Rules of the elite

Thinking about Allott and his anthology … again

I am revisiting Allott via a set of email exchanges with Simon Jenner and John Goodby. We started with Charles Osborne’s memoirs and discussion of the impersonal style of arts management, with objective and apparently anti-artistic criteria taking over. Osborne was writing about this in 1986, as he left the Arts Council. It takes us back to the late stage of the rule of connoisseurs, as what the impersonal style replaced. A good example is Allott’s Penguin anthology (one edition in 1950 and another in 1962) with its central decision to include 39.5% of Oxford graduates in its selection of poets. This covered the period 1918 to 1960. That one figure sums up the horror so many people have for the dominance of choice. It links in to a vision of uncontrolled elitism: an in-group owns poetry, reproduces itself, shuts everyone else out. They set standards of taste by which other groups become out-groups. In the bad vision, this elite compiles a product which drives most of the audience away. There is a whole new cultural market, but poetry can’t keep up with it and becomes an old-fashioned genre run by old-fashioned people. The impulse is to eliminate choice as a factor. The guess is that if you edit and subsidise poetry according to bureaucratic, governmental criteria then it will do much better. John disliked Allott's notes, which sometimes include more words than the poems he is supposedly presenting.
Note that if you add in Cambridge graduates it becomes 60%. We are looking at what happened to “validated” 18 year olds, but if we had more evidence we would probably see that they had already been to one of a fairly small number of “good schools” and had probably encountered English teachers who actually read modern poetry. The unfairness starts early on. People don’t like this... they want the outcome of the game to be unknown before the game is played. They do not want to observe X being given a coupon at the age of seven and cashing that coupon in, aged 30, as entry into a Penguin anthology.
I have just acquired Heath-Stubbs’ 1946 book. It is good, although I think he gave up trying to be good at a certain point in the 1950s. At this distance in time, we can say that there were objective risks… because Heath-Stubbs failed, there was evidently a risk of failure. He wrote a lot of bad poetry and people lost interest. Being in “8 Oxford Poets” was apparently a ticket, but maybe a ticket to obscurity. The malice of his immediate peers is the objective risk; this is a game that people can lose. Martin said Heath-Stubbs was “a coming man who never came”; I think they had known each other for 40 years at that point. Actually, Allott’s poetic career was pretty disastrous. Both Allott and Heath-Stubbs were clearly under a lot of strain… they knew they were losing the game. “Privilege” does not capture this situation with any precision.
John sent us a copy of a floridly Apocalyptic poem:

O antique vistas of stone sarcophagi,
Silent except for the stammer of literature
Through millennia,
Whose yellowing relics caricature and festoon the
Dropped anonymous features of this ice-era;
All plasm shaped to human symmetry
Through shell-coiled generations of incessant downpour;
Assemble backward out of charred time’s collapse.
Come,
Honeycomb each coxcomb
With drums for the dead and sea-green elegiacs,
Ring now like tinnitus in every ear.
Hands, be immersed in suffering like a surgeon,
And eyes, probe everywhere.

O agnus mundi, baa-lamb inhabiting
The inhibiting volcanic ranges of today,
Hovered over by harpies, restricted to cavities
And fissures out of the metre of time’s way,
Labyrinthine limp hero of a thousand epics,
Miles from the mild archipelagos of content,
Let these who underline your rhythms and stresses
Warn you like sirens of imminent judgement;
Sailors at sea
With their mercy of coracles and compasses,
Learn with the flashing miracle at last discernment.
Let their lives warp you away from the thinly-roofed crevasses.
You need not go astray, as they do, in the mountain passes.

Yet what heartbreak we have managed to mint between
The abstract cold that eyes us and the iron fire,
In our cage-bubble of doom barely six miles high,
Our quaking littoral with its sastrugi of pressure
Where nothing is shipshape, and time
Flares like a vesta and finds
An odour of memory like a pink keepsake.
Spreadeagled fall from your precipice of pride
Crying ‘Peccavi’,
Who futile and supine rut in the folded hills,
Wishing disasters may happen somewhere else.
The shadows are eerie,
The eyelids heavy,
The chances of flowers go out like a life on the tide.
(‘Ode in Wartime’, part of)
The strange thing is, this is by Kenneth Allott. So he wrote some audenesque poems in the Thirties... got carried away by the New Romantic style and wrote terrific poems from inside it… then joined the enemies of the New Romantic thing… and compiled a standard anthology which eliminated the New Romantic thing from the record. And lost the ability to write.

Maybe in his depressing poet-analyses Allott is doing an autopsy of the cadaver of his own talent. Those poems were reprinted – after his death. The early-50s reaction against Apocalypse was a punishment of Allott as much as anybody else. The friends he valued so much had decided that this style was Outside Good Taste and this enactment prevented him from any further creative fulfilment. This is a really interesting story.
In the notes (in his anthology), Allott is squeezing young poets like someone juicing a grapefruit… it’s horrible. But it’s not outsiders who are getting this treatment, it is insiders, young insiders. He has Thwaite and Levi on board but you get no idea of what they were going to do, he only sees flaws. He apparently knows everything about that little Insider group, and they are homogeneous and so knowable. But he totally fails to get those two, even though they are going to be the “star” Oxford poets a few years later. Relations inside the dominant group are so interesting. They certainly aren't friendly all the time. Yes there is hostility towards outsiders, they are “blanked”, excluded; but the hostility among insiders is more cogent. The Wars of the Roses were a huge series of factional struggles between members of the elite, often related to each other; they weren’t fights between the nobility and the peasants. You can't bring those fights on stage because they didn't happen.

I wrote: “Even more about Allott. Martin said about Heath-Stubbs 'a coming man who never came'. This could be like someone selling wine in an honest way… I can imagine Martin saying 'a touch of the cat-piss but excellent value for money'. In a wine-shop where you go on Friday night and he knows his stock because he is always drinking it.” This is Martin Seymour-Smith, a genuine Forties poet whom Simon and I knew well many years later. John Goodby said “I’m not saying Allott was a manager anyway - don’t know enough about him. I just don’t like the censorious, anti-pleasure, nit-picky nature of his prose intros in that anthology.” John is quite right about this. We are looking at the Oxford network as the most privileged people, ones freed from the usual controls. This does not seem to have worked for Allott. This is the most interesting thing in the story. How can you have a system where people at the apex are not free, can’t do what they want? Surely that makes the apex unattractive? So maybe the Apocalypts demanded freedom, seized it… and were punished by the real managers for doing so.
All through those Notes (skewering the poets he is anthologising), he sounds unhappy… that is being presented as the prestige behaviour. He gives away pure freedom to get into interrogation and collecting evidence. I mean, you don’t sell wine by showing people who drink it and don’t enjoy it. He doesn’t even answer the question, why did you decide to spend your life doing this.
If you think about the wine trade, the people who face the public actually enjoy wine. They even enjoy getting a bit drunk. They stimulate people to buy – that is an aspect of spreading knowledge. They can do the talk because they really know what wine is about – a taste you enjoy. The elite which Allott was part of was not hedonistic. They lost a lot of ground in the Sixties as people came along who did take a hedonistic attitude towards poetry. The strange thing is, this mixture of austerity and Close Reading is moving towards an impersonal-bureaucratic style of decision-making. If it is not based on pleasure, what is the point of personal choice? It has to be “I like this one, I don’t like that one”; if you don’t enjoy the ones you like, the whole project has run out of fuel. I mention wine because it was something which around 1930 only a tiny number of people were enthusiastic about, and it was an aspect of upper-class pleasures which made that downward journey, it was marketed and people wrote How To books about it and now a couple of million people are involved. You know, wine, Mediterranean holidays, visiting art galleries, French food. Downwardly mobile pleasures. A whole package of things which poetry somehow isn’t part of.
We need to go back to where we started, with an impersonal decision style in the arts and documents written in management-speak. It seems like a big disaster. You can’t market leisure commodities in that way. But there are unsolved problems to do with connoisseurship and personal choice. These tend to come out when people discuss anthologies. If you make an anthology with 85 poets today, you have probably a thousand poets who didn’t make the cut seething with resentment. That sort of resentment is now a big part of the conversation around poetry. I guess the conversation must be productive of something. I suspect also that it displays the spread of privatisation and the destruction of shared and public space. Is it too much to admit that the other team has won?