The original Selected Poems of Joseph Macleod has sold out, so there is going to be a small reprint. I was thinking about a new edition.
Possibly the edition can be improved. After 24 years, I think a rethink is possible. (NB I was doing the work in 2000 and 2001, although it didn’t get into print until 2009.) We know more now than we knew then.
The reprints of the plays have duplicated some of the texts. And there are so many unpublished poems I left out. It seems a bit heartless to leave them out again. And, I found more than one new poem not among the typescripts.
Overall, maybe we could remove twelve pages of (now) duplicated poems and inject ten pages of unfamiliar poems. They would be (I think) ‘Earthscape’ ‘Open Letter to the Countess of Sutherland’ ‘Tristia’ and ‘The last wolf’.
However, Simon (Jenner) has advised me that the printer still has the production file of the 2009 edition, so that it is quite a lot cheaper if we reprint it unaltered. I think we could manage a 5% improvement, but I dislike the cost. The original version has reached quite a few people, and is still serviceable. Waterloo will put the resources into other Macleod books.
It seems shameless to leave the introduction unaltered. However, I think it always left most questions unanswered, and it hasn’t got worse in that sense. I can see that the introduction doesn’t even attempt an artistic evaluation of Macleod, but it is its fixed limits that make it able to stand up without being changed. There has been some very important work on Macleod since 2001, but it is reasonable to ask people to go and look for it. For example, we now have ‘Hidden sun’, James Fountain’s monograph on Macleod, and since you can’t summarise that it is sensible to ask people to go and read it.
I assumed, in 2001, that because there were 200 Macleod poems in typescripts in the National Library of Scotland, they were all there. However, later information has made it clear that, where he published a poem, the typescript usually isn’t in that archive. He kept the printed versions. You have to know which magazine the poem was in in order to go and look for it. I saw a poem on 4 July, in the university library, which I had never seen before. (in Botteghe Oscure for 1957.)
The Macleod conference was on July 5th. Even after 26 years of fairly strong interest in Macleod, I was swept away by all the new information and new ideas. It is all happening. This means that anything I write now will become obsolete rather quickly.
I think we can say that Macleod was remarkably gifted, unusually prolific, and never saw most of that prolific work published. This combination may be unique, at least in its extent. I say this to excuse myself for not grasping more about Macleod at an earlier stage. This is also why the conference threw me into a torrent of new information and new ideas.
Monday, 7 July 2025
Monday, 30 June 2025
On the margins of great housing estates
Great Housing Estates: Sources
My new book is coming out from Shearsman Books in September.
There are notes in the book but I wanted to go into more detail about sources of moments in the poems. This has to do with accountability. There is another point about originality. If you look at the notes below, I keep using motifs from folklore. In fact this move can be seen as a “structural quote”. The use of these rich but regressive patterns is part of what is called naive art, or primitive art. By using them, I am absorbing naive art (and releasing naive parts of myself). But of course this isn’t an original idea. It is a “structural quote”. I can’t list the total set of such structures, it is not feasible. There is a pre-existing artistic language which I can use. I think someone invents a “game”, but after that every time you play it produces a unique run of events and throws of the dice.
'Controlled Conditions'. I associate this with a line from Verhaeren, l’halluciné dans la forêt de la nombre. I can’t find the line in there now, but it must have been present in an earlier draft, I think. Le cabaret du jour et de la nuit; I think this is also in Verhaeren. Somewhere.
Goths. Origo gothica has been described as “perhaps the most problematic work of the early Middle Ages”. The text is old but the title supposedly comes from Herwig Wolfram, in the 1980s. It means "origin of the Goths".
Sortes. The word means “lots”. Our word lot comes from hlutr, which is related to a root meaning “fall” and supposedly refers to small objects cast in the air to allow allocation of shares, or divination. So, a lot as a land division points to the land of a commune being shared out using chance, perhaps. By sortes gothicae I mean the celebrated division of Roman territory between barbarian warriors.
355M. As the notes say, this derives from a GPT-2 run. I looked at 100 pages of output, essentially meaningless, took one part of it, and changed it to look like a poem. The verbal structures are coherent because GPT took them from a human source, although I don’t know what that source was. It would be hard to claim ownership of this text.
(Inside and Out) Glass, claws. I got this from a volume about folklore by someone called Bernatzik.
He found a Grimms’ fairytale in which someone uses lynx claws to climb a glass mountain. He used this to interpret a Bronze Age (?) burial in which lynx claws were buried with the deceased. So, you use lynx claws to walk across the sky to the afterlife. In a Norse saga, glasvellir are the place of death, the place where dead heroes live. (That would mean glass hillsides, but the word glass may have meant glare before being attached to a substance manufactured by specialists in the Mediterranean.)
Bedesten. This is a name for market buildings, in several Turkish towns, which shelter many stalls, including antiquities dealers. The term implies a lockable building, so where relatively expensive commodities were traded. Oscar White Muscarella writes at length about bedesten objects – which he regards as unreliable, often being forged or set out with false provenances and find sites. He regards them as the raw evidence which bad archaeology is made of. Muscarella wanted to distinguish sharply between forgeries and other things, but I didn’t have this urge. I was quite excited by forgeries and by the whole patter, of dealers in antikas. I wanted to make verbal forgeries of my own.
Sacheverell Sitwell. I referred to his “Parade virtues of a dying gladiator”, which as a phrase is taken from Nietzsche. ‘Parade’ was published in the sixth number of ‘Wheels', in 1921. I think the whole of ‘Calendar Rite’ could be a re-enactment of his poem ‘The actor rehearses’. The actor is unemployed, he spends his time rehearsing parts to keep his skills strong. The theatrical illusion is projected without its proper means. ‘Rite’ is also about someone unemployed, practising their art in a private room.
12 days. The idea that the world returns to chaos at Christmas and that the following Twelve Days govern the shape of the following twelve months is described in Dumézil's Le mythe des centaures. The “December storms” play a role in this, said to represent primal cosmic forces, not yet reduced to articulate shapes by a sort of refinement process. The legend comes from the folklore of several countries, including Greece and Poland.
Altyn Dagh. The schema is that there is a mountain where on one side people speak Chinese, in the other side Indo-European, on the next Turkic, and on the next Paleo-Siberian. I like this myth and I completely invented it.
There should be a point where these so different cultures meet. Maybe there is no such point.
‘Altyn Dagh’ means ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish.
(Route march in the cultural field) Spinkel og dobbelspidse. The phrase comes from Ravn, Morten: “Guldbådene fra Nors – tolkning og datering”. It is translated in the poem, “slender and double-prowed”. The idea that the little gold ships were a spell to ensure the safety of the fleet invading England comes from Danish archaeologists. The ships are 11-12 cm long, the longest one 17 cm. They were once dated to the 3rd C AD, but the dating has been shifted so that they could be mid-5th century. They were found in Jutland, close to the North Sea.
‘that food which the living eat’. I think this came from a curse, one of those features of the high Roman Empire. Possibly from Wunsch’s Defixionstabellen. “Let him not eat that food which the living eat’. I thought the curses were like lyric poems, short and passionate. "More than 1500 curse tablets (defixiones) are now known, two-thirds of them written in Greek; of the Latin texts, over half have been found in Britain,".
My new book is coming out from Shearsman Books in September.
There are notes in the book but I wanted to go into more detail about sources of moments in the poems. This has to do with accountability. There is another point about originality. If you look at the notes below, I keep using motifs from folklore. In fact this move can be seen as a “structural quote”. The use of these rich but regressive patterns is part of what is called naive art, or primitive art. By using them, I am absorbing naive art (and releasing naive parts of myself). But of course this isn’t an original idea. It is a “structural quote”. I can’t list the total set of such structures, it is not feasible. There is a pre-existing artistic language which I can use. I think someone invents a “game”, but after that every time you play it produces a unique run of events and throws of the dice.
'Controlled Conditions'. I associate this with a line from Verhaeren, l’halluciné dans la forêt de la nombre. I can’t find the line in there now, but it must have been present in an earlier draft, I think. Le cabaret du jour et de la nuit; I think this is also in Verhaeren. Somewhere.
Goths. Origo gothica has been described as “perhaps the most problematic work of the early Middle Ages”. The text is old but the title supposedly comes from Herwig Wolfram, in the 1980s. It means "origin of the Goths".
Sortes. The word means “lots”. Our word lot comes from hlutr, which is related to a root meaning “fall” and supposedly refers to small objects cast in the air to allow allocation of shares, or divination. So, a lot as a land division points to the land of a commune being shared out using chance, perhaps. By sortes gothicae I mean the celebrated division of Roman territory between barbarian warriors.
355M. As the notes say, this derives from a GPT-2 run. I looked at 100 pages of output, essentially meaningless, took one part of it, and changed it to look like a poem. The verbal structures are coherent because GPT took them from a human source, although I don’t know what that source was. It would be hard to claim ownership of this text.
(Inside and Out) Glass, claws. I got this from a volume about folklore by someone called Bernatzik.
He found a Grimms’ fairytale in which someone uses lynx claws to climb a glass mountain. He used this to interpret a Bronze Age (?) burial in which lynx claws were buried with the deceased. So, you use lynx claws to walk across the sky to the afterlife. In a Norse saga, glasvellir are the place of death, the place where dead heroes live. (That would mean glass hillsides, but the word glass may have meant glare before being attached to a substance manufactured by specialists in the Mediterranean.)
Bedesten. This is a name for market buildings, in several Turkish towns, which shelter many stalls, including antiquities dealers. The term implies a lockable building, so where relatively expensive commodities were traded. Oscar White Muscarella writes at length about bedesten objects – which he regards as unreliable, often being forged or set out with false provenances and find sites. He regards them as the raw evidence which bad archaeology is made of. Muscarella wanted to distinguish sharply between forgeries and other things, but I didn’t have this urge. I was quite excited by forgeries and by the whole patter, of dealers in antikas. I wanted to make verbal forgeries of my own.
Sacheverell Sitwell. I referred to his “Parade virtues of a dying gladiator”, which as a phrase is taken from Nietzsche. ‘Parade’ was published in the sixth number of ‘Wheels', in 1921. I think the whole of ‘Calendar Rite’ could be a re-enactment of his poem ‘The actor rehearses’. The actor is unemployed, he spends his time rehearsing parts to keep his skills strong. The theatrical illusion is projected without its proper means. ‘Rite’ is also about someone unemployed, practising their art in a private room.
12 days. The idea that the world returns to chaos at Christmas and that the following Twelve Days govern the shape of the following twelve months is described in Dumézil's Le mythe des centaures. The “December storms” play a role in this, said to represent primal cosmic forces, not yet reduced to articulate shapes by a sort of refinement process. The legend comes from the folklore of several countries, including Greece and Poland.
Altyn Dagh. The schema is that there is a mountain where on one side people speak Chinese, in the other side Indo-European, on the next Turkic, and on the next Paleo-Siberian. I like this myth and I completely invented it.
There should be a point where these so different cultures meet. Maybe there is no such point.
‘Altyn Dagh’ means ‘gold mountain’ in Turkish.
(Route march in the cultural field) Spinkel og dobbelspidse. The phrase comes from Ravn, Morten: “Guldbådene fra Nors – tolkning og datering”. It is translated in the poem, “slender and double-prowed”. The idea that the little gold ships were a spell to ensure the safety of the fleet invading England comes from Danish archaeologists. The ships are 11-12 cm long, the longest one 17 cm. They were once dated to the 3rd C AD, but the dating has been shifted so that they could be mid-5th century. They were found in Jutland, close to the North Sea.
‘that food which the living eat’. I think this came from a curse, one of those features of the high Roman Empire. Possibly from Wunsch’s Defixionstabellen. “Let him not eat that food which the living eat’. I thought the curses were like lyric poems, short and passionate. "More than 1500 curse tablets (defixiones) are now known, two-thirds of them written in Greek; of the Latin texts, over half have been found in Britain,".
Thursday, 17 April 2025
Stricken by primal kitsch
Stricken by primal kitsch
experimenting with html
experimenting with html
I bought a DVD of the 1950 film of 'Dancing Years’, the Ivor Novello musical. This must seem eccentric, my excuse being partly that I was fascinated by Novello’s performance in the British silent films ‘The Rat’ and ‘Triumph of the Rat’. He was magnificent. Also, I read a book about Novello which revealed that not only cynics, but also Novello, referred to the musical as “Prancing Queers”. I was curious to see how someone could go from being the best thing around (‘The Rat’ surely the best British silent film!) to utter junk in such a short time. ‘Dancing Years’ premiered in 1939, only fourteen years after ‘The Rat’. (He had written the original play ‘The Rat’).
I occasionally go for an afternoon walk which ends up at a certain pub in Sherwood, down the road from here. One of their ‘furniture books’ is ‘Theatre Review Annual 1951’ (they also have the 1953 volume). I enjoy leafing through these books, redolent of a vanished time (although I know quite a few of the faces). It reveals that his last musical was called “Gay’s the word” – not as a political outcry but because the star is an ageing musical comedy figure called Gay.
I am unable to say how I knew that Novello was despicable. It must have been a current idea in the 1960s, when I was a child. Can’t say exactly how it reached me. I think his musicals were still making money in theatres, a favourite for coach excursions to London from less cultured towns. And they were despised. They were completely asexual, they had no trace of African-American rhythm. They were out of date in the 1950s, but very popular, and in the 1960s they just seemed to stand for everything which people disliked about fifties popular culture.
The plot of ‘Years’ involves the year 1910 and a penniless aspirant composer of operettas. He owes the landlady 1000 crowns for six months of unpaid bills. He also has a harmless relationship with her entrancing 15 year old daughter, Grete. A gay throng of officers and operetta chorus girls stay up all night and go for breakfast to a farm amazingly near Vienna. They ask the composer, Rudi, to play for them. Somehow, they start to compete to buy his tunes for their innamoratas, and he auctions his harmless songs. Soon, he has the thousand crowns – mainly paid for by the star of the operetta, Maria, who has also shown up in pursuit of her idle cast. Rapidly, Rudi becomes a hit composer, but this involves him becoming entangled with Maria. Grete has to lose out. Maria’s protector, Reinaldt, also loses out.
There is a love scene between Rudi and Maria which is interrupted by the entry of Reinaldt, a minister (of state), her patron. He wants to collect his dressing-gown from her flat – at this point Rudi realises the true relationship between the Minister and Maria, and breaks off relations with her. This should be an emotional climax, but the mise en scene has so fatally undercut it that we barely react.
Three years later, Grete has trained as a dancer and visits Rudi. She reminds him of a foolish promise which he had made, that he could never marry anyone without asking her first. He goes torough a formal proposal, mere words, for her pleasure and to fulfil his promise. She says no. But Maria has overheard the proposal part of the exchange. She is stricken, and that same day marries Reinaldt.
The love plots are singularly unconvincing. This has to be connected with having a gay writer and a gay leading man. The drama has that thin quality which hides everything deep. We are simply not to regard art as something which expresses feelings that we have. His rejection of involvement is attractive to people with deep anxieties, but also gives a way out for gay men who have no intention of revealing the shape of their wishes but wish to make a kind of art anyway. All the moves are to protect that frail and gleaming surface.
Of course, where the depth is successfully excluded, the surface has more freedom to carry out its role of decoration and stylisation.
In the scene which Maria overhears, Price utters the words of a proposal without meaning them, and Dainton listens to them without any intention of accepting them. We are not asked to feel. This is the enchanted and vacuous quality – we are not going to do any work, even emotional work. The two characters are in perfect harmony. They collaborate to drain the scene of meaning. Surely the point of a scene in a drama is usually that the characters disagree, at least at first. That provides the tension. A musical like this one is living in a world where different rules apply.
I had difficulty watching ‘Years’ and it leaves little trace in memory. That is not the same as disliking it. I am not even sure it is kitsch, it is too reliant on music and too light. It is noticeable that it is not funny at any point – unusual for a comedy. I must admit that I enjoyed the music. Also, Patricia Dainton gives a genuinely starry performance as the flaxen-braid-wearing Grete. The leading lady is someone who can sing but not act, and Dennis Price is simply unconvincing as someone moved by love. Clearly he doesn’t want either of the two ladies on offered to him by the script. This is mis-casting; I don’t think Price, thirty-five at the time, ever played an ingenu role successfully, although he was excellent in Caravan (1946) as the villain and in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a beguiling mass murderer.
It seems that art has a fundamental relation to anxiety, and that, without anxiety, art has little to say – certainly not enough to sustain a 90 minute film. If you can’t bear to depict anxiety, you are forbidden to show the release from anxiety. So, when Rudi is faced with the landlady selling his piano, to pay his bill, he does not face the authority figure direct. Instead, her message is transmitted via Grete and the kindly housekeeper, Hatti, two characters who obviously adore Rudi. The anxiety is the plot point, but it is muffled to the point where you barely notice it. So we stay in a wonderfully smooth state of mind which is almost blankness. The feeling is like being in a hotel - you don't care about the dirty glasses because someone else will do the washing-up.
There is a depressing 1959 interview by John Osborne where he defines the whole tenor of Fifties popular theatre as dominated by a gay sensibility which trivialises everything and reduces it to star-worship and spectacle. He was an irritating man. The weaknesses of that culture were too pervasive to be simply defined. The situation is more that gay people could work inside a set of conventions (and inhibitions) which belonged to everybody, and which offered a shelter for the morally accursed (sic) as well as for the chronically inhibited and inexpressive. I don't even think all this reflects gay sensibility, it is something bland and collective which gay creators could find a shelter in, while remaining basically frustrated. We are talking about affluence, harmony, and blandness, where any real preoccupations are buried, gay or not.
There is an invisible wall between men and women in this film. This can be taken in three ways. First, it is a musical. The performers are concerned to deliver their songs and dances without errors. These are narcissistic and exacting activities, and they are little concerned with other performers. Secondly, the wall prevents deep feelings, and is functional for a film of this kind, where depth is simply unpleasant. Thirdly, and hypothetically, it could be a gay sensibility. But the desire for emptiness cannot be explained by the presence of wishes which it automatically frustrates.
The story has scenes in 1910, 1913, and 1928. This completely fails to mention the Great War, which presumably wiped out most of the young officers we saw in the opening scene. The Austrian Empire collapses, all the politicians become unemployed, but we hear nothing about it. This smooth covering over of the serious events of life sheds light on the unreal attitude towards sex. Escapism covers everything, so it is not simply to be traced back to gay problems with the public stage. Both evasion and kitsch have a much wider scope. For example, Novello also wrote a patriotic musical, ‘Crest of the Wave’. I have not seen this, but evidently patriotism was a big component of kitsch in the first half of the 20th century, and not just for Novello. (I heard a patriotic song taken from it, but it may not be patriotic all the way through.)
An article for the London Magazine records that “Another agent of persuasion to keep him in light entertainment was the Management of the Drury Lane Theatre, which did very well out of him. It objected to a section in the initial text of The Dancing Years where the hero is sentenced to death by the Nazis for protecting Jews. Such material was considered unsuitable for light entertainment. In a new version, the hero is reprieved at the last minute and that was soft-pedalled. One wonders whether Novello resented this interference and resented even more his own complicity in it.“ This episode is not in the film at all. The vacuity of the film may not be simply due to Novello. There was a 1979 TV version which does include this scene - a finale in 1939. Rudi helps Austrian Jews to emigrate, and so his music is banned in Austria and Germany. He remains defiant.
Some shots in 'Years' remind us of 'The Sound of Music', 13 years later. I am unaware of how Novello absorbed the cliches of numerous Austrian or German Heimatfilms. The first 20 minutes are evidently a reminiscence of 'The student Prince' (originally a stage play, 'In Old Heidelberg', 1901). The composer theme derives from any number of films about romantic composers, I don't have the details, but the prototype is possibly Mörike's 'Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag'. The cliches may have been the subjects of operettas before the cinema picked them up. "Der junge Komponist Franz Schubert versucht in Wien Fuß zu fassen, doch aller Anfang ist schwer. Seine Freunde, der Maler Moritz von Schwind und der Sänger Franz von Schober, wollen ihn aufheitern und organisieren einen Ausflug mit den drei hübschen Töchtern des "Dreimäderlhaus". Schubert verliebt sich Hals über Kopf in Hannerl, die jüngste der Schwestern, und schreibt ihr ein bezauberndes Liebeslied. Er bittet Schober, es seiner Angebeteten vorzutragen, doch zu seinem Unglück verliebt sich Hannerl in den Sänger und nicht in den Komponist..." This is a summary of a 1958 film about Schubert. I admit that it doesn't qualify as a source for a 1939 musical, it's just an example of where composers fit into sentimental German/ Austrian cinema. Director, Ernst Marischka. There was a 1918 film of the same story, with Conrad Veidt. And a 1931 film called "Schuberts Frühlingstraum". The idea that Heimatfilms are gay is completely unheard-of.
More, if superficial, reading on the Net suggests that Price was at least bisexual – the idea of him being gay is just too simplistic. It remains, though, that he could not play straightforward characters or simple feelings. Or the heroes of musicals.
The theme of a mature composer whom an under-age girl inappropriately falls in love with appears in 'The constant nymph', a novel popular in the 1920s. It was filmed, and Novello appeared in one of the film versions.
The director, Harold French, was interviewed for the ACTU history project. This was 40 years later. French's recollection is "Of course, I couldn’t do it. I had a go. I was very lightweight." This is super accurate. As for Price: “it wasn’t for him.” That is no less accurate. My reading is that this (and "The bad Lord Byron") ended Price's phase as a leading man in films. He was demoted to a comic actor, usually not as the lead comic. It was a crisis in his life. He worked hard, from then on, and to my memory was very precise and effective in whatever he did. I wish to record that I rather liked two of French's films, "The blind goddess" and 'Dangerous Cargo'.
I bought a DVD of the 1950 film of 'Dancing Years’, the Ivor Novello musical. This must seem eccentric, my excuse being partly that I was fascinated by Novello’s performance in the British silent films ‘The Rat’ and ‘Triumph of the Rat’. He was magnificent. Also, I read a book about Novello which revealed that not only cynics, but also Novello, referred to the musical as “Prancing Queers”. I was curious to see how someone could go from being the best thing around (‘The Rat’ surely the best British silent film!) to utter junk in such a short time. ‘Dancing Years’ premiered in 1939, only fourteen years after ‘The Rat’. (He had written the original play ‘The Rat’).
I am unable to say how I knew that Novello was despicable. It must have been a current idea in the 1960s, when I was a child. Can’t say exactly how it reached me. I think his musicals were still making money in theatres, a favourite for coach excursions to London from less cultured towns. And they were despised. They were completely asexual, they had no trace of African-American rhythm. They were out of date in the 1950s, but very popular, and in the 1960s they just seemed to stand for everything which people disliked about fifties popular culture.
The plot of ‘Years’ involves the year 1910 and a penniless aspirant composer of operettas. He owes the landlady 1000 crowns for six months of unpaid bills. He also has a harmless relationship with her entrancing 15 year old daughter, Grete. A gay throng of officers and operetta chorus girls stay up all night and go for breakfast to a farm amazingly near Vienna. They ask the composer, Rudi, to play for them. Somehow, they start to compete to buy his tunes for their innamoratas, and he auctions his harmless songs. Soon, he has the thousand crowns – mainly paid for by the star of the operetta, Maria, who has also shown up in pursuit of her idle cast. Rapidly, Rudi becomes a hit composer, but this involves him becoming entangled with Maria. Grete has to lose out. Maria’s protector, Reinaldt, also loses out.
There is a love scene between Rudi and Maria which is interrupted by the entry of Reinaldt, a minister (of state), her patron. He wants to collect his dressing-gown from her flat – at this point Rudi realises the true relationship between the Minister and Maria, and breaks off relations with her. This should be an emotional climax, but the mise en scene has so fatally undercut it that we barely react.
Three years later, Grete has trained as a dancer and visits Rudi. She reminds him of a foolish promise which he had made, that he could never marry anyone without asking her first. He goes torough a formal proposal, mere words, for her pleasure and to fulfil his promise. She says no. But Maria has overheard the proposal part of the exchange. She is stricken, and that same day marries Reinaldt.
The love plots are singularly unconvincing. This has to be connected with having a gay writer and a gay leading man. The drama has that thin quality which hides everything deep. We are simply not to regard art as something which expresses feelings that we have. His rejection of involvement is attractive to people with deep anxieties, but also gives a way out for gay men who have no intention of revealing the shape of their wishes but wish to make a kind of art anyway. All the moves are to protect that frail and gleaming surface. Of course, where the depth is successfully excluded, the surface has more freedom to carry out its role of decoration and stylisation.
In the scene which Maria overhears, Price utters the words of a proposal without meaning them, and Dainton listens to them without any intention of accepting them. We are not asked to feel. This is the enchanted and vacuous quality – we are not going to do any work, even emotional work. The two characters are in perfect harmony. They collaborate to drain the scene of meaning. Surely the point of a scene in a drama is usually that the characters disagree, at least at first. That provides the tension. A musical like this one is living in a world where different rules apply.
I had difficulty watching ‘Years’ and it leaves little trace in memory. That is not the same as disliking it. I am not even sure it is kitsch, it is too reliant on music and too light. It is noticeable that it is not funny at any point – unusual for a comedy. I must admit that I enjoyed the music. Also, Patricia Dainton gives a genuinely starry performance as the flaxen-braid-wearing Grete. The leading lady is someone who can sing but not act, and Dennis Price is simply unconvincing as someone moved by love. Clearly he doesn’t want either of the two ladies on offered to him by the script. This is mis-casting; I don’t think Price, thirty-five at the time, ever played an ingenu role successfully, although he was excellent in Caravan (1946) as the villain and in Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) as a beguiling mass murderer.
It seems that art has a fundamental relation to anxiety, and that, without anxiety, art has little to say – certainly not enough to sustain a 90 minute film. If you can’t bear to depict anxiety, you are forbidden to show the release from anxiety. So, when Rudi is faced with the landlady selling his piano, to pay his bill, he does not face the authority figure direct. Instead, her message is transmitted via Grete and the kindly housekeeper, Hatti, two characters who obviously adore Rudi. The anxiety is the plot point, but it is muffled to the point where you barely notice it. So we stay in a wonderfully smooth state of mind which is almost blankness. The feeling is like being in a hotel - you don't care about the dirty glasses because someone else will do the washing-up.
There is a depressing 1959 interview by John Osborne where he defines the whole tenor of Fifties popular theatre as dominated by a gay sensibility which trivialises everything and reduces it to star-worship and spectacle. He was an irritating man. The weaknesses of that culture were too pervasive to be simply defined. The situation is more that gay people could work inside a set of conventions (and inhibitions) which belonged to everybody, and which offered a shelter for the morally accursed (sic) as well as for the chronically inhibited and inexpressive. I don't even think all this reflects gay sensibility, it is something bland and collective which gay creators could find a shelter in, while remaining basically frustrated. We are talking about affluence, harmony, and blandness, where any real preoccupations are buried, gay or not.
There is an invisible wall between men and women in this film. This can be taken in three ways. First, it is a musical. The performers are concerned to deliver their songs and dances without errors. These are narcissistic and exacting activities, and they are little concerned with other performers. Secondly, the wall prevents deep feelings, and is functional for a film of this kind, where depth is simply unpleasant. Thirdly, and hypothetically, it could be a gay sensibility. But the desire for emptiness cannot be explained by the presence of wishes which it automatically frustrates.
The story has scenes in 1910, 1913, and 1928. This completely fails to mention the Great War, which presumably wiped out most of the young officers we saw in the opening scene. The Austrian Empire collapses, all the politicians become unemployed, but we hear nothing about it. This smooth covering over of the serious events of life sheds light on the unreal attitude towards sex. Escapism covers everything, so it is not simply to be traced back to gay problems with the public stage. Both evasion and kitsch have a much wider scope. For example, Novello also wrote a patriotic musical, ‘Crest of the Wave’. I have not seen this, but evidently patriotism was a big component of kitsch in the first half of the 20th century, and not just for Novello. (I heard a patriotic song taken from it, but it may not be patriotic all the way through.)
An article for the London Magazine records that “Another agent of persuasion to keep him in light entertainment was the Management of the Drury Lane Theatre, which did very well out of him. It objected to a section in the initial text of The Dancing Years where the hero is sentenced to death by the Nazis for protecting Jews. Such material was considered unsuitable for light entertainment. In a new version, the hero is reprieved at the last minute and that was soft-pedalled. One wonders whether Novello resented this interference and resented even more his own complicity in it.“ This episode is not in the film at all. The vacuity of the film may not be simply due to Novello. There was a 1979 TV version which does include this scene - a finale in 1939. Rudi helps Austrian Jews to emigrate, and so his music is banned in Austria and Germany. He remains defiant.
Some shots in 'Years' remind us of 'The Sound of Music', 13 years later. I am unaware of how Novello absorbed the cliches of numerous Austrian or German Heimatfilms. The first 20 minutes are evidently a reminiscence of 'The student Prince' (originally a stage play, 'In Old Heidelberg', 1901). The composer theme derives from any number of films about romantic composers, I don't have the details, but the prototype is possibly Mörike's 'Mozart auf der Reise nach Prag'. The cliches may have been the subjects of operettas before the cinema picked them up. "Der junge Komponist Franz Schubert versucht in Wien Fuß zu fassen, doch aller Anfang ist schwer. Seine Freunde, der Maler Moritz von Schwind und der Sänger Franz von Schober, wollen ihn aufheitern und organisieren einen Ausflug mit den drei hübschen Töchtern des "Dreimäderlhaus". Schubert verliebt sich Hals über Kopf in Hannerl, die jüngste der Schwestern, und schreibt ihr ein bezauberndes Liebeslied. Er bittet Schober, es seiner Angebeteten vorzutragen, doch zu seinem Unglück verliebt sich Hannerl in den Sänger und nicht in den Komponist..." This is a summary of a 1958 film about Schubert. I admit that it doesn't qualify as a source for a 1939 musical, it's just an example of where composers fit into sentimental German/ Austrian cinema. Director, Ernst Marischka. There was a 1918 film of the same story, with Conrad Veidt. And a 1931 film called "Schuberts Frühlingstraum". The idea that Heimatfilms are gay is completely unheard-of.
More, if superficial, reading on the Net suggests that Price was at least bisexual – the idea of him being gay is just too simplistic. It remains, though, that he could not play straightforward characters or simple feelings. Or the heroes of musicals.
The theme of a mature composer whom an under-age girl inappropriately falls in love with appears in 'The constant nymph', a novel popular in the 1920s. It was filmed, and Novello appeared in one of the film versions.
The director, Harold French, was interviewed for the ACTU history project. This was 40 years later. French's recollection is "Of course, I couldn’t do it. I had a go. I was very lightweight." This is super accurate. As for Price: “it wasn’t for him.” That is no less accurate. My reading is that this (and "The bad Lord Byron") ended Price's phase as a leading man in films. He was demoted to a comic actor, usually not as the lead comic. It was a crisis in his life. He worked hard, from then on, and to my memory was very precise and effective in whatever he did. I wish to record that I rather liked two of French's films, "The blind goddess" and 'Dangerous Cargo'.
Wednesday, 26 March 2025
Ian McMillan
Tex-Mex floor-filler across the snowy fields: Ian McMillan, To Fold the Evening Star. New and Selected Poems (Carcanet, 2016, £8.99)
This volume starts in 1994, but McMillan (born 1956) had two books out in 1980. This does not affect the book you can buy, but possibly the contents of his Selected Poems (1987) are being taken as a separate era. It has been followed by the recent Yes But What Is This? What Exactly? and That's Not A Fishing Boat, It's A Giraffe: Responses To Austerity. He is, basically an oral poet who regards language as a mysterious substance; an equivalent of Peter Finch. Peter Porter reviewed his first collection, in 1980, in these terms: “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” The changes word refers to bells ringing changes. Newer compares our poet to two radical poets (“erudite and restless minds”), whose work Porter says he does not understand.
The new Selected has about 190 poems. We have to unfold the title. Evening Star is a likely name for an evening paper, the local newspaper for some town or other. The last poem has him going out to buy an Evening Star, in 1965. McMillan is punning on the gap between literal and figurative meanings of the two words. To fold a star (the evening star is actually the planet Venus) takes us into a word of dreams or surrealism. To fold the evening paper you have just bought is quite normal and unsurprising. Many poets subscribe to the idea of a special place where there are no banal experiences or ordinary people, and suggest that this is a place where you can actually go, and which the volume of poems is a postcard from. McMillan does not do this. He is always close to everyday experience, and for example is interested in work, in the working class, in West Yorkshire. Many books of contemporary poetry can be seen as starting by excluding those realms of information. McMillan is constantly pushing back at this invisible boundary of aestheticisation – which simultaneously defines, however silently, what is not aesthetic. His ability to make the poetry itself constantly interesting is the focal point. To state the obvious, all the poems are interesting. He seems unable to write a predictable cadence.
We have to divide his work into two parts. Since he has been working since 1982 (see the cover of the Selected Poems) as a touring writer in schools, ‘provincial villages, clubs, and supermarkets’, he has a line of populist and participatory poetry, encouraging people to create word forms for themselves. Thus, he is the good conscience of poetry, making it available to everyone, going into schools and attracting a younger audience which will keep poetry alive, as opposed to becoming increasingly ancient, rigid, and attenuated. Whether the poetry grandees deserve to be continued is another question. But surrealism is the most immediate of styles, and his accessible poetry has not ceased to be original: facing people who have no idea what poetry is is one of the frontiers of newness and strangeness, and behaves often like the other frontiers. That work is collected in, for example, Perfect Catch (where ‘catch’ is what runs from one voice to another). But a large part of his work is literate poetry, for the literate, and this is what is collected in generous quantities in Evening Star.
McM has (as the third poem in the book) a documentary record of memories of someone he describes as housebound, whom he met while working for Age Concern. The memories date to the Second World War, when she was working in a factory in Leicester. This has some resemblances to a poem by Thomas Kling which I translated. Kling was working with old people, as an alternative to military service, probably in the mid 1970s. His poem deals with an old man who has Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and the memories go back to the Eastern Front, in perhaps 1943. Kling heightens the negative elements of the experience to the point where it is all like a horror film. His poem is neo-Expressionist. McMillan does not see any element of horror or grotesque in his stories of people with limited social or economic capital.
The dominant theme of the poems, as a body, is de-industrialisation. There are good reasons for thinking that this was not chosen by the poet, but was simply the chief process unrolling in the region he lives in and in his lifetime. I note that I was born at much the same time as he was, and not very far away. This affected everybody, at least within the industrial regions (or, regions which were that until they weren’t). When I was born (so, when Ian was born), there were 14 million jobs in manufacturing, and 80% of the population was self-identified as working class. It’s not like that now. The disjuncture which so many McMillan poems exploit may also be the discontinuity between what we expect and what is actually there – a new country. His pervasive use of defamiliarisation, of the not quite real, may connect to a country which demands the use of your imagination because it wasn’t there ten years ago. You have an apparatus of social knowledge, which you may as well scrap, because reality has mutated while you weren’t looking. The defamiliarisation could also trip you into imagining a social order which we don’t yet live in – one where the powerful are not all-powerful and where economic and political power is very widely distributed, geographically and otherwise. This is a matter of personal preference. The basic techniques allow you to go there or elsewhere.
Simple language makes the poems easy to read, but the subject can be completely unfamiliar, as in ‘Deaths by ice-Cream’: Man killed by eating whole cone too
quickly. Woman died after slipping
on ice cream, falling under bus
carrying brass band. Child dies
sitting in snow trying to cool
dripping cone. Man killed by 99
hurled from hot air balloon by
lute player. Woman died after
argument with ice cream salesman
in Fife. The flow of information is just about ideal. The feel is like a silent comedy film, where anything inanimate becomes mysterious kinetic and hostile. I never asked in childhood if there was a 97 or a 98. And, 99 what? who counted? This nature film about the new apex predator is immediately followed by “Ted Hughes is Elvis”, which is probably McMillan’s most famous poem. Again, it is a very simple idea, but it does open up a new world. The idea gets over quickly and it is very enjoyable. How could we have failed to notice that “I’m itching like a bear in a fuzzy tree” introduced the shaggy character who appears in every Ted Hughes poem? In the poem, Elvis escapes by hitching a ride on a truck, explains to the driver that he is the Big Bopper (the one who sang ‘Chantilly Lace’) and had faked his death in the plane crash in Iowa which felled Buddy Holly and Richie Valens (‘La Bamba’). Later, he stabs Ted Hughes and begins a lucrative career as a Ted Hughes impersonator. From the same book also comes “Poem Occasioned by the High Incidence of Suicide amongst the Unemployed”. It also includes ‘Stone, I Presume’:
second stanza.’ That’s what he said,
leaning over me in the classroom,
puffing on his tweed pipe, the air
thick with twist and reek. ‘Always
start your poems with the second
stanza, my boy, and you won’t go far
wrong.’ I pondered this in my rooms
in the University. I knew,
just knew, it was the Thirties. ‘The Thirties
are a sort of second stanza, aren’t
they?’ I said to him. The air was
thick with twist and reek.
This shows the reflexivity which McMillan starts from, the sense that the poem is an artificial environment, although any environment filled with humans is artificial. He defines the older English poetry effectively but very lightly – the tweed and the pipe combine as a tweed pipe. The burning wool is like burning Old Twist, a shaggy tobacco. The poem is an object, you can fold it like the evening star. He does not follow up the idea that older, academic-conservative, poetry is absurd with a heavy notion of new poetry being Authentic. The new poem he offers is absurd and very light.
In the sky, look. That constellation there.
Round here we call it Wrecked Oil Tanker,
that constellation, because there’s no shape
to it and it’s black all around it.
Is that thing turning?
That’s a joke.
O pinpoint the Grimness for me madam.
Pointpin it. Speak into this thing.
This, call it what you like, pimple.
Speak faster than you normally would
to compensate for my dying battery.
And in a higher register than you
would normally employ. Pin pin
the Grim? Point it?
(from ‘The Grimness: BBC Radio 4, Tuesday, 8.30 p.m.’)
A number of the poems rely on word substitutions. We have to speak about ludic. This was a thing in the 1980s, often cited by people who wanted you to think they knew what the word postmodern meant. Ludic was associated in the 1960s, and the 1970s, with Edwin Morgan and George MacBeth. I mention this because they were firmly shut out from the provenance expertise, in the 1980s. You couldn’t define yourself as being super up to date if the idea you were peddling had reached a peak in 1964. It was a pretty strong idea, though. It connected with an idea that people mainly wanted to be distracted from the high unemployment and rapid impoverishment of entre regions, during the 1980s, and that art with no reference to the real was the only kind which would reduce your anxiety rather than increasing it. This part didn’t fit with Ian McMillan, since his poems incorporated passages from the real, at every opportunity. It connected up with the idea that art was a game, and that a lot of human activity was there to pass the time away. I didn’t instantly realise that a lot of people had no jobs and a great deal of time on their hands, and that games provided a way of enjoying the down time, of being sociable and genial and dexterous even if you were just waiting for the giro. Anyway, many of McMillan’s poems seem to have been constructed as part of games, and they can also be compared with poems by Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Robert Crawford, W N Herbert, and John Hartley Williams, from the same era. These poets – unless I’m making it up – realised that language could be separated from experience and manipulated like numbers: they could be written on a non-rigid surface which was then subjected to transformations, so copying, expanding, perforation, various distortions, etc. Geometry could produce the shapes of objects which didn’t exist, and poetry could do much the same. This abundance of verbal objects stood in a definite relationship to the shortages of material objects which were a feature of the period of de-industrialisation and high unemployment. It was the source of a lot of pleasure.
As a professional poet since 1981, he goes into the cultural wastelands and is usually surrounded by bad poetry – which is where the language mostly lives; but takes good poetry there. He has the ear of local government, the schools and councils which want poets to reach the people and will pay very small sums, repeatedly, for a poet to do this. They have him by the ears. This is admirable when compared with other poets who plan to change the whole system of government and aim at a centre, while really being wrapped in silence and on the periphery. There is doubt a link between decentralisation and the unpredictable, rule-eluding, organisation of his poems. He reminds me of Semyon Kirsanov – a comrade of Mayakovsky, he lived out the whole era of poetic coma in his country by writing poems for children, a kind of folk-Futurism. McMillan is the visible face of poetry.
** I didn't realise that this Selected had come out in 2016 when I saw it in an on-line library (with no date inside). So I wrote a review, but it was too late for magazine publication. So it is being released here. **
This volume starts in 1994, but McMillan (born 1956) had two books out in 1980. This does not affect the book you can buy, but possibly the contents of his Selected Poems (1987) are being taken as a separate era. It has been followed by the recent Yes But What Is This? What Exactly? and That's Not A Fishing Boat, It's A Giraffe: Responses To Austerity. He is, basically an oral poet who regards language as a mysterious substance; an equivalent of Peter Finch. Peter Porter reviewed his first collection, in 1980, in these terms: “A newer sensibility still pervades the poetry of Ian McMillan[.] Seeing both more and less than the real is McMillan’s standby; these poems of country mysteries devolve around bell-ringing, […] McMillan makes some attractive pictures with his surrealist assembly kit, and The Changing Problem marks the emergence of an interesting new talent [.]” The changes word refers to bells ringing changes. Newer compares our poet to two radical poets (“erudite and restless minds”), whose work Porter says he does not understand.
The new Selected has about 190 poems. We have to unfold the title. Evening Star is a likely name for an evening paper, the local newspaper for some town or other. The last poem has him going out to buy an Evening Star, in 1965. McMillan is punning on the gap between literal and figurative meanings of the two words. To fold a star (the evening star is actually the planet Venus) takes us into a word of dreams or surrealism. To fold the evening paper you have just bought is quite normal and unsurprising. Many poets subscribe to the idea of a special place where there are no banal experiences or ordinary people, and suggest that this is a place where you can actually go, and which the volume of poems is a postcard from. McMillan does not do this. He is always close to everyday experience, and for example is interested in work, in the working class, in West Yorkshire. Many books of contemporary poetry can be seen as starting by excluding those realms of information. McMillan is constantly pushing back at this invisible boundary of aestheticisation – which simultaneously defines, however silently, what is not aesthetic. His ability to make the poetry itself constantly interesting is the focal point. To state the obvious, all the poems are interesting. He seems unable to write a predictable cadence.
We have to divide his work into two parts. Since he has been working since 1982 (see the cover of the Selected Poems) as a touring writer in schools, ‘provincial villages, clubs, and supermarkets’, he has a line of populist and participatory poetry, encouraging people to create word forms for themselves. Thus, he is the good conscience of poetry, making it available to everyone, going into schools and attracting a younger audience which will keep poetry alive, as opposed to becoming increasingly ancient, rigid, and attenuated. Whether the poetry grandees deserve to be continued is another question. But surrealism is the most immediate of styles, and his accessible poetry has not ceased to be original: facing people who have no idea what poetry is is one of the frontiers of newness and strangeness, and behaves often like the other frontiers. That work is collected in, for example, Perfect Catch (where ‘catch’ is what runs from one voice to another). But a large part of his work is literate poetry, for the literate, and this is what is collected in generous quantities in Evening Star.
McM has (as the third poem in the book) a documentary record of memories of someone he describes as housebound, whom he met while working for Age Concern. The memories date to the Second World War, when she was working in a factory in Leicester. This has some resemblances to a poem by Thomas Kling which I translated. Kling was working with old people, as an alternative to military service, probably in the mid 1970s. His poem deals with an old man who has Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s Disease, and the memories go back to the Eastern Front, in perhaps 1943. Kling heightens the negative elements of the experience to the point where it is all like a horror film. His poem is neo-Expressionist. McMillan does not see any element of horror or grotesque in his stories of people with limited social or economic capital.
The dominant theme of the poems, as a body, is de-industrialisation. There are good reasons for thinking that this was not chosen by the poet, but was simply the chief process unrolling in the region he lives in and in his lifetime. I note that I was born at much the same time as he was, and not very far away. This affected everybody, at least within the industrial regions (or, regions which were that until they weren’t). When I was born (so, when Ian was born), there were 14 million jobs in manufacturing, and 80% of the population was self-identified as working class. It’s not like that now. The disjuncture which so many McMillan poems exploit may also be the discontinuity between what we expect and what is actually there – a new country. His pervasive use of defamiliarisation, of the not quite real, may connect to a country which demands the use of your imagination because it wasn’t there ten years ago. You have an apparatus of social knowledge, which you may as well scrap, because reality has mutated while you weren’t looking. The defamiliarisation could also trip you into imagining a social order which we don’t yet live in – one where the powerful are not all-powerful and where economic and political power is very widely distributed, geographically and otherwise. This is a matter of personal preference. The basic techniques allow you to go there or elsewhere.
Simple language makes the poems easy to read, but the subject can be completely unfamiliar, as in ‘Deaths by ice-Cream’: Man killed by eating whole cone too
quickly. Woman died after slipping
on ice cream, falling under bus
carrying brass band. Child dies
sitting in snow trying to cool
dripping cone. Man killed by 99
hurled from hot air balloon by
lute player. Woman died after
argument with ice cream salesman
in Fife. The flow of information is just about ideal. The feel is like a silent comedy film, where anything inanimate becomes mysterious kinetic and hostile. I never asked in childhood if there was a 97 or a 98. And, 99 what? who counted? This nature film about the new apex predator is immediately followed by “Ted Hughes is Elvis”, which is probably McMillan’s most famous poem. Again, it is a very simple idea, but it does open up a new world. The idea gets over quickly and it is very enjoyable. How could we have failed to notice that “I’m itching like a bear in a fuzzy tree” introduced the shaggy character who appears in every Ted Hughes poem? In the poem, Elvis escapes by hitching a ride on a truck, explains to the driver that he is the Big Bopper (the one who sang ‘Chantilly Lace’) and had faked his death in the plane crash in Iowa which felled Buddy Holly and Richie Valens (‘La Bamba’). Later, he stabs Ted Hughes and begins a lucrative career as a Ted Hughes impersonator. From the same book also comes “Poem Occasioned by the High Incidence of Suicide amongst the Unemployed”. It also includes ‘Stone, I Presume’:
second stanza.’ That’s what he said,
leaning over me in the classroom,
puffing on his tweed pipe, the air
thick with twist and reek. ‘Always
start your poems with the second
stanza, my boy, and you won’t go far
wrong.’ I pondered this in my rooms
in the University. I knew,
just knew, it was the Thirties. ‘The Thirties
are a sort of second stanza, aren’t
they?’ I said to him. The air was
thick with twist and reek.
This shows the reflexivity which McMillan starts from, the sense that the poem is an artificial environment, although any environment filled with humans is artificial. He defines the older English poetry effectively but very lightly – the tweed and the pipe combine as a tweed pipe. The burning wool is like burning Old Twist, a shaggy tobacco. The poem is an object, you can fold it like the evening star. He does not follow up the idea that older, academic-conservative, poetry is absurd with a heavy notion of new poetry being Authentic. The new poem he offers is absurd and very light.
In the sky, look. That constellation there.
Round here we call it Wrecked Oil Tanker,
that constellation, because there’s no shape
to it and it’s black all around it.
Is that thing turning?
That’s a joke.
O pinpoint the Grimness for me madam.
Pointpin it. Speak into this thing.
This, call it what you like, pimple.
Speak faster than you normally would
to compensate for my dying battery.
And in a higher register than you
would normally employ. Pin pin
the Grim? Point it?
(from ‘The Grimness: BBC Radio 4, Tuesday, 8.30 p.m.’)
A number of the poems rely on word substitutions. We have to speak about ludic. This was a thing in the 1980s, often cited by people who wanted you to think they knew what the word postmodern meant. Ludic was associated in the 1960s, and the 1970s, with Edwin Morgan and George MacBeth. I mention this because they were firmly shut out from the provenance expertise, in the 1980s. You couldn’t define yourself as being super up to date if the idea you were peddling had reached a peak in 1964. It was a pretty strong idea, though. It connected with an idea that people mainly wanted to be distracted from the high unemployment and rapid impoverishment of entre regions, during the 1980s, and that art with no reference to the real was the only kind which would reduce your anxiety rather than increasing it. This part didn’t fit with Ian McMillan, since his poems incorporated passages from the real, at every opportunity. It connected up with the idea that art was a game, and that a lot of human activity was there to pass the time away. I didn’t instantly realise that a lot of people had no jobs and a great deal of time on their hands, and that games provided a way of enjoying the down time, of being sociable and genial and dexterous even if you were just waiting for the giro. Anyway, many of McMillan’s poems seem to have been constructed as part of games, and they can also be compared with poems by Edwin Morgan, Frank Kuppner, Robert Crawford, W N Herbert, and John Hartley Williams, from the same era. These poets – unless I’m making it up – realised that language could be separated from experience and manipulated like numbers: they could be written on a non-rigid surface which was then subjected to transformations, so copying, expanding, perforation, various distortions, etc. Geometry could produce the shapes of objects which didn’t exist, and poetry could do much the same. This abundance of verbal objects stood in a definite relationship to the shortages of material objects which were a feature of the period of de-industrialisation and high unemployment. It was the source of a lot of pleasure.
As a professional poet since 1981, he goes into the cultural wastelands and is usually surrounded by bad poetry – which is where the language mostly lives; but takes good poetry there. He has the ear of local government, the schools and councils which want poets to reach the people and will pay very small sums, repeatedly, for a poet to do this. They have him by the ears. This is admirable when compared with other poets who plan to change the whole system of government and aim at a centre, while really being wrapped in silence and on the periphery. There is doubt a link between decentralisation and the unpredictable, rule-eluding, organisation of his poems. He reminds me of Semyon Kirsanov – a comrade of Mayakovsky, he lived out the whole era of poetic coma in his country by writing poems for children, a kind of folk-Futurism. McMillan is the visible face of poetry.
** I didn't realise that this Selected had come out in 2016 when I saw it in an on-line library (with no date inside). So I wrote a review, but it was too late for magazine publication. So it is being released here. **
Friday, 14 February 2025
Blakean ballyhoo
Children of Albion: a moment of national humiliation?
After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.
I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.
Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.
None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)
The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:
stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:
has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.
Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to. “Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.
'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!
After writing about Horovitz as hustler, I saw a copy of Children of Albion in Oxfam, so I abandoned good taste and bought a copy. I will burn it after doing some analysis. (subtitle is “poetry of the underground in Britain”). First, he has 5 women out of 63 poets. That is definitely an advance on Allott, only seven years before, with 6 women out of 85 poets. About a 1% increase, 7% to 8%. But I don’t think that specific ratio changed much in the Sixties, it was the Seventies and some stiff polemics which changed things. I think the basic lesson is that Horovitz couldn’t tell good poems from bad. I read Albion in about 1973 and I was appalled. I just thought it was complete junk. Today, I notice that he has left out Patton, Henri, and McGough. That is so bizarre. But, he wanted to be Czar of live poetry and the Liverpool crew were far more popular than he was. So that is why he left them out. Horovitz did ‘poetry and jazz’, but Christopher Logue had done it a few years before, with the Chris Kinsey Quartet. Logue was the top man for jazz poetry, song related poetry, poetry about yesterday's news, radicalism, being hip. So... Horovitz left him out too. OK, this wouldn't matter if the quality of the poems selected was good.
I was just sickened by this book in 1973. Sixty pages of Horovitz’s visibly fake, inflated, marketing prose must have put me off. The inside jacket text says “the present anthology is intended to reveal his (i.e. MH's) subsequent ten years’ involvement with the living poetry which he found all around, within and without him.” Pretentious shit! He is radically confused between selecting poetry by other people and producing an art statement in which everything relates to him (and we buy it on that basis). This stress on the self is likely to make culture disappear behind the incessant testimony of egoism. Such wording signals a profound nervousness about objectivity, abstractions, and formal intuition.
Chaloner, four poems. None of them picked up in his Collected. Not his best. Paul Evans, six poems. Four lost. But two are in his first book – OK, they are both really good. I failed to respond in 1973. My fault. John James, two poems. Both in his first book. Both good.
None of the poems has anything blakean about them. That theme is only there because Ginsberg associated Britain with “Albion”. Just a reflection of a fantasy. The poems are much more like polaroids – instant and with no mention of the past. It’s the idea which so much good Sixties poetry uses. Obviously, the polaroids often show boring people leading boring lives. (There is an exception, and it is Horovitz's own poems, mediocre imitations of Ginsberg which have a sediment of Blakeanism due to the transfer of degenerative material from the American source. He had prominently confused the marketing guy with the talent, and the publicity release with the commodity.)
The cover is beautiful. I looked at an anthology called “It’s world that makes the love go round”, (edited Ken Geering, 1968) from Corgi, but from the same era and with the same Pop approach, for comparison. It is much worse than ‘Albion’, and one has to give Horovitz that much. I liked a couple of poems from ‘World’:
stones and other things
live like statues to words
praising the sound of sticks
uncarved
pebbles uncut.
In the beginning
was it the words or the beach?
(John Porter)
and by the same poet, ‘Analogue’:
has ever a clay model
reached pseudopodial about itself
to mould its eyes to face inwards
its ears to be deaf.
He will make the shell
make it solid,
and poke out the filling
as an unnecessary suicide circuit.
Horovitz gets credit for including poems by Harry Guest, not well known at that point. The take-away from the whole schlamassel is that a terrible anthology does not prove that a whole poetic scene is terrible, instead it may just be the product of an editor who can’t tell red from green and has missed everything good and desirable. If you have someone spending six days a week on the schmoozing, the networking, the fake spirituality, the ballyhoo, they haven’t got time to read poetry. Even supposing they wanted to. “Here at last is the ‘secret’ generation of more or less British poets…” There was no ‘Albion’ era in British poetry. It is just a bad anthology. Lucie-Smith’s book came out a year later and that actually does define an era.
I am interested in finding a division between Pop poetry and the avant garde… but 10 of Horovitz’s sixty-three poets are also in Mottram’s list of the “British Poetry Revival”, five years later. So, a good portion of the avant-garde were writing Pop poetry in the 1960s, apparently. Poems became more stringent, more conceptually evolved, over a few years. The phrase about “living poetry” probably gave Mottram the stimulus for writing about a “poetry revival”. The subtext is, probably, about readings before a live audience, and to freedom from conservative artistic conventions. As an emotional utterance, it can take on many implications.
'Suicide circuit' is presumably what is attached to a "self-destruct button'. This was a real thing, for example the U2 spy plane was supposed to be destroyed by the pilot rather than have its design secrets fall into enemy hands. 'Mission impossible' had tapes which would "self-destruct in 60 seconds" -OK, that was fiction rather than Cold War fact. Wikipedia has a page on the topic, saying e.g. "The landmines have a battery and when the battery dies, the land mine self-destructs." This only applies to the expensive kind!
Wednesday, 5 February 2025
Riddle; ding?
In BF I quote Molly Vogel’s poem:
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Silent is my dress when I bow to earth; pluck me
for pleasure and watch me blush; witness the birth of neither
nymph nor satyr. I am barren with seeds; watch me dismantle
my own throat. Who savours me pressed in wind? My vellum
pinion spews life. Shorn, my woolly husk unfurls like a mollusk.
I stand singular with many, mimic of mimicry.
- but could not propose a solution to the riddle. Robert Hampson emailed me.
"Dear Andrew,
I am currently working my way through your Beautiful Feelings. I have a former colleague who is an expert on Anglo-Saxon riddles, and she was very taken by the poem by Molly Vogel, which I sent her.
She noted it as a response to Exeter Book riddle 7 - and suggested the solution might be the Medusa Mushroom? She found this page with some details that seemed suggestive - particularly about the cluster and the blushing:
https://www.wildfooduk.com/mushroom-guide/medusa/ “
Riddle 7 is taken to be about a swan. It contains a line about silence, but also refers to dress which makes a sound (swogan). This is taken to refer to the creaking of feathers when the swan is flying. The word ‘hraegl’ refers to feathers rather than more generally to ’array’. Robert says further:
“The opening lines riff off Riddle 7 (where the solution is 'a swan' - hence, perhaps, 'pinions' later (with 'vellum pinions' as the constraints of the medieval page). The transformation of swan into mushroom would link to the reference to Ovid - and I wonder if transformation is the key to 'Medusa'. (Medusa also features in Ovid's Metamorphoses.)
Do mollusks unfurl? I imagine a snail emerging from its shell - and then I wonder about the 'woolly husk'. If I google 'shorn woolly husks', Google gives me advice about cutting the fur of woolly huskies ... From swan to mushroom, from swan to husky - 'singular with many'.
Mollusks have 'great morphological diversity' - which seems appropriate. Their body is called a 'mantle' ('Watch me dismantle my own throat'). The soft bodies, the gills ... remind me of mushrooms.”
My colleague, Jennifer Neville, has written quite a bit about OE Riddles.”
How a mushroom can be like the Medusa I am unclear.
I am not sure we have hit the jackpot here. Where is the “shorn/ my woolly husk”? But the ”blush” is the red tinge when the Medusa is bruised. The state of being neither nymph nor satyr would refer to an organism neutral in gender, so a mushroom rather than a plant, since plants have gender. I looked up the Medusa and it is one of the Amanita family. I am familiar with Amanita muscaria but that does not seem to fit well. I think the answer may be a book, and the 'vellum pinions" are indeed pages of a manuscript. (Pinions would mean wings rather than bonds.) 'Singular with many' could refer to the pages of a library. Hides have hair on one side which gets shorn off to make vellum for writing, so that could be the "woolly husk". The 'blush' could be rubrication, red-letters. I am not getting a real "ding ding ding feeling" about this solution.
Tuesday, 28 January 2025
DDR-Krimis
DDR 2
am reading a book on crime in the DDR. The author, Wolfgang Mittmann, records that he was for 30 years a policemen in the Volkspolizei. He was writing in the 1990s, essentially, and looks back on the period with a bias in favour of objective facts, and an acquired disinterest in Marxist ideas. Once you get rid of the Marxism, the daily life of the DDR citizens becomes intensely interesting – inclining their economic endeavours, and also their crimes. Mittmann was a product of the DDR and speaks the language of its citizens, in the deepest sense. The book has been published under two titles and so I have inadvertently bought two copies under different titles. One is Tatzeit. The cover of the 1995 version ascribes 34 years' service to Mittmann.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
He gives us 80 pages about the career of a smuggler named Schützendorf (not his real name). After 1948, a good part of his activity was smuggling eastern industrial goods into the West. This is interesting, because it shows how the East could export into the Federal Republic, at least up to a certain point. This possibility evidently declined, but in the early 1950s the problem was the exchange rate – goods sold in eastern shops for so many east-Marks cost about one-sixth as much as the same goods acquired through regulated cross-border trade, paid for in western marks (D-marks). The smuggling affected the DDR's conventional export business. Schützendorf is recorded, by Mittmann, as smuggling optical goods, office machines, silk, porcelain, and lace. Quite a broad range of products! The question for us is, then, how this advantage was lost, so that by 1989 the DDR had very limited exports, and almost everything collapsed after the 1990 currency reform (and reunification).
Schützendorf became famous partly through a trial involving his career smuggling goods into Spain, and through a 1959 DDR film “Ware nach Katalonien” (goods to Catalonia) which put his adventures on screen (in some form).
Mittmann records how the tradition of “DDR – Krimis (cop stories)” may have been started by someone called Preussler in 1949. The original format was little booklets (Hefte) of 20 pages. The style drew on traditions of Weimar detective stories, but obviously had to have a Marxist tinge in order to get access to paper and to retail outlets inside the DDR. This connects with an interest of mine in European low culture – obviously, the big story is the dominance of American imports, and the limited exportability of “popular” products from one country to another, but the details are quite absorbing. A simplifying theory is that the Communist Bloc did not have popular culture, because it was incompatible with Communist ideals about everyone liking high culture, and because all consumer industries were under-developed and badly funded. That is not the whole story. The Hefte series was called “Geschichten, die das Leben schrieb”. Obviously there was a line of DDR detective novels and TV shows. They are one of the little things people miss about the old DDR.
I don't have information on when the DDR government decided that it would not accept payment for exports in East-marks. Evidently, there was a moment when the idea of “hard currency” was invented. And, evidently, the exchange rate problems (the two marks, still identical up to June 1948, rapidly evolved to have an exchange rate of almost 6 to 1) gravely reduced the purchasing power both of East German citizens, paid in eastern Marks, and of eastern firms, earning revenue in eastern Marks but needing hard currency to buy components and equipment outside their own small country.
I am not sure how Spain came into the operation, but I suppose that Spain had at that time a grave difficulty with foreign exchange, and a deep need for industrial goods not made domestically. Cameras are a relatively precision-made good, normally obtained as imports, in most countries. So there was probably a fat tariff on imported cameras. Put that together with a supply of east German cameras, a car with Swiss plates, and some under-paid customs officials, and you possibly have a business. ‘Ware nach Katalonien’ is on YouTube but only in a version with a spoken Russian translation slapped on top of it. I did watch five minutes, but my Russian is nowhere near up to it. I did see an old lady travelling on a train to the west, a cop searches her handbag, it has a pair of binoculars in it… this was how S smuggled the optical equipment, many people carrying small consignments. That was the 1950s. Later, he retired from crime and lived on Mallorca – an early exponent of the German interest in the Balearics. He made a lot of money out of a car rental business for tourists. (Handbag is sumka, I did get that much.)
Mittmann also writes about a “show trial” of eight businessmen in 1949, the so-called “Conti Affair”. They were the board of a big firm which owned many subsidiaries, mostly in the West, but which had its registered headquarters in Dessau. Faced with sequestration by the Occupying Power, they broke up the firm and transferred control of the western branches, only, to a new holding company. The Communist administration decided to treat this as if it had been the theft of a hundred million marks, as if the directors had been smuggling potatoes across the zonal border. It was presented as theft from the working people of the east, even though all the property transferred was in the western Zones. The accused all got fifteen years in jail. This was in January, 1949, a few months before the transfer of power from the Soviets to a notionally independent local, one-zone, government. The real point of the trial, possibly, was to intimidate the non-communist parties, who were getting the majority of the votes. Brundert, the minister in the regional government who had approved the break-up, was a member of the SPD, the social democratic party. Putting him in the dock, defaming his party as criminals, was part of the SED (communist) Party’s election campaign. Conti was mainly operating gasworks, so sequestering everything would have given the communists a grip on a key part of the West German economy. The three Western Allies would never have allowed this. Nor would they have allowed, during an economic crisis, the shareholders living in their Zones to be deprived of their shares by such an uncompensated sequestration. The directors had not broken any law known to the other Occupying Powers.
The prosecuting lawyer was Hilde Benjamin, sister-in-law of Walter Benjamin, a Stalinist culture critic. Walter’s essay “Linke Melancholie” is an attack on the SPD, as ineffective because they didn’t follow the Moscow Line. It is the same attack that Hilde was making on Walter Brundert, in 1949, and getting him fifteen years in Bautzen. Voters preferred the SPD, and that is why Stalinists had to pretend that they weren't talented and idealistic.
Hilde was a prosecutor in show trials, which, because they have so little to do with jurisprudence or factual testimony, have to be seen as part of literature. They are conspiracy theories staged as thrillers. Benjamin H looked, in photographs, like the villain of some film noir. She looks like a cross between Akim Tamiroff and Edward G Robinson.
I looked up the Potsdam Conference page of Wiki, and one of the provisions in the agreement is "8.The Soviet Government renounces all claims related to reparations on shares in German enterprises, which are sited in the Western Occupied Zones in Germany. That same applies to German foreign assets in all countries, except for the cases indicated below in section 9." ("Die Sowjetregierung verzichtet auf alle Ansprüche bezüglich der Reparationen aus Anteilen an deutschen Unternehmungen, die in den westlichen Besatzungszonen in Deutschland gelegen sind. Das gleiche gilt für deutsche Auslandsguthaben in allen Ländern, mit Ausnahme der weiter unten in § 9 gekennzeichneten Fälle.) - Potsdam agreement.
I have read elsewhere that there was a part of the Potsdam Agreement which gave the Soviet Union 25% of the shares of firms in West Germany. It was part of the agreement on war reparations - compensation for "scorched earth" tactics inside the Soviet Union's territory. My guess is that this idea was discussed, by the Three Powers, and that is why the clause in the actual agreement specifically describes that this claim has been renounced. Otherwise, section 8 has no force. Obscure. However, the conclusion is that the Conti trial was a complete fake. No crime had been committed and the 15-year jail sentences were an act of terror.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)