Orchard’s Bay

Orchard’s Bay

A charity sale turned up a copy of Noyes’ 1939 book Orchard’s Bay which I thoughtlessly scarfed up. Two pounds. A cup of coffee costs more. I was interested because I had recently read quite a lot of Noyes’ poetry in connection with a reject in English nationalism and its complete exit from poetry in about 1924. Noyes had written a large amount of significant nationalist poetry, was 40 in 1922 and had followed the exit from that whole Public Emotion along with his rivals. I didn’t like that nationalist poetry but I was curious about the apparent legislative change which meant that poetry was governed by new rules. I am now, 2022, in an era of right-wing populism where poor people are induced to vote for governments which impose low taxes and low levels of welfare. A key part of this set-up is distrust of educated elites who are also liberal and fascinated by foreign cultures. The electorate scores, in contrast, as xenophobic and nationalistic. It interests me to return to a time when the educated elite were imperialist and xenophobic, and to recover how that steady opinion changed. Everybody witnessed this, but did they record what they witnessed?
Noyes has an account of the career of Stephen Phillips (a model for his own self-perception, perhaps) which shows him as having his career wrecked by a clique of critics who were animated by jealousy. This is already an anticipation of the UKIP theory of how things have gone wrong: if you disbelieve journalists, then it follows that you can cling to your populist-right views. So, we can say that bookshops stock what they want and people buy what they want, and so events in the poetic world are spontaneous - the democracy of the market validates rule changes. Or, we can accept that changes are the result of tiny metropolitan cliques who drink together, and so that every decision since 1905 has been arbitrary and a manipulation, and so that history should be re-run – with the losers winning. It is very difficult to prove which side is right, if any. Noyes does not explain how newspaper critics could overwhelm and replace word of mouth.

Bay was published in September 1939 by Sheed and Ward, Catholic publishers. It is a set of essays about his garden on the south shore of the Isle of Wight, interspersed with reflections on literature. That doesn’t sound very exciting, and indeed there is no page of it which I enjoyed or wanted to share with anyone. It includes about 30 pages of his poetry, presumably recent. The house is now a guest house and so you can find a photograph of it on the Internet, with notes on the topography. I certainly enjoyed the photograph. A few months after publication, the house was facing a coast occupied by the German Army. It is very far south: an unusual climate and one justifying a book about a garden full of plants that wouldn’t do well closer to the middle of England. He says the garden occupies ten acres, but not how many people were employed in the gardening of it. Bay is golden and unfocussed kitsch in the way that his famous poetry is drum-beating nationalist kitsch. 1939… Britain was visibly steaming towards another world war. Noyes had written the sentimental soundtrack to the first one. Did he remember what he had done, or have thoughts about the new militarism (in Europe) and its drum-thumping bards? Apparently not. He never mentions it.
1936 had seen two key anthologies of British poetry, both of which excised Noyes from the collective record. He was facing an eclipse, however suffused with the colours of the sunset. Did he notice? he never mentions it. This is an index of kitsch – it leaves out anything that interrupts its swaddling fantasy, any splinter of the real world. How could he write 300 pages while leaving out anything which intrudes on his state of serenity and vagueness, of blossoming self-love?

This is the sound of affluence. Any significant idea would break the spell of serenity. So he writes gushingly and grammatically about trivia. Or about false ideas- there is a moment where he disproves Darwin. How stupid do you have to be to think you can disprove Darwin without being a biologist or even reading any specialist literature? But that is the proposal of affluence, that you can make unpleasant ideas go away and that you can be a great thinker without effort or study. The world of ideas is as subject to him as his garden – he can have anything that does not suit cut down.

The clouds drift over the sea, the great white clouds,
Trailing their violet shadows, all as one.
For I remember watching them, long ago
In other lands, these clouds.
They are not changed,
The sunlit sea, the green-crested waves,
The dusky shadows travelling all one way,
Expanding like dark stains, or like a breath
Vanishing into the sunlit green again.
Nothing is changed. Nothing is there but beauty;
And yet, and yet;
O, why should beauty weigh on hungering eyes
And heart, as though some deep unuttered thing
Were there sealed up in lead?
(untitled, at p.153)

This isn’t very good.
Two features of Noyes. He has that quality of self-approval... it is very attractive. I certainly wonder if anyone who has close contact with a university has quite that level of inability to doubt any idea. Secondly, his fluency with words. He is saying almost nothing, but he is always rippling with words, like some pianist who can improvise decorations and variations apparently forever. Rippling, pointless, trills.
This is so elevated. The term Edelkitsch may apply. Edel means noble and Edelkitsch is a sort of bad art which ennobles whatever it looks at. And omits anything functional and work-related, naturally. Edelkitsch relies usually on Nature, God and the Tranquillised Past. The process of cultivating the past, of dissolving it down to egocentric story lines of a comforting shape, is like cultivating a garden: removing all the plants you don’t like and aiming at flowers. Freud wrote a paper called "The ego and mechanisms of defence". Really, Bays is all about mechanisms of defence. Evidently he is trying to sound as if he were writing in 1820. One defence mechanism has locked out news of the death of Tennyson, even the death of Keats. This is not like other poems written in about 1938, by Auden or Barker. But Gascoyne is not so dissimilar -

Hush, says the sameness of the snow
The Ural and the Jura now rejoin
The furthest arctic’s desolation. All is one:
Sheer mountain: plain, mountain; country, town;
Contours and boundaries no longer show.
(‘Snow in Europe.’)

I think we could label this as Edelkitsch.
I was vaguely interested in Noyes as a believer in the occult. This followed a snippet on the internet – which is actually more to do with a Believer projecting onto Noyes than with Noyes. The snippet records that Oliver Lodge tried to convert Noyes to spiritualism and failed. This is in his 1953 autobiography. But, in fact, there is a passage in the same book where Noyes talks about the invisible world:
And now having said all this, let me add that for years I have felt quite certain that communications from the invisible world do come unpredictably in quite a different way, subtle as the language of music or the colours of an evening sky, in aid and consolation to the lonely heart of man. On some of these personal experiences, I have dwelt in The Last Voyage, but it is a matter of living experience, not of detached experiment.

This is neither Catholic nor real – it is something like spiritualism, like the deduction of a world where the spirits lived, because to have them floating in nothing would have distressed the relatives. So Noyes believed in something like Summerland, the home of recently passed spirits. He believes that art obeys the rules of an invisible world – it works because we see part of that world through the external and sensuous forms of art. This is a kind of Platonism. “The real secret of this ‘desiderium' is that it is an attempt of the heart, often unconscious of its real aim, to transcend the Time process altogether; to escape from the world of shadows and perishable things, and find the eternal world.” ‘Desiderium’ is the word from which ‘desire’ derives. Getting away from Time may be a kind of response to the realisation that the collective memory of the poetry world is going to throw you off the boat.
He uses the phrase philosophia perennis several times – this holds that all religions contain the same basic truth, which is not compatible with Catholicism. So he wasn’t quite a good Catholic. He wanted to merge Platonic ideals and the Christian Heaven in some way – perhaps the details don’t matter. He is quite close to Kathleen Raine on this topic. I was interested in measuring how new modern occultist or New Age poetry was. Evidently there was a wave of poets in the first decades of the 20th C who were influenced by Theosophy, spiritualism, neo-platonism, G.R.S. Mead, and what have you. The details are quite difficult to dredge up. There were rationalist poets too – and, to be accurate, a great many Christian poets. But spirituality obviously wasn’t confined to the Christian realm, with its bureaucracy of very intelligent and logical people exposing inconsistencies and personal fantasies and throwing them out of the window, as it were.
Noyes wrote the words to the songs for the Pageant of Empire which was performed as part of the Empire Exhibition, 1924. Music by Elgar. He was right at the centre of the shiny coloured cloud which threw a nimbus around the bloody and quite uncontrolled activities which sustained the Empire. Anybody looking at attitudes today which are white-supremacist, unfair to Black and Asian people, against equal rights, etc., and going back to find where they came from, is going to look at that Exhibition because it was on such a large scale and because it made explicit feelings (or fantasies) which were wisping in the air prior to it. I don’t think the Exhibition included a stand portraying the Amritsar Massacre… omission is the key, and maybe Noyes’ practices of omission in writing these “intimate” and domestic essays will shed light on the omissions within propaganda as a kind of “aestheticisation” of a scene where the human blood was always fresh. (John Newsinger’s book The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire was on sale at the same charity event.) But my impression of Noyes is that he wasn't truly engaged in all that… he had a very low threshold of suggestibility, he was able to write poems (used as song lyrics) with great fluency, precisely matching a public mood, and rapidly assimilated by a big audience. So he was affluent by 1939, he actually didn’t have to worry about his next bank statement. When he wrote nationalist and imperialist verse, in prodigious quantities, it didn’t leave much mark on him. It was just a job. Conversely, I think he really was interested by Catholicism, by the history of science, and by the invisible world which he thought made its presence known through art. But the fact that he hadn't written any nationalist poetry for twenty years, that he had evidently changed his mind completely and given it up, doesn't give rise to any moment of reflection in Orchard's Bay – it is as if he had just crossed the street and forgotten the shop window he had just been looking at. No chance that we can find out why opinion moved against Empire, why the Empire was given up (just a few years later), what had changed. He just never mentions it.
He makes remarks about how fatuous modernity is, but this is perfunctory. He is very happy to think that any writer younger than him is a complete idiot. It’s a great feeling!

Noyes evidently didn’t actually do the gardening. He wasn't going down on his knees in the borders, or sawing off branches of trees. In the sense of Gardeners’ Question Time, he wasn’t a gardener at all – he didn’t know anything about plants. This certainly limits the interest of a book entirely about his garden. The plants are only there to reflect a brief yet bouffant mood of self-approval, of golden wisdom, of blossoming optimism, in the poet. It is an estate made of metaphors.
We could call the book an ode to the sense of leisure that flowed joyously when wages were low and you could afford servants.
The garden contains non-European plants and so we could link this to imperialism. The plants had been collected on various continents by botanists who were at least connected to colonial endeavours, for shipping, among other things. This is not a strong link, I find. You can be a gardener without being an imperialist.

My impression is that there is a connection between the bodiless communication which is the basis of Spiritualism and the “aural” emotional sharing which is the basis of nationalism. The devisers of the Empire Pageant didn’t have a good explanation for why a crowd could share nationalist sentiments… but they thought that crowd-feeling embodied a vast and real, if invisible, world. It was “already there” and the artist just had to channel it. They were very interested in how the Anglo-Saxon race could share big but invisible emotions, and not at all interested in a global system of exchange in which nobody who wasn't White had the vote. The Big Feelings were accepted as proof that Race existed. I think the same people who doubted that Race really existed doubted that spirits really spoke through mediums.
It is only fair to say that this is a minor work in Noyes' career. Like most works about gardens, I suspect.

At one point he talks about Pontanus and says he was the finest Latin poet of the Renaissance. Pontanus came from Spoleto, lived mainly in Naples, lived in the 15th century, wrote only in Latin. Pontanus did write a poem on the cultivation of oranges and so fits into a book about a garden. He is someone the modern person has probably never read… so it would be good to learn something about him. Noyes tells us almost nothing… you get the effect of Noyes being a great connoisseur, validating his own knowledge and his own aesthetic sensations, savouring the distilled finest vintages of the past, lost in admiration and self-admiration. That is, he scores the points needed to make Noble Kitsch come off. You get to see two whole lines of Pontanus. We hear that he was “the best” and this gives us a good feeling… it makes the prose overlap with the world of advertising, but maybe that isn’t misleading. It is the idea of Gracious Living.
The absence of doubt corresponds with the ability to exclude people who would disagree with him… he knows they exist, but somehow they are kept at a comfortable distance. The discussion isn’t really a discussion, it is more like music. It is not surprising that he chose to live on an island. We started with the Empire, and the fact that he creates this homogeneity in his prose, that there is only ever one side to any argument, is inexplicably related to racial homogeneity. I can’t analyse this but if the modern thing is for writers to experience Doubt then that is related to a society in which the verbal realm acknowledges divisions and the existence of diverse groups.

Noyes' autobiography was called Two Worlds for Memory. The second one is this Platonic world, hidden from the senses but embodying memory and reaching us as a memory of the timeless world. The first one is the one of real life.