Reliable Essays (19 page)

Postscript

Sadly, the first thing I feel bound to say about this essay on Montale is that I still believe he was a great artist. It shouldn’t need saying. But all too soon after his death his copybook was retroactively blotted in a big way. It emerged that a good few, and perhaps most, of his reviews of books in the English language had been written by someone else. Montale had made a practice of handing the book to a subaltern, specifying the word length, publishing the results under his own name, and splitting the payment. If it had been discovered that Vermeer had known van Meegeren personally, and actually supplied him with paint, the scandal could not have been more rancid. It could be said in Montale’s defence that in Italy there has long been a tradition by which prominent painters whistle in the apprentices of their
bottega
to help fill the less challenging stretches of a canvas. It could also be said that in Italy there is a long tradition of outright corruption in all walks of life. At the time when Montale was posthumously rumbled, about half of Italy’s politicians were facing a stretch in gaol, and nobody was surprised except them, because when
everyone
is on the take the moral outrage is confined to those who get pinched. But Montale should have been above all that.

Most of the time he was. Take away the stuff he farmed out and there is still a large amount of steady, responsible, thoughtful and generous reviewing – criticism in its most nourishing form. Take all
that
away, and there is still the poetry, which remains near the apex of European achievement in modern times. It should subtract nothing from a quiet triumph to find out that its author was a bit more complicated than we thought. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that I was pleased when the man I revered as the epitome of selfless literary endeavour turned out to share a few characteristics with the man who fixed the World Series. But I wasn’t displeased either; just even more fascinated. The way to avoid that kind of fascination is to concern yourself entirely with art and learn nothing about artists: an impossible ideal and probably a hollow one. There are still a few major compositions by Stravinsky that I haven’t sat down to listen to properly. I could have devoted some of the time to them that I spent reading the first volume of Stephen Walsh’s biography. It reveals Stravinsky to have been a nasty piece of work in several respects. But I don’t, on that account, love the music I already know any the less, and might even feel inspired to search through the rest of it with reinvigorated concentration, having found out that the demigod really was a human being all along. There was something perfect about Montale, and now there isn’t, but somehow the bones of the cuttlefish are picked cleaner than ever, now that the soul which chose them for an emblem of purity turns out to have dealt the occasional card from the bottom of the deck.

2001

Door into the Dark
by Seamus Heaney, Faber

Of all the newer tight-lipped poets Mr Heaney is the hardest case, and the tight-lipped critics whose praise is not usually easy to get have been sending quite a lot of approbation his way. His technique is hard-edged: a punchy line travels about two inches. The subject matter is loud with the slap of the spade and sour with the stink of turned earth. Close to the vest, close to the bone and close to the soil. We have learnt already not to look to him for the expansive gesture: there are bitter essences to compensate for the lack of that.
Door into the Dark
confirms him in his course, its very title telling you in which direction that course lies. I will show you fear in a tinful of bait. It should be said at the outset that poetry as good as Mr Heaney’s best is hard to come by. But it is all pretty desperate stuff, and in those poems where we don’t feel the brooding vision to be justified by the customary dense beauty of his technique we are probably in the right to come down hard and send our criticism as close as we can to the man within. The man within is at least in some degree a chooser. If he chose to be slick, to let his finely worked clinching stanzas fall pat, there would be a new kind of damaging poetry on the way – squat, ugly and unstoppable.

But first let us demonstrate the quality of the poetic intelligence with which we have to deal. This is the first stanza of his two-stanza poem ‘Dream’: it should be quickly apparent that his virtuoso kinetic gift can find interior equivalents in language for almost any movement in the exterior world, so that the mere act of sub-vocalizing the poem brings one out in a sweat.

All the correct chunks and squeaks are caught without being said. But where does it get us? It gets us to the second stanza.

He had a dream, you see, and his skill brings you close to believing it – but not quite. This deadfall finish is really a conventional echo of the professional toughies, ‘realistic’ about violence, who have been giving us the jitters for some time. Most of the other symptoms in the syndrome are manifest somewhere or other in the book. Human characteristics tend to be referred back to animals and objects. As with Ted Hughes, it takes a visit to the zoo, the game reserve, or an imaginary dive below the sod before the idea of
personality
gets any showing at all. The people themselves are mostly clichés disguised in heroic trappings. A stable vacated by a horse (‘Gone’) offers more character than the smithy still occupied by the smith (‘The Forge’). This latter poem, surely fated to be an anthology piece for the generations to come, can usefully be quoted in full:

The numbered questions in the back of the school anthology are obvious. What is the attitude of the smith to modern civilization? Is it the same as the poet’s attitude? And (for advanced students) would you consider the Leavisite views on the organic relationship of work to life relevant? But it should also be obvious that the interest of the poem drops considerably when the human being replaces the object at stage centre. Those hairs in his nose don’t do much to establish him, except as a character actor sent down at an hour’s notice from Central Casting. If he were more real, his attitudes towards mechanized culture might not fall so pat. Get through that doorway in the dark and you might find him beating out hubcaps or balancing the wire wheels on a DB6 – both jobs which can be done with as much love as bending your millionth horseshoe. There is no conflict here: there is just a received opinion expressed in hints and cleverly overblown in unexpected places – that altar, and the unicorn’s horn, which ought to be a rhino’s only that’s too easy. On the page the refined poem has its attractive spareness: it’s the implication, the area of suggestion, that worries the reader through the ordinariness of its assumptions about culture. Self-employed artisans are usually tough enough to see reality straight: given the chance, the leather-aproned subject might well remind Mr Heaney that there ain’t no pity in the city.

Things live; animals almost live; humans live scarcely at all. The inverse progression holds disturbingly true in well-known efforts like the poem about the frozen pump, ‘Rite of Spring’.

It’s a roundabout way for passion to get into print. The obverse poems to this are ‘Mother’, in which the lady ends up wanting to be like the pump, and ‘The Wife’s Tale’, a brilliantly tactile poem in which you touch everything – cloth, stubble, grass, bread, seed and china cups – except flesh.

Mr Heaney’s ‘A Lough Neagh Sequence’ forms an important section of the book and could well be pointed to if one were asked to isolate a thematic area absolutely his.

Evocation could go no further: the eels (‘hatched fears’) are practically in your lap. Similarly in poems like ‘Bann Clay’ and ‘Bogland’ his grating line, shudderingly switched back and forth like teeth ground in a nightmare, finds endless technical equivalents for the subject described: he really is astonishingly capable. And in ‘Bogland’ there is an indication that he can do something even more difficult – state the open statement, make the gesture that enlivens life.

The spirits lift to the flash of wit. There ought to be more of it. Nobody in his right mind would deny that Mr Heaney’s is one of the outstanding talents on the scene, or want that talent to settle in its ways too early.

TLS
, 1969

Postscript (i)

One of my earliest notorieties was obtained by mentioning Seamus Heaney in the same breath as Yeats. I was right not to regret it, because sooner rather than later everyone was doing it. More commendably, this piece paid Heaney the compliment of careful writing on the reviewer’s part. By using ‘symptom’ and ‘syndrome’ in the same sentence to show that they did not mean the same thing (strictly, a syndrome is a group of symptoms) I pioneered a technique which I have been using ever since in the attempt to do my share of saving useful distinctions threatened with decay through misuse. As a TV critic, writing every week, I would frequently form a sentence around such paired words as ‘disinterested’ and ‘uninterested’, or ‘mitigate’ and ‘militate’, in order to prove that the precision conferred by using them correctly was worth preserving. If the campaign had succeeded I could be more modest about it. It failed completely. As Kingsley Amis has pointed out, there is an iron law operating which dictates that anyone working in the media who makes such errors somehow never gets to read articles deploring them.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1994

Postscript (ii)

To hitch a ride on the coat-tails of a comet is a bad ambition, but can be gratifying if it happens accidentally. I was lucky enough to be the first critic into print with the nerve, or the naivety, to suggest that Heaney might have a Yeatsian gift. For some time afterwards the comparison was cited by my detractors as clear evidence of hysteria. Later on it was called a boldly premature tip that turned out to be right, and still later everyone forgot that I had ever said it. But it was fun while it lasted. With another flight of fancy I was less lucky. In my mock epic poem
Peregrine Prykke’s Pilgrimage
I fielded a Guinness-voiced character called Seamus Feamus. The nickname caught on, but I never got the credit for it. In profiles about Heaney, its coinage (but with the second name spelt ‘famous’, which loses half the point, one would have thought) is usually ascribed to his old literary chums in Ireland. This might very well have been so: it was an idea begging to be had, so anything less than multiple authorship would have been surprising. Fortunately it is not possible to copyright a coinage, or else professional jealousy would spawn a million lawsuits. If you invent a word or a phrase, you should be ready to see other people lift it without acknowledgement; why else did you invent it, except to get it into the language? In the best critics of any medium there is always a poetic urge, and in the critic of poetry it can lead to a professional deformation. Almost always he is, or has been, a poet himself, and when faced with a brilliant new arrival he needs to guard himself against his own envy. The best way is to admit it. From his first book, it was obvious that Heaney commanded, as a natural dispensation, a vocal register well fitted for grandeur – rather more grandeur, in fact, than the emergent Yeats, who spent a long time trilling lightly near the top of the stave before his voice finally broke. The comparison was elementary. Yet one poet of my acquaintance – famous himself later on, although not quite
Seamus
famous – spent years telling me that it was the silliest thing he had ever heard.

2001

Apart from
Poets, Farewell
, which was published in 1929 and has been unobtainable for most of the time since, the two main collections of Edmund Wilson’s verse are
Note-Books of Night
and
Night Thoughts
. Of these,
Note-Books of Night
was published in America in 1942, took three years to cross the Atlantic (Secker & Warburg brought it out in May 1945) and has since become fairly unobtainable itself, although it is sometimes to be found going cheap in the kind of second-hand book shop that doesn’t know much about the modern side.
Night Thoughts
, published in America in 1961 and in Britain a year later, is still the current collection. It regroups most of the work in
NoteBooks of Night
into new sections, interspersing a good deal of extra matter, ranging from lyrics written in youth to technical feats performed in age. The final effect is to leave you convinced that although
Night Thoughts
is good to have,
Note-Books of Night
remains the definitive collection of Wilson’s verse. Less inclusive, it is more complete.