Travelogue - more doubts

Am still in the phase of checking ‘Travelogue’, which may go on for years. Am looking at Alan Rooss’s poem ‘Racing at Kassar Said’ (circa 1958?) and have just googled the name to find it is a hippodrome in Tunisia. That helps me to think about the poem, but there is a further dreadful possibility that I would be deciding whether his poem is accurate. That is absurd, but the book involves me in writing about roughly 60 poets, mainly describing foreign parts, and sometimes criticising what they say. The possibilities for factual error are endless, and this is where my book could spring a leak and trickle away. It is mainly about incomprehension. So, do I have to know about sixty territories… to avoid glaring errors… a tale of incomprehension? This is genuinely insoluble, so I am just trying to curtail my claims and so reduce exposure. You can’t write about the Empire without making claims about what the empire was like.

I searched ‘Autumn Sequel’ (1953) by Louis MacNeice, and did find something about the Empire and colonial wars. In Canto X, he is in a news room at the BBC, and stories about several colonial wars flit past. He recalls a moment, not in 1953 but perhaps 1943, when he was in India and there was trouble. Suez and Kenya pass by. There is trouble in Kenya, but he focuses on a regiment being sent there to clear it up, the Enniskillen Fusiliers, and on people he used to know who served in that regiment. He refers to them as the Skins. They came from Northern Ireland as he did. Lots of detail about this, but we don’t find out what the trouble in Kenya is, that the white settlers had stolen Kikuyu land, that younger Kikuyu were trying to take it back, that there were local nationalists with a strong economic cause feeding popular support. He just doesn’t have time for this. He doesn’t even tell you whether it was a black versus white struggle. The news stories are just scenery. He is only interested in people who are listening to him, preferably face to face. He goes to the pub with the newsmen so they have to listen to him. The stories might as well be sports stories. MacNeice had developed a completely conversational way of writing, cheerful and chatty, fluent, neatly metrical and rhymed, but never intense at any point. This solved certain problems of accessibility but didn’t leave behind poetry which we can enjoy now. One noticeable feature is that he has abandoned modernism altogether. I am not sure he ever wrote a modernist poem. However, I think this style of 1953 was an innovation, and that he was going in the direction which the poetry business followed. I think he had worked for the BBC for 11 years by then – broadcasting created the “fireside chat” quality and removed the distance between speaker and listener. MacNeice has also removed that gap. This cosy style was an advanced development; it suited the new world of public readings which was going to come on in the 1960s. But that conversational quality tended to produce forgettable poems. Television developed a typically flat world, where events in a greater world receded to the twilight while affable personalities produced most of the signal. Evidently MacNeice had pioneered this, and it follows that there was an idea of intimate banality which came before television, which TV was simply captured by. I am not writing about MacNeice.

Am reading Gooch’s book on the wars of Mussolini, 1935 to 1943. He remarks, or quotes someone in a strategy meeting remarking, in March 1943, saying that Italy (its empire) is vulnerable from Toulon to Rhodes once Tunisia has fallen to Montgomery. The question of where to place your garrisons is unanswerable. This is the nightmare of the infinite perimeter, and it affects all empires eventually. The attack is always going to come at a weak spot. What if we apply it to the British one…in 1940 there was a perimeter from Hong Kong to Capetown. Every expansion brings more exposure to foreign aggression, or to internal politics, and every increase of power increases that exposure. The climax of Empire was so brief that it is hard to find.
The stage of the book I am in is one of trying to reduce the perimeter size.

I stumbled across Ariel Dorfman’s book on Violencia y imaginacion en America (1970) and found that it deals with the most famous Magic Realist novels (adding Arguedas and Juan Rulfo). He screens out the ‘marvels’ and focuses on the violence. Clearly they are all extremely violent. This is a complete shift of perspective. The novels in question deal with the history of the regions where they are set (Cuba, Guatemala, Colombia) and that history is strikingly violent. This redefines the novels as being political and containing history. His first subject is Borges… I am surprised to see Borges treated as a model of violence in art, and I don’t think he is interested in recording the political history of Argentina. His heroes are playing metaphysical games which involve death. He is, however, nostalgic for gaucho stories which are like Westerns. The claim is that the Borgesian human “Mata o muere para salir del laberinto y entenderlo momentaneamente, transciende al violencia al usarla come instrumento de su desajenacion, derrotanda la muerte en la boca misma del Muerte, la muerte mia o el asesinato como manera de fijar algo eterno, digno, significativa [.]” I find this hard to believe. Dorfman tells us that Borges is denying and killing his own being because he hates America, and his whole work is a denial of the reality of America, especially its violence. So, he is really writing about America and violence the whole time. This is taking over Borges’ silence and running away with it.

* I recently acquired two anthologies, from 1953 and 1956 respectively, which can serve as a check on my thesis that poets did not agitate for decolonisation and did not foresee, or even react to, the rapid decline of Empire. (The books are New Poems 1953, edited by Robert Conquest and two associates, and Poetry Now, 1956, edited by G.S. Fraser.) The finding is largely that the thesis is right. I am not seeing poems calling for decolonisation. But no idea works 100%, and it is valuable to comb through the exceptions. We can start with Lawrence Durrell’s poem on ‘Alexandria’. Egypt was under British hegemony for a century or so, and when Durrell was living in Alexandria it was a city loosely within British influence, which came to an end in 1953. It is a good poem. We know that Durrell had friends in the local community, probably all of them Christian and more European than the average Egyptian. It is a good poem. But I don’t see anything about the presence of the Empire or about its end. It is not a political poem. In Fraser’s anthology, there is a poem by Sidney Keyes. It cannot be later than 1942, because Keyes was killed in that year. That happened in Tunisia. The poem is about Carthage, a city in what is now Tunisia. The theme is the collapse of the Carthaginian empire, overthrown by Rome. I can’t prove that the poem relates to the 1940s, and I especially have difficulty attributing a specific value to its inexplicit message. In 1942, the empire collapsing was most obviously the Italian one, with its many far-flung provinces rapidly falling to other armies. But there may be a reference to the fate of the British Empire, which in spring 1942 was just about emerging from a phase of crisis which looked terminal.

Rome remember, the courts of learning are tiled
With figures from the east like running nooses.
The desolate bodies of boys in the blue glare
Of falling torches cannot stir your passion.
Remember the Greeks who measured out your doom.
Remember the soft funereal Etruscans.

The last two stanzas are more explicit as a warning to the Romans that North European barbarians will bring their state to an end. The stanza quoted is startlingly vivid but basically ambiguous. The ambiguity is the power, I think. I can’t easily enrol this in a political argument. A poem by Julian Symons is about the gap between political perception and daily life in an uneasy affluence. The politics are described in a terse four lines which are clearly Marxist. Since that implies anti-imperialism, we can see the poem as anti-imperialist. However, the lack of detail deprives it of any poetic weight. Symons has political certainty, but that has hardened into a dogma and he can’t break it down to show something happening inside a poem. His poem published in 1956 has little psychological content.

I see that Symons wrote about the events in the South Sudan in the 1880s (England's pride : the story of the Gordon Relief Expedition, 1965). I presume this is a Marxist interpretation, and it probably disagrees a lot with Scawen Blunt’s version. Even more obscurely, his brother AJA Symons published a biography of Emin, Governor of Equatoria, in 1928. Emin Pasha was a German governor of a region technically part of South Sudan, near Uganda, who retreated south to avoid the Mahdist army which captured Omdurman in 1885. He was a Muslim convert.

The 1953 book has a poem by G. Rostrevor Hamilton called “The African” which is an early response to the few Commonwealth immigrants who were in London in 1953. Hamilton is sitting opposite an African (or possibly just a Caribbean of African heritage?) on public transport, and reacting with shock. This is not a hostile poem, but the poet finds the African to be completely out of context in London, and writes about that. He applies an old-fashioned and schematic psychology to his subject. Hamilton wonders “beyond his waking/ Quiet behaviour what still potent background/ Vast and primeval worked, what violence/ Ancestral[.]”. This isn’t very far from the Fascist view of Africans, even if the tone of the poem is not aggressive. The poem offers a moment of literary authority which we now see as complete ignorance, a defensive reaction to cover confusion. Hamilton thinks he knows about the “ancestral” mind of his subject and doesn’t give him a word to speak of his own. He gets credit for registering that immigrants existed, in a literary landscape which generally didn’t register anything, but less credit for letting the subject really get into the poem. This is not at all a good poem. Hamilton sees a Black person on the commuter train and then sees 20 white swans on the Thames. Why does this image follow? Is he relieved because they are white and because they belong where they live? If you wanted to write a Fascist poem, the image sequence of “ancestral blood thirst” plus “white birds on a river” would fit perfectly.

I spent a day reading old runs of ‘Poetry Review’, available on the shelf in Cambridge University Library. I was looking for racist poems but I went through 5 years’ worth of issues without finding any. I found the experience depressing so I am discontinuing. Instead, I am using a poem in Brooks and Faulkner’s classic anthology of imperialist poetry. This feels like cheating, but it serves as a reminder of how good that anthology is. The deeper question is whether the supposed Left-liberal hegemony is a real thing. Clear evidence on that is not available. After some work, I think it might be fairer to say that it holds for the period after about 1965, when there was a cultural revolt which had Afro-American music as one of its favourite staples. I think the situation in the 1950s was still one of near-universal passive racism, a common belief that coloured races were incapable of self-government (even if this might change after another 100 years of White rule). The poems I looked at rarely talked about politics, and I was not struck by critical or protest poems. Poetry Review was culturally conservative and it is likely that their audience was also politically conservative. That is not explicit in the pages of the magazine. One has to ask how many poems of the mid-century could have offended conservative opinion.
I don’t see any trace of poets who support Reform UK, so I think there is a Left-liberal hegemony, it is a real thing and presumably has a history. I don’t have that history, but I can say that if the poetry world wasn’t so full of Left people I wouldn’t have spent my life inside it. I can’t see my life being any better if there were one or a hundred Reform UK poets, or Restore Britain poets, rattling away. Reading, or skimming, old issues of Poetry Review was depressing, not so much because I couldn’t find the evidence I was interested in, as because the people writing it were so stupid and their judgments were so numbing and irritating. I didn’t want to spend another 40 hours doing this. There were moments of interest. So in the 1957 volume, page 165, you find a review of Christopher Logue’s book (his second book, I think), “The thoughts… are too private in their expression to be often shared by reviewer or reader.” We also hear about “an obsession with the macabre, both in life and in death[.]” So it tells you you won’t understand it. If Poetry Review dismisses a book in 20 words, there must be something of value in it. So, there was something happening in the 1950s! Logue was, three or four years later, viewed as a wholly public poet. Strange, and actually the privacy is simply because his style is bold and compressed.
Another fascinating moment is in the 1923 volume, at page 89, when someone has a snit about attacks on rhetoric. Obviously, this was already a controversy by 1923. That is well before close reading was invented. So, the decline of rhetoric cannot be due to the advent of close reading and the New Criticism. PR only registers new ideas as things to ridicule and be indignant about. It is a detector programmed not to detect what is happening. However, this is evidence of something, I think.

I am trying to read Beaton’s biography of George Seferis. It records (p.229) a moment around 1945 when English poets are trying to translate the poet from Smyrna and finding that they always make him sound like Eliot. This is an interesting moment. Is it a failure report? I had always assumed that Seferis was much influenced by Eliot. But, maybe that is an effect of translation? Maybe it doesn’t sound like the Waste Land at all, in Greek? Tinos Malanos wrote a book (in 1951) claiming this influence. Seferis wrote an essay refuting the idea (which was never published). (Beaton, p.295) Seferis translated a lot of Eliot’s poetry. The translators were born in a certain time… they knew Eliot backwards. Maybe they could make anything sound like Eliot because that is what they were saturated in. This is relevant, because I touch on Seferis and the ability of English poets (Rex Warner, Philip Sherrard, etc.) to translate him. That scene, about 1941 to 45, of poets hanging out in Alexandria, of Personal Landscape, of English people understanding Seferis in Greek, is a moment when English culture actually gets close to a foreign culture. One possibility is that the translation goes so well because Seferis was a cosmopolitan and anglophile and had absorbed so much English poetry. But maybe that isn’t true. Maybe it’s more that you can make Seferis sound like Eliot, and he then sounds less like the real Seferis. Maybe it’s very hard for us to get someone who grew up in Smyrna, on the Aegean, in the Ottoman Empire, and whose father was heavily involved in the “language quarrel”, between two variants of standardised modern Greek. The Greek town of Smyrna was destroyed in 1922. A brilliant translation can be a screen behind which everything strange hides. Cavafy went to school in England and his English quality is much stronger.

The Prince of Wales’ African Book (words by St John Adcock, 1926) may be the source Sitwell used for Gold Coast Customs. This is an obscure area. What she says may in fact be true, for the Gold Coast in the 1820s.

A note on Prynne’s poem “Aristeas”. It is possible to connect the tale about Aristeas flying above the sea and seeing cities, ships etc. with Siberian tales of the shaman leaving his body and flying out to see distant things. However, this bird’s eye view is hard to find in Siberian shaman literature. Reitzenstein (in his book on Hellenistic wonder-tales) lists a series of Greek writers who describe the world as if seen from high above – an imaginary vantage point. If we return to Aristeas, he came from Proconnesus, a trading port at the end of a long trading route leading all the way to Siberia, in fact through the countries which the Arimaspeia describes. The “bird’s” perspective describes a map, and the 7th C date puts us in the early days of maps. These were in fact the cognitive means by which merchants could go to Central Asia and return. Aristeas’ knowledge is what merchants on Proconnesus, and in other Black Sea ports, really possessed. There is a perspective implied in a flat rendition of a portion of the Earth. So the “overflight” belongs to Greek knowledge and not to Siberian.