Poetry Notebook (23 page)

But we have to see the matter from Larkin’s viewpoint. For all that he might have admired my friend’s seriousness, he didn’t think that the result was poetry: whereas he
thought that Vita, even though a loquacious mediocrity whose work in verse could be measured by the square mile, had occasionally hit the mark. The inclusion of so much Betjeman was an obvious sign
that Larkin’s taste had triumphed: he had always seen Betjeman as an important poet and now he was in a position to assert it irrefutably. But the inclusion of even a little of Sackville-West
was an even greater triumph of taste, if much less obvious. He was saying that something matters beyond the name and the reputation. What matters is the authoritative voice of the successful poem;
a voice in which the poet might speak only once, but it is still a poem if it sounds like this –

After which she goes on to speak wonderfully about the rich subject she has opened up. Why couldn’t she have written more poetry like that? The only possible answer is
that she just didn’t find it imperative. The idea that people might actually choose not to do more of their best thing is one that we are bound to find unsettling, but it is part of freedom.
Robert Conquest, incidentally, has spent most of his literary career, when he has bothered with verse at all, cobbling squibs in rhyming form. In a long life he has written only a handful of
serious poems. Sometimes to the dismay of his friends and admirers, the man who defined the simply complex has seldom pursued it. But his book
The Great Terror
helped to bring down the
Soviet Union, so we owe him for other things.

During the few years in which I was writing and compiling the notes that form the main part of this book, I also, but not very often, wrote some articles in my usual manner,
and for the usual primary reason: they were commissioned. They were, in other words, somebody else’s initial idea. But, though I would really rather dream up my own projects, I have always
tried to be grateful when an editor suggests a topic on which I might write. Even when the suggested topic seems too bizarre or banal to touch, the invitation is flattering, and sometimes the most
acute reason to regret one’s ebbing strength is that the debility removes the chance to make something useful out of a superficially lousy idea. Kingsley Amis was invited to write a regular
short piece about poetry by one of the most horrible newspapers in Britain. Carrying the war to the enemy, he took up the commission, and wrote some wonderfully humane and quotable criticism. The
fact that he was dealing with the kind of journalists who aren’t talented enough to be terrorists served only to concentrate his wit.

In this next-to-last section of my book, the component pieces were brought into being on a more civilized basis than that. With the exception of the valedictory article on the poetry of John
Updike, which was written at the invitation of the
New York Times
, they were all written to answer requests from publications in Britain, or, on one occasion, Australia: to that extent, the
old Empire remained my stamping ground. This imbalance is fitting, I think, because in America poetry is something that happens to one side of the literary mainstream, whereas in the old Empire it
happens in the middle of it. Even in Australia and New Zealand, countries where small population means being a poet depends so much on grants and prizes, poetry is still regarded as life’s
blood. Some of the poets mentioned in the main body of my notebook appear again here, treated with greater exclusivity: with, in a phrase, more focus. To that extent, any essay with a single topic
must distort the picture, which is multiple, intertextual, endlessly complex. As the centuries accumulate, poems grow out of poems, and critical remarks out of critical remarks. (Would Hazlitt have
spotted that Spenser had insufficient rhymes for his stanza, if Johnson had not first said that Pope sometimes failed to disguise that rhyme sounds were in short supply?) A thousand names jostle to
be remembered. A cautionary truism: any poet from the past whose name we remember once knew the names of all his contemporary poets who are now forgotten. Nothing is harder, in modern times, than
for a new name to stand out longer than a little while. No surprise, then, that Robert Frost should occupy us again as the final topic in this section. He was there at the start of the book and he
is still there as the book passes its half-way mark. There is no point protesting at such eminence: much as we might be suspicious of the long rule of a master, there is such a thing as a great
name. Only twenty-four years old, Chidiock Tichborne wrote an uncannily good poem on the eve of his execution. But because the axe deprived him of the chance to write further, his name is hard to
remember now. Sir Walter Raleigh, also, was beheaded, but at least he had had time to get a few things written, as well as having been the lover of Queen Elizabeth I. That last idea, however, was
the invention of movie producers, and I’m afraid they were handing him a reward for his piracy, not for his poetry.

John Updike was always so careful not to make high claims for himself as a poet that he gave his more owlish critics the opportunity to say he wasn’t a poet at all. They
should have looked harder. Most of the poems he ever published in book form counted as light verse, but his light verse was dauntingly accomplished. Very few recognized poets could handle the
formal element that well, and occasionally there was a serious poem with all the linguistic vigour of the prose that had made his novels compulsory reading.

Nevertheless, and despite a fairly large body of work as a poet, it was as a novelist that he was hailed. Clearly he had poetic qualities as a writer: he had the imagery, the observation, the
rhythm, the delight in making words click into their ideal working order. But it was into his novels that he put these things, was it not? Nobody, and especially not other poets, wanted to think of
him as a poet as well. Helpfully he appeared to think the same.

But this posthumous volume,
Endpoint
, tells a different story. Consisting entirely of poems he wrote in the last years of his life, it is a serious book indeed. The subject is his
approaching death, and it turns out that he started treating it as a special poetic subject several years back. The ‘Endpoint’ poems, written at the rate of roughly one a year since
2002, deal with no other theme, and the ‘Other Poems’ in the book are plainly collected and grouped so as to reinforce the same theme from all directions, and especially from the
direction of the past.

In these ‘Endpoint’ summaries the Top Gun technician makes it easy for himself from the mechanical angle: the forms are loose and unrhymed, held together only by the
beat of the iambic pentameter. But from the thematic angle there is a strict discipline in operation. Every recollection has to be specific. If it passes that test, it can come from as far back as
early childhood.

The way that these poems search their author’s early mind suggests that he has belatedly discovered a modus operandi that he might have used all along. He used the novel instead, with
results that we all know. The Rabbit and the Bech novels placed him securely among the high achievers of Team America, up there with Roth and Bellow, and more substantially accredited, as a
novelist, than Mailer, Vidal and Salinger. Yet when it came to the last he chose another form.

In his early verse, Updike could be boastful about his sexual prowess. One young woman was recorded as lying in his arms and crying ‘John!’, so moved was she. Here, at the eleventh
hour, he is more regretful about his overmastering, though obviously masterful, early lust.

The typeface vocabulary is the tip-off to where those early feelings of virile immortality came from. It was being a published writer that turned him into Errol Flynn. (The
priapic actor is tellingly invoked, along with, for other qualities, Jack Benny, Fred Astaire and Lucian Freud. The book is a gallery of role models.) At the
New Yorker
, natural home of the
Jewish upmarket wordsmiths, he was the go-to Goy who could write anything. He revelled in the girl-getting fame.

Details of his earlier life are plentiful in the sequence, giving us a touching counterpoint to the details of his life coming to an end. For that second aspect, no detail is too grim to be
recorded. Updike was always a clinical observer of his own body. Right to the wire, he took inventory: he had the mind of a regimental quartermaster. We find him planning the guest list for the
last hours: ‘My visitors, my kin.’ And in the ‘Other Poems’, the famous names would clearly be invited too, if they had not already moved on. For the young Updike, Frankie
Laine ranked with Flynn, Benny and Astaire as an incarnation of the all-male possibilities. Like a classical poet calling up a shade from the Halls of Dis, Updike addresses the singer’s ghost
through the teenage hormone-laden haze of the Sweet Shop in 1949:

The famous faces and voices lay out the terms of the sexual drama that will be the writer’s life. Doris Day bulks large, especially with regard to her bosom, which Updike
in his first days of fact-based social research was pleased to discover was as ample as Marilyn Monroe’s, just more discreetly reined in. The teen prodigy was mad about Doris Day and on his
deathbed he still is. Philip Roth and Nicholson Baker would acknowledge the tone in which he speaks to her shade:

The phrase ‘gigantic silver screen’ is uncharacteristically automatic: in a novel he would not have permitted himself to be so ordinary. But poetry was his holiday.
A pity, perhaps: though he would have had to live in a smaller house, he might have written the poetry that reported America. He could have given us a lot more about Doris Day. Frank O’Hara
became a famous poet largely for a single mention of Lana Turner.

The poetic reporting of America began before Walt Whitman and in the twentieth century even the novelists were doing it. Not many recognized poets wrote as effectively about actual events as
John Dos Passos did in the montage passages of his novel
U.S.A
., the book which, for the future stars of Team America, made their mission clear. But Updike was unusually well qualified to
write the kind of poem that gives a news event its historic dimension. Witness his bloodcurdling poem about the death of the golfer Payne Stewart in the private jet

Updike could have reported the nation like this all his life, but he chose another method. Let there be no doubt, though, about the high quality of what he might have done. In a
single poem, he did enough of it to prove that he not only had the whole tradition of English-speaking poetry in his head, he had the means to add to it. ‘Bird Caught in My Deer
Netting’ deliberately and justifiably echoes Frost in its title, and in the body of the poem we can hear Gerard Manley Hopkins and John Crowe Ransom and . . . well, everyone, really, Jack
Benny included.

It’s a wonderful poem, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves. He wrote very few like it, and usually, even on the comparatively rare occasions when he tried to give it
everything, he was led towards frivolity by a fatal propensity for revelling in skill. But his very last book, a book of poems, proves that he always had what it took.

Before writing a notice of Stephen Edgar’s latest collection of poems,
History of the Day
, I should declare an interest, not to say a fascination. When I read his
collection before last,
Lost in the Foreground
, and concluded that he was setting a new mark of accomplishment for the Australian formalist poets, I made immediate plans to meet him, if only
to check up on whether he was a normally configured human being, and not a cyborg toting a large extra memory box for his vocabulary and range of technical skills. He turned out to look like what
he is: a classicist who makes a crust by correcting the textual errors of other people, and writes poems on the side. Our first lunch at the Oyster Bar on Sydney’s Circular Quay lasted until
dusk, and we have been friends ever since. So the reader should allow for a possible bias. But the reader should first consider this: