Reliable Essays (15 page)
Authors: Clive James
Ripping, what? (The ambiguity in the third line, incidentally, is less a grammatical error than a mark of class. Osbert Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence whose past participle is so firmly attached to the wrong subject that there is no prising it loose. This habit has something to do, I suspect, with a confusion between the English past participle and the Latin ablative absolute.) But some of the young diplomats were not content to shelter behind Britannia’s skirts. Greatly daring, they took what opportunities they could to mingle with the locals – to penetrate, as it were, the membranes of inscrutable reserve:
Climbing with shoeless feet the polished stairs,
Gay were the evenings in that house I’d known.
The mats are swept, the cushions that are chairs
Surround the table like a lacquer throne.
The geisha have been booked by telephone,
The whisky brought, the raw fish on the ice,
The green tea boiled, the saké in its stone
Warmed to a turn, and seaweed, root and spice
Await their last repose, the tub of nutcrisp rice.
The scene is set, and soon a wall will slide,
And in will run, professional as hell,
Our geisha team, brisk as a soccer side,
We’ll ask the ones we like, if all goes well,
To luncheon at a suitable hotel . . .
Everything in the diplomatic colony is ordered, decorous and unreal. The unreality becomes most apparent during periods of leave in Shanghai, where a phoney aristocrat rules society:
‘Le tennis, ce jeu tellement middle-class,’
Drawls the duchesse, whose European start,
Whose Deauville background manages to pass
For all that’s feudal in this distant part.
The locals thought she couldn’t be more smart,
And prized admission to her little fêtes,
And searched through Gotha with a beating heart,
But vainly, for the names of her estates,
And for the strange device emblazoned on her plates.
But only in the enforced idleness of internment is there time to see all this in perspective. Long months of contemplation yield no grand might-have-beens or if-onlys. Nor, on the other hand, do they bring nihilistic resignation. Britain’s imperial role is not repudiated. Neither is its inevitable passing particularly regretted. Instead, there is redemption in the moment:
Time passed. A tramcar screaming in the dark
Of total blackout down the Kudan hill
Strikes, out of wire, spark on cascading spark,
Lights from below the cherry swags that spill,
In all the thickness of the rich April,
Their pink festoons of flower above the street,
Creamy as paint new-slapped. I looked my fill,
Amazed to find our world was so complete.
Such moments, in the nick, are strange and sharply sweet.
A stanza MacNeice would have been proud to have written. Even in these few examples you can see how Johnston is beginning to realize the lexical freedom that strict forms offer. Up to the point where restriction cramps style, the more demanding the stanza, the greater the range of tone it can contain. Slang phrases like ‘professional as hell’ and ‘in the nick’ sound all the more colloquial for being pieced into a tight scheme.
The second long poem in the book, ‘Elegy’, is written in memory of Johnston’s brother Duncan, ‘killed leading a Royal Marine Commando raid on the Burma Coast, on the night of February 22nd 1945’. This, too, ranks high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F. T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston’s best things.
It loses nothing by its air of doomed gentility. The narrator could be Guy Crouchback talking: there was a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets for grief in several different formal schemes, including blank verse. The stiff upper lip relaxes, leaving eloquence unchastened. There is no gush, but there is too much vague suggestion towards feeling, made all the more unsatisfactory by your sense that the feeling aimed at is real, harsh, and unblunted even by time. A first-hand experience has aroused a second-hand artistic response. The air is of an Owenesque regret, of the dark barge passing unto Avalon in agony, of a drawing-down of blinds. The few details given of the lost, shared childhood leave you wanting more, but the author is caught between his forte and an ambition foreign to it: he is a poet of controlled emotion who can give way to anguish only at the cost of sapping his own energy:
Only through the hard
Shaft-face of self-esteem parsimonious tears
Are oozing, sour distillate from the core
Of iron shame, the shame of private failure
Shown up by the completeness of the dead.
I wrote in the fierce hope of bursting loose
From this regime, cracking its discipline . . .
I wrote, but my intense assertion found
No substance and no echo, and all I did
Was raise an empty monument to grief.
‘Elegy’ is something better than an empty monument, but it is tentative beside its predecessor ‘Towards Mozambique’, and scarcely begins to suggest the abundant assurance of its successor, the third long poem in the book, ‘In Praise of Gusto’. This contains some of Johnston’s best work and instantly takes its place as one of the most variously impressive long poems since Auden and MacNeice were at their peak. It is not as long as either ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ or
Autumn Journal
but it has much of their verve and genial bravura. It embodies the quality to which it is dedicated.
‘In Praise of Gusto’ returns to some of the same subject-matter dealt with in earlier works, but this time it is all brought fully within the purview of what can now be seen to be his natural tone, a tone which taps its power from the vivacity of experience. His dead brother is again mentioned. This time all the emphasis is on the life they enjoyed together when young. Nevertheless the effect of loss is more striking than it is in ‘Elegy’, where death is the direct subject. One concludes, aided by hindsight, that Johnston loses nothing, and gains everything, by giving his high spirits free rein. It might have taken him a long time completely to realize the best way of being at ease with his gift, but with consciously formal artists that is often the case. The last thing they learn to do is relax.
The poem is written in two different measures, the
Onegin
stanza and the stanza which Johnston insists on referring to as
Childe Harold
, although really Spenser has the prior title. Johnston’s mastery of the latter form was already proven. But by this time he could read fluent Russian and had obviously become fascinated with the breakneck measure in which
Eugene Onegin
unfolds its story. The
Onegin
stanzas of ‘In Praise of Gusto’ give every indication that their author will one day be Pushkin’s ideal translator. As well as that, they serve the author’s present purpose. The
Onegin
stanza is a born entertainer. As Johnston points out in his Author’s Note, ‘it has an inner momentum, a sort of infectious vitality of its own’. It packs itself tight and then springs loose like a self-loading jack-in-the-box. Comic timing is crucial to it:
Beauties who manage the conjunction
Of glamour and fireside repose
Pack what I call without compunction
The deadliest of knockout blows.
Japan bewitched me. Half forgotten
Were home and faith. The really rotten
Part of it all, which, when it came
Back later, made me sweat with shame,
Was that our worlds were fast dividing
And that my fondness must ignore
The headlong chute direct to war
Down which Japan was quickly gliding
With all its ravishingly queer
Compound of sensual and austere.
The rapacious hostesses of pre-war Shanghai and wartime Alexandria now find their perfectly appropriate rhythmic setting. One of the many things that attracted Johnston to his Russian exemplar must have been the way Pushkin gives full value to the glamour of imperial court life without romanticizing its meretriciousness. Nobody who admires both will ever tire of counting the ways in which Pushkin and Mozart are like each other. Each could see all the world as it was yet neither could reshape it in any way except by making masterpieces. Even their own disasters lifted their hearts. (Pushkin said that trials and tribulations were included in his family budget.) Everything that happened belonged. Johnston has something of the same defiant exuberance:
How Egypt’s hostesses detested
The victories in our campaign:
‘Assez de progrès,’ they protested,
‘Vous étiez bien à Alamein’;
And then they’d stress in full italics
The point of being close to Alex,
The races and the gay weekends
Of bathing parties with one’s friends.
They saw no merit in advancing
Far from the nightclub and the beach
Out beyond invitation’s reach
To worlds remote from cards and dancing
With absolutely not a face
They’d ever seen in the whole place.
But the
Onegin
stanza enforces epigrammatic terseness. As a countervailing force, Johnston employs the Spenserian stanza to luxuriate in his visual memories. Without sinning against cogency, they amply exploit this traditionally expansive form’s magically self-renewing supply of pentameter – a copiousness of rhetorical space which is symbolized, as well as sealed, by the long sweep of the alexandrine at the end:
Mersa Matruh. A fathom down, the sun
Lights on the faintest ripple of the sand
And, underseas, decyphers one by one
The cursive words imprinted on the strand
In the Mediterranean’s fluent hand;
For eastern waters have the graceful trick,
By way of compliment from sea to land,
Of signing their imprint, with curl and flick
Of the vernacular, in floweriest Arabic.
An extended metaphysical conceit has been matched up to a rigorous physical form: two kinds of intellectual strictness, yet the effect is of a single, uncalculated sensory celebration.
The essence of classical composition is that no department of it gets out of hand. After aberrations in artistic history the classic principle reasserts itself as a balancing of forces. In ‘In Praise of Gusto’ Johnston uses his Spenserian stanzas to specify his remembered visions, but he uses them also to unfold an argument. The same contrast and balance of perception and rhetoric was demonstrated by Shelley – a romantic with irrepressible classic tendencies – when he used the same stanza in ‘Adonais’. Shelley obtains some of his most gravid poetic effects by deploying what sounds like, at first hearing, a prose argument. The same applies,
mutatis mutandis
, to Johnston, when he remembers what the Western Desert looked like after the battles:
Such scenes have potency, a strange effect,
Contagion with an undefined disease.
They throw a chill on all whom they infect,
Touch them with sadness, set them ill at ease.
The sense that friends now dead, or overseas,
Fought here and suffered, hoped here and despaired,
Transports us outside time and its degrees.
Here is a new antique, already paired
With the most classic sites that scholar’s trowel has bared.
The poem begins in the
Onegin
stanza, takes a long excursion in the Spenserian, and returns to the
Onegin
. Though tipping its plumed hat to a younger version of the author – a satirical youth who ‘shot down other people’s fun’ – it conveys a whole-hearted acceptance of the good life, which apparently includes plenty of foie gras, champagne and personally slain partridges. If Dr Leavis were still with us it would be hard to imagine him appreciating any of this, especially when he noted the book’s dedication to Sacheverell Sitwell, familiarly addressed as Sachie. Yet the spine of the poem’s argument is that prepared pleasures, though it is churlish to eschew them, are not what inspires gusto, which is
Immediately sustained delight,
Short-lived, unhoped for, yet conclusive,
A sovereign power in its own right.
It lends itself to recognition
More aptly than to definition . . .
The reason it can’t easily be defined is that it is something more all-pervading even than a view of life. It is a way of being alive. Those gifted with it, if they have artistic gifts as well, can tell the rest of us what it is like. Reviewing his own life in search of its traces, Johnston now becomes one of those who have done so. The poem ends in a clear-eyed exultation.
The fourth long poem in the book is a translation of ‘Onegin’s Journey’ which was originally designed to go between the present chapters seven and eight of
Eugene Onegin
. Pushkin eventually decided to leave it out, but it remains a logical subject for the translator of
Eugene Onegin
to tackle. He makes the accomplished job of it that you would expect, revelling in the inspiration engendered by the physical obstacles of the tetrameter and the rhyme that continually looms too soon. They help contain his prolific knack – so appropriate in a translator of Pushkin – for sonic effects.
Throughout his work Johnston is to be found exploiting prosodic conventions (such as eliding ‘the’ into the initial vowel of the next word) for all they are worth. Sometimes he overcooks it, so that you have to read a line twice to pick out the rhythm. Sometimes the conversational stress and the metrical stress separate to the point where the reader must strain to put them back in touch with each other. Usually, though, Johnston maintains the old rules only in order to increase the number of ways he can speak freely. All those ways are on view in his rendition of ‘Onegin’s Journey’. But anyone wanting to acquaint himself with Pushkin would be advised to turn in the first instance to the
Eugene Onegin
translation itself, which Penguin has now brought out.