The Meaning of Recognition (44 page)

In recent times I have had the privilege of collaborating and contending with him in several series of dialogues for ABC radio in Australia, and the subject of intelligibility in poetry has
often come up. Though I still think he is too generous in finding Wallace Stevens valuable as a whole instead of in part, and in rating the later, deliberately opaque Ashbery as high as the earlier
Ashbery whose thread I can follow, the Porter line on this point is hard to rebut. It is not, after all, as if he endorses holus bolus the idea of poetry written for poets, and he positively
dislikes the idea of music composed for musicians. Loving music too much to put up with the music that has no inspiration beyond its own technique, he feels the same way about poetry. He would be
no more likely to quote J. H. Prynne than to whistle anything by Schoenberg after
Verklaerter Nacht
. But he is right to think that there can be poetry that makes sense of itself beyond any
argument paraphrasable in prose. The evidence has been in since the very earliest Eliot that tone and intensity can do the uniting in a poem, and the weight of its fragments can hold them together.
Porter still writes that way, becoming clearer and clearer as he goes on only because he has always written that way, and his approach to a theme has become part of our repertoire of recognition.
As now, so then, his characteristic tone was of a delphic bulletin you couldn’t quite follow, illustrated with imagery you couldn’t forget. If he had not been driven by a sense of
structure, he would have been impossible to remember even by the phrase. But I found myself remembering him by the line, and then by lines that linked inseparably to each other: by stanzas, in
other words, although he did not always write in stanza form. Indeed his signature form in those days was a one-piece oratorical extravaganza, welded together by the arc-light intensity of the
paragraphs that had been drawn into it. Paragraphs like this:

The poem was called ‘Death in the Pergola Tea-Rooms’ and soon I knew it all, or anyway I could recognize any line from it, which is really the way we learn poems by heart unless we
deliberately set out to memorize every word for performance on stage. Because I never put in the donkey work of rote learning, I never could recite the whole of ‘Who Gets the Pope’s
Nose’ without making a mistake. But it wasn’t often in the next four decades that I failed to remember its last stanza, especially when I was suffering from the effects of too many
cheap cigars in a hot foreign city: New York in August, for example, or Buenos Aires in January.

Here was an unmistakable music, but it wasn’t the music of a bush ballad. It was a music that went back at least as far as the tough articulation of Metaphysical poetry: at least as far as
Donne. The displaced and reinforced rhythms of St Lucy’s Day were somewhere behind the way that line about the heat exploited the momentum of the line before it. ‘The Pope also waits to
die.’ (Wait for it.) ‘God is the heat in July’. Even remembering it under your breath, you had to observe the heart-seizure of delay as the first line turned over into the second:
the staccato pause before a dying fall. But Porter didn’t have to go to Rome to get the sense of Christendom winding up. He could get that in Harrods. There had been nothing startling about
that death knell since
The Waste Land
. What was startling was the energy: the snap and syncopation of the dirge, as if the orchestra on the tilting deck of the Titanic, instead of playing
‘Abide With Me’, had broken into ‘I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You’. Porter, like Amis and Larkin, might be delivering the opinion that England was
all but dead: but, again like them, he was delivering it in an English language that was as exultantly alive as it had ever been in its greatest flowering. This was what I liked best about the best
of the poetry that came out of what was journalistically known as the Movement: that it continued to be lyrical even as it pushed on into the furthest reaches of resignation, whether personal or
political. (Porter is usually assigned membership in the Group, which followed the Movement: but by now, I think, we can afford to shuffle those tags, if we can’t forget them altogether.)
Those two areas, the personal and political, were connected, of course: for an artist they always are – one of the main reasons why artists aren’t to be trusted in their political
opinions. But Porter, especially, could scarcely conceal the impresario’s delight he took in assembling the last things and counting them off. If this was a
Totentanz
out of Holbein,
it had lyrical flourishes out of Charlie Parker. Perhaps motivated by my personal circumstances at the time – there was a Haslemere girl in a cashmere twin-set and tartan skirt ensemble who
didn’t want me to touch any of it or even breathe out in the same room – I especially admired the closing couplets of a dramatic monologue called ‘Made in Heaven’. Clearly
the poem was taking its heartfelt revenge on some unattainable young woman who had married for advantage, and had lived to repent at leisure. But the poem didn’t take advantage of her: not,
anyway, in the sense of neglecting to admit the power of her initial attraction, which had been a poetic power.

Cancer was much mentioned by Porter, and would go on being so. He wrote about it as if he had it. He didn’t, but it was a useful marker for a theme. Written out more fully, the theme was
that the body disintegrates. He wrote about his as if it already had, so for his younger friends it has been progressively more startling as the years go by to find him looking almost exactly the
same as when we first met him. (Those of us who have lost our hair find it hard to suppress the suspicion that it has been stolen in the night by those who have kept theirs.) Written out more fully
still, the theme would be
carpe diem
; and the same theme, elevated beyond the personal, would be that society disintegrates too. In this last aspect he fitted all too well into the frame
already assigned to Larkin and Amis, both of whom seemed to thrive on the idea that it was all up with the England they loved. In Porter’s poems about the First World War trenches –
‘Somewhere ahead of them death’s stopwatch ticks’ – there was plangent evidence that he had the same sense of a tragic loss of social coherence, even though his sense of the
injustice that had made the coherence possible was equally vivid. From all three poets, the sense of an accumulating historical disaster seemed to me irresistibly persuasive on the artistic level,
even though I personally believed that history was getting better all the time. By and large I endorsed Sartre’s joke on the subject. It was the only successful joke Sartre ever made, so we
ought not to be shy about repeating it. Sartre said that he could have no real quarrel with history, because it led up to him. My three chosen poets had the opposite opinion: even Amis,
superficially the most self-assured of men, showed signs to the keen eye that he felt disabled by the cultural wreckage piled up around him, and neither Larkin nor Porter made any secret of it.
That they could treat this shared vision with an eloquence precluding sentimental indulgence was surely a sufficient claim to seriousness. In my own view of the way poetry in the English language
was coping with post-war reality, their accumulating achievement was at least the equal of what was coming out of America. By picking on these three I don’t mean to say that there
weren’t other Britain-based voices who impressed me just as much. I found much to memorize in the early collections of Thom Gunn, and David Holbrook, though he turned hopelessly chatty
afterwards, had one poem, featuring the daunting line ‘I do not want to have had my day’, which for me permanently nailed down the feeling of falling apart that comes when you realize
you have postponed your visit to the dentist for so long that he will call an ambulance if you finally turn up and open your mouth. Donald Davie, whose Olympian stance and
de haut en bas
critical attitude drove me high up the wall for the way they left Herbert von Karajan looking diffident, had one poem that I thought splendid: ‘Remembering the Thirties’. And, of
course, one good poem is enough to make you a poet. (One major poem is enough to make you a major poet, for that matter: another bogus classification crying out to be ignored.) But these three
poets, Amis, Larkin and Porter, were clearly going to go on being excellent, no matter what the critical opposition.

Some of the critical opposition was home-grown, and from a powerfully influential source. Al Alvarez not only thought that Ted Hughes got in more of the
angst
of the modern world than
Larkin, he thought that the American heavyweights got in more of it than any of the British English poets at all. Lowell and Berryman, according to Alvarez, were the grownups: the poets who flew in
the face of danger using its hot wind for uplift. Sylvia Plath’s suicidal commitment was a proof of seriousness. In comparison with the American effort, anything home-grown was threatened by
the enervating heritage of the genteel. Only Hughes and a few others could hope to break out, to break through. Alvarez’s presentation of this line was dramatic, obviously heartfelt, and, as
always with him, argued with a command of rhetoric all the more persuasive for being tersely stated. I didn’t like to disagree with him. Reverential by nature for anyone who can write an
elegant sentence, I have never enjoyed disagreeing with the essayists I look up to. Lately, as an Australian who believes that the still-flourishing Japanese right wing should not be encouraged in
the convenient fantasy that the United States tricked their country into World War II, I felt bound to disagree in print with Gore Vidal, from whose earlier prose I learned a lot about the
assembled sweep of plain rhythms. But in condemning American imperialism he had neglected to examine the extent to which he himself carried American imperialist assumptions, and I thought he needed
to be called out on it. Much earlier, and presuming hugely on my scarcely established position, I had felt obliged to call Alvarez out on what I saw as the dangerous extent to which he was praising
as professional commitment the careerist presumption of the American poets in taking the whole world’s suffering upon themselves, not just as if it were their responsibility – all
artists feel responsible for everything – but as if it were somehow mirrored in their own interior drama, their unblushingly proclaimed psychic turmoil. It was the desire and pursuit of the
whole: a potentially misleading desire, in my view, and a doomed pursuit. Convinced that Hannah Arendt had been right when she said that an artist is making a mistake when he views his own soul as
the battlefield of history, I thought that the British poets, in restricting their historical and geographic scope, had a better chance of being true to the world beyond their set borders. None of
them would have been capable of the blasphemous foolishness shown by Lowell when he described the dead Sylvia Plath as rising in her saddle to slash at Auschwitz. The British poets didn’t
even mention Auschwitz. They had their own worries closer to home, and universal resonance, I thought, was more likely to arise from the treatment of those than from self-consciously, and
self-servingly, addressing a big theme.

But Porter did mention Auschwitz, as confidently as he mentioned the Battle of the Somme. One of my British poets was an Australian, and what separated him from Larkin and Amis was the overt,
stated inclusiveness of his historical range. Neither Amis nor Larkin much liked the place they called ‘abroad’. Porter loved it. Much more than theirs, his curiosity was at home
everywhere, and in all times. He ranged further, and further back, than the
echt
British poets had chosen to find legitimate. Larkin deplored the very idea of writing poems about
paintings. Porter wrote poems like that all the time. Amis, in one of his finest poems, harked as far back as a European princeling who had to bring his land to ruin before finding out the
elementary truths about decent behaviour. But Amis rarely harked back as far as ancient Rome. Porter practically lived in ancient Rome: he was on quipping terms with Martial. I hadn’t thought
Alvarez right when he argued that provincialism was a disabling flaw in the home-grown poets. But there could be no doubt that he was right in thinking them provincial. They were proudly so; and
effectively so; but being so, there was bound to be a great number of reference points that they left out, even when the reference points were in their heads. Porter used what was in his head.
There was a lot in there, and, as we now know, there was to be a lot more.

In the best sense, the body of Porter’s work, both in poetry and in prose, is an education: an education both for him and for us. From his published beginnings, he showed none of the
mandatory Movement diffidence about a display of erudition, and he has gone on to build in print the university that he never attended, and which can’t be attended by anyone in any other form
but this. What the Germans call
Bildung
is made manifest as the work of a lifetime. His body of poetry, in particular – his enchantingly conversational prose serves, but as a
subsidiary – reminds us of how Proust would bring into his great book anything that excited him about the humanities. A critical anthology as well as a novel,
A la recherche du temps
perdu
is forever in search of understanding: the understanding depends on what has already been understood by others; and Porter’s poetry works in the same way. In the field of classical
music alone, his poetry could serve as the ideal introduction for the beginner, and the ideal reminder for the adept that the treasury of achievement belongs not to an individual nation, or even to
the West, but to the world. And as with culture, so with history, the vivid pyramid built by this benevolent pharaoh marks a tomb asking to be plundered before it is even occupied. How does Porter
escape Arendt’s dictum that an artist should not pretend that his own soul is a measure of all the world’s agonies? He escapes it by his selflessness. All who know him in real life are
well aware that he is the most selfless of men. But there are seemingly humble people who are monuments of conceit in their public work. You would not need to know this artist personally, only to
know his art, to realize that he is selfless even at the centre of his creative impulse. His famous poems written in honour of his first wife’s tragic death are merely the most obvious
example. It took a supremely self-effacing poet to make a subject of the awkward fact that he couldn’t help seeing such an event as an opportunity for expression as well as a cause for grief.
Milton never did that for Lycidas, or Tennyson for Hallam. You might say that it was a specifically modern possibility. But even in the framework of that modern ambition in which anything at all is
grist to the mill, it was a specifically Porter possibility. Confessional poetry, of the type exemplified by Lowell when he printed his ex-wife’s letters without permission, excuses itself
from ordinary responsibility on the grounds of a higher calling. Porter excused himself nothing. He made a self-examining, and indeed self-flagellating, subject out of the poet’s unstoppable
urge to make poetry: the necessary shame of seeing inspiration in absolutely anything. You could call it recklessness if you liked, but surely a better word was courage. The hallmark, then as
always in his work, was a sense of intellectual adventure.