards, and the quality control is poor. Yes, but that is in keeping with the collective wish for derepression, and there are positive results which we can all appreciate.
That total is roughly twice the figure for titles coming out in the 1980s. The landscape was mature then, not underdeveloped, so this kind of growth is genuinely impressive. It does not argue for persistent blunders by the people with influence. The growth rate is probably understated by doing a count, because of the proliferation of Internet activity which does not use paper at all, and which would represent a much more rapid growth rate. I can't measure it but surely a lot of poets are bypassing the paper world. The count of titles does express the relationship of poetry to its budget controllers and its audience, so the economic basis. There is a relationship between the Basis and the ideology of the participants, but also it is hard to repress anything. That function is vacant.
I have just seen a post by Norman Jope where he says: "Overall, if we were to estimate that as many as 0.1% of the adult population might be writing poetry to a publishable standard – which wouldn’t be that far off the mark in Plymouth, given the extent of participation in local groups – and each of them produced, say, two poems a month (which has basically been the measure of my output since I can remember), then that would mean that, across the UK, there would be approximately 50,000 poets producing approximately 1.2 million publishable poems annually. I accept that this is a demented exercise, but it’s also an honest attempt to quantify the sheer amount of poetry that is out there now.
The extrapolation is unsecured and the category of "publishable" is shaky, but this is a valuable contribution. The level of books being published is vitally connected to the pressure of poets swarming up the beaches, and it could cause serious problems if the level of frustration rose any higher. It's very helpful to look at the pattern from the other direction and try to pick up how if 1700 books come out then that might still leave thousands of poets barred from entry.
I suppose 1650 books in a year might mean 100,000 poems. So maybe 90% of "effective" poems don't get printed in a volume? But if you add in anthologies, the percentage shifts again. And if you add magazines. I look forward to the other six parts of this promised series of seven posts.
I am reading Tim Shipman’s book on the Tory problems at the June 2017 general election. It was published in 2017 so it doesn't have the benefit of hindsight. Shipman says (p.448) that “Labour won among voters with a degree by seventeen points, while the Tories won by a 22 per cent margin with those who left school at sixteen.” This is stunning, I had never seen this analysis before. Clearly Labour's later defeat at the 2019 election (down to 202 seats) was because they were struggling with the working-class vote. It is quite reasonable to think that the educated are behaving like a separate country.
The proposal is that education will make you more liberal, open your head to new possibilities, make you acceptable to a more diverse range of people, make new pleasures available to you, make you more tolerant and more perceptive. If you head in this direction you will get somewhere (and not just run out of space). That is the offer. Crudely, there is a Commodity, and poetry too offers this commodity. It is offering all the things I have just listed. They are part of the poetry Brand and we will be in trouble if poetry fails to deliver this commodity, or if something else offers more of it.
At the same time I think this group may be marching away from where the country is and I want Labour to be the party of the working class.
This puts anything I write about recent poetry into perspective. It makes the details invisible, I suppose. It means the differences between different parts of the poetic landscape are less important than a shared, if unconscious, sense of direction. Again, I think poetry is delivering what it has to deliver, and I wouldn't feel right attacking the scene for not moving in some different direction. It opens people up to a range of possibilities and that is a perfectly valid endeavour. So I can move back down to the detailed level and talk about individual books or poems. Of those books from 2019, dozens are interesting and start up lines of investigation and pleasure.
We have to ask “what does going to university” mean. I would rather leave this as a mystery than write it up as a supposedly known value. Students took over poetry in the 1960s. Other groups lost control, lost their stakes. In order to record the history of poetry you would also need to know the history of the student body and of university life. Of course that is a more complex question than just reading books full of poems.
If you accept that the artistically successful poetry is not confined to one stylistic area, but scattered over a large landscape, it follows that the audience is also divided and has different reactions to the same poem. Derepression means pursuing personal wishes, and being taught by them over time, and not accepting a social norm as the goal of artistic experience. This makes it difficult to write criticism, which after all presents one reaction pattern as a norm, or as success. So it is difficult to write down a consensus view. And pretty easy to annoy people.
I read a 1957 book called ‘Declaration’. It is statements about the state of culture by various English intellectuals, or supposed intellectuals. I went for a walk and paused in the pub in Mansfield Road and they had a bookshelf and ‘Declaration’ was one of the books. Lindsay Anderson's essay in it was striking because he was sure that he knew how people had to behave in order to be happy, he knew what films had to say, he knew the right way to make films, and he could relate the failure of English films to behave properly back to the financial structure of the industry and the interests of the company Board. He was absolutely granite in his certainty. It was impressive and you could also see why he was unemployed in the film industry. All that certainty is what derepression swept away. I can’t correlate one style with moral virtue and political progress. And the plurality of styles also implies a scattering of taste, which is why I can’t write criticism that a lot of people will not disagree with. I don’t even agree with Anderson, the kind of film he presses for is not my favourite sort of film. I can see that every time he saw a British film he rewrote the script to make it a much better film. This was his daily activity. But I also feel that he rewrote every person he encountered to be something else, not themselves, a projection of Anderson. That idea that the film can only be Good by symbolically destroying the people who had financed it, and redirected the script towards cliche, deference, and sentimentality (etc.), tends to produce bad films. Just in a different way. He was a critic writing, covertly, about the films he wasn't allowed to make.
If you grasp Anderson's sense of conviction, and moral authority, you grasp what "going to university" was supposed to do for you and also why educated people turned against that sense of authority and favoured something more diffuse and humanistic.
I am inclined to add Elizabeth David as a Fifties cultural voice imbued with certainty and authority. To be accurate, her comments on English cookery are just remarks made in passing but she makes it very clear that English cookery is hopeless and probably fatal. Her books were aimed at English cooks, almost by definition, so they were the subjects of attack as well as the recipients. I think this kind of thing can be addictive, so that people wanted cultural critics to be destructive and rigidly certain, they wanted to be told how culture had to be. But derepression released a hundred styles outside the central and worn-out style; derepression may have been a response to the convincing critique of hostile commentators, but it also made that critique obsolete. I suppose I miss it. Anyway I am not denouncing modern British poetry and I think it is too scattered to have a single point of failure. To denounce something, you have to have a cogent description of it first.
Anderson was strongly on the Left and David was, if anything, firmly on the Right and committed to an upper-middle-class lifestyle which was always surrounded by something unacceptable, lapsed, and ‘uncivilised’. But the sound they give off seems to be much the same sound.
Oh well. I certainly liked going for a walk, good for my blood pressure, and I certainly liked finding a book I didn’t know was there and being plunged back into the state of 1956. Maybe ‘Beautiful feelings’ will record some of the state of 2024.
Saturday 24 February 2024
beautiful feelings
To my great pleasure, Shearsman have now accepted ‘Beautiful feelings’. I see I said in a blog that I had completed the book in January 2023, so I have spent the last year doing fine rewrites of it. Here is a contents list.
Chapter list
Introduction
Generalisations about the poetry world
Theories of style time
Language is made of rules
Foundation Texts (Loving Little Orlick; Ffynhonnau Uchel; Englaland; Incendium Amoris; Cloud. A coffee cantata
Identification
Their Trajectory Was Just Large (Flatlands; Terrain Seed Scarcity; Implacable Art; Unsung; Birdhouse; a.m.; The President of Earth; The Itchy Sea; Capital; The Hutton Inquiry; Natural Histories; Vacation of a Lifetime; Andraste's Hair; Galatea; The Missing; The Midlands; The Land of Green Ginger)
Cultural Asset Management
Verticegarden (Octet; Nekorb)
Insignificance; or, Structure Engulfed by Surface
Poems On Communal Wellbeing (Songs for Eurydice; Black Sun; Winstanley; Surge)
Local Knowledge (Birds of the Sherborne Missal; A Portland Triptych)
Serial: Lost In Data Labyrinths (The School of Forgery; Winter Journey; Exotica Suite)
Short Strings, Polyrecombinant (Duetcetera)
Splendours And Chagrins (Rendang; Plague Lands and other poems; Amnion; Katabasis; Writing The Camp)
Devolution/ Disassembly:
Anglo-Welsh (Edge of Necessary; stenia cultus handbook; Keinc; King Driftwood)
Scottish poets (Zonda? Khamsin? Sharaav? Camanchaca?; Hand Over Mouth Music; Florilegium; The Sleep Road; makar /unmakar)
British South Asian poets (Brilliant Corners; Small Hands; The Voice Of Sheila Chandra; The Routines)
West-bloc dissidents: alternative poetry (Arrays; Lines on the Surface; INSTANT-fLEX 718)
Triumphs And Panics (Ephemeris; False Flags; Somnia; Makers Of Empty Dreams; Forms of Protest; Self Heal; The Cook's Wedding)
The Human Voice (rabbit; Venusberg; Rookie; Soft Sift; Kim Kardashian's Marriage)
Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet (the arboretum towards the beginning; Leave Bambi Alone)
Sociolinguistics (Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy‑Machine!!!; Wilia; Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues; Northern Alchemy; Unquiet)
Privatisation and Religion (The Palace of Oblivion; Ascension Notes; Monica’s Overcoat Of Flesh; Stranger In The Mask Of A Deer)
Land And Sea (Disappearance; Green Noise; Continental Drift; Else)
I keep wanting to add new bits to it but really it is complete. Part of the concept is the centrality of personal and individual poems to the scene, which is actually what used to be called “bourgeois individualism”. I never use this phrase because I don’t value the Marxist consequences it comes attached to, but evidently the Marxist theorists identified what it was, possibly back in the 1930s or even the 1920s. So their version is roughly “writers who failed to face up to the consequences of industrialisation and class society wrote about their own feelings and appealed to the narcissism of the reader. Developments of style led to refinements which diminished the basic energy and evaded political issues. Reader and writer floated off in a little boat which was cut off from a wider reality.” My book is about the consequences of this. I call it Genre A. Evidently the individualism thing is bypassed by cultural critical poetry and by poetry about ecology and man-made climate disaster. We could call these genres B and C. They deal with the collective fate even if the matters presented are specific to the poet and written in an original style.
For reasons we need not go into here, I spent a lot of time, sometime in the 20th century, studying Soviet and East German literature. This has affected my frame of reference. The difference between Western literature and that other world of texts is rather striking, and the difference has a lot to do with individualism and narcissism and the small scale. With the artist’s personality, in fact. I think the Marxist analysis of culture is right at about 30 key points. It was developed by very intelligent people who between them had a very wide knowledge of the facts of cultural history. That thought does not extend to wishing to live under a dictatorship. But you have to have a perspective on the West from outside the West. There is so much to gain from that. This politicised analysis did not lead me to reject the West any more than I wished to wake up in East Germany and find myself without a vote or civil rights. If people were put in prison for practising “bourgeois individualism”, a few hundred years have to pass before you can legitimately use the term to discuss real people and real poets.
In a previous post, I discussed a level of poetry underneath genre A, exhibited in “open mike” events, where people did not aspire to a personal style and avoided poems about their personal lives. It looks as if Genre A is an ambitious endeavour, and unambitious poets are writing in a way which is more conventional (or colloquial) and less personal. It is difficult to practise Genre A. So identifying it with “Western style poetry” is not completely accurate.
The obvious reference point for narratives which deal with collective endeavour and objective facts, rather than individual feelings, is Fifties war films. I mention this because I am very happy with individualist poetry and indeed being a poetry critic in this era involves appraising that kind of poetry rather than promoting a Soviet-style civic poetry. That attitude would of course mean rejecting the poetry which is actually being published and talking about something which basically does not exist. Distinguishing between a hundred poets within the “Western“ style is only possible if you take an interest in that style, although of course if you are more interested in the Five Year Plan then variations of style are not really worth noticing. (I like some of those films, which I grew up with. Recently I watched Simon Heffer’s documentary on those films, where he regrets that the genre came to an end at a certain point, to be replaced by films where virtue and achievement played a very small role indeed.) Even at the time, there was no poetry which corresponded to those films: something in the unwritten constitution of poetry made it suitable for describing individual and intimate experiences rather than public and objective ones. We don’t have a body of “Fifties war poetry”.
The line of narcissism applies to the reader as well as to the poets. So we could draw a distinction between “believing in individual artistic experience” and “rejecting individual experience because it is simply an expression of deposited strata of imperialism, patriarchy, class bias, pro-Western bias, etc. etc., and is scheduled to be replaced by pure Theory administered by Experts”. If you reject the contents of individual experience, the fine vibrations of its reactions, then there is no point reading poetry. I am interested in nuances of sensibility, moments of identification, comparison between sensations, details of style. That is, I value the contents of consciousness and do not think it is able to be replaced by anything else (even Marxism).
There is a history of individualism. The arguments about national debt and borrowing in the general crisis following 2007-8 saw interesting gaps open up in Europe between countries where people paid their taxes and countries where people steadily avoided them. This was discussed in terms of a “southern tier” where Greece was the “most southern” and had the worst problems with taxes not being collected. So within Europe there was a southern band of individualism, and it contrasted with another variety where you had a developed bourgeois social structure but people respected the State enough to pay their taxes and to make accurate statements of income. And the ”black economy” was weak and not popular with the public. During these arguments it was possible to reflect, not just on the pervasive nature of an individualist (or “familist”) set of attitudes in Europe, but also that such attitudes did not necessarily bring about economic growth and perhaps only brought growth in special and unusual circumstances.
I scanned the Poetry Book Society pages and found that they have suggested/ listed another 540 titles since I finished the first draft of the book. Yes, I haven't read them.
Chapter list
Introduction
Generalisations about the poetry world
Theories of style time
Language is made of rules
Foundation Texts (Loving Little Orlick; Ffynhonnau Uchel; Englaland; Incendium Amoris; Cloud. A coffee cantata
Identification
Their Trajectory Was Just Large (Flatlands; Terrain Seed Scarcity; Implacable Art; Unsung; Birdhouse; a.m.; The President of Earth; The Itchy Sea; Capital; The Hutton Inquiry; Natural Histories; Vacation of a Lifetime; Andraste's Hair; Galatea; The Missing; The Midlands; The Land of Green Ginger)
Cultural Asset Management
Verticegarden (Octet; Nekorb)
Insignificance; or, Structure Engulfed by Surface
Poems On Communal Wellbeing (Songs for Eurydice; Black Sun; Winstanley; Surge)
Local Knowledge (Birds of the Sherborne Missal; A Portland Triptych)
Serial: Lost In Data Labyrinths (The School of Forgery; Winter Journey; Exotica Suite)
Short Strings, Polyrecombinant (Duetcetera)
Splendours And Chagrins (Rendang; Plague Lands and other poems; Amnion; Katabasis; Writing The Camp)
Devolution/ Disassembly:
Anglo-Welsh (Edge of Necessary; stenia cultus handbook; Keinc; King Driftwood)
Scottish poets (Zonda? Khamsin? Sharaav? Camanchaca?; Hand Over Mouth Music; Florilegium; The Sleep Road; makar /unmakar)
British South Asian poets (Brilliant Corners; Small Hands; The Voice Of Sheila Chandra; The Routines)
West-bloc dissidents: alternative poetry (Arrays; Lines on the Surface; INSTANT-fLEX 718)
Triumphs And Panics (Ephemeris; False Flags; Somnia; Makers Of Empty Dreams; Forms of Protest; Self Heal; The Cook's Wedding)
The Human Voice (rabbit; Venusberg; Rookie; Soft Sift; Kim Kardashian's Marriage)
Pistachio Euphoria Sorbet (the arboretum towards the beginning; Leave Bambi Alone)
Sociolinguistics (Tippoo Sultan's Incredible White-Man-Eating Tiger Toy‑Machine!!!; Wilia; Knitting drum machines for exiled tongues; Northern Alchemy; Unquiet)
Privatisation and Religion (The Palace of Oblivion; Ascension Notes; Monica’s Overcoat Of Flesh; Stranger In The Mask Of A Deer)
Land And Sea (Disappearance; Green Noise; Continental Drift; Else)
I keep wanting to add new bits to it but really it is complete. Part of the concept is the centrality of personal and individual poems to the scene, which is actually what used to be called “bourgeois individualism”. I never use this phrase because I don’t value the Marxist consequences it comes attached to, but evidently the Marxist theorists identified what it was, possibly back in the 1930s or even the 1920s. So their version is roughly “writers who failed to face up to the consequences of industrialisation and class society wrote about their own feelings and appealed to the narcissism of the reader. Developments of style led to refinements which diminished the basic energy and evaded political issues. Reader and writer floated off in a little boat which was cut off from a wider reality.” My book is about the consequences of this. I call it Genre A. Evidently the individualism thing is bypassed by cultural critical poetry and by poetry about ecology and man-made climate disaster. We could call these genres B and C. They deal with the collective fate even if the matters presented are specific to the poet and written in an original style.
For reasons we need not go into here, I spent a lot of time, sometime in the 20th century, studying Soviet and East German literature. This has affected my frame of reference. The difference between Western literature and that other world of texts is rather striking, and the difference has a lot to do with individualism and narcissism and the small scale. With the artist’s personality, in fact. I think the Marxist analysis of culture is right at about 30 key points. It was developed by very intelligent people who between them had a very wide knowledge of the facts of cultural history. That thought does not extend to wishing to live under a dictatorship. But you have to have a perspective on the West from outside the West. There is so much to gain from that. This politicised analysis did not lead me to reject the West any more than I wished to wake up in East Germany and find myself without a vote or civil rights. If people were put in prison for practising “bourgeois individualism”, a few hundred years have to pass before you can legitimately use the term to discuss real people and real poets.
In a previous post, I discussed a level of poetry underneath genre A, exhibited in “open mike” events, where people did not aspire to a personal style and avoided poems about their personal lives. It looks as if Genre A is an ambitious endeavour, and unambitious poets are writing in a way which is more conventional (or colloquial) and less personal. It is difficult to practise Genre A. So identifying it with “Western style poetry” is not completely accurate.
The obvious reference point for narratives which deal with collective endeavour and objective facts, rather than individual feelings, is Fifties war films. I mention this because I am very happy with individualist poetry and indeed being a poetry critic in this era involves appraising that kind of poetry rather than promoting a Soviet-style civic poetry. That attitude would of course mean rejecting the poetry which is actually being published and talking about something which basically does not exist. Distinguishing between a hundred poets within the “Western“ style is only possible if you take an interest in that style, although of course if you are more interested in the Five Year Plan then variations of style are not really worth noticing. (I like some of those films, which I grew up with. Recently I watched Simon Heffer’s documentary on those films, where he regrets that the genre came to an end at a certain point, to be replaced by films where virtue and achievement played a very small role indeed.) Even at the time, there was no poetry which corresponded to those films: something in the unwritten constitution of poetry made it suitable for describing individual and intimate experiences rather than public and objective ones. We don’t have a body of “Fifties war poetry”.
The line of narcissism applies to the reader as well as to the poets. So we could draw a distinction between “believing in individual artistic experience” and “rejecting individual experience because it is simply an expression of deposited strata of imperialism, patriarchy, class bias, pro-Western bias, etc. etc., and is scheduled to be replaced by pure Theory administered by Experts”. If you reject the contents of individual experience, the fine vibrations of its reactions, then there is no point reading poetry. I am interested in nuances of sensibility, moments of identification, comparison between sensations, details of style. That is, I value the contents of consciousness and do not think it is able to be replaced by anything else (even Marxism).
There is a history of individualism. The arguments about national debt and borrowing in the general crisis following 2007-8 saw interesting gaps open up in Europe between countries where people paid their taxes and countries where people steadily avoided them. This was discussed in terms of a “southern tier” where Greece was the “most southern” and had the worst problems with taxes not being collected. So within Europe there was a southern band of individualism, and it contrasted with another variety where you had a developed bourgeois social structure but people respected the State enough to pay their taxes and to make accurate statements of income. And the ”black economy” was weak and not popular with the public. During these arguments it was possible to reflect, not just on the pervasive nature of an individualist (or “familist”) set of attitudes in Europe, but also that such attitudes did not necessarily bring about economic growth and perhaps only brought growth in special and unusual circumstances.
I scanned the Poetry Book Society pages and found that they have suggested/ listed another 540 titles since I finished the first draft of the book. Yes, I haven't read them.
Sunday 21 January 2024
Fascist culture
Linehan
I was impressed by Thomas Linehan’s British fascism 1918-39 and especially by its two chapters on fascist culture. Since the fascists were just conservatives with a reduced level of inhibition and since there is no coherent statement about right-wing cultural attitudes in Britain, this fills a gap and gives us a moment of heightened awareness of how literature intersects with right-wing views of fantasies. (The lower-case f is a signal that he is dealing with a genre of tiny parties with vague allegiance to Italian fascist values, and not a single dominant brand – which arrived later.)
I think the situation is different with the BUF, which did not arrive until 1935, and which was in some ways radical and in some ways influenced by Nazism. However, the numerous fascist grouplets before that time were not influenced by Nazism, had little grasp of what Italian Fascism meant (a question hard to answer in concrete terms), and were strikingly similar to what Conservative voters uttered and favoured. Resistance to socialism and a burning wish to defend the Empire were prominent for all of them. Linehan can speak in exact and concrete terms because he is consulting particular texts, notably by CRF Boulton and Alexander Raven Thomson. I can’t disguise the fact that I regard a category of 70s-style definitions (usually Marxist in inspiration) of Right culture as hopelessly prejudiced and short on facts. They typically were confused about whether they were discussing German, French, Tsarist, American or British right groupings. They tended to paraphrase revered Grand Masters even where their writings had no reference to Britain and were decades out of date. There was a gap to be filled. It is difficult, on the other hand, to distill an ideology out of a right-wing world which dislikes generalisations, claims perfect individual autonomy, and also tends to build a wall between culture and politics. Right attitudes to culture certainly vary a great deal, all the same there is a set of unconscious inhibitions which are defended with frenzied energy when someone violates them. The set of these unconscious fixed positions is a cohering Fixed Position, and this is of interest to historians. There is a whole group of attitudes which tend to cluster together. The number of elements is fairly small – as is clear when one reads Linehan’s crisp analysis.
I think this is of limited use in analysing poetry of the last fifty years. Very few poets have taken in these right-wing symbols. They may be wary of politics or of generalisations, but that is a different matter. What I do find in Linehan is a compact reference statement, which can be used to discuss whether a given set of symbols actually are right-wing. I have just been reading the Australian historian of Italy RJB Bosworth mocking Norberto Bobbio for saying “where there was culture there was no Fascism, where there was fascism there was no culture”. This is too much of a let-out for Italian writers and artists, quite a few of whom had a fascist (PFN) membership card. Bosworth is right, and equally it can't be true that English culture was free of imperialism or that English imperialism was free of culture. It can’t be true that English literati did not identify with British crypto-colonial domination of Egypt over an eighty-year period, or that all of them were instinctively against the Suez campaign of 1956 and the plan to take back control of the Suez Canal. We are talking about an unconscious investment which became conscious when it was challenged (by Egyptian anti-colonialism). Unfortunately Egypt is just one example out of forty different countries where Britain had colonial authority (whether disguised as some form of protectorate or not).
Linehan is good at describing earlier phases of which 1920s fascism was a certain successor – so the Imperial Preference alliance of opinion, rejecting free trade to reinforce imperial identity, and the current which supported a naval arms race against Germany from roughly 1890 to 1914. This is important because we have difficulty in connecting poetry to anything like inter-war British Fascism. Inspiration from Italy was not of much relevance, whereas the preoccupation with military power, territory, and with the nightmare of decline in both, was highly relevant. What was expansive in 1880 became defensive and conservative in 1920 without alterations at a deeper level. And attitudes towards culture discarded the idea of apolitical culture, to use it as a proxy for physical struggle over territory and authority.
There was during the 1940s and 1950s a Right Book Club. Richard Griffiths has used lists of names to point out the overlap between its selection committee and British Fascist or pro-Nazi groups up to 1940. This sounds then like an excellent source of evidence, but from a quick inspection there is a lack of statements at the theoretical level and the books chosen tend to be peripheral as well as anti-intellectual (or even anti-political). I am embarrassed to see that I have read some of them, but then some of the titles are comic and about social manners and not very political. (an Inn-Keeper’s Diary, by John Fothergill – he is a snob and makes a joke of this throughout. Of course he wants to make money and dislikes customers who don’t have any. Somehow this book expresses right-wing values but also makes them a source of laughs. He was also published by Penguin and Faber.) I am unclear how a biography of Dr Johnson could turn out to be a right-wing book. I am not impressed by earnest attempts to map modern politics onto the 1740s. No doubt Johnson was a Jacobite, he disliked the Hanoverian dynasty, and no doubt there is some kind of flow from Jacobitism into later versions of the Right, in particular supporters of various exiled dynasties... but there was no Right and Left in 1750. Am I supposed to define the Hanoverians as left-wing? Why did the Right Book Club publish the memoirs of Guild-socialist Eric Gill? This just isn't a high-garde source.
One can speak of a crisis of modernism between the wars, as the stimulus which brought about an anti-modernist reaction to drive it away. Linehan is very astute in describing the fascist rejection of any kind of modernism in the arts, and we have to acknowledged that while a stratum of people were becoming fans of modernism there was a whole other stratum which detested it altogether (whether examining it as evidence or rejecting it sight unseen). So for example Linehan quotes a report from a fascist who attended the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and saw it as an example of modern decadence. Since the focal experience for the Right was hatred of the new, the art they favoured was defined initially by features missing from it and not by any positive content. I think it is a waste of time to identify any formally conservative art with political conservatism. To start with we are looking at features which by definition are not there, to be looked at, and to go on with someone with a radical political message probably uses conservative artistic languages to reach the broadest audience. If the Soviet bloc used 19th C artistic conventions for propaganda, we cannot suddenly define that mass (slew?) of art as conservative. And evidently committed left-wing art in western Europe or north America has tended to use similar artistic conventions to carry a message.
I was tantalised by the appearance of Philip Mairet as joining the British People’s Party in about 1939 (they were a very fugitive fascist and anti-war group). Mairet probably provided some of the imagery for Four Quartets and represented a sort of anti-industrial, back to the land, organic farming, craft current which surfaces in Four Quartets. I had not defined him as a fascist and now realise I have some work to do to track down his intellectual biography. I now see that he wrote a large essay for a 1945 symposium edited by Maurice Reckitt, who was the leading Christian Socialist of the mid-20th century. The going may be soft in this district, but some more definite conclusion needs to be sought. I imagine that his goal was to protect Europe from war rather than to roll back socialism.
The shortage of right-wing poets goes back to the 1920s rather than the 1960s. Edmund Blunden was someone with Right positions and a dubious record of association with pro-Hitler opponents of the war. But does anyone read him any more? He was not a militarist.
Where we find writing about modern art, it is usually by people with a real interest in the art. There probably is a whole group of people who have conservative attitudes on many scores but also like modern art. This disguises the fact that so many people rejected modern art altogether. With poetry, one has to reckon with people who reject free verse altogether, even if they are not writing anything on the subject.
It is unpleasant to read quotes from a book justifying Hitler because the homosexual culture of Berlin had become intolerable, so in need of cleansing and constraint, along with descriptions of visibly gay people in parts of Berlin, and then find that the author quoted is Wyndham Lewis. Lewis is a good example of an English fascist. If you read his art criticism, he takes a whole series of ideas very productive in creating art, and demolishes them. For example, Paleface looks at artists connecting to Third World art, to myth and the unconscious, to pre-classical art, etc., and ridiculed them. But this idea has been one of the most productive in 20th C art. Lewis is very similar to someone denouncing modern art altogether – he never seems to find anything positive in modern art. I feel the key is his inability to identify with any kind of reformist political ideas – he dislikes anyone with radical ideas so much that in the end he detests radical ideas. This remains true even if he produced startlingly modern paintings. You have to look at his writing in isolation. With Lewis, the feeling is occasionally that he hates other people in general. But he liked Hitler.
There is a whole series of Far Right leaders, in this country, who admired Hitler and imitated him as far as they could. That strand has nothing to do with conservatism. The comparison I am making relates only to the fascists of roughly 1920 to 1935, who didn’t have much interest in race or in a radical transformation of society. Foreign comparisons are likely to be misleading where we are dealing with a mature political culture with a long history of debate being freely carried on.
I was impressed by Thomas Linehan’s British fascism 1918-39 and especially by its two chapters on fascist culture. Since the fascists were just conservatives with a reduced level of inhibition and since there is no coherent statement about right-wing cultural attitudes in Britain, this fills a gap and gives us a moment of heightened awareness of how literature intersects with right-wing views of fantasies. (The lower-case f is a signal that he is dealing with a genre of tiny parties with vague allegiance to Italian fascist values, and not a single dominant brand – which arrived later.)
I think the situation is different with the BUF, which did not arrive until 1935, and which was in some ways radical and in some ways influenced by Nazism. However, the numerous fascist grouplets before that time were not influenced by Nazism, had little grasp of what Italian Fascism meant (a question hard to answer in concrete terms), and were strikingly similar to what Conservative voters uttered and favoured. Resistance to socialism and a burning wish to defend the Empire were prominent for all of them. Linehan can speak in exact and concrete terms because he is consulting particular texts, notably by CRF Boulton and Alexander Raven Thomson. I can’t disguise the fact that I regard a category of 70s-style definitions (usually Marxist in inspiration) of Right culture as hopelessly prejudiced and short on facts. They typically were confused about whether they were discussing German, French, Tsarist, American or British right groupings. They tended to paraphrase revered Grand Masters even where their writings had no reference to Britain and were decades out of date. There was a gap to be filled. It is difficult, on the other hand, to distill an ideology out of a right-wing world which dislikes generalisations, claims perfect individual autonomy, and also tends to build a wall between culture and politics. Right attitudes to culture certainly vary a great deal, all the same there is a set of unconscious inhibitions which are defended with frenzied energy when someone violates them. The set of these unconscious fixed positions is a cohering Fixed Position, and this is of interest to historians. There is a whole group of attitudes which tend to cluster together. The number of elements is fairly small – as is clear when one reads Linehan’s crisp analysis.
I think this is of limited use in analysing poetry of the last fifty years. Very few poets have taken in these right-wing symbols. They may be wary of politics or of generalisations, but that is a different matter. What I do find in Linehan is a compact reference statement, which can be used to discuss whether a given set of symbols actually are right-wing. I have just been reading the Australian historian of Italy RJB Bosworth mocking Norberto Bobbio for saying “where there was culture there was no Fascism, where there was fascism there was no culture”. This is too much of a let-out for Italian writers and artists, quite a few of whom had a fascist (PFN) membership card. Bosworth is right, and equally it can't be true that English culture was free of imperialism or that English imperialism was free of culture. It can’t be true that English literati did not identify with British crypto-colonial domination of Egypt over an eighty-year period, or that all of them were instinctively against the Suez campaign of 1956 and the plan to take back control of the Suez Canal. We are talking about an unconscious investment which became conscious when it was challenged (by Egyptian anti-colonialism). Unfortunately Egypt is just one example out of forty different countries where Britain had colonial authority (whether disguised as some form of protectorate or not).
Linehan is good at describing earlier phases of which 1920s fascism was a certain successor – so the Imperial Preference alliance of opinion, rejecting free trade to reinforce imperial identity, and the current which supported a naval arms race against Germany from roughly 1890 to 1914. This is important because we have difficulty in connecting poetry to anything like inter-war British Fascism. Inspiration from Italy was not of much relevance, whereas the preoccupation with military power, territory, and with the nightmare of decline in both, was highly relevant. What was expansive in 1880 became defensive and conservative in 1920 without alterations at a deeper level. And attitudes towards culture discarded the idea of apolitical culture, to use it as a proxy for physical struggle over territory and authority.
There was during the 1940s and 1950s a Right Book Club. Richard Griffiths has used lists of names to point out the overlap between its selection committee and British Fascist or pro-Nazi groups up to 1940. This sounds then like an excellent source of evidence, but from a quick inspection there is a lack of statements at the theoretical level and the books chosen tend to be peripheral as well as anti-intellectual (or even anti-political). I am embarrassed to see that I have read some of them, but then some of the titles are comic and about social manners and not very political. (an Inn-Keeper’s Diary, by John Fothergill – he is a snob and makes a joke of this throughout. Of course he wants to make money and dislikes customers who don’t have any. Somehow this book expresses right-wing values but also makes them a source of laughs. He was also published by Penguin and Faber.) I am unclear how a biography of Dr Johnson could turn out to be a right-wing book. I am not impressed by earnest attempts to map modern politics onto the 1740s. No doubt Johnson was a Jacobite, he disliked the Hanoverian dynasty, and no doubt there is some kind of flow from Jacobitism into later versions of the Right, in particular supporters of various exiled dynasties... but there was no Right and Left in 1750. Am I supposed to define the Hanoverians as left-wing? Why did the Right Book Club publish the memoirs of Guild-socialist Eric Gill? This just isn't a high-garde source.
One can speak of a crisis of modernism between the wars, as the stimulus which brought about an anti-modernist reaction to drive it away. Linehan is very astute in describing the fascist rejection of any kind of modernism in the arts, and we have to acknowledged that while a stratum of people were becoming fans of modernism there was a whole other stratum which detested it altogether (whether examining it as evidence or rejecting it sight unseen). So for example Linehan quotes a report from a fascist who attended the Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 and saw it as an example of modern decadence. Since the focal experience for the Right was hatred of the new, the art they favoured was defined initially by features missing from it and not by any positive content. I think it is a waste of time to identify any formally conservative art with political conservatism. To start with we are looking at features which by definition are not there, to be looked at, and to go on with someone with a radical political message probably uses conservative artistic languages to reach the broadest audience. If the Soviet bloc used 19th C artistic conventions for propaganda, we cannot suddenly define that mass (slew?) of art as conservative. And evidently committed left-wing art in western Europe or north America has tended to use similar artistic conventions to carry a message.
I was tantalised by the appearance of Philip Mairet as joining the British People’s Party in about 1939 (they were a very fugitive fascist and anti-war group). Mairet probably provided some of the imagery for Four Quartets and represented a sort of anti-industrial, back to the land, organic farming, craft current which surfaces in Four Quartets. I had not defined him as a fascist and now realise I have some work to do to track down his intellectual biography. I now see that he wrote a large essay for a 1945 symposium edited by Maurice Reckitt, who was the leading Christian Socialist of the mid-20th century. The going may be soft in this district, but some more definite conclusion needs to be sought. I imagine that his goal was to protect Europe from war rather than to roll back socialism.
The shortage of right-wing poets goes back to the 1920s rather than the 1960s. Edmund Blunden was someone with Right positions and a dubious record of association with pro-Hitler opponents of the war. But does anyone read him any more? He was not a militarist.
Where we find writing about modern art, it is usually by people with a real interest in the art. There probably is a whole group of people who have conservative attitudes on many scores but also like modern art. This disguises the fact that so many people rejected modern art altogether. With poetry, one has to reckon with people who reject free verse altogether, even if they are not writing anything on the subject.
It is unpleasant to read quotes from a book justifying Hitler because the homosexual culture of Berlin had become intolerable, so in need of cleansing and constraint, along with descriptions of visibly gay people in parts of Berlin, and then find that the author quoted is Wyndham Lewis. Lewis is a good example of an English fascist. If you read his art criticism, he takes a whole series of ideas very productive in creating art, and demolishes them. For example, Paleface looks at artists connecting to Third World art, to myth and the unconscious, to pre-classical art, etc., and ridiculed them. But this idea has been one of the most productive in 20th C art. Lewis is very similar to someone denouncing modern art altogether – he never seems to find anything positive in modern art. I feel the key is his inability to identify with any kind of reformist political ideas – he dislikes anyone with radical ideas so much that in the end he detests radical ideas. This remains true even if he produced startlingly modern paintings. You have to look at his writing in isolation. With Lewis, the feeling is occasionally that he hates other people in general. But he liked Hitler.
There is a whole series of Far Right leaders, in this country, who admired Hitler and imitated him as far as they could. That strand has nothing to do with conservatism. The comparison I am making relates only to the fascists of roughly 1920 to 1935, who didn’t have much interest in race or in a radical transformation of society. Foreign comparisons are likely to be misleading where we are dealing with a mature political culture with a long history of debate being freely carried on.
Monday 20 November 2023
beautiful feelings
Beautiful Feelings – another bulletin
am in a tired and decaying state with my book ‘Feelings’. That is, the project is decaying because it is over. My energy is decaying. Preparatory to being abandoned. An email recently had a photo of an audience with the comment that they are all white and middle class. This is a new approach: the history of the audience. If we had a series of 1000 photos of audiences, going back 30 years (or whatever), we could analyse shifts in race and in gender composition. Who knows what. Absent that database, it is all speculative. Close analysis suggested that you could see “ethnic minority” faces in that photo. Discussion revealed that there is no way of identifying middle class people just from appearances. You could do that from their voices, yes.
Another email records a rejection note from a publisher which says that in the “application window” they had received 1000 applications for their chapbook series. My correspondent suggests that there might be another 1000, at the same time, for their (longer) pamphlet series. This contradicts something I say in the book about the gates being open. Pretty obviously the gates aren’t finally open if someone is receiving 1000 typescripts and accepting 70. There is a world of unpublished books, floating around outside the harbour entrance, just as there is a world of open mike poets who aren't good enough to get a gig as the “name” act.
The messages I am seeing often say that “I am being rejected because I am working class”. There are variants on this. I don’t discuss this in the book and at this stage I am collecting “a thousand stories I don’t tell”. I think editors turn down the poems, not the biography. But the other version deserves examination.
I am rereading Philip Norman’s Beatles biography. I hadn't noticed before, but at one stage (1961, in Hamburg) all five of the musicians on stage had attended grammar schools. Replacing Pete Best with Ringo brought in someone who hadn’t been to such a school- changing their image. No-one analyses their music in terms of this because it is supremely unimportant. A million pages of Beatles commentary and nobody sees it as a reflection of the effects of the 11-plus. Everybody can see that listening to Elvis was the key experience and there is no point analysing it in some other way. Similarly with poetry – people have a primal experience with poems and then try to offer a primal experience inside their own poems.
I read half of Richard Houghton's collection of fans’ memories of the Beatles (The Beatles – I was There). So you get people who were 16 in 1962 and went to the Cavern Club. The most perceptive memoir has a lot of detail and describes the frontmen as, one was a grammar school boy and one wasn't. He was wrong – Lennon did attend a grammar school although he was a tearaway. He was describing the difference between John and Paul, as a million people have. Relating it to schools is a good example of someone drafting in Sociology and getting it wrong.
Editors see poems, not biographies. But suppose you can detect class origins in verbal patterns, in preoccupations, in the cost of the objects described in the poems, etc. etc. I really don’t want to start analysing poems in these terms. If someone feels that they are disliked by someone else because they are working class, they may be right. Also, from the audience side, people may want poets with a specific social identity in order to dramatise internal conflicts, longings and humiliations of biographical significance to them.
You rarely see people explaining that they were turned down because they took 20 lines to say what they could have said in 4, because they delivered emotions in preset packages rather than appearing genuine and sincere, because they sounded too much like other people, because they were predictable, etc. It is much more acceptable to return aesthetic preferences to the level of sociological prejudice. But surely poems can be good or bad?
I think this approach is able to make my subject disappear altogether. So you have McCartney being suave, friendly, and manipulative and he is seen as typically middle class, you have Lennon being sarcastic and disaffected and this is seen as the expected thing for someone who attended a secondary modern. The sociological approach makes personality disappear altogether… I want to describe poems as expression of personality, as the product of momentary states of mind, and finally as the expression of freedom. But sociology wipes that out by saying that being suave, or else being disaffected, are inevitable behaviour patterns expressing what niche someone belongs in. So I can’t really deal with sociology. I am not listing what kind of school all my chosen poets attended. I am pretty interested in the way they write, though.
I am intrigued by the idea that any male pupil of a secondary modern school (or a technical school, the third model, the one which never took off) is bound to be disaffected. This is quite a deep observation. But poets are very proud of their disaffection; they don’t see it as a predictable response to being in a niche from which most of society is invisible and you are invisible to most people. They want you to be surprised by it and they want it to be temporary, as someone comes along and solves their problems.
I looked up the secondary technical school on Wiki and read “For various reasons few were built, and their main interest is on a theoretical level.” It never was a fully three-tier system, and then comprehensivisation took over. I read another column which says "An interesting place to start is the Norwood report of 1943. Commissioned in 1941, famous educationists of the period spent two years considering how secondary education ought to work in England. Grammars provided a passage to university, but it was increasingly obvious the country needed to replace the engineers and scientists who had died in the Second World War. Buildings and machinery also had to be replenished. Hence, a route was needed to get smart people into science." This was totally unlike what actually happened. It is not a bad idea, though.
So, a thousand stories I don’t tell. I am not going to list them. Should I read the thousand scripts which got turned down? At one level, this is information I am missing.
am in a tired and decaying state with my book ‘Feelings’. That is, the project is decaying because it is over. My energy is decaying. Preparatory to being abandoned. An email recently had a photo of an audience with the comment that they are all white and middle class. This is a new approach: the history of the audience. If we had a series of 1000 photos of audiences, going back 30 years (or whatever), we could analyse shifts in race and in gender composition. Who knows what. Absent that database, it is all speculative. Close analysis suggested that you could see “ethnic minority” faces in that photo. Discussion revealed that there is no way of identifying middle class people just from appearances. You could do that from their voices, yes.
Another email records a rejection note from a publisher which says that in the “application window” they had received 1000 applications for their chapbook series. My correspondent suggests that there might be another 1000, at the same time, for their (longer) pamphlet series. This contradicts something I say in the book about the gates being open. Pretty obviously the gates aren’t finally open if someone is receiving 1000 typescripts and accepting 70. There is a world of unpublished books, floating around outside the harbour entrance, just as there is a world of open mike poets who aren't good enough to get a gig as the “name” act.
The messages I am seeing often say that “I am being rejected because I am working class”. There are variants on this. I don’t discuss this in the book and at this stage I am collecting “a thousand stories I don’t tell”. I think editors turn down the poems, not the biography. But the other version deserves examination.
I am rereading Philip Norman’s Beatles biography. I hadn't noticed before, but at one stage (1961, in Hamburg) all five of the musicians on stage had attended grammar schools. Replacing Pete Best with Ringo brought in someone who hadn’t been to such a school- changing their image. No-one analyses their music in terms of this because it is supremely unimportant. A million pages of Beatles commentary and nobody sees it as a reflection of the effects of the 11-plus. Everybody can see that listening to Elvis was the key experience and there is no point analysing it in some other way. Similarly with poetry – people have a primal experience with poems and then try to offer a primal experience inside their own poems.
I read half of Richard Houghton's collection of fans’ memories of the Beatles (The Beatles – I was There). So you get people who were 16 in 1962 and went to the Cavern Club. The most perceptive memoir has a lot of detail and describes the frontmen as, one was a grammar school boy and one wasn't. He was wrong – Lennon did attend a grammar school although he was a tearaway. He was describing the difference between John and Paul, as a million people have. Relating it to schools is a good example of someone drafting in Sociology and getting it wrong.
Editors see poems, not biographies. But suppose you can detect class origins in verbal patterns, in preoccupations, in the cost of the objects described in the poems, etc. etc. I really don’t want to start analysing poems in these terms. If someone feels that they are disliked by someone else because they are working class, they may be right. Also, from the audience side, people may want poets with a specific social identity in order to dramatise internal conflicts, longings and humiliations of biographical significance to them.
You rarely see people explaining that they were turned down because they took 20 lines to say what they could have said in 4, because they delivered emotions in preset packages rather than appearing genuine and sincere, because they sounded too much like other people, because they were predictable, etc. It is much more acceptable to return aesthetic preferences to the level of sociological prejudice. But surely poems can be good or bad?
I think this approach is able to make my subject disappear altogether. So you have McCartney being suave, friendly, and manipulative and he is seen as typically middle class, you have Lennon being sarcastic and disaffected and this is seen as the expected thing for someone who attended a secondary modern. The sociological approach makes personality disappear altogether… I want to describe poems as expression of personality, as the product of momentary states of mind, and finally as the expression of freedom. But sociology wipes that out by saying that being suave, or else being disaffected, are inevitable behaviour patterns expressing what niche someone belongs in. So I can’t really deal with sociology. I am not listing what kind of school all my chosen poets attended. I am pretty interested in the way they write, though.
I am intrigued by the idea that any male pupil of a secondary modern school (or a technical school, the third model, the one which never took off) is bound to be disaffected. This is quite a deep observation. But poets are very proud of their disaffection; they don’t see it as a predictable response to being in a niche from which most of society is invisible and you are invisible to most people. They want you to be surprised by it and they want it to be temporary, as someone comes along and solves their problems.
I looked up the secondary technical school on Wiki and read “For various reasons few were built, and their main interest is on a theoretical level.” It never was a fully three-tier system, and then comprehensivisation took over. I read another column which says "An interesting place to start is the Norwood report of 1943. Commissioned in 1941, famous educationists of the period spent two years considering how secondary education ought to work in England. Grammars provided a passage to university, but it was increasingly obvious the country needed to replace the engineers and scientists who had died in the Second World War. Buildings and machinery also had to be replenished. Hence, a route was needed to get smart people into science." This was totally unlike what actually happened. It is not a bad idea, though.
So, a thousand stories I don’t tell. I am not going to list them. Should I read the thousand scripts which got turned down? At one level, this is information I am missing.
Wednesday 25 October 2023
open mike poetry
History of banal poetry
There was action in Facebook recently as Tim Allen raised questions about the “lyric I”, and people generally say that they are advanced users and their scepticism about having feelings is a proof of it. “The above certainly makes more sense to me than the usual stuff said about identity. Brings back a memory of a Wessex fest from long ago when I read some of my long 'I' poem (finally published in 2014 under the name 'Copyright' - Department Press, Manchester) and I was being heckled and argued with by lots from the audience because of the obvious questions concerning the term that were going on in the poem - David Caddy might remember.”
I’m intrigued by the story of sub-prime poetry. The fact that people can mock the Lyrical I, or Ego, as unsophisticated doesn't mean that it is the lower tier of contemporary poetry. It is a lot higher than that. It is the more conventional stratum of poetry which is reviewed, put in books, taken seriously. In fact it’s hard to write. My idea is that there is a tier below the Lyrical I and that lyrical writing is relatively fanciful and ambitious. On open mikes, people don’t usually describe feelings. The tone is informal, down to earth, often a spoof of a familiar form. Sincerity isn’t the big thing. Someone less skilled will go for the grumpy, jokey, cynical, parodic, etc. bits of worn-out language, turned around a bit. Instantly recognisable. In a recent session of open-mike readers I noticed poems about the royal family, Glastonbury Festival, and the NHS. These “low hanging fruit” deliver an instantly recognisable context which the reader has already been familiarised with. The poem does not reach autonomy or strive for it. That is for a more skilled poet.
I like the idea that there is a separate history of unskilled poetry, following a different pattern in time than intelligent poetry. I always write about good poetry. But perhaps we can glance at the history of sub-prime poetry.
Stannard and I often talk about the open mike experience because we both find it so difficult to sit through. We also talked about Colin Nixon, who is famous because of an interview in Görtschacher’s book Little Magazine Profiles which singled him out as someone who had got possibly 600 poems into print but who had never gone beyond the minimum artistic standards. His poems deliver a message, their intent is perfectly clear to the reader, they say little beyond the message. He was said to be disappointed that no editor had ever accepted a book of his; he was stuck in a world of low-prestige magazines. I think bogg and krax were the ones mentioned. Martin was editing a rather good magazine in the (later) 70s and 80s (Joe Soap’s Canoe) and recalls rejecting many poems by Nixon. He could hardly get through one thick envelope before another had arrived. Nixon used a special thin paper, presumably because he was sending out so many envelopes and so many poems that postage was a large cost. Nixon (born 1939) was really systematic about sending out and that is why so many editors have bad memories of having to read his output. He can stand for the whole world of bad poetry because he was so methodical. I looked under N in the South Bank Poetry Library last time I was there and found four tiny pamphlets by Nixon, but no book. He was a civil servant, working as a housing officer (or something?) for a London borough, and his writing style owes something to civil service conventions of clarity, impersonality, and lack of features. Nixon definitely didn’t use the Lyrical I, he wanted his poems to be part of the real world and so avoided subjectivity.
If you plunge back into that time, there was a Feeling that a world of poetry and personal relations was opening in which everything would be marvellous, and that poems or magazines were doorways into that marvellous realm. Having lots of magazines and opening them to lots of poets was a consequence of the feeling. But when you opened a magazine and found it full of junk poetry, another feeling could take over: in which the new realm was full of pointless experiences and conversations and had to accommodate a great deal of bad language.
I am interested in the situation of someone who runs a bad magazine. You are full of high hopes. But once you put out a couple of bad issues, good poets avoid you. They have many other places to go. So at publication time you have a tray full of bad poems. You put them out because that was your first intent and the initial energy is still running. It is courageous to go on. But the end result is a poetry world full of bad magazines and bad poems. It is not a new realm in any way that stands up to daylight. At this point we can approach the word “elite” or “elitist”. It means, concretely, someone who doesn’t want the bad stuff. Someone who defends the idea of a new ideal space. But, as used in speech, it is a negative word. Someone who is not an elitist accepts that 90% of the poetry coming out is no good but thinks it is impolite to say so.
I am advised that the big open mike slot at a readings series which Martin and I both attend was specified by the brewery. The organiser could have the room for no fee, it is an acoustically warm room, cut off from the sounds from the bar elsewhere in the building. The brewery sees it as another bar and wants it full of people. Their policy guy thinks that most people there turn up to do their open mike spot. So the series has to have lots of open mike readers. Two breweries have quite a lot to do with staging poetry events in Nottingham. Personally, I feel that you have to have little magazines and open mike slots, there has to be a non-selective tier where people can get started. If the brewery guy thinks that the audience would be much smaller if you only had the main scheduled poets, that implies that the pulling power of those poets is limited. This is probably correct. But it is unnerving to think that the audience is basically uninterested in anyone’s poetry except their own. That is not a good feeling. But also... that brewery is pretty good at making beer.
There was action in Facebook recently as Tim Allen raised questions about the “lyric I”, and people generally say that they are advanced users and their scepticism about having feelings is a proof of it. “The above certainly makes more sense to me than the usual stuff said about identity. Brings back a memory of a Wessex fest from long ago when I read some of my long 'I' poem (finally published in 2014 under the name 'Copyright' - Department Press, Manchester) and I was being heckled and argued with by lots from the audience because of the obvious questions concerning the term that were going on in the poem - David Caddy might remember.”
I’m intrigued by the story of sub-prime poetry. The fact that people can mock the Lyrical I, or Ego, as unsophisticated doesn't mean that it is the lower tier of contemporary poetry. It is a lot higher than that. It is the more conventional stratum of poetry which is reviewed, put in books, taken seriously. In fact it’s hard to write. My idea is that there is a tier below the Lyrical I and that lyrical writing is relatively fanciful and ambitious. On open mikes, people don’t usually describe feelings. The tone is informal, down to earth, often a spoof of a familiar form. Sincerity isn’t the big thing. Someone less skilled will go for the grumpy, jokey, cynical, parodic, etc. bits of worn-out language, turned around a bit. Instantly recognisable. In a recent session of open-mike readers I noticed poems about the royal family, Glastonbury Festival, and the NHS. These “low hanging fruit” deliver an instantly recognisable context which the reader has already been familiarised with. The poem does not reach autonomy or strive for it. That is for a more skilled poet.
I like the idea that there is a separate history of unskilled poetry, following a different pattern in time than intelligent poetry. I always write about good poetry. But perhaps we can glance at the history of sub-prime poetry.
Stannard and I often talk about the open mike experience because we both find it so difficult to sit through. We also talked about Colin Nixon, who is famous because of an interview in Görtschacher’s book Little Magazine Profiles which singled him out as someone who had got possibly 600 poems into print but who had never gone beyond the minimum artistic standards. His poems deliver a message, their intent is perfectly clear to the reader, they say little beyond the message. He was said to be disappointed that no editor had ever accepted a book of his; he was stuck in a world of low-prestige magazines. I think bogg and krax were the ones mentioned. Martin was editing a rather good magazine in the (later) 70s and 80s (Joe Soap’s Canoe) and recalls rejecting many poems by Nixon. He could hardly get through one thick envelope before another had arrived. Nixon used a special thin paper, presumably because he was sending out so many envelopes and so many poems that postage was a large cost. Nixon (born 1939) was really systematic about sending out and that is why so many editors have bad memories of having to read his output. He can stand for the whole world of bad poetry because he was so methodical. I looked under N in the South Bank Poetry Library last time I was there and found four tiny pamphlets by Nixon, but no book. He was a civil servant, working as a housing officer (or something?) for a London borough, and his writing style owes something to civil service conventions of clarity, impersonality, and lack of features. Nixon definitely didn’t use the Lyrical I, he wanted his poems to be part of the real world and so avoided subjectivity.
If you plunge back into that time, there was a Feeling that a world of poetry and personal relations was opening in which everything would be marvellous, and that poems or magazines were doorways into that marvellous realm. Having lots of magazines and opening them to lots of poets was a consequence of the feeling. But when you opened a magazine and found it full of junk poetry, another feeling could take over: in which the new realm was full of pointless experiences and conversations and had to accommodate a great deal of bad language.
I am interested in the situation of someone who runs a bad magazine. You are full of high hopes. But once you put out a couple of bad issues, good poets avoid you. They have many other places to go. So at publication time you have a tray full of bad poems. You put them out because that was your first intent and the initial energy is still running. It is courageous to go on. But the end result is a poetry world full of bad magazines and bad poems. It is not a new realm in any way that stands up to daylight. At this point we can approach the word “elite” or “elitist”. It means, concretely, someone who doesn’t want the bad stuff. Someone who defends the idea of a new ideal space. But, as used in speech, it is a negative word. Someone who is not an elitist accepts that 90% of the poetry coming out is no good but thinks it is impolite to say so.
I am advised that the big open mike slot at a readings series which Martin and I both attend was specified by the brewery. The organiser could have the room for no fee, it is an acoustically warm room, cut off from the sounds from the bar elsewhere in the building. The brewery sees it as another bar and wants it full of people. Their policy guy thinks that most people there turn up to do their open mike spot. So the series has to have lots of open mike readers. Two breweries have quite a lot to do with staging poetry events in Nottingham. Personally, I feel that you have to have little magazines and open mike slots, there has to be a non-selective tier where people can get started. If the brewery guy thinks that the audience would be much smaller if you only had the main scheduled poets, that implies that the pulling power of those poets is limited. This is probably correct. But it is unnerving to think that the audience is basically uninterested in anyone’s poetry except their own. That is not a good feeling. But also... that brewery is pretty good at making beer.
Friday 6 October 2023
Perverted patriotism
Perverted patriotism
Richard Griffiths’ Patriotism Perverted (1998) is about the Right Club in 1939-40 and is a follow-up to his previous book on British pro-Nazism, anti-Semitism, etc., in 1930-39, Fellow travellers of the Right. Perverted centers on Archibald Ramsay (“Captain Ramsay”), a Conservative MP who was so pro-Hitler that he was interned for four years while still an MP. He was head of the Right Club, whose main focus was anti-Semitism and the "Jewish conspiracy" theory.
The difference between Ramsay and other right-wing Conservative MPs of the late 1930s seems to have been that he was more vulnerable to conspiracy theory and less able to perceive other levels of reality. So once he had identified that there was a secret war against Christianity, and identified this with the Communist Party in Moscow, and identified the Jews with the Bolsheviks, his attitude to Hitler followed logically. He does not seem to have had the intellectual resources to realise that secularism had made a great start with the Enlightenment, in the mid 18th century, or that Christianity was not a logical and reasonable construct, that not all Jews were Bolsheviks, and finally that Hitler did not have the best interests of Great Britain at heart. Of course this involved depersonalising everyone who was not a right-wing Christian, and the link between belief in conspiracy and a lack of belief in the agency and reasoning powers of other people is striking.
To go back, the Depression in the 1930s made investment in the British and US economies unattractive. There was an over-supply of productive capacity and new investment was not able to generate income enough to make it worthwhile for the investor. However, the Third Reich was re-arming at a stunning rate and was keen to facilitate foreign capital investment. It was inevitable that funds would flow into the Reich from Britain and the USA. Equally logically, the investors, and their lobbyists or media agents, agitated against war with Germany, or anything raising tension between the Reich and the democracies. Politicians who rang up experts to find out the attitude of the City would be told that criticising German foreign policy was a Very Bad Thing. There was a whole apparatus discouraging attitudes, either public ones or among the political class, which could lead to a breach with Germany or even to running accurate stories about Kristallnacht, conditions in Dachau, aircraft production, and so forth. The information I have is that the City changed its attitude within days of the outbreak of war. To start with, the investments in German industry were no longer real – a dictatorship had as little respect for private property as it did for freedom of speech. The two things are intimately related. Secondly, they were in general patriots and could only be on one side in a war which had actually broken out. Thirdly, British re-armament was obviously going to be a source of profits beyond measure. This was the new focus for business, whatever else had closed down for the duration. So City funding for pro-German lobbying groups just dried up. Something similar happened to groups which had combined anti-Bolshevism with pro-Nazism. They rediscovered their patriotism. But, this left a residue of the irreducibles – people who were too pro-Nazi, or pro-Mussolini, to shift sides just because of a world war. And these irreducibles were likely to end up being interned without trial under a Defence Regulation.
Griffiths started his book, he records, with the Red Book, a ledger containing a membership list of the Right Club dating from 1940 and seized by the police when they arrested Parker Tyler, which mysteriously turned up in the safe of a solicitor's office when they were clearing out the stored documents of a client, in the late 1980s. The client was deceased, not necessarily recently. Someone at the office recognised that the aged ledger had some historical value and delivered it to Griffiths – they had read Fellow travellers of the Right. Griffiths concluded, after a while, that the use of a formal membership list was to impress hesitating potential recruits. The list might therefore contain many names of people too sober and stable to join up with a conspiracy (aiming to change British foreign policy and frustrate His Majesty's Government). It might well be a fake list. A list of headstrong Fascisti would not be persuasive for someone hesitant. Griffiths therefore felt that the ledger was not a reliable piece of historical testimony, although he also does not accept that it was for show (p.124).
It is bizarre that the ledger was in the flat of a US citizen, a traitor to the US government, at the moment when he was arrested by the police. This suggested a link between Ramsay and active supply of secret information to the Italian government (so indirectly to the German government, which no longer had an Embassy open in London). That link led directly to Ramsay’s arrest and internment, along with a raft of Far Right opponents of the war. However, it was never tested in court. Ramsay was never convicted of giving aid to the enemy. The Red Book was returned to him, since it was possible evidence in a case which was never going to be brought.
Maxwell Knight of MI5 was present when the arrest was made and if you are a right-wing conspiracist you surely believe that the Red Book was a fake and that Knight planted it in Tyler’s flat to justify a group arrest of Far Right conspiracists. It would have been a key document in a mass trial of Hitler supporters and peace-makers – which never took place. Most of the people whose names appear on the list were never interned.
Looking up the string 'Right Club' gave me a group of hits identifying the Right Book Club, an association whose publication might give an outline iconography of the cultural Right. If you look at the committee of this club, you can see names which also occur in Griffiths’ book as pro-Hitler and indeed English Fascists. Wikipedia gives a complete list of their books.
I also thought to collect some elementary material for a future discussion of the Right in poetry. So, here goes.
Edmund Blunden. Was so anti-war as to be pro-Hitler in the 1939-40 period.
David Jones. Was much influenced by Spengler and had difficulties with the Jewish Question and the anti-Bolshevik question. See an earlier post on this blog where I explore some neglected utterances of Jones.
CH Sisson. Was pro-Franco and emotionally committed to Charles Maurras and the position of Action Française. Seems to have had a phobia for the Left and for the State solving social problems.
Kathleen Raine. A very anti-political person but was connected to the Counter-Enlightenment and so opposed a range of processes following on the Enlightenment, characterised as “the rise of materialism”. She identified the decline of the arts with the rise of materialism. She married two very left-wing husbands but this is not unambiguous in its implications.
Peter Abbs. used imagery from Spengler in some of his most powerful poems. Is strongly christian and by implication anti-materialist. Disliked the culture of demonstration in the 70s. Later poetry involves the promotion of Great Men as part of an anti-modernist position. I have just been reading an essay by Alan Sinfield which discussed Abbs as part of an analysis of different policies of teaching English in schools. Abbs comes out as a “progressivist”, so one who believes in the inner needs of the pupil emerging and turning into an adult personality, through culture. This is derived from Lawrence, although it has developed over the following decades. Teaching is central to Abbs and that argument does not lend itself to left-right oppositions, or not easily.
DH Lawrence. This is probably an out of date issue. In the 1950s, people wanted to say that Lawrence was like Nazism because both believed in the irrational and instinct. This was probably part of saying that free verse led to the breakdown of character and civilised constraints, as part of promoting regular metre and so on. I doubt anyone living today takes this stance. Lawrence does not have much to do with the Conservative Party, who were certainly the local Right, so there are major problems in defining his ideas, or a subset of them, as Right. He certainly had a German wife but equally certainly the attitudes which she shared with her friends were a million miles away from Nazism. One of her cousins was a fairly prominent nationalist, but that doesn't prove anything.
Robert Conquest. Was a communist as a student and possibly learnt Russian as part of this. Served in the Army during the Second World War and ended up in military intelligence, it would seem, on the way to becoming a sovietologist. His professional career was inside the defence establishment. He was firmly anti-communist although this is not the same as being right-wing.
Philip Larkin. Was a great fan of Thatcher and the likelihood is that he regretted every aspect of modern life after 1945 which Thatcher was later an enemy of.
Agenda. Agenda magazine was set up on the instructions of Ezra Pound and had an abiding link with reverence for Mussolini, which led to editors resigning on at least two occasions. It was the main editor who was a fan of Pound and Mussolini, and I am not clear that other poets appearing in Agenda had the same enthusiasms. There were other right-wing poundians, for example Denis Goacher, but these are not much-read poets. Agenda may have been a focal point for right-wing poets, but I do not have information on this.
Hugh MacDiarmid. According to Wikipedia "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, Plea for a Scottish Fascism and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini's regime. By the 1930s, however, following Mussolini's lurch to the right, his position had changed[.]” Mussolini himself said that his regime was neither Left nor Right, so working out the implications of supporting him is a baffling task. As he said that he had no ideology, establishing what fascist ideology was is arduous and can never reach a satisfactory conclusion. MacDiarmid did not understand politics, he was tone-deaf when it came to politics. (Mussolini did not lurch to the Right in 1930, although he took on racial politics in 1938. This is not a meaningful statement if we take “by the 1930s” to mean “by the end of 1930”. His regime was militarist and expansionist from the word go.)
Peter Russell. As a poet, Russell was amazingly unimportant. He did edit the magazine Nine, a source for right-wing culture of the early 1950s. Encounter. Everyone knows that Encounter was financed by the CIA through various front foundations, and that it aimed to dissuade the centre Left from making common cause with the more solid Left. It published a lot of poetry, partly because it paid more than anyone else. It does not follow that the poems are right-wing. Encounter always spoke with a centre-left voice, even if it was always convincing people to move further towards the right. It did not favour overtly political poems (although it did publish at least one, by CH Sisson.) The point, not made explicitly, was that high culture was in favour of the status quo and so of the Cold War. It is not a good source for studying the Right itself.
It is obvious that I haven’t identified any right-wing poets born after 1940. This is probably a genuine result, although there might be a lot of evidence which I am just not aware of. I think the biggest problem in this area has to do with seeing the Right as something unitary and in which all parts share exactly the same set of ideas, which leads necessarily on to the idea that almost everything is secret and that the invisible evidence would support the unitary theory!). One has to allow for most poets not being very political – they are too immersed in poetry. Most invisible things are not visible because they are not there. I feel that more research is needed in this area, that is uncovering visible evidence and not invisible speculations.
One of the titles published by the Right Book Club was the 1938 This England: a book of the shires and counties, by W S Shears. This raises a real can of worms. The one certain thing is that the people in charge at this reactionary club thought that topography and provincial interests were of interest to consumers on the Right. When we start to extend this to proposals such as “writing about landscape is right-wing” or “writing about anything outside the big cities is right-wing” or “writing about the past of any district in Britain is right-wing”, these proposals sound totally unconvincing and we are faced with the prospect of doing a lot of fine-grained work and ending up with results which are also fine-grained but unimpressive and, in the end, inconclusive. I have a weary feeling that we are going to spend much, much work on this precisely because it there are no undisputed facts.
I have great difficulty in supporting the proposal that we can identify poetry about landscape as right-wing from the word go. I can extend that to saying that I am impressed by ideas that art has to have serenity, has to represent something larger than humanism and more stable, that it gives us access to abstract ideas by showing objects stable enough to make thought about them possible. So I can’t just identify art with what is critical, depicts conflict, undermines individual consciousness, and so forth. These things may appeal to many left-wing cultural thinkers but they do not characterise the Left as a whole.
I have also been reading Raphael Samuel’s Island stories: Unravelling Britain, his last, notably unfinished, work about how British people remember the British past. He was the son of two communists and remembers going on hikes through beautiful countryside in groups of young people organised by the Party. So there they were, looking at landscapes, seeing remote parts of the country, experiencing the past by seeing old (possibly ruined) buildings. This cannot have been a right-wing experience. (The essay is “Country visiting: a Memoir”, and is 20 pages long.) The date he specifically mentions is 1940-1 but I get the impression that he, or his family did a lot of hiking in the 1930s and 1940s.
I have no doubt that there is a right-wing way of imagining the past and the landscape, integrating real things into a fantasia which has a minimal connection to reality. I have much more doubt about finding such fantasias in poetry of the past 80 or so years.
Captain Ramsay, interned in Brixton jail, was still allowed to ask parliamentary questions because he was still an MP. Griffiths records him asking one which dealt with the activities of the Advisory Music Council. This organised music for the armed forces and was headed by Sir Victor Schuster (1885-1962), a name which could be Jewish. The question “asked the Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that, under the chairmanship of Sir Victor Schuster, the Radio Music Council has been overburdening the musical programmes for the Forces with renderings characteristic of Oriental and African races; and whether he will ensure that programmes shall contain a greater proportion of music characteristic of the white races and especially those inhabiting the British Islands.” (Hansard) This was debated on 3 August 1944. The wording is a code for jazz, felt to be something African which was often played by Jews. I am listening to a Benny Goodman recording to check this out. Fabulous! I guess that the music in question was not jazz but non-improvised dance-oriented pop with an African-American influence, so swing. This is a moment when a Right view of culture comes into the open. The point was clear in 1944 but I don’t think it holds good today, the conservative-supporting newspapers expect their readers to listen to rock music, and no doubt they are right. The Sixties changed everything and we have to work out a description of right-wing cultural preferences which is accurate for today and not for 1944.
(I have consulted Hansard and the reply was “I am informed that the Advisory Music Council over which Sir Victor Schuster presides acts in an advisory capacity only to E.N.S.A., and possesses no executive authority.“ So this would relate to music given at Army entertainments, by ENSA, and not to military music as used for marching, on parades, etc. The government spokesman said further that “The Advisory Music Council is concerned solely with the place and share of classical music” in ENSA, so was not even involved in the dance music which ENSA might use, in revues for example. The question was framed entirely because Schuster is a possibly Jewish name. Most of the classical music played under government auspices during the war was put on by the CEMA, not ENSA, so I am not clear that the Music Advisory Council had any importance. Is there somewhere a master list of "wartime committees which didn't really do anything"?) **
Richard Griffiths’ Patriotism Perverted (1998) is about the Right Club in 1939-40 and is a follow-up to his previous book on British pro-Nazism, anti-Semitism, etc., in 1930-39, Fellow travellers of the Right. Perverted centers on Archibald Ramsay (“Captain Ramsay”), a Conservative MP who was so pro-Hitler that he was interned for four years while still an MP. He was head of the Right Club, whose main focus was anti-Semitism and the "Jewish conspiracy" theory.
The difference between Ramsay and other right-wing Conservative MPs of the late 1930s seems to have been that he was more vulnerable to conspiracy theory and less able to perceive other levels of reality. So once he had identified that there was a secret war against Christianity, and identified this with the Communist Party in Moscow, and identified the Jews with the Bolsheviks, his attitude to Hitler followed logically. He does not seem to have had the intellectual resources to realise that secularism had made a great start with the Enlightenment, in the mid 18th century, or that Christianity was not a logical and reasonable construct, that not all Jews were Bolsheviks, and finally that Hitler did not have the best interests of Great Britain at heart. Of course this involved depersonalising everyone who was not a right-wing Christian, and the link between belief in conspiracy and a lack of belief in the agency and reasoning powers of other people is striking.
To go back, the Depression in the 1930s made investment in the British and US economies unattractive. There was an over-supply of productive capacity and new investment was not able to generate income enough to make it worthwhile for the investor. However, the Third Reich was re-arming at a stunning rate and was keen to facilitate foreign capital investment. It was inevitable that funds would flow into the Reich from Britain and the USA. Equally logically, the investors, and their lobbyists or media agents, agitated against war with Germany, or anything raising tension between the Reich and the democracies. Politicians who rang up experts to find out the attitude of the City would be told that criticising German foreign policy was a Very Bad Thing. There was a whole apparatus discouraging attitudes, either public ones or among the political class, which could lead to a breach with Germany or even to running accurate stories about Kristallnacht, conditions in Dachau, aircraft production, and so forth. The information I have is that the City changed its attitude within days of the outbreak of war. To start with, the investments in German industry were no longer real – a dictatorship had as little respect for private property as it did for freedom of speech. The two things are intimately related. Secondly, they were in general patriots and could only be on one side in a war which had actually broken out. Thirdly, British re-armament was obviously going to be a source of profits beyond measure. This was the new focus for business, whatever else had closed down for the duration. So City funding for pro-German lobbying groups just dried up. Something similar happened to groups which had combined anti-Bolshevism with pro-Nazism. They rediscovered their patriotism. But, this left a residue of the irreducibles – people who were too pro-Nazi, or pro-Mussolini, to shift sides just because of a world war. And these irreducibles were likely to end up being interned without trial under a Defence Regulation.
Griffiths started his book, he records, with the Red Book, a ledger containing a membership list of the Right Club dating from 1940 and seized by the police when they arrested Parker Tyler, which mysteriously turned up in the safe of a solicitor's office when they were clearing out the stored documents of a client, in the late 1980s. The client was deceased, not necessarily recently. Someone at the office recognised that the aged ledger had some historical value and delivered it to Griffiths – they had read Fellow travellers of the Right. Griffiths concluded, after a while, that the use of a formal membership list was to impress hesitating potential recruits. The list might therefore contain many names of people too sober and stable to join up with a conspiracy (aiming to change British foreign policy and frustrate His Majesty's Government). It might well be a fake list. A list of headstrong Fascisti would not be persuasive for someone hesitant. Griffiths therefore felt that the ledger was not a reliable piece of historical testimony, although he also does not accept that it was for show (p.124).
It is bizarre that the ledger was in the flat of a US citizen, a traitor to the US government, at the moment when he was arrested by the police. This suggested a link between Ramsay and active supply of secret information to the Italian government (so indirectly to the German government, which no longer had an Embassy open in London). That link led directly to Ramsay’s arrest and internment, along with a raft of Far Right opponents of the war. However, it was never tested in court. Ramsay was never convicted of giving aid to the enemy. The Red Book was returned to him, since it was possible evidence in a case which was never going to be brought.
Maxwell Knight of MI5 was present when the arrest was made and if you are a right-wing conspiracist you surely believe that the Red Book was a fake and that Knight planted it in Tyler’s flat to justify a group arrest of Far Right conspiracists. It would have been a key document in a mass trial of Hitler supporters and peace-makers – which never took place. Most of the people whose names appear on the list were never interned.
Looking up the string 'Right Club' gave me a group of hits identifying the Right Book Club, an association whose publication might give an outline iconography of the cultural Right. If you look at the committee of this club, you can see names which also occur in Griffiths’ book as pro-Hitler and indeed English Fascists. Wikipedia gives a complete list of their books.
I also thought to collect some elementary material for a future discussion of the Right in poetry. So, here goes.
Edmund Blunden. Was so anti-war as to be pro-Hitler in the 1939-40 period.
David Jones. Was much influenced by Spengler and had difficulties with the Jewish Question and the anti-Bolshevik question. See an earlier post on this blog where I explore some neglected utterances of Jones.
CH Sisson. Was pro-Franco and emotionally committed to Charles Maurras and the position of Action Française. Seems to have had a phobia for the Left and for the State solving social problems.
Kathleen Raine. A very anti-political person but was connected to the Counter-Enlightenment and so opposed a range of processes following on the Enlightenment, characterised as “the rise of materialism”. She identified the decline of the arts with the rise of materialism. She married two very left-wing husbands but this is not unambiguous in its implications.
Peter Abbs. used imagery from Spengler in some of his most powerful poems. Is strongly christian and by implication anti-materialist. Disliked the culture of demonstration in the 70s. Later poetry involves the promotion of Great Men as part of an anti-modernist position. I have just been reading an essay by Alan Sinfield which discussed Abbs as part of an analysis of different policies of teaching English in schools. Abbs comes out as a “progressivist”, so one who believes in the inner needs of the pupil emerging and turning into an adult personality, through culture. This is derived from Lawrence, although it has developed over the following decades. Teaching is central to Abbs and that argument does not lend itself to left-right oppositions, or not easily.
DH Lawrence. This is probably an out of date issue. In the 1950s, people wanted to say that Lawrence was like Nazism because both believed in the irrational and instinct. This was probably part of saying that free verse led to the breakdown of character and civilised constraints, as part of promoting regular metre and so on. I doubt anyone living today takes this stance. Lawrence does not have much to do with the Conservative Party, who were certainly the local Right, so there are major problems in defining his ideas, or a subset of them, as Right. He certainly had a German wife but equally certainly the attitudes which she shared with her friends were a million miles away from Nazism. One of her cousins was a fairly prominent nationalist, but that doesn't prove anything.
Robert Conquest. Was a communist as a student and possibly learnt Russian as part of this. Served in the Army during the Second World War and ended up in military intelligence, it would seem, on the way to becoming a sovietologist. His professional career was inside the defence establishment. He was firmly anti-communist although this is not the same as being right-wing.
Philip Larkin. Was a great fan of Thatcher and the likelihood is that he regretted every aspect of modern life after 1945 which Thatcher was later an enemy of.
Agenda. Agenda magazine was set up on the instructions of Ezra Pound and had an abiding link with reverence for Mussolini, which led to editors resigning on at least two occasions. It was the main editor who was a fan of Pound and Mussolini, and I am not clear that other poets appearing in Agenda had the same enthusiasms. There were other right-wing poundians, for example Denis Goacher, but these are not much-read poets. Agenda may have been a focal point for right-wing poets, but I do not have information on this.
Hugh MacDiarmid. According to Wikipedia "MacDiarmid flirted with fascism in his early thirties, when he believed it was a doctrine of the left. In two articles written in 1923, Plea for a Scottish Fascism and Programme for a Scottish Fascism, he appeared to support Mussolini's regime. By the 1930s, however, following Mussolini's lurch to the right, his position had changed[.]” Mussolini himself said that his regime was neither Left nor Right, so working out the implications of supporting him is a baffling task. As he said that he had no ideology, establishing what fascist ideology was is arduous and can never reach a satisfactory conclusion. MacDiarmid did not understand politics, he was tone-deaf when it came to politics. (Mussolini did not lurch to the Right in 1930, although he took on racial politics in 1938. This is not a meaningful statement if we take “by the 1930s” to mean “by the end of 1930”. His regime was militarist and expansionist from the word go.)
Peter Russell. As a poet, Russell was amazingly unimportant. He did edit the magazine Nine, a source for right-wing culture of the early 1950s. Encounter. Everyone knows that Encounter was financed by the CIA through various front foundations, and that it aimed to dissuade the centre Left from making common cause with the more solid Left. It published a lot of poetry, partly because it paid more than anyone else. It does not follow that the poems are right-wing. Encounter always spoke with a centre-left voice, even if it was always convincing people to move further towards the right. It did not favour overtly political poems (although it did publish at least one, by CH Sisson.) The point, not made explicitly, was that high culture was in favour of the status quo and so of the Cold War. It is not a good source for studying the Right itself.
It is obvious that I haven’t identified any right-wing poets born after 1940. This is probably a genuine result, although there might be a lot of evidence which I am just not aware of. I think the biggest problem in this area has to do with seeing the Right as something unitary and in which all parts share exactly the same set of ideas, which leads necessarily on to the idea that almost everything is secret and that the invisible evidence would support the unitary theory!). One has to allow for most poets not being very political – they are too immersed in poetry. Most invisible things are not visible because they are not there. I feel that more research is needed in this area, that is uncovering visible evidence and not invisible speculations.
One of the titles published by the Right Book Club was the 1938 This England: a book of the shires and counties, by W S Shears. This raises a real can of worms. The one certain thing is that the people in charge at this reactionary club thought that topography and provincial interests were of interest to consumers on the Right. When we start to extend this to proposals such as “writing about landscape is right-wing” or “writing about anything outside the big cities is right-wing” or “writing about the past of any district in Britain is right-wing”, these proposals sound totally unconvincing and we are faced with the prospect of doing a lot of fine-grained work and ending up with results which are also fine-grained but unimpressive and, in the end, inconclusive. I have a weary feeling that we are going to spend much, much work on this precisely because it there are no undisputed facts.
I have great difficulty in supporting the proposal that we can identify poetry about landscape as right-wing from the word go. I can extend that to saying that I am impressed by ideas that art has to have serenity, has to represent something larger than humanism and more stable, that it gives us access to abstract ideas by showing objects stable enough to make thought about them possible. So I can’t just identify art with what is critical, depicts conflict, undermines individual consciousness, and so forth. These things may appeal to many left-wing cultural thinkers but they do not characterise the Left as a whole.
I have also been reading Raphael Samuel’s Island stories: Unravelling Britain, his last, notably unfinished, work about how British people remember the British past. He was the son of two communists and remembers going on hikes through beautiful countryside in groups of young people organised by the Party. So there they were, looking at landscapes, seeing remote parts of the country, experiencing the past by seeing old (possibly ruined) buildings. This cannot have been a right-wing experience. (The essay is “Country visiting: a Memoir”, and is 20 pages long.) The date he specifically mentions is 1940-1 but I get the impression that he, or his family did a lot of hiking in the 1930s and 1940s.
I have no doubt that there is a right-wing way of imagining the past and the landscape, integrating real things into a fantasia which has a minimal connection to reality. I have much more doubt about finding such fantasias in poetry of the past 80 or so years.
Captain Ramsay, interned in Brixton jail, was still allowed to ask parliamentary questions because he was still an MP. Griffiths records him asking one which dealt with the activities of the Advisory Music Council. This organised music for the armed forces and was headed by Sir Victor Schuster (1885-1962), a name which could be Jewish. The question “asked the Secretary of State for War whether he is aware that, under the chairmanship of Sir Victor Schuster, the Radio Music Council has been overburdening the musical programmes for the Forces with renderings characteristic of Oriental and African races; and whether he will ensure that programmes shall contain a greater proportion of music characteristic of the white races and especially those inhabiting the British Islands.” (Hansard) This was debated on 3 August 1944. The wording is a code for jazz, felt to be something African which was often played by Jews. I am listening to a Benny Goodman recording to check this out. Fabulous! I guess that the music in question was not jazz but non-improvised dance-oriented pop with an African-American influence, so swing. This is a moment when a Right view of culture comes into the open. The point was clear in 1944 but I don’t think it holds good today, the conservative-supporting newspapers expect their readers to listen to rock music, and no doubt they are right. The Sixties changed everything and we have to work out a description of right-wing cultural preferences which is accurate for today and not for 1944.
(I have consulted Hansard and the reply was “I am informed that the Advisory Music Council over which Sir Victor Schuster presides acts in an advisory capacity only to E.N.S.A., and possesses no executive authority.“ So this would relate to music given at Army entertainments, by ENSA, and not to military music as used for marching, on parades, etc. The government spokesman said further that “The Advisory Music Council is concerned solely with the place and share of classical music” in ENSA, so was not even involved in the dance music which ENSA might use, in revues for example. The question was framed entirely because Schuster is a possibly Jewish name. Most of the classical music played under government auspices during the war was put on by the CEMA, not ENSA, so I am not clear that the Music Advisory Council had any importance. Is there somewhere a master list of "wartime committees which didn't really do anything"?) **
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