travelogue - more progress

Travelogue

Am now (August 2026) reading around the subjects in Travelogue to check that I have not made outstanding mistakes. This is tedious because most of it is repetitive and not productive (of lurking errors). The tedium encourages me to have new ideas which obviously are NOT going to fit into a structure which is good as it is.

I left out Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. He was too arrogant to form sensible policies. Alan Moorehead says in The White Nile (1960) that when the Mahdi’s forces took Omdurman they massacred several thousand, enslaved everyone who survived, and ravished the women as a first step. “Human beings were the chief loot, but there was great wastage of them at first.” When news reached London, Blunt wrote “Unexpected and glorious news of the fall of Omdurman… I could not help singing all the way down [into the country] on the train.” He just didn’t know what he was talking about. He had left the Foreign Office (11 years in the Diplomatic Service) and was promoting his own personal foreign policy, without the benefit of the local intelligence which the FO itself had. I sympathise with his resistance to colonialism, but he is just someone you don’t want on your side. This is the equivalent of someone in the 2020s being a big fan of Hamas.
In a democracy, we have the right to criticise the government’s foreign policy. That still applies even when we are not “area specialists”. Someone like Blunt discredits this role of democratic opposition. That is why I don’t want him in my book.

August Closs. A chance encounter with an essay in Antaios (volume for 1964) showed me a reference to Closs’s 1936 article in which he claims that shamanism is a key to the Germanic religion as it was practiced 2000 years ago in Northern Europe. This is interesting because it shows that connection being made before Eliade’s 1951 book – although Eliade co-edited Antaios, in fact. The link explains the mysterious fact that “Wodan, id est furor” (Wodan, that is fury), was the statement made by bishop Adam of Bremen in the 12th C, when there still were pagans around. If you translate “furor” as “spirit possession”, then you can make a link to shamanism in Siberia, which was reasonably well studied by anthropologists (including those exiled for their political activities). The etymology is convincing, a word which gives us meanings like “rage” in German and “insane” in Middle English and Scottish (“I mun waxen wode”). But the idea that all states of ecstasy, trance, possession, etc. resemble Siberian shamanism is not tenable. It is a link with no specific content. Moreover, the written records we have of Wodan legends do not contain this trance aspect at all. The date when he acquired the name may have been far distant from the stage when literate monks (or others) came to write down Norse mythology. There is no instance where “wood” means “possessed by a spirit”, and it seems odd that Woden would be possessed by a spirit if he was a high god. I find the link between Siberia and Northern paganism fascinating, but the more I know about it the less real it seems. You have to strip the Siberian thing of every specific feature to make the match. But, if you do that, where is the intellectual gain?
There was a religion in Iron Age Northern Europe. And I don’t think it involved wise men sitting around reading works of theology and discussing philosophy. But it is the link with Siberia which I find questionable. Of course, this would bind Europe to the Third World. So many people have found shamanism fascinating, and tried to import it into the West in various forms.

Love of country
One of the sources I looked at, possibly Herbert Palmer, said that people after 1918 began to write patriotic poetry through writing in detail about their tiny bit of the country, so “love of country” in small-scale pictures. I have not gone into this at all. The sequel would be that the impact of the First World War had moved patriotic feeling away from the Army and the Navy and towards the countryside (urban scenes did not arouse the same feelings). That is, patriotic poetry continued but it no longer took the form which it had done between 1890 and 1920. I think it’s well-known that people fighting in the Second World War thought of scenes from the cherished English countryside when they asked themselves what they were fighting for. Such scenes were not heroic and certainly not arguments in favour of expansion. I have not explored this, and I think the problem in distinguishing propaganda from simple landscape or nature poetry (and painting etc.) is pervasive. If you look at the art and films which the official organs of propaganda encouraged, or funded, during the second war, some part of it is clearly the rural, the picturesque, the sentimental. There was a whole mythology of England, and to some extent of Wales and Scotland. And when people thought of war aims, they often thought of lovely villages and old woods. I know what the propaganda czars were thinking about, and that they thought a lot about how to portray the English countryside. But, the message of those paintings etc. is that here is something old and vulnerable. Something under threat from aggression and mechanization. The anti-war message is obvious. Of course, at the time this meant defence against invasion, and the defence obviously took military forms. But it was the same set of messages and emotions which pacifists liked to imagine. It just isn’t militarist. It also tends to be against the State, because in favour of very small areas which can be thought of as home. One of the cultural events of 1940 was a project funded by the Pilgrim Trust to record aspects of the countryside. This was often done in watercolour, which was more suited to painting outside, on the spot. The theme is vulnerability and the small-scale. The results are fascinating and very moving. But the editors of the book, from the 1980s I think, which collected and showed these images, pointed out that the immediate stimulus was anxiety that the British war effort would destroy all these things, turn them into tank training grounds and so on. Many guns, much concrete. The stress between love of country and militarism was obvious. That stress explains why creative people had gone off militarism and territorial aggression. It also explains why they stopped being patriotic in one way but went on being patriotic in another way. Anyway, it is ridiculous to think of some poem about wild flowers as instantly being nationalistic.
It is inaccurate to think of British poets as all trooping off into individualism in the 1920s. Some of them did. Few of them were happy about the gigantic efforts of the world war which had just finished. Fewer wanted a repeat. Many of them had grave doubts about the State and the ruling classes. But a belief in the community united most of them, and the issue was more how to express this.
A different version of the book would be if I were looking for patriotic poetry and foregrounding the successes. I didn’t do that, but after all love of country is something most writers share. Michael Powell’s 1944 film “A Canterbury Tale” is a good subject if we want to think about patriots in the 20th C. Its protagonist turns out to be carrying out small acts of vandalism (pouring glue in the hair of courting couples?) because he wants to defend a beautiful Kent, as something for tired warriors to come home to. The couples involve American soldiers, in Kent to help win the war. He is genuinely in love with his country. This is a portrait of patriotism; and the film is about patriotism. But the story is profoundly ambiguous. This cluster of feelings was not easy to simplify.

Matthew Mead as Cold War poet

The Cold War

After evoking (in Travelogue)the absence of good pro-Cold War poetry, I can't resist mentioning someone who wrote excellent poetry about everyday life in the Cold War, without actually being enthusiastic about it. So we should talk about Matthew Mead a bit. Mead (1924-2009) was best known as a translator from German poetry, and he was living in Germany in the Sixties. He had acquired German as part of Army service, in some way. He published Identities in 1967 and The Administration of Things in 1970. It is obvious that being learned in modern German literature made him sophisticated – no cheap effects. He also did not partake of English literary fashions. Mead’s theme, as suggested by his liking for a (largely forgotten) poet named Heinz Winfried Sabais, is “living through the shared experiences of a generation and reaching the truth through loss of generalisations”. Reaching the truth is the artistic drive. The generation is not mainly English, but in fact German and Russian. Take this passage from ‘A Poem In Nine Parts’, which was published, as part of the original series of Migrant Press pamphlets, in 1960:

Skirts, head-scarves, skin-tight slacks.
Lips of blood, breasts by e.e. cummings,
Girls hurry up the hill against the wind
To work at the sweet-factory.
Is it true that two women
(Furtseva and Pauker)
Trudge middle-aged
Like a theory of increasing misery
Yet nyloned, sandalled, stiletto-heeled,
Girls hurry up the hill
To hive as worker-queens,
Climbing to an eight a.m. start
With the jounce of a gay proletariat
In a confection of spring sunshine.

This proletariat hurrying up the hill
Is gayer, at a guess, George,
Than any proletariat you have seen.
Hey yeeorgi, Georgi Karpov!
Does the committee still meet Wednesdays
To smash the occasional ikon?

Furtseva and Pauker were senior female politicians (in the Soviet Union and Rumania, respectively) in the post-war era. “Served with distinction in illegal and violent regimes”, roughly. Pauker actually fell from power in 1953. The shot of female workers walking down the street towards a factory could be in a hundred European films. The poem is addressed to Georgi Karpov, in this case as “minister of religion” – in the Soviet Union that actually meant being an atheist-materialist whose job it was to arrest people for “religious propaganda”. The factory is in the West, presumably in Germany – the girls are wearing the branded products of “consumerism”. The comparison with top female communists is sarcastic. The theme is how abstract ideologies fare when mapped onto concrete, documentary, scenes – how generalised ideas are traps. Female factory workers are not much impressed by abstractions. The poetry is about sobering up from Marxist intoxication. This makes his poetry seem oddly out of date in 1970; the questions he is answering relate to the period after the death of Stalin, rather than the Sixties. Mead’s subject matter is broadly similar to that of Jack Beeching. With both, there is a kind of emotional anti-climax after the Twentieth Congress and destalinisation. But ‘Nine Parts’ makes its statement about politics concrete while being complex enough to bring about a “potential space” in which the imagination can work.
I thought his best poem was “From a Provisional Capital”, which is an account full of novel-like detail of life in Bonn. Yes, it was a provincial town, chosen as the capital partly to avoid jealousy by all the large towns of each other. The poem is mainly about German women of a certain generation being unmarried, and their matching men lying in graves deep inside the Soviet Union.

Mead does not have the heroic qualities which would set him beside Kipling. And so, we still have a gap in the series of patriotic poets. This is what I argue in 'Travelogue'. But there was good poetry about the Cold War, and Mead wrote some of it.
There was a Penguin Modern Poets (in 1970?) which had Mead, Beeching, and Harry Guest. It was vital in pointing out poets whom common opinion had missed. It is still a thing one must possess.