history of the avant-garde in Austria and Germany

Ute and Ulf
Two essays about the history of the avant-garde in Austria and Germany (mainly).


Austrian poetry

(letter from Ute Eisinger circa 2003)

As a presupposition for this, let me say that the poets of Germany after 1945 no longer interest me and so I can hardly say anything about them, but in compensation I will say more about the Austrians.

The best accounts of Austrian literature since the war are in Peter Demetz, who teaches germanistics in California - everything should have appeared in English. For poetry, I recommend Hermann Korte’s contribution, Über Lyrik nach 1945, in the latest volume of the Reclam Geschichte der deutschen Lyrik, in which Kling, Czernin and all our favourites are well presented. If you want, I will send you a copy.

Ingeborg BACHMANN is overrated - an achievement of the women’s movement and of glossy magazines, which have stylized her into a Romy Schneider of literature. Her best poetry is indebted to Celan. She was certainly a dazzling philosopher (Heideggerian). CELAN is in any case in any respects unsurpassed, if also psychologically damaged. He saved something for the soul of lyric poetry - not because he was a Jew, but because he came from the East and drew from the same sources as the inventors of surrealism. During the single year, for which Celan held out in the previously aspired-to Vienna - he arrived in 1946, in a bombed-out, exhausted, hungry city - he only felt at home in the circle of fantastic painters. More than with BACHMANN, who adored him, he would probably have found elements in common with our underrated poet Christine LAVANT, who lived in impoverished circumstances in a Carinthian village and taught herself -as he did initially - from Rilke. Her poems - in reality prayers - belong to an alienatingly archaic Expressionism, as it is found more often in Czech or Rumanian poetry, in Siktanc, Stanescu, etc.

Then came the year of Gruppe 47, which in literary terms means the first “Anschluss” of Austria to West Germany: the only ones who travelled to their meetings from here were Bachmann and Aichinger, who were also the only women. Celan travelled there from Paris, where he had settled. Aichinger got married to Günter Eich, Bachmann was awarded the prize which Celan had deserved.

In the 1950s Vienna had come back to life. In a jazz cellar club named “der Strohkoffer”, painters met, whom the priest Monsignore Dr Otto Mauer exhibited in his gallery “Galeria nächst St Stefan”, and let them have discussions there too. That is the background from which the slightly older - he took part in the war - H.C. ARTMANN stood out. The so-called Wiener Gruppe [Vienna Group] is more an invention of the lamented, self-indulgent, Gerhard RÜHM. Artmann himself didn’t want to found anything, he was simply a splendid human being with a scholar’s attitude to life, unerring in his erudition and appearing in all kinds of masks, like Ezra Pound - but never with didactic gestures, always with a twinkle in his eye, lively. Vienna has been rich in theatrical gestures since the Baroque and Artmann’s gesture pointed once again to the grotesque, the Dance of the Dead procession from the legacy of ‘dear Augustin’.

For JANDL and MAYRÖCKER (and by the way it was she who educated KLING, a rather un-German bard) the ludic was decisive, the performable sound. All three are by now found in all anthologies. Very important - for Schmatz and Czernin, but also for the Swiss Ingold among others - was in the 1970s Reinhard PRIESSNITZ, who was a drinking companion of Artmann (who wasn’t?), and whose disciple Schmatz was in turn. Priessnitz’s legacy includes more essays than poems. No-one who wants to approach Schmatz and Czernin can bypass his systematic-theoretical essays.

The so-called Experimentals (SCHMATZ, CZERNIN and others) have had a hard time in recent years. Only Schmatz is on the path to success. One reproaches Franz Josef, primarily, because his writing has allegedly reached the cul-de-sac of self-observation - while Schmatz allows himself to write with increasing sensuousness, no longer raps himself on the knuckles when a tune begins to emerge. With “babel’n” he is for the first time dealing with what belongs to an outside world, instead of exploring what he has just invented. “tokyo, echo”, which has just come out, follows the same line. Whom both love: the Munich poet Paul WÜHR.

In the big picture, something is missing in contemporary Austria: the only thing which we have done for the world since the Second World War is Actionism, which was theorised by the Experimentals. The great talents of the Austrians are however found in the musical-theatrical, ludic, style. Because we suffer from an inferiority complex in comparison with the Germans, they are lying fallow. Austrian literature was always strongly involved with linguistic philosophy (Wittgenstein, Mauthner, Ebner; Kraus) and so must fail when it is inspired by beer and becomes ideologically earnest.

If I put myself into the picture… From the start I have only written about writing, above all about reading. I never shared the theoretical demands of the Experimentals (to analyse democratically, psychologically, system-theoretically), but hold more by a mediaeval code of honour of poet-apprentices, which prescribes that one should prove worthy of one’s master. It is said of me that I write like a man. But I regard myself as very heathen and this in turn as something very feminine. (Art is the working-through of flashes of inspiration as well as the knowledge of how one comes to the former - i.e. in this case highly erotically. Women perhaps do not write in a different way from men but procure other Muses. As I always felt close to the danger of losing the thread in sheer rhythm, I impose strict formal rules on myself.

Richard OBERMAYR writes prose - but it is like a quarry for poets. Recently I heard him as he was instructed to react in the framework of a literary project to an unfamiliar composition by Handel? Haydn? - and carried out this task quite breathtakingly. Not only that Richard thinks musically, above all his images are of an unheard-of accuracy and with that so completely freshly coined, that one can only wonder at them.

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(There is some reference to a 1992 web essay by AD which had very few Austrian poets, no doubt a consequence of using a London library funded by the Federal Republic. Quite a few of these poets are found translated in the 2001 Chicago Review anthology, Contemporary German Writing. The Cambridge Conference of Contemporary Poetry brought over Schmatz, Czernin, and Kling. AD translated all three. There are some translations of Ute Eisinger in the anthology 16 New German Poets [Burning Deck, 2008]. AD)


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Ulf Stolterfoht
This is a general description of the position of the avant-garde in German-language poetry, written about 2007.

Once again: about avant-garde and experimental poetry



(1)

When one began, at the end of the seventies, beginning of the eighties, to take an interest in poems whose authors felt themselves in some way bound to the concept of Experiment, one was in a peculiar situation - stamp-collectors call something like this, I believe, a closed collection area. To be sure, access to the key texts of the German- and French-language avant gardes was, as was not true for the two previous generations, a big problem - a medium-solvent university library, an ambitious borough library was then often better equipped to satisfy the most urgent longings - only the common evaluation of this form of literature had altered radically. The concept avant garde had been declared obsolete by the culture sections of newspapers and by mainstream theory, and bid farewell to with a sigh of relief, it had from the start played no great role for the younger poets of the “new subjectivity” or even served, along with “elitism”, to fill out their image of The Enemy, and so it was only the poets born in the twenties: Friederike Mayröcker, H.C. Artmann, Helmut Heissenbüttel, Ernst Jandl, Oskar Pastior, and a few others, who kept the colours high and kept the “collection area” a chink open. With which naturally also a reception problem is named - much was then hard for me to understand or even not perceptible: in what way Elke Erb and Adolf Endler were whirling around in East Berlin, what sensations Günter Falk in Graz and Reinhard Priessnitz or Dominik Steiger in Vienna were furnishing, not to mention that the first volumes of Franz Josef Czernin and Ferdinand Schmatz appeared in these years - in Stuttgart the clocks moved a bit more slowly.

However that may be - it seemed to me, anyway, as if I had discovered something, which at the latest in the moment of being discovered by me had become part of history - or at least was declared to be so. Which meant, that also my own efforts towards poems, still mostly unpolished by avant garde theory and practice, but somehow aiming in this direction, probably were not right up to date. No catastrophe, but all the same a persistent irritation, which continue until, much too late, I read Heissenbüttel’s magnificent volume of essays On the tradition of modernity (Zur Tradition der Moderne), and realised that the skirmishes around the concept of avant garde did not centre in literature and its possibilities of development, but in positioning and the control of opinion - power struggles on a very small pitch. Heissenbüttel now showed impressively that the history of the avant garde did not begin with Marinetti and Mayakovsky, with Ball and Schwitters, but at latest with Fischart and Kuhlmann, and did not end with concrete poetry - rather the situation is (Heissenbüttel‘s theses can perhaps be reduced to this denominator), that we are dealing with an unfinished, unfinishable process, and that there is no going back behind the achievements of the avant-garde, which applies equally to those who despise it and those who proselytise for it.

So things had been tugged into position again, just that Heissenbüttel’s realisations did not seem to have reached the young poetry-scene, at least there was no trace of them to be found in the relevant anthologies and annuals. But then, in the middle of the barren eighties, occurred with a flourish on the drums the “Pentecostal miracle of German-language poetry” (Tobias Lehmkuhl): within a very brief space of time appeared the first volumes by Peter Waterhouse, Thomas Kling, Bert Papenfuss, and many, many others. The scene showed up as completely changed from one day to the next, and it became obvious to me that there really were people who had taken up the same problems in the foregoing years that I had, just that they had got significantly further with their work. Another revolution, then, which didn’t wait for me.

When the poets born between the beginning and the middle of the sixties published their first books, the situation was changed again. The lyrical Pentecost had not been able to hold back the progressive marginalisation of the genre, which had as a consequence a stronger solidarity between poets, also across ideological boundaries. So the course of the front lines remained clearly visible, but it became possible to discuss the differing ontological principles and to respect them. Heissenbüttel’s theses had finally fallen on fertile ground, as just as it had been unthinkable to follow an experimental opening without being informed about (for example) Peter Huchel and Paul Celan, so it had also become something that went without saying for a representative of a more narratively oriented poetry to have read Konrad Bayer or Oswald Wiener. Isn’t that progress?

This process has continued, if my views are correct, among poets born around 1970 and later, and has got stronger. Perhaps the literary balance of powers has changed - the newer North American poetry with Charles Simic and John Ashbery now certainly plays a larger role than the old tussles of the avant garde, still it would be hard to find a younger poet who would not name Thomas Kling’s poems as an important influence. This has as a consequence that today really bad poems are hardly being written - the knowledge of tradition protects against that - and beyond that an incredible variety of stylistic projects has developed, which permits groups, but prevents schools. And so among the younger poets there are only a few who would describe their writing as experimental.

If I now try to show, in what follows, why it seems sensible to me, all the same and continuingly, to stick with the concepts of the avant garde, of experimental writing, that it certainly not so as to excavate happily filled-in trenches - quite the opposite, I find the present, un-angry situation extremely helpful, and would be glad and grateful if it lasts until my farewell to poetry. On the other hand I am convinced, now as before, that what poems can achieve depends substantially on what theoretical or ontological measures underly them, and that, to put it mildly, different concepts have different carrying powers. Diverse is good.

(2)


But perhaps to start out we have to go back to the origin of all the misery, to Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s essay, “The Aporias of the Avant Garde”, of 1962. This essay has a great defect, namely that not everything which Enzensberger claims in it can be rejected out of hand- more of this later; the predominant part of his argument is, though, highly problematical or straightforwardly tactical nonsense, written although the writer knows better. That begins with Enzensberger seeing the avant garde essentially as a sociologically relevant phenomenon, which in the competition of aesthetic ideologies has won a larger share than he would like. Now, polemics do not have to be empirically provable in order to function - but the assertion that avant garde art, especially literature, was over-represented in the marketplace, was in 1962 just as absurd as it would be in 2007. All the same this error of judgment has enjoyed a long life and has a wide distribution now as then, of course rarely among people with the intellectual capacity of H.M. Enzensberger. Just here is the second problem of the essay: who argues in the way that Enzensberger does must not only reckon with applause from the wrong side - that was his goal. Give him the obligatory derivation of the term “avant garde” from military vocabulary as a free gift, give him the playing off of Lenin’s avant garde metaphor against the Futurist one as a free gift, give him also a free gift (even if this one grates rather) the equation of “Neues Deutschland” with “Völkischer Beobachter” - but don’t let him get away with, of course, never, the criticism of Lukacs’ admittedly bizarre concept of realism as being linguistically “tattered and rotten“! If you don‘t believe me, you can check the reference for 9 euros 90 - “The Aporias of the Avant garde” are available again, that is in: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Einzelheiten I & II (Spiegel-Edition, Band 24. Hamburg: 2007). And this essay has even more to offer: from the surprising enthronement of Jack Kerouac as the “paramount chief of the Beatnik sect“, which Enzensberger takes to be the experimental division for North America - very witty! to the cutting and contemptuous: “A lab coat clads the breast twitching with visionary raptures; and what the avant garde produces, be it poems, novels, pictures, films, buildings or pieces of music, is and remains experimental.” Yo! you have to read it to believe it!

If I have indicated above that not everything is wrong with Enzensberger’s assault on everyone in the room, that refers mainly to two points:
First: the unenjoyable avant garde gesture of exclusivity: Like this, and only like this! Enzensberger: “Someone is already wrong when they insist on objective necessity, material compulsion, and inevitably progressing development. Every such doctrine relies on the method of extrapolation: it protracts lines into the unknown.”
And secondly: the problem of freedom by decree.
Enzensberger: “Just like communism in society (!), the avant garde wishes to impose freedom in the arts by decree. Just like the Party, it believes that, as a revolutionary elite, and that means as a collective, it has taken out a lease on the future. […] It proclaims total freedom as its goal while surrendering without resistance to the historic process which is going to release it from this freedom.”

These are really, and not just for Hans Magnus Enzensberger, two self-contradictions, whose consequences were that even today many older authors, whose work is undoubtedly to be grouped with the avant garde tradition, have very deep suspicions about claiming the term for their writing. These contradictions (which in reality are only one) seem to be resolvable only by finally taking the demand for and the promise of freedom seriously - it does not have to be instantly “total freedom“! The unpleasantly authoritarian tone which clung to many manifestoes of the Fifties and Sixties and which persists to this day in the pure theory of the experimental, is psychologically understandable (I think) as the defensive reaction of a minority pressed against the wall: against the prevailing malicious whispers and intrusive interpretation of the 1950s, against the “anything goes” of today - but it does not become more sympathetic for that reason. And if an opening both of concepts and of method should lead to a dilution - excuse me! Renate Kühn writes in her never sufficiently to be praised work of interpretation, Der poetische Imperativ (Aisthesis: 1997, 3rd edition 2020): “That such an open definition is appropriate was shown by further developments. Since the Seventies, the shifting of the experimental field in favour of “contents” has led to an increasing differentiation, which breaks with the taboos of the first phase and by doing that reaches a grade of textual complexity which is in noticeable contrast to the reductions of the first phase.”
And: “As an end result remains therefore only that new attempts to define (a single) “experimental literature” are out of bounds at the moment.”


(3)


Two attempts to define:

If in what follows we talk about “experimental poetry”, that refers to texts whose information content (if present) is not set before the beginning of the writing process, so ones which do not steer towards a preset destination of meaning or for example illustrate this meaning. Freedom is always also freedom of intention. So even a text that wanted to impart to us that one can reach a tenable result only by the experimental route: guided by rules or sounds, by permutation, combination, etc., would not be, in this stricter sense, an experimental text. “Experimental” should describe an attitude (Priessnitz), not a package of procedures or a bulging box of tools.
“Avant garde” should be taken to mean: the category of people who write such texts.

That was it. End of presumption.

(4)

Beginning of the hairy part, an attempt to rescue some basic insights of the avant garde and to grant a patent of nobility to experimental writing.

And to begin right away with the hairiest point: freedom of purpose, missing statement- or meaning-goals, do not imply the absence of sense - just the opposite! Just that sense is not something that allows itself to be captured and transmitted in a planned way, for instance in the manner of a “lyrical speaking about” or in the addition of semantic components by the reader - it has rather, to put it somewhat vaguely, to generate itself.
Renate Kühn again:
“Especially enlightening in this connection is a glance at the French “scene” of the Sixties. Conservative criticism reproached the avant garde of the time, represented above all by the “Tel Quel” group, with wanting to abolish the “author” as well as “sense”. De facto the category of sense was, however, not at all being radically thrown into question. What was being questioned was rather the traditional idea, oriented around notions of mimesis, of a meaning of the text as preceding it, which was also seen as something that could be exchanged for it (…) This marks not only the transition from “sense” to constituting sense, but (also) stands in direct relationship to an idea of the author as losing his formerly privileged status as autonomous creator god and now becoming a subject…”
I don’t think it can be put better than that.

What corresponds to this widespread misunderstanding of the concept of sense is, quite directly, a misunderstanding about the concept of understanding: just as it was felt possible to understand the directions for use or a recipe, it must also be possible, with the relevant previous knowledge, to understand a poem. But here there are already several zombies lurking. I am actually not at also sure that it is really possible to understand a functional text in the intended sense - to discuss this here, with all its semantic and referential implications or - well: aporias, would surely lead us too far - a small question mark shall suffice. To understand a poem, though, whether it be by Goethe or Oskar Pastior, in the sense of an understanding or several distillable statements, seems to me not only impossible, but above all not rewarding of effort. So as to bypass the theory-of-knowledge plane, just a provisional working hypothesis: one does not read poems to understand them, but to understand understanding a little better. Which would then lead, in a volte-face which is even Fregean, to the notion that all poems, experimental or not, might have the same sense, that is, to bring the possibilities and impossibilities of our knowledge before our eyes. That is a lot and little at the same time, above all though it is dangerous for the advance of my argumentation, for if it is true that a “conventional” poem has the same sense as an experimental one, then the routes which lead to this sense would have to be equivalent or at lealest comparable. That is a quite important objection, and I am not sure if I can disarm it altogether. If we proceed from here on the basis that all poems have the same sense, it seems to me that there are at least two significant distinctions. For one, the conventional poem does not know that its semantic thrashing around is to no avail - it is leading to a specific and singular goal of sense! This can be formulated in the most banal case in a concluding moment, in more elaborate versions it shows through as a kind of epiphany or bringing to light, which could only be shown and understood in the form of this specific poem. And it is always about the transfer of an appearance from the outside world, a “picture of an object”, into the language the poem. Right away there is nothing to be said against it, and there are enough cases in which this is also successful. Only it is, I fear, not thought through. Poems which want to communicate to us such “bringing to light” experiences (or really do communicate them - as I said, I don‘t want to exclude that!) are in a strange way speechless. For as they trust the immediacy of their central picture, the epiphany itself, however artistic its linguistic form, they have left poetry far behind as they travel towards figurative art. One could even say that they are experimental in the bad way mentioned above, because they use language only as a box of tools to bring the “real thing”, which does not dwell in the realm of language, to linguistic expression. The bringings to light, which experimental poetry is concerned with, are always bringings internal to language, a reflection of language about itself, and what from the world comes to light in the poem always continues to be recognisable as linguistically constructed. For how would world be thinkable, even outside the poem, if not linguistically constructed and constituted; and something which is generally seen as a defect of experimental poetry, the kind which relates to itself and language, was in reality its great advantage: to take things and deal with them, as they present themselves: verbally.

This is the one essential difference between experimental (so, actually, realistic) and conventional poems. The second follows from it and consists of this, that experimental “exploratory” texts seem suited in a special way to engage productively with the semantic area of “analysis of understanding and perception”. If it is true that with “understand” and “perceive” we mean not phenomena before or adjacent to language, but genuinely linguistic ones, and in fact both as regards the process of understanding and perception itself, but also in relation to their contents (whatever that might be- possibly just more understanding and perception), then it seems obvious to me that in poems, based on this insight, there is hardly a distinction between the course of the poem and the process of perception - they demonstrate both to the same extent.

The sense of the poem: to understand understanding, would then not only be the result, but displayed itself already in facture and form - noticeably, compulsorily and not because the author had painted it on his banner. In the idle case - and now it gets even more convoluted: the experimental poem would understand itself in this way, and even if I don’t exactly know what it means, it seems to describe the matter quite well.

Behind the self-understanding poem lurks naturally also the poem which writes itself, and we have landed at the court of the author. The problem began to be heard with Renate Kühn, as loss of “the privileged status as autonomous creator god “. Now, the experience of the “it is writing” such an existential fact for every poet, that I don’t see any great differences here. Even the installation of a “lyrical self” cannot an should not cover over this fact. Apart from the fact that “self” and author are naturally different entities, the “self” seems to make one authorship seem likely, on the other hand it fictionalises the authorship so strongly, that one could say with equal justification that the “I” in the poem problematises authorship or suspends its operation. In general the prohibition of the word “I”, like most other prohibitions, is naturally obligated to the authoritarian gesture, and is in that way (liberal and doctrinaire at the same time) formally suspended. And from a distance the concepts of radical self-revelation beckon, which was of course once an important avant garde topos…

A word on methods. I find it, as indicated above, difficult or frivolous to define experimental poetry by its methods. For one thing, permutation (for example) neither an attainment of, nor the exclusive property of experimental literature, but came and comes into action also in non-experimental literature, on the other hand I would not be able to say what distinguishes permutation, apart from its rather weaker grade of conventionalisation, from regular metres, strict rhyme schemes, or particular strophic arrangements. The sense of writing to set rules was from the beginning to delegate the burden of meaning and reference, experienced as something imposed on language. What then comes to utterance in the poem does not do so because the author actually wanted to talk about it, but because the rules of the game suggest or demand that one form exactly this statement or this word. This shift becomes clearest in the especially strict game-forms like anagram or palindrome. The “it writes” is then demonstrated doubly, as not only language, but also by its side the rule, sit together at the writing-desk. And beyond that the “It writes” is so to speak brought to book - just through the fact that the author normally selects the rule which he follows. Here there is in fact a small distinction from, for example, a rigid metre. The simultaneity of a speaking and of speaking about speaking, the meta-level which has been recruited, is certainly one of the few methodical constants of experimental literature. But one should not fall into the error of taking on the meta-linguistic portion of poem as the actual speech, a speech of a higher order, for which the referential and semantic problem would be put out of play. This mistake has been named often, not least by me, and is indeed laden with consequences. Logically meta-language is confronted with the same difficulties and impossibilities as “regular” poem-speech (and, as I believe, also everyday speech) - if that were not so, it would have as a consequence that the whole experimental concept would collapse in on itself or would at least reveal itself as superfluous. The notion, that one has only to pitch the linguistic level high enough (or low enough - see this discussion around the phonetic subtext in Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, which it is then planned to establish as the “real” text) and so would have returned to a linguistic paradise, in which words and things are perhaps not identical, but reference and meaning have regained their innocence, this idea is as attractive as it is idiotic.

What remains are the marginal features of the experimental spectrum: avoiding capitals, phonetic spelling, lack of titles, setting in blocks, syntactic eccentricities, in fact the whole world of deviations. Deviant is good. But doesn’t have to be, all the time.

(5)


Not the method, then, but the attitude. Experimental poetry as the form of “realised freedom” (Ernst Jandl), which out of its own impulse must reject every compulsion of method - and reject, in the end, an essay like this one. It is an insoluble dilemma, to demand absolute freedom in writing and simultaneously to deprecate certain disagreeable ways of realising it. Freedom naturally means always, as well and directly the right to write otherwise. Just that freedom seems to me not just to be something which is conceded to someone, but in equal measure something that one has to take. Although freedom does not obligate to anything, its meaning remains empty without the three Rs: risk-readiness, ruthlessness, and radicalism. Or - one number smaller: one should try to transgress the limits of conventionalised language use in the poem, if one wants to get to a place which is not already adapted to tourists. And when Harald Hartung, in 1975, in his volume Experimental Literature and Concrete Poetry, observes that experimental literature has become established, its methods have been tested out many times and by now it would be “actually the absence of stimulation and surprise which prevents us from experiencing this literature as experimental in the provocative sense of the word”, one must, without sharing Hartung’s evaluation in any slightest degree, - also because experimental literature is not free of the habit of developing commonplaces and conventions and carrying them along down the years. On the other side Hartung seems to want to say, implicitly, that the lack of stimulation and surprise was always constitutive for conventional literature. Enough said. But even if experimental literature, exploratory poetry, should succeed via clever swerves in dummying, also in future, the hedgehog of convention (which is nothing else than redeeming its promise of happiness), yet a problem remains. It presents itself just as a hundred years ago and is linked to the basic claim of the avant garde, to make art and lived reality the same thing. This seemed to me, for a long time, to be particularly simple: in this way, that I saw reality as linguistically formed and normed and can probably assume the same for poetry, I have to do more than to display this congruence in the poem, or the poem would (see above) perform that of its own accord, if it owes its being to this realisation. What was not clear to me - and is even today still not clear to me: what consequences this insight and its converse implications have for my life - the logically obvious “No consequences!” seems to me by now to be too little - and what that, conversely, means for the poem. Check this out.


(6)

“about the execution we note that our investigation has no claim to completeness. the gaps in our work, which arose under pressure of time, are well-known to us. we would gladly have worked it through again, increased the number of observations, tightened the discourse, unified the terminology. we hope nonetheless that this has been confined to surface deficiencies, flaws in beauty, and that these do not impair the argument. we present the work with the promise, to deliver a more thorough version at some point.”

(from: reinhard priessnitz/ mechthild rausch: “tribut an die tradition. aspekte der postexperimentellen literatur“. In: Wie die Grazer auszogen, die literatur zu erobern. Edited by Peter Laemmle and Jörg Drews. Issue of text + kritik magazine. Munich: 1975, 1979)

Notes (by AD)
Original texts were in German.
“new subjectivity“: the essential point about this was the rejection of the politicisation of the “generation of 68” and while it played a big role for cultural journalists it was not primarily a literary event.
German-language: a generous concept to avoid unintended slurs, as for example Pastior was Rumanian.
 Fischart and Kuhlmann: 17th century German poets.

“Neues Deutschland” was an East German newspaper, and “Völkischer Beobachter” was the mass-distribution daily which spoke for the Nazi party.


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Mid-century women poets: Coelsch-Foisner

Mid-century women poets: Coelsch-Foisner

At this point I am about to revisit a blog I wrote about 4 years ago, about Sabine Coelsch-Foisner's 3-volume work on mid-century British women poets. Then, I regretted its stylistic qualities while being glad to have a list of women poets one could go off and work on. (For the list, see the previous blog, posted August 2010) I admit that I did not read the thing back then, I merely saw it on the shelves of Cambridge University Library and spent a few hours examining it without daring to take it away.

The title is “Revolution in consciousness: an existential reading of mid-twentieth century British women's poetry”. This is a singularly unpromising subject. I am reminded of a review I have just been reading of a huge 1982 retrospective of Sir Edwin Landseer which the art critic Hilton Kramer saw in New York and responded to rather sarcastically. The sheer scale of the work (the Index starts at page 1165, the main text ends around page 1020) asks for the subject matter to be large-scale, just as the scale of the Landseer exhibition induced curators to claim grand status for the art included in it. This ominous symmetry is the most menacing aspect of such an endeavour. The fact that we are given a new product seems to suggest that the old product wrapped up inside it has uncharted potential and in fact needs to be revived. But although the work of Kathleen Raine and Edith Sitwell remains admirable, I am doubtful that the work of all the other poets even can be revived. Meanwhile the excess effort of the project may miss and obscure the virtues of small-scale work with its delicacy and discretion.

This is a passage from Anne Ridler, quoted at p.552:

Sitting in this garden you cannot escape symbols

Take them how you will.

Here on the lawn like an island where the wind is still,

Circled by tides in the field and swirling trees,

It is of love I muse,

Who designs the coloured fronds and the heavy umbels,

second-hand marriage, not for passion but business,

Brought on by the obliging bees.

(from 'The Phoenix Answered')

Surely this is not very inspired. And surely we don't need lengthy exegesis to break down barriers between us and it. And surely it does not require the creation of a whole critical vocabulary to explain what its intent is. (The style reminds me of Christopher Fry. The cleverly inverted description of pollination sounds just like him.)

The book would be more aptly titled 'people writing conservatively to avoid unpleasant thoughts'.

For example, take 'Ruth Pitter's book of cats”. This is likely to outlive the rest of Pitter's work as a commercial venture. The cat poems do not fit into C-F's cultural concept and do not get discussed. It seems possible here that the schema is unwelcoming to features which were really central to the poets concerned, and that the scale of the treatment does not mean that the handling will be accurate and revealing (of something that is actually there). This starts with the attribution of 'revolutionary' and 'existential' qualities of the poets in the title of the three-volume work. Would it not be more accurate to say that these poets stay inside their comfort zone? It seems a shame to write them up as scary people leading us into realms where we have to think and criticise, if they were really interested in children, animals, and gardens, and the idea of Comfort Zone was the source of the dominant stylistic factor, i.e. conservatism and rejection of a personal style. The Anglican Church has, in fact, represented for many people a Comfort Zone rather than a source of spiritual doubt, turmoil, and soul-searching.

The poets generally put serenity and harmony above other values. This connects them directly to affirmative culture, and we can see at this point that when Herbert Marcuse described that he was also describing- in large measure- contemporary feminine culture. But feminism preferred contestation and so imposed a boldly marcusean line.

I will quote one passage at length, describing the poetry of Dorothy Wellesley:

“The buried child reminds us of the hybrid constitution of the self, its origin and end in the child, which he suggests a primordial mode of being more in line with Jung's collective child-archetype than with Proust's personal memories of childhood.

Wellesley’s poetry abounds in such medallions – isolated lines which convey the central thought of a poem, pithy phrases, emblematic images and their ritual, dance-like recurrence, echo the central idea of her poetic vision: the circular stream of renewal and the persistence and resilience of life enshrined in a cosmic principle of birth and death. Wellesley’s “matrix”, her way of encoding this uterine mystery of life and sphingian wisdom, the preconscious chaos and early light of creation, provides a prototypical metaphor of the matriarchal mode: Matriarchal art “is a process which gives a pre-existing inner structure, found in the ritual of dance, external expression (Gottner-Abendroth p.82) This matrix or inner structure represents Wellesley’s concept of the numinous, of the instinct to survive mirrored in 'acts of love and passion':

Our loves are myths, our myths are loves. Out of Space, out of Time. The darting of blue dragon-flies over the lily pool, their beauty, their ardour, their lyrical ecstasy melting into union in the air, eternally they pulsate, eternally desire, their desire is their dream, their dream is their desire. They hold for a day their eternal illusion. This is their myth.“

(including a quote from Wellesley's autobiography)

The treatment of Kathleen Raine is one of the more acceptable chapters, since Raine actually was an important poet. C-F says that there was a whole wing of British poetry on the “spiritual” side, of whom Kathleen Raine was one. This is surely true, and she quotes at page 500 John Holloway and John Press as authentic sources for the idea. Press named a book on the English 1950s 'Rule and Energy', the “energy” part being authors such as Raine (and Gascoyne, Barker, etc.) The author says that Raine was not influenced by her contemporaries (except early on by the Experiment group, a group of student poets she was part of around 1930). This is true, but C-F does not say from where Raine did get her style. This account leaves out WB Yeats. If that source takes us back to the 1890s, it follows logically that Raine, Wellesley, and the whole congregation of “spiritual” writers were notably conservative in their approach, and that the esoteric-spiritual leanings of the Symboliste movement were the source of their cultural position. (James Webb wrote about this as the “Occult Revival”.) They presumably outnumbered the modernists. The belief in timeless values combines well, of course, with a rejection of innovation in matters of verbal form. If there is such a large party of poets sharing certain values, it is likely that the source of those values is several generations earlier, so that it has had time to disseminate. Despite the energy C-F has put into a battalion of deeply neglected poets, it seems possible that her work is short of context here – the relation of these poets to various strands of late nineteenth century poetry is not picked up. The thesis of “revolution” could not be sustained without establishing an older cultural set-up from which Nott, Lynd, Raine, Bowes-Lyon, etc., would have deviated in some way. It is doubtful that deviation was of central importance in what they did. If we accept that there was a cluster of modern innovations on the scene around 1920, then we can look at the poets who, in the 1920s, took these innovations on, risking the wrath of a literary audience which preferred the Victorian past, and see that they get a lot of attention from historians. But obviously not every poet who began publishing in the 1920s took on any of these innovations. A much larger number of poets were writing in a conservative way, where the influence of Tennyson, Housman, of Anglican hymns, of Theosophy and Symbolisme, was much more important. Change is more interesting to write about, but it loses its force as a concept when we look at large amounts of published poetry. Why should a style be valid for 20 years and not for 100? or only for two? Where is the scale built on which the point is marked where a style dies? These deaths are perhaps the key to understanding the history of poetry. The poets in question lack stylistic individuality (this statement excludes Sitwell, Raine, Stevie Smith). That is conventionally the point at which we stop recording and move on, but in a “recovery project” we also have to question the assumptions we brought with us. The idea of personal style implies not just a theory of Time but also one of property, individuation, demarcation - almost of territory. Certainly of competition. If you don't want the self to aggrandise itself and seize territory, then perhaps you don't want artists to have a personal style – or to express themselves, at the cost of other subjects. That whole attitude may be incompatible with a Christian ethos.

The account of Raine (at pages 500 to 544) is good but does not take on the esoteric doctrines which Raine saw as the laws of the universe. Although her religious commitment is what turns most people off, to cut the poems off from the doctrines which they illustrate is not the ideal solution. The imagery is not merely subjectivity, Raine was a true believer and her poems relate to Neo-Platonism (and the rest of it) as hymns relate to Christian doctrine. C-F has a 'New Age' esoteric religious doctrine which to some extent these aged English poets are being recruited to fill roles in. To some extent they fail by delivering lines of their own. It involves "the alliance of the imagination with magic, its embeddedness in matriarchal mythology, its resistance to the objectification of art, its rejection and denigration of power and control, and its emphasis on communal processes and social subversion.” (p.438). (The source of the esoteric 'alliance' doctrine is Heide Gottner-Abendroth. It is safe to say that none of the mid-century poets described was a follower of Gottner-Abendroth.)

C-F quotes Raine:

But what, then, is it in the assembly of organs of special sense, at one end of the central nervous system, that makes a face, that has recognisable unity, entity, person? To think too far this way leads to that madness for which there are not faces in the streets, and in the trains and buses, not people, but collections of organs, topping a spine, whose upper bones are stretched and pointed a little – but no faces, any more than on the breast and belly, no more than the fringed circle of the holothurian or the medusa.

I am inclined to say that you can’t write poetry without knowing what the answer to this question is. You can probably get away without being able to visualise a holothurian. The passage underlines Raine's link (at C-F page 501) to the other figures around Experiment, such as Charles Madge and William Empson and Hugh Sykes-Davies. She was preoccupied like them with the relationship between science and poetry. Many of her poems are like science writing. But the answer she found was Neo-Platonism.

C-F has no interest in whether a poet is good or bad. This is inseparable from the book’s method of becoming, that is as a doctoral thesis (Habilitationsschrift) at the university of Salzburg. The guiding idea is to accumulate large amounts of irrefutable facts, so literary judgement could only be a secondary accretion. At many points, though, one would be relieved to see a sentence like “Ignoring the vagaries of fashion, Venetia Celandine spent 85 years working quietly and unobtrusively on delicate nature lyrics, none of which are any good.” It is quite reasonable to start with an inventory. However, a project of recuperation normally gives preference to poetry which is interesting to read, that is which is able to be recuperated. C-F is more like an archaeologist who regards every grain of pollen as precious information about a lost era. C-F deals with people who wrote little nature lyrics by spending 20 pages explaining what a nature poem is and why it is Really Important. This is extensively unproductive. At the end we realise that the subject is still a little nature poem and is something we understand perfectly well. We do not need to be told that Nature is Big. The interest is more why a nature poet – most nature poets? - fails to write a poem which is also Big. To analyse this in a concrete case would give an image which has the right proportions. CF has no interest at all in whether her subjects succeed or not. This also gives a problem of proportion. Thus when we read about categories such as “the sphingian voice in Dorothy Wellesley’s poetry”, “the Uranian voice in Ruth Pitter's poetry”, the “ethos of the numinous”, the epiphanic mode, the apocalyptic mode, “the voice of incubus in Kathleen Nott's poetry”, the entropic mode, etc., we are seeing unbelievably long descriptions of things which were familiar at the outset, and where the criterion of being interesting has been rigorously excluded. The names tend to be Latin or Greek words but the poets are English. The argument that the named poets were producing significant and personal variations on set genres is not convincing, and I am doubtful that these laboriously worked out descriptions will be taken up by other critics. In fact, the title of “critic”, meaning someone who judges and who writes prose recording acts of judgement relating one thing to another and setting things in their true proportion, emphasising what is of value and pointing out what is of low value, is of little relevance to what C-F has set out to do. Crucially, the project is missing any mention of artistic failure, and so of any reasons for artistic failure. This is where there is a feminist angle. Because this walled garden of submissiveness, meekness, spirituality, piety, traditionalism, gentility, is where feminism started – as a violent antithesis. The problem with building a lens the size of a pyramid to magnify something modest by nature into Big Culture, is that you are obliterating the reason why feminism had to be invented. The lens operation is reducing our level of awareness of cultural sequence.

Does writing in these set genres mean a grand achievement or just harmonious unoriginality? The stage where the poem is interrogated to see if it measures up to the ideal is missing from the text. The degree of attentiveness is astounding but it has no fine lenses – the mediocre is written up with the good. The idea of creating a past for oneself, before birth, and rearing it up to monumental scale, can well be called the Curse of the Pharaohs. (Also a track by Metallica, we understand.) Everyone wants a past. If C-F's past is gigantic and overblown, that must be related to the modesty and delicacy of the literary works of female poets in the mid-century period. The two things are in no very exact proportion. Part of the Pharaonic risk is that the scale of the monument is related to the fact what is inside it is dead.

To take a section of the Past, to acquire it as a projection of cultural wishes of the Present, to blow up its scale in proportion to your wishes, to project into it cultural programmes that did not exist before the 1970s, to use it as a kind of projection of yourself, to recruit it as an example of the corruption of institutions you are in dispute with – this is also not compatible with a Christian ethos. In fact, it is what you would call Sin.

In the house I grew up in, there was a copy of a book of poems (The Invisible Sun) by Margaret Willy, which I think my mother had bought in the late 1940s. Willy did not seem to feature in the cultural histories, and this was a source of puzzlement to me later on. I am glad that C-F brings up Margaret Willy, not as a principal subject but in an interesting passage around p.282 where several “pastoral” poets are described. Books which later more or less institutional and metropolitan operations discarded had readers at the time, and gave them things they wanted. A female identification figure may well have been one of these things. Along with reviving these texts, we would hope to recover forms of sensibility which people practised and which relate to the texts as their counterparts, in a matching set. The contrast between the wishes of such an audience and the dominant styles of poetry is of interest. Certainly a lot of readers didn't like the styles variously represented by Eliot, Auden, Roy Fuller, Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Brian Patten, and found other things to entertain them. These groups were passive and less articulate about their preferences. Certain sources, such as the old Poetry Review, do articulate these “intuitive” (or conservative) positions. I believe they typically draw on a less adult and more unconscious stratum of awareness and so are more difficult to articulate. There just wasn't an intellectual hinterland to the meaning-bearing structures in the poems the way there was for Auden, Spender, and so forth. And Poetry Review couldn't articulate its anti-intellectual position in prose. The contradictions in such a position become very powerful as you try to write about them logically. The endeavour breaks down.

I am aware of a book called The Distaff Muse, (edited by Clifford Bax and Meum Stewart, 1949), which gathered female poets going back to the Middle Ages. But up until the early selections of feminist poets, starting to flow in 1976 or 77, I am not aware of other anthologies of women poets. It is an interesting gap and the temptation to fill it must be very powerful. Certainly the mid-century saw quite a few women poets, and most of them have been forgotten today. (The old British Council pamphlets give lists of significant publications, which always include women poets. The 1957 one lists Kathleen Nott, Iris Orton, and Ruth Pitter almost one after the other.) Equally certainly, they resemble each other and represent a distinct poetic sensibility, which it is of interest to discover. Presentations of this sensibility from the time itself, and especially first-person statements from the poets, seem to be very scarce and would be of great interest. C-F has corresponded with at least one of the poets, and this material is of high interest. It seems very likely that there is a feminine sensibility which accounts for much in the poetry we are looking at. We would have to define what that is before finding out how much the poets differ on it. We don't have 20 different femininities; all the same Edith Sitwell is a long way removed from Dorothy Wellesley.

It is likely that the women of the time admired certain virtues as particularly feminine, and that female poets demonstrate these virtues in verse as well as observing them. The observance was also a limit, quite notoriously. The 'gentility' which Alfred Alvarez attacked in a famous anthology introduction was predominant in the English poetry scene he was looking at. It follows that somebody liked it. The poetry under consideration fits perfectly into that guiding concept of gentility, and surely it would have been better to explore the motive for liking that condition than to mount up this idea of “revolution”. Predominance is not easily achieved, and surely the whole cultural order of gentility is a large subject and worth recovering, Evidently the modern taste likes intensity and conflict, and it is useful to articulate why poets such as these rejected those emotional values in favour of serenity, harmony, piety. If you reject psychological positions which involve conflict, that has radical implications for what kind of poetry you like. If we accept that concentration on the self (anyone's self) tends to lead to conflicts, as selves clash over assets which both sides want, then the wish for serenity implies a critical view of the self. To develop an original artistic style would be rather in conflict with this. An interest in abstract ideas could also be incompatible with it – so far as that interest promotes dispute (a form of verbal intensity) and leads to radical disagreements about the social order. If we discover that Kathleen Nott was interested in philosophy, marshalled arguments against Christian positions in culture, was a prominent member of the Humanist Association, and was overall an Intellectual, that is a vital piece of knowledge about Nott; it also points out that almost all these women poets were not intellectuals, and that we need an anti-intellectual way of thinking about them.

I am tempted to say “poetic taste went from a state where people believed that intellectuals could not write poetry because everything they said was angular, jangling, abstract, disturbing, to one where people believed that only intellectuals could write poetry because only they could sustain originality over the long haul and, fundamentally, poetry is about originality and ideas”. But this is not quite accurate. If in 2014 most poets are thoroughly unintellectual and banal, it shows that intelligence has not won. The Cambridge School do not dominate the poetry shelves of bookshops. Instead, we might want to trace the history of banal and domestic poetry of 2014 back to domestic and banal poetry from mid-century.

I am tempted to say that “harmony” actually means “predictability”, a conservative principle where the past supplies the design rules. But matters are not so simple.

The idea of “revolution” suggests a realm of stylistic legislation which is able to be seized and changed, and which is thereafter binding on younger poets. To do it, you have to know where social power is. This seems to mean a degree of institutionalisation – controlling institutions, having been shaped by men, and working inside them – which leads us far away from where these poets are. Almost all of them believe in interiority and privacy to a remarkable extent. They are not open either to speculative stylistic reasoning or to factional impulses. Naturally this is part of being an out-group, and of being women and centred on the home and the domestic realm, while not doing significant things in office buildings, clubs, or universities. Because it is bound to authenticity and to empathy, it is important for the aesthetic principles of these poets. The word revolution leads us away from where these poets were happy and what they did best. The title is puzzling, but it looks (from p.407) as if the revolution C-F has in mind is a move out of the realm where historical change is possible, and into the archetypal. But if historical change is irrelevant, or a distraction, there are no revolutions.

Because C-F wants her subject to be revolutionary, she is unable to form a line of reasoning like “these poets ignore fashion. They did not go to university, being women. Fashion is produced where people throng together and have an intense shared interest. Perhaps the choice of conservatism is a solution to problems of not being part of the institutional literati who produced fashions.” This may not be right, but it is an example of the sort of hypothesis we need in order to get close to who these writers were. I suspect in fact that “revolutionary” and “existential” are male concepts and that they actively lead us away from recognising what these old-fashioned women poets believed and desired – and created.

It would be interesting to trace the development of fashions in poetry, perhaps to include semi-successful ones as well as the ones which became central. The very early history of these styles is the most revealing phase. No doubt the universities were important, and no doubt most of the innovative writers were also members of a dominant group in one way or another. Edith Sitwell is a striking exception in the 20^th century, not because she was not part of a dominant group (the landed aristocracy, no less) but because she never went to university and was not a man. It is hard

not to see a structural link between these facts and her lack of influence on other writers. However widely read she was, she lacked followers at the time and in fact never has had followers. It would be helpful to be given an exploration of how women poets influenced other women poets during the century. Was this what was going on? was Raine influenced by any women poets? Surely it would get us further to analyse how women poets were immune to innovations and “movements” and lived in a poetic world that didn't need that sort of thing. Such writers had a completely different sense of time. Later, as women poets came to be primarily graduates, these rules changed or disappeared.

The point of conservatism is to be acceptable, and indeed to be accepted. Whoever accepts, is accepted. C-F offers us nothing on such questions as whether more scripts by women poets were rejected than ones by male poets. It is hardly likely that adequate evidence still exists on this to be recovered at this date, but after all it would be interesting to know if projective ideas like “brilliant women poets have always been put down by men” have any validity except the candle-power of projection. We would like to see contemporary examples of generalisations about women's poetry or reviews of it. Negative reviews would be the most interesting, since after all it is the non-appearance of women in the history of the period which is most perturbing. This material is missing and after all the key processes are hardly inside the realm of literature. I am quite certain that there is neglected poetry by women from this period, but there is considerably more neglected poetry by men. The audience for poetry at the time was limited, and publishers were quite keen not to lose money. No doubt poetry got turned down on all sides. The process of losing out will stand a great deal of attention but clearly the losers are a diverse lot and not some wholly uniform and virtuous congregation dressed in white robes. I don't know whether we can retrieve some of the lost poetry. There is a lack of uptake from the wished-for audience. There is another issue about reviving and pumping-up poetry which was actually worse than the familiar poetry of the period and gravitated naturally to the dampest of the storage cellars. Where only heroic critic-historians wearing waterproof boots dare enter and linger.

C-F does not mention Lynette Roberts, Audrey Beecham or Eithne Wilkins. I definitely think that 'recovery' work should be directed at these. Indeed. Roberts has been recovered, with the admirable republication volumes edited by Patrick McGuinness. Work on Eithne Wilkins is progressing, I think we can say, among the fans of the 1940s.

Final points. Clearly there has been a deluge of gifted women poets since 1990, and I would recommend to anyone that they go and plunge into that deluge rather than struggling with these mid-century poets, most of whom can never be revived. Also, Deryn Rees-Jones' anthology 'Modern Women Poets' is much more effective as a way of getting to what from this blighted period can be revived. I suspect that reading groups spending an evening discussing an individual poem are going to be an effective way of dealing with the rather alien rules and suppositions of this era.

I should confess that I have only read volume two of this work, plus selected parts of the others while in the library.

After the end, I wish to quote a poem by Audrey Beecham (1915-89), a poet omitted by Coelsch-Foisner.

Fossil Bird

The vital nettle growing next the dock

Is less frustrate than I within this rock,

Whose blunted beak has tried a million years

To breach the prism of my crystal fears.

My fiery feathers are to fossils grown,

My blood-drawn talons sunk in nerveless stone:

A mountain’s weight is heaped upon my wings

While dauntless in the sun a small bird sings.

A changing world fell on me as I slept:

Yet, crushed in two dimensions, have I kept

The pattern of my predatory lust

Impregnable against the earth’s slow rust.

This is from a sequence named 'The Twelfth House', an astrological concept which the poet glosses as "It denotes ... secret toil of the mind, envy, incarceration … also according to Hay, 'it represents banished persons, malefactors, lost goods never recovered, long hidden wrath.'" (in the 1957 book, The Coast of Barbary). In the folklore of English children, the dock leaf is supposed to ease the pain of being pierced by stinging nettles. This never seemed to work. Beecham's pursuit of extreme states of mind, negative feelings, conflict, was basically unacceptable to most mid-century women poets, and also accounts for her appeal to modern taste. The poems are a total occupation of an emotional state one would like to vacate. A bird driven by predatory lust? is this the backstory of Crow?

Incredible variants of Scottish identity

Incredible variants of Scottish identity

Mussolini and MacDiarmid

I bought a copy of Gavin Bowd’s book Fascist Scotland. Very good although he covers groups linked to European fascism to the exclusion of ultra-nationalism within Scotland, Republican movements for example.
He has some useful details about MacDiarmid’s pash for Mussolini. - put on display in ’At the Sign of the Thistle. Programme for a Scottish Fascism’ (1923): “Nevertheless there is need for a Scottish fascism just as there was need for an Italian Fascism [.]”.
1923: “Italian Fascism needs most urgently to be exactly reproduced in Scotland in so far as agrarian policy is concerned.”

1929: “What I have said about the need for aristocratic standards for a species of fascism applies equally here. I feel we will never make any real headway till we cease to imitate English organisations by running the party on democratic lines or wanting anything similar in organisation or programme to the English parties.”
1931: “In 1932, in The Modern Scot, MacDiarmid favourably reviewed Wyndham Lewis’ book on Hitler”. (Bowd)
He seems to have moved away from Fascism in the early 1930s. All the same his adherence to Marxism does not tell us very much about MacDiarmid. He did not think like Marxists and did not know the things that Marxists typically know. The ‘superman’ idea is the key.

I read John MacCormick’s memoir, A Flag in the Wind (1955). MacCormick was the first inspiring leader of Scottish nationalism. He gives an account of Spence’s election campaign and also talks about MacDiarmid, whom he views as a disaster: “C. M. Grieve has been politically one of the greatest handicaps with which any national movement could have been burdened.”. Like most poets who get involved in politics, MacDiarmid was very bad at politics. He had no political talent. Early adhesion does not mean that he understood the Scottish voter, or that the other ‘day one nationalists’ liked him or felt like him, or that he had a gift of prophecy. MacCormick points to Grieve’s hatred of the English as something which put possible supporters off.

 Bowd identifies the only indigenous Scottish Fascist movement as Protestant Action, with its radical and physical anti-Catholicism. This was a typical product of the Depression, like Fascist movements elsewhere in Europe, but was not nationalistic - just sectarian. Its leader, the Reverend Alexander Ratcliffe, became anti-Semitic, in line with certain turbid currents of European opinion in the Thirties, and distinguished himself by claiming that there was no proof that any Jew had been killed by the Nazi regime (in 1943), and then by publishing a pamphlet which claimed that the concentration camps (liberated and photographed) were fakes- Holocaust denial in July 1945. That’s going some!

I should add a proviso, before going on, about what I am going to say. This is about a group of four Scottish poets, and bizarre varieties of Scottish nationalism, affecting poetry. It is not saying that ‘these deviations are part of the DNA of Scottish nationalism”, because that is the opposite of what I think. Nationalist politics succeeded by throwing out the infantile forms. There is a link between these malnourished and largely fantastic theories and Scotland being a people without organs for so many years: more devolution led to better quality political discourse, just as the nationalist argument proposed.

Since Bowd finished his book there has been the publication of a volume of letters from MacDiarmid (to Sorley MacLean) which includes his 1940 judgement that it would be better if the Nazis won because they would then be easier to defeat than the English and French bourgeoisie, who were just as bad. (Much comment about this on the internet.)

Celtic twilight

When the new Scottish National Party (not yet called that) presented their first parliamentary candidate, in 1929, they chose Lewis Spence (1875-1955). He also wrote an early statement of the nationalist platform: Freedom for Scotland. The case for Scottish Self-Government (1926). He also wrote the poems in a revived sixteenth-century Scots which gave MacDiarmid the stimulus to start doing the same - ‘complete’ Lallans as opposed to a dialect with restricted vocabulary and range of social contexts.

 I have been reading Murray GH Pittock’s book on Jacobitism, The Invention of Scotland : The Stuart Myth and the Scottish Identity, 1638 to the Present. It is very interesting and clearly there is a lot I don’t know about this rather forgotten area of fringe politics. (Fringe after 1750, anyway.) Ruskin was a Jacobite. Wha? Pittock says “By 1905, neo-Jacobitism in England was largely a spent force[.]” Just as well, you may think. He shows that it was still an emotional focus for some people in Scotland in the 1940s. (Just to recall: James II was deposed in 1688 because he was a Catholic and many people thought he was plotting a Catholic coup in Britain which would have led to the disenfranchisement and persecution of Protestants. He was replaced by his sister, but succeeding monarchs were not the legitimate heirs and so there continued to be hold-out supporters of the Stuart dynasty. James is ‘Jacobus‘ in Latin so this party were called Jacobites. Harking back to 1688 in 1945 is truly bizarre.)

In the 1890s, there was a link between Scottish nationalism and occultism. In 1880 or 1890, the Stuart cause was almost a fantasy, but there was a club, ‘the Order of the White Rose’; one member was McGregor Mathers, the founder of the Temple of the Golden Dawn. There is a history to this. In the 1790s, French monarchists were in exile and had a lot of time on their hands. They also blamed the Enlightenment for their woes. They were ideologically productive and came up with a pattern of ideas of which the rejection of reason, a belief in supernatural intervention in history, a belief in conspiracies, the natural superiority of the aristocracy, and insistence on legitimism as a basis for choosing monarchs, were a few. This was the ‘Counter-Enlightenment’, and it was a dominant and attractive set of thoughts, certainly attractive to the adherents of failed dynasties in other parts of Europe. (After 1918, the Russian monarchist exiles came to be the dominant group in this cultural sector.) The Scottish Jacobite cause was one of these. (English Jacobites were numerically more important.) A certain number of disaffected Scots were drawn to it, and it was logical that they should also be anti-English - since the Hanoverian dynasty was so heavily in power in England. But it was also logical that they should pick up the mystical and occultist components of the Counter-Enlightenment package. At that time this had developed into the form of Symbolisme, which had a pendant in the form of the Celtic Twilight with its belief in fairies, second sight, and what have you. This was the context in which it was possible for a ‘Scottish nationalist’ meeting to attract people who were also Jacobites and interested in Theosophy, the Golden Dawn, and so forth.

Any movement that begins on the fringes loses most of its early characteristics if it evolves into something central and attractive to millions of people. The occultism has nothing to do with Scottish politics. That is why I was perturbed to see Lewis Spence as the National Party of Scotland’s first parliamentary candidate - because Spence was an occultist. In 1943 he published The Occult Causes of the Present War, which links it back to Atlantis. Recently I found a book by Joscelyn Godwin called Atlantis and the Measures of Time, which among much interesting information about deluded and psychic people says that Spence got into occultism after 1940. He was already 64 by that time and at that age people do start ‘hearing secret harmonies’. So it is doubtful that he was inclined to see ‘an occult pattern in history’ in 1926. All the same, he had published a book called Encyclopaedia of Occultism in 1920. If he was born in 1875 he was of an age to have encountered the ‘Celtic Twilight’ lot when they were still active.

I was discussing these strange facts with my mother after reading Pittock, and she remarked that in the east of Leicestershire, at Stamford, there is a house now open to the public which has a Stuart collection: when Henry, Cardinal of York, the last heir of the Stuart line, died in Rome this family from Stamford had acquired his household goods, and they are now on show down there on the river Avon. This is an example of an English family of Jacobite sympathies - but also of the loss of at least one dimension, so that what had been a government (until 1688) is reduced to a set of knick-knacks. Loyalist families were still pro-Stuart around 1770, but this was not on the scale of ‘oppositional politics’ but of sentiment, domestic ceremonies and keepsakes. This reduction is a kind of aestheticisation -and points ahead to a merely literary version of politics. It is a forerunner of the pictures on tins of shortbread which are so often mocked as kitsch versions of Scottish history. For foreigners, let me say that the tins might show highly-coloured images of Mary Queen of Scots, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Greyfriars Bobbie, and Hugh MacDiarmid. An old Welsh periodical quotes someone turning up in court in Pembrokeshire in 1714 for saying “he was sent as Messenger from his master James the Third, King of England, and of Scotland the Eighth [.]”

 Joy Hancox’s 1992 book The Byrom Collection describes a hidden archive of diagrams and documents once belonging to John Byrom, who lived in Manchester, and created in the early 18th century. They were recovered in the late twentieth century. The documents have to do with a range of occultist practices - Kabbalism, Rosicrucianism, the whole set. Byrom was also a Jacobite. There is a Byrom Street just off Deansgate. There were good reasons for keeping Jacobite sympathies silent, as indeed magical and heretical practices. It is hard to measure how much of this secret activity was going on. All the same it may be that the link between occultism and ‘loyalty to deposed dynasties’ existed well before 1789. This is a ‘prehistory’ of the Far Right, generations before the term ‘right wing’ was coined. The addicts of ‘conspiracy theory’ began as members of conspiracies - planning the botched uprisings of 1712, 1715, and 1745. After that, they pioneered exile, the Underground, and cryptic utterance.

I am told that the Anglo-Catholic 'Society of Charles King and Martyr' (founded 1894) are technically Jacobites, although my informant suggests that they are not actively planning military action to further their good cause.

So much of this stuff is literally ‘occult’, hidden, and it is easy to overrate it because it is so hard to find and so neglected. The similarity with the hippy Underground and the whole cultural tide of 1968 and years thereafter is obvious. Sinclair discusses Hancox’s book when he visits Manchester in Ghost Milk. John Michell wrote The View Over Atlantis and was at the outset one of a long line of people who believe that Atlantean technology was wonderful and had dominated the early history of Europe. The main Atlantean writer in Britain was indeed Lewis Spence. This rubbish had been around for at least a century but Michell got it into paperback and was perhaps the key hippy in England. He had certainly absorbed Spence. For about three years ‘the marginal became central’. Sinclair has chronicled apparently the whole range of fringe theories arising after 1968 - but completeness is hardly possible.

Occultism is structurally given for reactionary monarchists since 1792, hence for Jacobites. If you accept that knowledge of human affairs is to to be gathered from facts, statistics, newspapers, etc., you have given in to the Enlightenment and your resistance to Reason is fatally weakened. But monarchy and aristocracy can't really co-exist with Reason. This leaves a vacuum of interpretation in which supernatural influences flourish and you rely on hermits, virgins, ascetics, psychics, etc. to reveal the plan of contemporary events. Spence wrote Occult Origins of the Present War, an unconventional way of explaining the Second World War - but he wasn’t the only occultist in Europe in 1943.

‘Failure theories’ of Scottish History

Spence (as quoted by Pittock) said that there were two currents of thinking among ‘disloyal’ Scots: one which rejected the Reformation, so that everything had been wrong since John Knox; and one which rejected the Hanoverians, so that while the Jacobite risings were OK everything which had happened since the failure of the last one in 1746 had gone wrong. We have to add another theory: the Scottish language has been losing its sociological grip and range of uses in Scotland since the later sixteenth century and this is wrong too. The idea of reversing this and writing poetry in a Scots which covers the full range of intellectual possibilities of contemporary culture was what animated MacDiarmid. It definitely resembles the first two theories. It incorporates the ideas of reliving the bad past in a good way and of four centuries of cultural failure.
If you think that Scotland has since the 1540s been living in a Bad Time which is effectively a Non-Time, you may move on to literary creation of a Non-Time which is also a Good Time. James MacPherson may have pioneered this.

Obviously Mackay Brown and Finn MacColla were two writers who believed that Scottish history had gone wrong with John Knox, but as Pittock points out Edwin Muir was someone who had Jacobite sympathies - although he did not have any expectation that this wrong step would be reversed. Muir underwent a Jungian analysis in 1919. This is an odd moment. Muir was so rational in many ways - but he had these contacts with deeply irrational and quasi-occultist areas. Jung was an occultist, you can’t get away from that. Muir published his long poem ‘Variations on a Time Theme’ in 1934, a strange but brilliant work which explains time in a heraldic way, as stylised characters appear and re-appear throughout history. There is some kind of relationship between the transformed and frozen Time of ‘Variations on a Time Theme’ and the ‘misdirected and lost time’ of anti-Reformation or anti-Hanoverian theories of history. The damaged time is recouped in aesthetic form. The poems disappear into a 'good time' which is too small to live in but for that reason can be stylised and heightened.

Muir wrote of the end of an organic community and its folk creativity in his 1940 book, The Story and the Fable, located in the gap between the Orkney of his childhood and the Glasgow where he moved at about fourteen. For him Scotland had fallen out of the timeless and cyclic into changing Time, which is also meaningless. He does not see any way of getting back. George Mackay Brown also came from Orkney and was Muir’s pupil in the 1950s. His ideas of time are based on Muir, they live in the same special theory. To this he adds a steeping in folk modes - he has disappeared into folk literature. To recycle what I have said elsewhere, he uses forms as stylised as if they were in a textile- he writes in a textile mode. The Norwegian embroideries illustrated in a book of Norwegian art treasures (from an exhibition) I have are a reference point for this comparison. The exhibition catalogue remarks “Together with the simple linear and flat-patterned treatment of pictorial elements in the tapestry, their evenly toned and sharply defined panes serve to enhance the decorative effect.” He solved his stylistic problems by an advance into flat images. As part of this reduction to a decorative schema with rules sharply detached from reality, we have to bear in mind that the designs were simplifications of rather grander designs from centres like Flanders and Byzantium – the quality of picking up driftwood, metaphorically, which grew in a forest far away, is significant for Brown. His language has an invisible loom which makes it come out like something from the fifteenth century –he hides inside a folk idiom but at no point reproduces a real folk form, such as a Scots ballad or a Norse tale. Like Spence, he seems to be speaking from another century. He has recovered Time by abandoning the Present. Brown’s book-length poem Fishermen With Ploughs is an astonishingly rich reworking of basically wrong theories about the course of history. Brown’s last volume has a poem dealing with his parents' wedding, which included Gaelic-speaking relatives of his mother:

The bridegroom, he was drowning
In a sea of lovely Gaelic;
And woke, his mouth cold
With dew of the wild white rose

(Collected p.444)
The white rose was a Jacobite emblem. This was about 1910. If the Stuart dynasty fell in 1688, would Highlanders still have been emotionally Jacobite in 1910? Brown is not really interested in chronology. It is a beautiful stanza though. The story about being whirled away in a dance and waking up cold is actually one about being carried away by the fairies: the identification of Celticity with the supernatural is lurking there, beneath the threshhold. I was not aware of the late poems before seeing the Collected: Brown died in 1996 but the volume published in 2001 seems to be his best. Perhaps I had re-read the earlier ones so often that their power wore out. This late material has his clearest references to Muir, in the poem about him and in 'Uranium', where Brown refers to 'the fable' and 'the story' (Muir's autobiography was called The Story and the Fable) in a poem warning against mining uranium in Orkney. Here he moves the fatal exit from the fable to the atomic age – which is not where it was placed before. This flexibility shows him thinking, which is not what he normally does and is admirable. The poem recapitulates human history but this time does not wheel on either the Reformation or the fall of the Stuarts or industrialisation – again, the tedious schemas which we expect from Brown fail to show up.

The poem about Muir is unusually explicit about a Time theory:

The labyrinth : an old blind man in the centre of it with a crystal key.
The labyrinth : towers, vennels, cellars.
The labyrinth : wilderness of dark doors, with one bright lintel here and there.
Bright lock by bright lock he turns the crystal key.
At every door, a rag of time falls from him.
Through ghetto, shambles, graveyard he goes.
The brightness spills out, spills out in front of him.
He brings the poem to the hidden bestiary.
The labyrinth. The labyrinth.
He stands, a young man, at a threshold of unbearable brightness.
(from 'Edwin Muir', p. 438)
The style is near Muir (who wrote a book of poems called The Labyrinth), it could be Muir rather than Mackay Brown. The sequence whereby an old man becomes a young one is part of an unusual theory of time. Perhaps unconsciously, this poem also tells the tale of Brown replacing Muir as the poet of archetypes – and orkneytypes. The repetition in this passage is related to the refusal of a syntactic organisation that is not available to folklore. It is like a tapestry preferring flatness to spatial depth.

The story is that Brown only visited England once – he lived in a world whose centre was Orkney. England was meaningless to him. Yet his ideas have no connection with politics. Theoretically he could campaign for the abolition of Protestantism in Scotland– the reversal of the Reformation. But this is an impossible goal – his literary pattern has very little contact with reality.

Conclusion
All of this has about as much to do with the SNP of the past 50 years as I do with William the Conqueror. Bowd’s book is fascinating, for me anyway, but it is a chronicle of people marginal to Scottish political life rather than a ‘hidden current’ even. MacDiarmid was no more influential on the growth of a nationalist current in Scotland than Jacobite-tinged occultism. The SNP has completely given up on Scots language revivalism - I have no idea of the history of this. There are people chewing away at ‘the supremacy of English’, writing in Lallans, studying it – but the SNP is not interested. My feeling about these poets is embarrassment – other countries had politics and governments, Scotland had these halfway-visionaries with their aesthetic systems and their total detachment from ordinary people. Now that Scotland has a government it does not need these deviant theories of Time based on the nothingness, vacuity, failure of the Present. The Present is now where we live.




More vital stuff on Scottish poetry at: http://www.pinko.org/30.html  

Michael Hamburger

Michael Hamburger


When I was in Germany in 2011 someone asked me about Michael Hamburger, who died in 2007. I had a firm idea that his poetry wasn’t very good  but was aware I hadn’t read very much of his work. Rosvita was convinced he was a really important modern English poet, and I was embarrassed about it. This followed W.G. Sebald’s book which had a long account of a visit to Hamburger in East Suffolk, and a German TV programme which followed  Sebald. In 2014 I took a few minutes off from a poetry weekend at Birkbeck to go shopping and found a copy of Hamburger’s 1973 selected poems. Conclusion? I still don’t think it’s very good.
Hamburger was born into a Jewish family in Berlin in 1924 and was able to escape to England in 1933, with his immediate family. The fate of the Jewish community in Germany made ’survivors’ guilt’ likely to feature in his self-awareness. His grasp of German was that of a native but his grasp of English language and culture was also that of a native. I don’t know whether he could write poems in German, but it is obvious that he had all the English you need and that the style of his poems is not related to having limited English.
We can clear the ground by saying what his poems achieve. They present a complete picture in which the existential state of the poet writing them embodies their whole relationship with geography, other  humans, and feelings, and in which every detail of the poems reflects this fundamental condition. All parts of the poetry sustain the other parts, and as we read more of it we travel deep into this fundamental condition. It is a poetry which explains modern history by going steadily into specifically modern states of mind. The theme is in fact of not feeling at home anywhere, of leaving a place and not arriving - emotionally - in a new place. This condition is a clearance of attachments which may open the way to new lands, but in itself it is depressing - we feel it as loss. The poems move from scene to scene but the scenes have no point unless to say that this is not where you can live and be.
The clearance might be of national socialist feelings but as I read it I relate it more to the emptying of imperialist fantasies and accepting a Britain with no Empire. The poems have that elevation which allows them to symbolise different things.
‘In a Cold Season’, from a 1969 volume, evokes a concentration camp bureaucrat (Eichmann) and the murder of his grandmother. It is a remarkable poem in its rigorously external technique and its patience in evoking the deskbound murderer who abolished people without even hating them. It is hard to take. That demonstrates its adequacy.
His poetry is artistic, all the parts of a poem are integrated to a given purpose; he was a reflexive writer - capable of absorbing the ambient literary ideas and creating sophisticated poetry out of a dialogue with the contemporary. The conventional view would be that a period of commitment of literary figures (1929-50?) was followed by an existentialist period where they explored ‘existential positions’ which were often depressing in colouration, and that this was followed (after 1960 or 1965) by a phase of hedonism - when books are designed to give pleasure and are about pleasure in life, with a radically reduced level of significance, in the sense of offering generalisations about the human condition. ‘Ownerless Earth’ belongs to the postulated existential period. It makes us long for hedonistic poetry, which appeals to the artistic sense and creates new areas of sensibility. In the period 1939-60 (roughly) Europe went through poverty caused by war, where not through death and the fear of death caused by war. It was not a good time to be alive. It may well be that poetry had to reflect that. Hamburger’s poetry is steeped in experience and recovers a time of low consumption - ’forced saving’ during post-war reconstruction. It has the quality of authenticity to a high degree. It is a story that actually happened.
Yvan Goll wrote, even in the 1930s, a sequence called ‘Jean sans-terre’, John Lackland, which was about the situation of someone whose home had been taken over by dictatorship. Goll wrote it in French but had earlier written poems in German. The concept is the same as for Hamburger’s poetry. Again, the problem is that the poems in ‘Jean sans-terre’ don’t go anywhere, the basic situation does not evolve. The idea is to teach us ‘this is how it is to be displaced’. I am glad that Hamburger did not write from the emotional situation of an eight year old, before he lost his family. Important as that might be, an act of memory of what deserved to be remembered, he renounced it and this climbing out of nostalgia and regression is part of his artistic message: you don’t own the past, along with not owning the earth. In view of Goll’s book (which I don’t think anyone reads any more), we have to ask about the ultimate originality of ‘Ownerless Earth’. There is no comparable book in English poetry.
‘Jean sans terre’ is about rootlessness - but it is not open in the sense that each new poem is full of new possibilities. To present authenticity, it is very predictable - every poem is about the same inescapable situation. The idea of ‘travelling’ would also be compatible with radical inventiveness, not clinging to a preset poem design but discovering the new form as you went along.
The centrepiece of the Selected is ‘Travelling’, fourteen pages about not belonging anywhere.


Slowly, detained by love,
He went, but never
Slowly enough for Earth
In her long slow dream
That has not finished yet
With the gestation of man,
The breaker of her dream,
And has not finished
Digesting the teeth and bone
Of her dinosaurs.
Making and breaking words,
For slowness,
He opened gaps, for a pulse
Less awake, less impatient,
Than his, who longed
To be dreamed again,
Out of pulverised rock, out of humus,
Bones, anthropoid, saurian,
And the plumage of orioles [.]

It is a flawless piece of writing. But the ruthlessness makes us unhappy. The theme of dinosaurs, and so the origin of the human species, is a typically ‘Apocalyptic’ motif, raising the visible scene to a level of significance which makes immediate and personal experiences seem insignificant. The theme is ‘anthropological’, theology at one remove. Abstraction and depression are akin: we can see back to the birth of the species only because everything in between has been erased, annihilated, discarded in the restless anti-desire of depression. The dinosaurs inescapably make us think of annihilation, of falling into aeons of non-existence. He evokes the places very vividly before leaving them; the abundance of details, the brilliance of editing, frame a message of emptiness.


To be grass, to be cud for cows. Not to know
The taste of meat or the taste of sugar,
To rise again from mud and be green,
Eat mud, eat carrion, but not with a human mouth.

(from ‘Homo Sum: Humani nihil etc.’)
The theme of the poem is that ‘nothing human is alien to me’ but that humans are vile - as exemplified by the Central American dictator Trujillo. Hamburger writes himself off with the whole species he belongs to; he wishes to exit into a lower plane of creation, to ‘be cud for cows’. This is an extraordinary poem: the intensity of its apprehension of political brutality could hardly be excelled. It is, again the longing ‘to be dreamed again’. It is a pessimistic poem but opens onto pantheism in the manner of John Cowper Powys. To become mud is one step higher than becoming rock.


The big thing in the TV programme was Hamburger’s orchard of apple trees, rare breeds which the commercial producers would consign to dying out, and a very aged man climbing up trees to prune them. If this is the big story and has to do with long time spans and attachment to a particular spot of earth, then it has nothing to do with his poems. In fact it contradicts what they say and even shows graphically why his tales of dispossession don‘t appeal and aren‘t great literature. Trees don’t go anywhere, they just keep growing all the time. So possibly his poems from 1973 to 2007 use new themes and are better poems. I count four appearances of the word ‘slow’ in the section I quoted (dated 1969-72): perhaps this is Hamburger moving towards the worship of trees, as things that don’t move.


Sebald admired Hamburger because S was involved in teaching German literature in English and Hamburger was the grand old man of this endeavour. Again, this was because of 30 years of accumulating knowledge, based on love and dedication. Stability. Purpose. Attachment. This is so different from the themes of restlessness and detachment which fill his own poems.


Ownerless earth. I don’t own any part of this earth. So, Germany does not belong to me. Inexplicitly, he is also saying that Israel does not belong to him. I can’t shed any light on this, but my guess is that he was very thoroughly a Western European and that the pioneer life of Israel in the 1940s was just not for him. He was not your typical first-generation Israeli. Hermlin went to Palestine in 1936 and became an apprentice to a book-dealer and antiques dealer named Zadek. OK, not everyone was out there digging irrigation ditches. I can see that Germans love the idea of someone who was, clearly, German, who represents age and stability, but who had no trace of a pro-Nazi or even a pro-communist past. He never wrote reportages on the Wehrmacht boys doing their bit, or shared a glass of wine with Ulbricht at a literary soiree. I suspect his poems will be much read in German translation - reversing the process of 1933, which fundamentally everyone wants to reverse.

I didn’t like ‘Ownerless Earth’ very much. My problem is that this is just a selected so there could in fact be other poems which would completely change the picture.  My memory of the poems I read before is that they were noticeably reminiscent of other poems. I think it was ‘The Notebook of a European Tramp’ (1945-9) that I read. So ’Travelling’ was a repeat, twenty years later, of themes of ’Notebook’. I felt this was the silhouette of a great translator, that hypersensitivity to powerful literary creations made them capable of great feats excluding original creativity. He could recreate the ambience of Eliot poems but it was too much an imitation. The selected poems leave quite a different impression. He wrote a lot of poetry but some share of it sounds like Hamburger and not like Rilke, Spender, Eliot, or Huchel.

There is a story that Hamburger published a pamphlet of poems, when he was barely out of his teens, which he hated later. The proofs didn’t reach him and he didn’t have the chance to fix the problems - even his name was misspelt. I didn’t read his books because he does not show up well in anthologies - I always work from anthologies but they have built-in limits. He was young in the 1950s, published three books then; the business selected other poets of that generation and then moved on to market a new wave of young poets


There is a very useful interview at book length (60 pages), with Hamburger, by Peter Dale (published 1998).