George Szirtes
(addendum
to the ‘Affluence’ work)
This
poetry is photographic and oblique – unemotional descriptions of
odd and elaborate events. Some of it is more like curious ceramics
than poems. He deals with the artistic debate of the time when he was
studying and being formed by ignoring them – certainly a solution
and one with fascinating outcomes. The exotic quality defines a
restricted range for the poetry and it doesn’t feel as if there is
an equally vital goal or attraction pulling it all. The poems are
elegant but not very committed. Szirtes (b.1948) made a debut, it
would seem, in a volume of Faber’s Poetry Introduction in
1978 – a time when a large number of new poets regarded Faber as
part of the conservative and corporate world which was about to
vanish.
Quoting Szirtes may be misleading, because his style has quite avoided the impulses of “simplify and repeat” which could end up with a work which can be exhibited in short quotations (and makes its points quickly and crudely). The cumulative effect moved away from, or past, most poetic impulses. The aggregate was profoundly attractive and
by being stable created an emotional place which created a following,
a company to be found in that place. It would not invite mediagenic
poets. Szirtes generally uses rhyme, and regular line-lengths to
support that; this is probably more to do with Hungarian cultural
politics than the English kind:
In
the glass you see anatomies,
Bacteria
and germs in broken places.
You
see the future in slivers and shards
Faint,
farcical, lobotomies.
I
try to discover my disease in traces
Of
tea-leaves, life-lines, livers, tarot cards.
(from
‘Border Crossing’)
Some
poems record an old pain like a shell worn by the ocean, and recall
the Soviet ‘fraternal’ invasion of Hungary in 1956, the mass
deaths and the loss of freedom. In fact Szirtes was a political exile
as a child. The poetry has a delicacy and passivity which may be a
reflection of past aggression, a step away from old front lines. The
lack of overall patterns may be a mirror-image, a negative image, of
the Marxist style in which everything is teleological, everything is
chained into one vast monolithic pattern – this is a guess but it
may also lead us to seeing why Szirtes’ poems express freedom by
not being like other Szirtes poems and capturing, when the weather is
right, sensations that are quite unfamiliar.
The
lack of intent is what makes the poems so decorative but also makes
them inconclusive. At times the poems take on a life of their own.
The detachment allows a peculiar elegance of diction:
[O]utside,
a rusticated, vermiform
ebullience;
outside, a cluttering
of
pediments, pilasters, pargeting,
embroidery;
outside, the balconies
expand
in their baroque epiphanies,
their
splendid Biedermeier uniforms;
outside,
the casement windows under rolls
of
stonework, rough or smooth or both [.]
(from
‘The Courtyards’)
This
is simply a detail from a complex poem about old buildings, evidently
in Central Europe, quite likely in Budapest. The Biedermeier style
flourished around 1830 and part of the emotional music is surely the
contrast between the bleak and blank monumental ideals of Stalinism
and the twirls of the early 19th century. Perhaps
Hungarian Stalinism was becoming more similar to the post-Napoleonic
autocracy in Hungary, in the era forever associated with Metternich.
I
wrote “unemotional” but this statement is not quite right, and
the key might be that it avoids emotional peaks or that it describes
major events obliquely. Many of his poems are acts to secure
continuity between two countries and two parts of a family. A big
theme is family history and the lack of ringing artistic climaxes is
because a family does not reach conclusions in an operatic way, and
its nature is in daily processes continuing over thousands of days
rather than in big scenes. The poems mentioned are visibly part of a
much larger verbal flow of family history which does not belong
singularly to George Sz., as opposed to all his relatives. Quite a
few of these seem to have died in 1944 and 1945, presumably as part
of Himmler’s genocide project. The history of Hungary in the
decades leading up to 1956 and the departure of Szirtes’ family saw
a large amount of persecution and totalitarian posturing – the poet
is not, obviously, interested in writing marching songs either for
the Hungarian Right or for the Marxist dictatorship which succeeded
Horthy. But also, he is not interested in refuting these oversized
and over-loud ideas. He is very attentive to his relatives, and this founds the attentiveness which his poems show generally. We can notice that family history is more
truthful, or flecked with errors of a smaller scale, than those ideas
of the State and the people, but Szirtes is also not using his
narratives to argue against the State, not explicitly anyway. The details are there to evoke a larger whole, which it would be over-dramatic to attack directly. People
sometimes want poems about England, and even more so ones about
eastern Europe, to lead them to sociological conclusions. Szirtes
evidently does not think literature is there to nourish sociology. If
he writes about a train, it may have 1000 people on it, but they are
not part of the story of the train – they are part of their own
separate stories. To some extent, writers since 1956 have existed to
undermine the overload of grand sociological truths which the 19th
century had produced and which were ever more different from what
real humans thought or experienced.
Biedermeier was an era of lost hope and very detailed political censorship, in Central Europe, in which intimacy and family subjects took over art. (Bieder means something like "pious but dim".) The word is always used in a pejorative way, but the era (roughly 1815-48) did produce some art, even if ideals could not be described. Perhaps Biedermeier could be seen as a phase of rehearsal for writing poignantly and convincingly about intimacy and personal life, preparing for effective intimate art under another Central European tyranny, that of the Warsaw Pact satellites a century later. Szirtes' lack of interest in Marxists is interesting – it is as if they were so stupid that intelligent people could not even mention them.
Biedermeier was an era of lost hope and very detailed political censorship, in Central Europe, in which intimacy and family subjects took over art. (Bieder means something like "pious but dim".) The word is always used in a pejorative way, but the era (roughly 1815-48) did produce some art, even if ideals could not be described. Perhaps Biedermeier could be seen as a phase of rehearsal for writing poignantly and convincingly about intimacy and personal life, preparing for effective intimate art under another Central European tyranny, that of the Warsaw Pact satellites a century later. Szirtes' lack of interest in Marxists is interesting – it is as if they were so stupid that intelligent people could not even mention them.
A
peak seems to be the 1986 volume “The Photographer in Winter”. A
poem “The Child I Never Was”, about attempting to be English,
includes the description of a composite face made out of things which
reflect life near the North Sea – a pun, because the painter who
made faces out of vegetables and so on in trompe l’oeil, was
Arcimboldo, many of whose Mannerist canvases hang in museums in
Vienna, near Hungary. He worked for Rudolf II, whose court was in
Prague, and who was also King of Hungary. A 1989 statement by the
poet quotes a 1985 statement initially, as “a central conflict
between two states of mind. These I called [in 1985] ‘the
possibility of happiness’ and ‘apprehension of disaster.’ The
early poems in The Slant Door made repeated references to
pictures, often paintings, as points of arrest between these states.
Sometimes the setting would be domestic, other times exotic. The
effort would often entail conflating the two.”
Another
theme that recurs is depictions of paintings. The silence and
liberation from time which that implies are qualities which point
directly away from the implications of family history. The contrast
may be a reason for Szirtes’ artistic success.
The
statement quotes a poem “North China”, and a line “The great
fantastic trains, like twists of barley” – I am guessing that
this should be “twist of barley sugar”, a piece of confectionery
familiar to people my or his age, produced (extruded?) as a stalk
with spiral fluting along it – a kind of column with such fluting
is referred to as “barley-sugar columns”. The fluting may
actually be ice because the setting is a city in north China where
the temperature sinks to 50 degrees below zero. The ice would be
shaped into that dynamic and specific shape by the forward rush of
the train – if that is not going too far.
The
title ‘Transylvana’ refers probably to ‘Transylvania’, the land
beyond the forest, and the poem is likely to be about a visit to his
mother’s home town, Cluj (many other names!), which is now in
Rumania and always was in Transylvania.
If
you analyse all the poets who made debuts in the 1970s (something
which took place during my specialist project and which may be hanging
over us), it seems that Szirtes is an isolate; he was solving
problems which other poets had not addressed. His 1989 list of
favourite poets is open but does not show obvious influences (except
Brodsky perhaps). I have found it hard to identify immediate
predecessors, or rivals. It is worth thinking about Didsbury or even
Kuppner. Encounters (1999, ed. Zsofia Zachar), an anthology
from the English-language Hungarian Quarterly, is helpful in
giving the background to the family history in question.
I
didn’t get Szirtes’ artistic idea until this week. This is sort
of stupid of me. I just didn’t read his poetry enough. There are
problems relying on anthologies, because editors leave out many
brilliant writers, because the showcasing often doesn’t work, but
also because I read them and didn’t react to the evidence they
offer me. I admit that Szirtes was present in anthologies I did read,
such as Firebox and New British Poetry. I guess it was
my brain which was absent.
