Bedouin of the London Evening (10 page)

The first poet is very interesting. In order to understand her, we must go into a certain room in Manhattan where a light is on over a table. A serious woman is sitting there, writing a lesson, which is the lesson of her life. On the paper we observe free verse stanzas in a near-colloquial idiom with a somewhat scientific vocabulary; they have an anonymous appearance. An occasional cockney rhyme (sister / glamor) comes up. Reading the lines gives us the illusion, at moments, of having gained an objective picture of events, even of our own thoughts:

introduces a fact, and related materials are used to describe thought later in the poem:

This is well done, so that we really believe while we are reading it that it is how thoughts behave. In this instance the idiom has justified its impersonal quality by an ability to produce convincing objective effects. It is the clean diction used by all good reporters (the method of Tolstoy when he is reporting), and it is insidious because of its invisibility. The subjective factor, with all its distortions, appears to have been edited out.

What we think of
as
diction is something that brings us quickly to the boil on an instinctive level, by throwing coloured words at us in a way for which we are unprepared, as in the writing of Rimbaud or of Gerard Manley Hopkins; or a rigid, thrilling block of modern words, with a granite frost on it, which smashes us
intellectually, like a phrase of Robert Lowell’s. Diction can then be identified by the autonomous life it leads; the poetry is already partly about the way it is written, and it becomes more difficult to paraphrase the content away from the page.

When a poet takes up a simpler idiom, like the one used by Adrienne Rich, subjects are of great importance. The presumption is that the poet has especially chosen a line that will allow her to cover ground of all kinds. Even so, we must be moderate in the expectations we form, for there are other difficulties in such a line – which, although fragmented, could be called a narrative line – and I shall try to show some of them. It becomes dangerous, rather than insidious, when there is insufficient fresh material within it; originally it did the work of prose and tends to be one-dimensional.

We must examine what is going on in the poems.

A cast of three or four men and women is living a life very close to the life of the newspapers; Manhattan is a living newspaper. There are refrigerators, airplanes, phone booths, hypodermics, chemicals, molecules, bombs – and subways, prisons,
rooms
where people all over the world become careworn in their efforts to face up to reality. But because these people, places, and objects are so little distinguished and personalised, we have to read minutely to assemble the essential data from which the story will begin.

There is a reason for this. The poet is careful not to impose herself on the landscape. She tries, on the contrary, to read exactly the meaning which is there, and no more, and to reproduce it without inflation. At times, a deliberately conventionalised sensibility is in fact placed so squarely before its public subject matter that we can check our emotional attitudes by it, to see whether we have them right, so to speak, as if we were checking our watches by a world clock. In the poem already quoted from, called ‘Burning Oneself In’, we note

brings about the humane but unexceptional (and slightly ambiguous)
comment at the end of the poem:

In Miss Rich’s work, the moral proportions are valid, the protagonists are sane, responsible persons, and the themes are moving on their courses. Why is it then that we are still waiting for the poetry? At once it’s obvious what has happened. She has taken on too much, and the imagination is exhausted by the effort required to familiarise itself with all the burdens of the modern world. The syntax is not there to reinvent the material, is not allowed to do so, but only to expose it. Therefore everything hangs on the uniqueness of the poet’s personal contribution.

But she has almost edited herself out of the picture in the initial effort to ‘get it right’. Furthermore, as we continue to read the ‘narrative’ line she is using, we notice that it is far more intractable than we had thought. What it can do to present facts it does very well. But once its basic character has been established in her poetry as a character of situation and event, the tone of the poetry sets hard, and it is extremely difficult to get anything else in. The line goes on quietly forcing the poet to produce more and more objective pictures in the interests of drama, tension, and news. It asks for the next action, the next scene, perhaps for the next statement – but not for the next
thought
. It would be impossible for example for an idea to be argued through to a conclusion. Similarly the lines can never have finish. It is not, regretfully we admit it, the ideal classical modern line, which can do every kind of work and for which we are searching; the one with which we can talk and think – cutting the marble with what Norman Douglas called ‘the thought-laden chisel of Lysippus’.

The only way thought and feeling can be introduced at all is on the same descriptive terms as material objects. And this, as I have shown in the first quotation, is exactly what the poet has had to do. They must match in kind and degree, or the line will not tolerate them. From now on she can only think in a certain way.
The inner world that she shows us occasionally is furnished then in much the same way as the outer world; although a transfer of material objects into mental counterparts does not necessarily guarantee that we are inside, for the soul has its own landscapes.

We may perhaps conclude that the basic fault of this book lies in the nature of a subject matter already familiar being joined to impersonality of presentation the result is abstraction, or politics.

Now the actual poetry in the book is elsewhere. It’s entirely personal, and is to do with psychological survival. It appears out of nowhere, almost by accident:

and in another poem whose intention is hard to follow, but which is in general a series of pictures and comments on the poet’s afflictions:

That is a personal admission which we find illuminating because it tells us something useful about ourselves. We know now that the private face that has been turned away from us is the one that can tell us things we need to know. From this snatch, we understand that the poet is rebuilding herself; the mind is still tough and fresh, even after the intellectual toil of taking on emotions not its own, as in this good descriptive piece:

It goes on, ‘To speak to another human / becomes a risk.’ The tears are said to be evoked by a sense of outrage at certain inhuman aspects of life today, according to the poem. Tears of rage can come to our eyes in the street, but usually, if we are scrupulously truthful, from less abstract causes.

At the end of the book is a section on
The Wild Boy of Aveyron
. Psychologically, it is most revealing. Some people may have read the book by J-M Itard, or seen the film by François Truffaut,
L’Enfant Sauvage
. Briefly, a child left for dead in the woods in 18th-century France manages to survive. Some years later he is discovered, caught, and brought back into society; a human wild animal. In the film (an extraordinary film leaving an indelible impression) we are shown the child reacting to rain falling on his head, to the taste of milk, and to the safety of the forests, with their hiding places, for they alone are trustworthy.

This child is the helpless animal within every lonely alienated human creature, every poet, who from early days has found himself cut off from the minds of his fellows. He does not know how to make contact with them; his only relationship is with Nature. I suspect that it’s for this reason above all others that he has entered Miss Rich’s imagination.

We can see that when her intellect and her ethics have got her into a corner once again in the name of poetry, and there seems to be no way out, nevertheless she manages to write in her lesson book:

This is not from the section on the wild boy; but they are certainly the stones touched, or carried, by the hand of the wild boy of Aveyron. In an attempt at wholeness the urban citizen must engross his experience within herself, for it is the part of her own story which is missing, and this is the moment in life when she needs it for her survival. In order to go back to the necessary depth, she takes the only route available from her room in the city, and makes the journey at night in her dreams:

The regression is to an almost sub-human ancestor, frightening to consciousness, but essential to
spirit
. The day consciousness of the poet appears to stand in direct opposition to the unconscious dreamer of the night – the compensating self, who is doing all the real work, and who rights the balance by releasing buried aspects of her personality. It’s no wonder that while this vital process of unification was going on the poetry regularly escaped from stanzas about current affairs. If we carelessly forget that Orpheus was especially famous for playing to wild beasts, trees, and stones, the myth which is active within us will remind us of its own accord.

Il faut être absolument moderne
; but there can also be an out-of-date modernness. Early poems by Miss Rich, such as ‘The Raven’, ‘After Dark’, and ‘In the Woods’ (those essential woods) are more modern than many in her present book. That the contemporary nerve is wide awake in her poetry is shown in ways that pass unnoticed. For example, as we read forward we are struck by the observation that this poet never writes a love poem from which she cannot learn something useful psychologically; which forms an amusing and relevant comment on our society.

The reverse is true of Miss Garrigue, who would not have to have reasons. She would write it for its own sake.

This is her last book of poems; she died in December, 1972. We follow her into romantic territory, but we have misgivings when we observe that she has grasped the nettle – an overtly poetic manner – which has been fatal to so many other good poets before her.

Romantics (and not only romantics) tend to be lazy about first principles. By a continuous process of effort on many levels, a poem is shaken free from all that is not the poem. This is the first step, done if possible well away from a sheet of paper. It is
the
work; brutal, classical precision work to isolate, develop, and organise. Everything important is decided there and then, in order to get a poem out alive from the rapid, egocentric thought-flow of the normal mind. It’s especially hard on lyric-romantic writers who have already swallowed the world and all its poets entire. Every
burr sticks to their verses.

It emerges gradually that Miss Garrigue has taken up her rich, mannered style with her eyes open. There are prose stanzas in this book in which that style is dropped, and they are good. But they do not contain those lines of poetry which appear in her other verse. Her style, then, is the only way in which she can realise her potential for certain thoughts; thoughts which cannot form in the mind unless the emotional conditions are propitious to them and the clock is turned back. They cannot form in this mind and be recognised as poetry unless they resemble what has already been poetry. For she has no vision of a lyric poetry which is new is kind.

Having made these reservations, we must try to look at her work on its own terms, and there will be rewards which will make the effort worth while. With regard to other voices in her poetry, this is a good moment to remind ourselves of the continuous tradition of licensed romantic borrowing throughout history; without it, our best poets would be out of court straight away. We learn to think and feel for ourselves only by first thinking the thoughts of others, and feeling what they felt. By these means, we learn what it is to do these things.

There are some bunglers, of course. Keats, young, ill and in a hurry, lifted words and mood from the first four lines of one of the
Epodes
of Horace in order to get off the ground with ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ (Epode no. XIV, in Dr John Marshall’s translation: ‘Why ’tis that languorous sloth can thus so strongly bind / My inmost heart and mind, / As though some Lethé draught, I down parched throat had cast’). Rimbaud’s ‘
Le Bateau Ivre
’ began in stanza thirteen of ‘
La Bouteille à la mer
’ by Alfred de Vigny. Dylan Thomas took over Edith Sitwell’s territory and vocabulary. And so on. But each of these poets managed to pull a whole poem out of the pie which we recognise to be
sui generis
.

One essential aspect of Miss Garrigue’s work is the presence in it of unseen forces, in the Yeatsian sense. The flowing of a mysterious charged current, especially near water or in lonely places. She is content to record it as part of her experience, interprets it pantheistically,
and regards herself as part of its experience in turn. From her text it is doubtful whether she had any deeper or more exact knowledge, and she abandons mysticism the moment it no longer serves her literary purpose.