Where Have You Been? (6 page)

This knowledge is there already in the
Sonnets
and the
Bradstreet
, but chiefly it illuminates the Dream Songs, which seem to me to be written with as much freedom and—before a manner, a tic, could establish itself—as much necessity as anything I can think of. I love the extremes of courtliness and creatureliness in the Dream Songs, on the one hand such things as “Come away, Mr. Bones” (the occasion for Adrienne Rich's first rapture), or “There is a kind of undetermined hair, / half-tan, to which he was entirely unable to fail to respond / in woman”; and on the other hand “Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat,” or “Henry / tasting all the secret bits of life”; or again, when the two categories are run together, as when Berryman remembers an adolescent amour: “while he was so beastly with love for Charlotte Coquet / he skated up & down in front of her house / wishing he could, sir, die,” or, perhaps most succinctly: “What wonders is / she sitting on, over there?”

The best of the Dream Songs have a sort of radical delicacy. Here is one never, so far as I know, much regarded or anthologized, #19:

Here, whence

all have departed or will do, here airless, where

that witchy ball

wanted, fought toward, dreamed of, all a green living

drops limply into one's hands

without pleasure or interest

Figurez-vous, a time swarms when the word

“happy” sheds its whole meaning, like to come and

like for memory too

That morning arrived to Henry as well a great cheque

eaten out already by the Government & State &

other strange matters

Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat

smiled into his mirror, a murderer's

(at Stillwater), at himself alone

and said across a plink to that desolate fellow

said a little hail & buck-you-up

upon his triumph

The poem is about dejection and money. It is unrhymed and almost unpunctuated, but rhetorically organized (“Here … here … that morning … smiled … and said”) into one strikingly cogent sentence. From the very first line—itself an extraordinary getaway or liftoff—the poem is a bristling and dazzling display of grammar: almost one's first thoughts on seeing it are to do with agreements and (“here airless”) appositives! The first “here,” which Henry (or Berryman) is in such a hurry to quit, is the world, a world, further, in which the world (or something very similar—an apple, or a green apple, or perhaps Snow White's poisoned—“witchy”—apple) falls into your lap, but without making you any the happier for it. The poem revisits the theme of Arthur Hugh Clough's “So pleasant it is to have money, heigh-ho!” or Brecht's “Song of the Vivifying Effect of Money,” but in an agnostic or unsatisfied mode, the mode, if you like, of Midas or, worse, a Midas with a paper touch. It is a poem of accursedness or ill fortune, set up as in a parallel world (the world of depression, or perhaps a mirror world, which would help account for the role of the mirror at the end of the poem in breaking the spell?) similar, say, to the “vast landscape of Lament” in Rilke's Tenth Elegy (“
Einst waren wir reich
”—We used to be rich). From “whence,” from “departed,” from “airless,” from “that witchy ball” and from “green living,” I have a sense that the earliest Russian and American space missions—Gagarin and Shepard, both in 1961—may have played into the poem, and the very earliest satellite photographs of ourselves—mirrorings—from space. If one strand of the poem's thought is cosmic, the other is monetary; it is there in the play on “interest,” “living,” and “green”—with its echo of “greenback”—in “buck-you-up” and the spectacular “Figurez-vous.” Berryman learned this sort of image cluster from Shakespeare, who is a constant pressure on his style. Typically, such literariness and ambition are balanced by an early use of the illiterate particle “like.” The verbs are conspicuously loose fitting and vitalist: “drops,” “swarms,” “sheds,” and “eaten.” It is out of the vegetable nature of these that the animal character of “Gentle friendly Henry Pussy-cat” is compounded. “Stillwater” in the third stanza is a penitentiary in Minnesota (Berryman, as one would have suspected, actually owned such a mirror); and “plink” is a bit of family slang. There is no one else in the poem but Henry: it is he who smiles, who is “alone,” then “desolate,” and finally triumphant. Still, the very clever introduction of the murderer, as it were, flavors the poem (Berryman identified his particular area of expertise as a poet as the personal pronoun!). The murderer brings in society, depth, risk, an alter ego (“in feelings not ever accorded to oneself,” it says with stern magnificence). The poem is an authentic Dream Song, diffusely coercive, unconventional, complex, bleak, tender in adversity, rallying.

The Dream Songs vary through every degree of lucidity and opacity: some of them, beautifully, add up; many others are at least consistent in their gestures; a few leave unanswered difficulties; but almost all make their own distinct mark on silence and the page. They are dramatic poems—few more so. Cliff-hanging or stalling episodes in a long-running series. Vainglorious or Pyrrhic, addled or plain: “His wife has been away / with genuine difficulty he fought madness / whose breast came close to breaking.” Often, they end up in rhetorical reaches most poems don't go near: threat, prayer, promise, action, resolve. Berryman always insisted on their unity—“The Care & Feeding of Long Poems” was his special study—but that no longer seems a plausible or even an important claim, if it ever did. (Nor, analogously, does the siting or defining of Henry: he may not
be
Berryman, but he shares too many of the trials and tribulations of the twentieth-century American poet.) Reading through all the Dream Songs is like remaining in your seat while the lights go up and down on three hundred and eighty-five phantasmagorical-existential sketches. “He led with his typewriter. He made it fly.”

 

IAN HAMILTON

Though Ian Hamilton died in 2001 of cancer, I still see him sometimes in party rooms, at literary gatherings, burly, almost square, with the low center of gravity of a Scottish ex-middleweight or -wing-half, encased in his black Crombie overcoat (indoors, radiating simultaneously cold and impermeability), invariably smoking—oh, how we used to smoke—and making what the Trinidadian novelist, Sam Selvon, calls “oldtalk.” There was something of Lino Ventura about him; Ian McEwan described him as having “the face of a capo di capi, and a useful, understated cool.” A conspiratorial element of backroom, exile, spit, and sawdust clung to him. He put one in mind of a boxing manager or a soccer coach. His father's middle name was Tough. The habitual set of his face was a sort of tender scowl. He had the secret sorrow one might look for in a Spurs fan and serial founder and editor of little magazines. The cowboyishly skewed mouth—the word “hard-bitten” might have been invented for it—passing sotto voce ten-ton judgments was much more familiar to me from Craig Raine's gifted and unexpectedly devoted imitations of him than from the real thing. In fact, parties aside, I saw him very few times, though these, oddly, seem as though they could furnish a biography. An ill-advised lunch at my instigation in the early '80s, just after his life of Robert Lowell appeared, at which Ian drank more than he spoke, and I hadn't yet learned to drink (“those played-with-but-uneaten lunches for which he was famous” in the words of his friend, the novelist Dan Jacobson; “You never ate / Just pushed things round and round your plate / Till you could decently light up again” in those of Alan Jenkins's poem “Rotisserie [The Wait]”—but how was I to know that?). Then there was the time he popped up in a playground in Queens Park, which was the wrong suburb, with a daughter I had no idea he had—he was supposed to be away in Wimbledon, and with sons—growling something about Catherine (innocently pulling at a bottle of water) having inherited her father's thirst. I saw him another time going into the publisher's to fetch some boxes of things, wearing a camouflage jacket, and with a station wagon idling outside, in the throes of moving house and changing lives. Later, there was a group reading in Manchester, even as an unbuttoned United having won the European Cup were paraded through the city on an open-topped municipal bus; we made our way through thousands of onlookers to read to a disappointed bookstore manager and a dozen nutcases—sorry, poetry lovers. I saw Ian the next morning, already ensconced in the London train, and felt far too shy to join him, but when I opened my newspaper, his name leaped out to greet me. It was his contribution to a series—this speaks volumes about a certain positively idealistic streak in English cultural philistinism—on “overrated books.” Ian's chosen target was
The Waste Land
.

He was possessed of more authority—more literary authority, I suppose I should specify—than anyone I've ever met, and it was, in the terms of the social anthropologist Mary Douglas, personal not positional authority. In other words, it didn't matter that he no longer sat at the head of the table; no longer fronted book programs on the BBC; no longer had commissions to dole out, approval to bestow or deny in the columns of
The Observer
or the
TLS
; that his magazines
The Review
and
The New Review
edited (partly to avoid creditors) from a pub across the road called the Pillars of Hercules had long since been wound up—you still wouldn't want to cross him, or even disagree with him. Not because he was a—literary—gangster but, rather, the opposite, because of the virtue and delicacy of his poems. In the long and fascinating interview that Dan Jacobson conducted with Hamilton shortly before his death (Between the Lines, 2002), it is striking how often he uses a phantom or gangland first-person plural; it's always “we weren't supposed to be telling people about fads” or “so we thought yes.” And yet I can't help thinking that the co-opted parties, left to themselves, would have stuck, more truthfully, to the third-person singular: “Ian this” or “Ian that.” Hence the persistent take-offs (flattery) and the unparalleled loyalty to his memory and example. He ran his magazines, the one from 1962 to 1970, the other from 1974 to 1979, without really making any discoveries or launching any notable careers. Perhaps they could even be described as gloriously exclusionary enterprises, ideally diminishing to a single angel (who?) on a pin. Most of the major reputations of the 1960s—Larkin, Gunn, Hughes, Plath—were already firmly defined, and the editorial “we” was fairly agnostic on their successors; “I never had any time for Geoffrey Hill and still don't”; entertained more or less crippling reservations about Lowell and Heaney and Berryman (“I was never a great Berryman fan”); never saw the point of the Black Mountain school (“that neo-Poundian stuff”); and fought an unremitting war against the poppy, crowd-pleasing Mersey Poets (“You can imagine what [Matthew] Arnold would have said if he had read Roger McGough”). At the same time, it seems to me that the poets who passed through his magazines, like Douglas Dunn, David Harsent, Hugo Williams, Craig Raine, did some of their best work then, in an endeavor to please Ian. The fiction writers, too, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Jim Crace, Martin Amis, Edna O'Brien, Kazuo Ishiguro surely bore some trace of having been through his editorial
cura
. It strikes me that Ian was perhaps the last poet routinely read by novelists (at least, if there have been others since, I am not aware of them). It was the last time there was any sort of citadel or center in English letters, even though it may have ended, in brilliantly English fashion, with the writers being called upon to pay the printers' bills. (Doesn't it all sound like something from Cavafy?) Or is that just a story?

*   *   *

Ian Hamilton published his book of poems called
The Visit
in 1970. It contained thirty-three poems, all of them short (more on this matter of brevity later). In 1988, the year he turned fifty, he had bulked this up to a production called
Fifty Poems
. Ten years later, that was replaced by
Sixty Poems
, always with the original thirty-three leading off. Alan Jenkins—poet and reviewer, a friend and successor of Ian Hamilton's at the
TLS
—has managed to turn up two more poems and another seventeen unpublished or uncollected pieces. Grand total: seventy-nine. You think prime number, or else of the perceived shame and difficulty of writing at such a slow rate. Ian, of course, was aware of the problem:
Fifty Poems
came with a moody though unapologetic preface (“Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think” included, with much other valuable material, in Alan Jenkins's edition). And when he read aloud to launch it, the difficulty was still more acute, as he threatened to gallop through the entire book in half an hour or so, because not only were the poems short, but they didn't elicit from Ian very much in the way of commentary or explanation. These problems, though real and un-get-round-able—is there any substitute for quantity in poetry!?—are ancillary, because in the end Hamilton's slender oeuvre is worth others ten times as bulky. As the man's life was a perhaps involuntary education in the difficulties of being a poet (or “man of letters”), so Ian's poems are an education in poetry. Reading them trains and civilizes one's nerves. Just as in his tastes he whittled and whittled away, “allowing” finally maybe only Hardy and Arnold and Frost and Larkin and some early Pound and Keith Douglas and half a dozen pieces from
Life Studies
, so the poems do away with luxuriance, the inessential. No filler, only killer. If you take them to your heart, you will understand how much poetry is to do with the mastery of hot and cold, of precisely heart and heartlessness: the control of side effects—semicolons, line breaks, syllables, changes of register, hurdles, internal rhymes—within its own silent and impossible speech. As his poem “Nature” has it, “counting syllables / In perfect scenery, now that you're gone.”