The Filial Art: a Reading of Contemporary British Poetry Author(S): Blake Morrison Source: the Yearbook of English Studies, Vol

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The Filial Art: A Reading of Contemporary British Poetry Author(s): Blake Morrison Source: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 17, British Poetry since 1945 Special Number (1987 ), pp. 179-217 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3507659 Accessed: 03-02-2016 06:54 UTC

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This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Filial Art:A Reading of ContemporaryBritish Poetry BLAKE MORRISON London

I I am morecertain that it is a dutyof nature to preservea goodparent's life and happiness,than I amof any speculative point whatever. (Alexander Pope) My fatherwas an eminentbutton maker - butI had a soulabove buttons - I pantedfor a liberalprofession. (George Colman) I wantedto grow up andplough, To closeone eye, stiffen my arm. AllI everdid was follow In hisbroad shadow round the farm. I wasa nuisance,tripping, falling, Yappingalways. But today It is myfather who keeps stumbling Behindme, and will not go away. (Seamus Heaney)

It is a little-remarkedfeature of the younger generation of British poets that therelationship which most concerns them is notthat with a loveror spouse, not witha particularplace, norwith society at large,nor with God (those traditionalconcerns of poets) but ratherthe relationship with parents. By 'younger'here I mean thegeneration of poets which came to prominencein and and which Harrison the I97os early I98os, spans Tony (b. I937), Seamus Heaney, Hugo Williams,Craig Raine,James Fenton,Paul Mul- doon,Andrew Motion, and MichaelHofmann (b. 1957). In thework of these writersparents have an unusualcentrality and fathersseem to figuremore largelythan mothers.This overlapof concerntells us much about these poets as a generation;but so, too, the differentways in whichthey write about theirparents are an insightinto theirdistinctive achievements. By examiningthe filialart of each in turn,I hope to removesome popular misconceptionsabout thekind of writer each ofthese eight poets is, and also to arriveat an understandingof why this generation, more than any other one can thinkof, should be so obsessedwith its parents. Certainlymost poets of the early twentieth century were altogether more peremptoryin thisrespect. Their commonpost-Freudian assumption was that we wrestlewith our parents in order to win the space to be ourselves: out

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 180 A Readingof Contemporary British Poetry of filialrevolution comes the birthof identityand ofart. Yeats in Autobio- graphiesspeaks of gettingfree of his father'sinfluence. Eliot and Pound crossedthe Atlantic to be freeof the family ties they thought would inhibit theirart. Lawrenceliberated himself by writingSons and Lovers and eloping intoexile: he latercame to feelthat the novel'sdepiction of his fatherhad been unfair,but at thetime it was a necessaryinjustice. The historyof early twentieth-centuryliterature is ofescape fromthe nets of family and father- land. The firmnesswith which thesewriters resisted 'obligation' and undid familyties was intimatelylinked to theprogramme of modernism. Rejecting ancestry,overthrowing precedent, refusing to continuethe line: the language of (hostile) familyrelations commingled with aestheticmanifesto- making.'We have to hate our immediatepredecessors to get freeof their authority', Lawrence wrote to Edward Garnett in February I913-1 More recentlythe criticismof Harold Bloom has based its theoryof poetic developmenton the analogyof Oedipal struggle;poets become 'strong' by fightingand 'swervingaway from' their predecessors: 'To live,the poet must misinterpretthe father, by a crucialact ofmisprision, which is there-writing ofthe father.'2 The conflationof 'real' fathersand 'literary'ones is typicalof muchmodern criticism and ofthe literature it addresses. Given the aesthetic of modernism,we cannotbe surprisedby the absence of thefilial in early twentieth-centurypoetry: both the 'men of 1914' and the 1930s generation lookedto thefuture not thepast; to like-mindedpeers and pioneers,not to precursors. In thepoets of the present generation attitudes have changeddecisively, whichis one reasonwhy they have been called (thoughthe termsraise a numberof problems) both 'anti-modernist'and 'post-modernist'.Their work recognizesLawrence's point about gettingfree of authoritybut recognizesalso the FifthCommandment. Where modernismresembles a phase of adolescent rebellionagainst elders, recentpoetry seeks to do honour,to measureup, to grantthat parents have a lifebeyond that of being parents:an attitudechildren can affordonly when theythemselves have grownup, or becomeparents (as mostof these poets have, but as Lawrence and Eliot,for example, never did), orwhen their parents are dead. If Oedipus Rexand Hamletwere loci classici for Freud and themodernists of the violent mutualdestructiveness of parents and children,for the currentgeneration theyare symptomaticof more subdued feelings of filial guilt and failure:the pertinenceof Oedipus is nothis parricidebut his agonizedself-accusations, thatof Hamlet notso muchhis angerwith Gertrude and Claudius but that conditionof being 'too much in the "son"' (I. 2. 67) whichparadoxically weakenshis resolveto be his father'savenger. The currentgeneration risks

TheLetters ofD. H. Lawrence,Volume I, edited T. Boulton 21 190oi-3, byJames (Cambridge,1979), p. 582. A Map ofMisreading (Oxford, 1975), p. 19-

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 181 seemingpious in itsdenial of violent Oedipal struggle.But itsrespectfulness does not precludea rangeof 'negative'(unfilial) emotions: anger, resentment,fear, guilt. Hugo Williams's'Death ofan Actor',for instance, from his collectionWriting Home, mixes homage with umbrage: Nowthat he has walked out again Leavingme no wiser, Nowthat I'm sittinghere like an actor Waitingto go on, I wishI couldsee again Thatrude, forgiving man from World War II Andhear him goading me. Dawdlingin peacetime, Nothaving to fight in my lifetime, left alone To writepoetry on thedole and be happy, I'm givento wondering Whatmanner of man I mightbe. Williams's descriptionof his fatheras a 'man fromWorld War II' is significant.For themodernists the assumption that sons must be at warwith fatherswas strengthenedby the eventsof the Great War, that global expressionof the violence in thefather-son relationship, a war in whichthe 'flower'of youthperished through the inflexibilityof old age. This is the argumentdeveloped in WilfredOwen's reworkingof the parable of Abrahamand Isaac: 'Offerthe Ram ofPride instead of him', God urgesthe father:'But theold man wouldnot so, butslew his son And halfthe seed of Europe,one by one.' Pound's 'E. P. Ode pourI'Election de son Sepulchre' expressessimilar sentiments ('young blood and highblood' are sacrifiedfor thesake of'old men'slies'); so do such poemsof Sassoon's as 'Base Details' and 'The General'. To a post-I945 generation,however, there must be almostopposite feelings towards fathers: they were the men who fought,on behalfof democracy and us, in theSecond World War; we are children,not who weresacrificed, but on whosebehalf the sacrifice was made. There is an unspokenburden of obligation here, and thoughresisted and set aside in the I96os, thatdecade ofadolescent rebellion when most of the currentgeneration of poets were adolescentsor in theirtwenties, it has returnedin the g98osto weigh us down.In the1 96os itwas possibleto mimic the modernistsand to pretendthat one's fatherswere Victoriannobo- daddies, stultifiedsurvivors from a bygoneera, comfortableconformists. Recent poetry shows paternal figuresin a less patronizinglight: as adventurersand fighters,travellers and heroes, men less shackled by domesticitythan our own post-feminist generation and alongsidewhom our own 'dawdling' peacetimeyouth cannot help but seem uneventful.In a recent collection, Elegies,Douglas Dunn (b. 1942) describes his as a 'gentle generation, pacific ... No friendof ours had ever been to war'. A pacific generation may count its blessings but also feel itself to be weak and emasculated. Measuring up to their fathers, poets such as Williams,

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Heaney, and Michael Longley emphasize their own (comparatively) depletedmasculinity. Heaneyis themost celebrated figure of this generation and has donemore thananyone to sponsora poetryof affiliation (or, more precisely, filiation) in whicha 'literary'and 'over-educated'son facesthe dilemma of following or rejectingancestry. The themewas presentin 'Digging',the first poem of his firstbook, Deathof a Naturalist(London, 1966), wherethe poet recallshis father'searth-work ('By God, theold man could handlea spade. [Justlike hisold man') and awkwardlystakes a claimto continue the hereditary chain: he has a pen,not spade, butwill 'dig withit'. The same processis visiblein 'Follower':at thestart the father is seenskilfully ploughing, the boy clumsily followingin his furrow;at the end the roles are reversed,the son having inheritedwhat were always in any case quasi-artisticskills, the father stumblingin hiswake as 'subject-matter'.Both poems are self-vindications, attemptsto shed a burdenof filial guilt. Both reveala poet who means to followin his ownfashion. Followingand diggingare commonactivities throughout Heaney's later work,but as he 'step[s]through origins' the notion of 'fathers' broadens out. Earlyon thesefathers are therural labourers of a precedinggeneration, men likehis father,a pantheisticand silentbreed of farmers, fishermen, thatch- ers,water-diviners, and so on. Now dyingalong with their trades, they have a lineagewhich goes back farinto the past, as a poem in North,'The Seed Cutters',suggests: 'They seem hundredsof yearsaway. Breughel,IYou'll knowthem if I can getthem true.' In thefirst half of North Heaney traces his ancestrystill further back, to theVikings. 'Old fathersbe withus', he prays in 'VikingDublin', buthis descriptions of their culture suggest that they are all too muchwith us already;'neighbourly scoretaking killers', 'hoarders of grudgesand gain', theirclannish violence parallels that of contemporary NorthernIreland. Similarparallels are evokedwhen Heaney comes to an even earlierset offorbears, the Bog People ofDenmark and Jutland.'The Tollund Man', Heaney has said, 'seemedto me likean ancestoralmost, one ofmy old uncles,one ofthose moustached archaic faces you used to meetall over the Irish countryside',and in exploringthe barbaritiesof Iron Age cultureHeaney identifiesa legacyof brutalism in hisown tribe.3 In thetitle- sequence of his most recent collection,Station Island (London, 1984), Heaney's search fora fathermoves forwardin time again to a series of meetingswith 'familiar ghosts'. Several of these are writers,and theyinclude JamesJoyce, whom Heaney addressesas 'Old father,mother's son'. What Joyce paternallytells Heaney is to writefor the joy of it and forgetthe 'nationalquestion'. This Heaney does in the last section,when he speaks throughthe voice of his rhyming predecessor, Sweeney, an earlyIrish King.

3 JamesRandall, 'An Interviewwith Seamus Heaney',Ploughshares, 5, no. 3 (1979), 7-22 (p. i8).

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If the themeof 'following the fathers' is a constantthread in Heaney, he also inheritsfrom his parents a set ofopposed values, masculine/feminine,which have affectedhis aesthetic and his role as a poetic 'conscience'. His fatherhe associates withpolitics and slydefiance: see, forexample, 'A Constable Calls' in North,where the boy Heaney 'assumes' (a characteristicpun) small guilts when his fatherappears to lie to an RUC policeman about thevegetables he is growing. His motherstands forreligion and forbearance,a more tenderand supplicant posture.Heaney has said thathe considersit vital thatthe 'mother' hold the more aggressivemale principlein check,but it is also trueto say that 'male' forces in his work have the upper hand.4 The gentleness and domesticity of poems like 'Limbo', 'Sunlight', and 'The Otter' are an interestingoffshoot of his work, not its main branch. Certainly Heaney associates the female principle with earth and territoryas well: 'mother ground' is a phrase he uses in 'Kinship', and themother here is a powerfuland destructive force. But it is the fatherswho work, and make war on, that territorywho possess Heaney's imagination, the victimsand casualties, the hearth-feedersand waggon-gods whom he describes with (and to whom he attributes) such 'manly pride'. This is an importantpoint to bear in mind when considering Heaney's influenceon othercontemporary poets, some of whom are more adamant than he is about thepriority offathers over mothers. Phallocentrism is an undeniable feature of the contemporary scene. Residual sexism no doubt plays itspart (it is evidentin theabsurd weightingof Edward Lucie-Smith's 1984 edition of the anthologyBritish Poetry Since 1945, where only six women out ofnearly one hundred poets are represented),but when the phallocentrism springs, as I think it does, from deep-rooted assumptions about power and 'priority' (assumptions common among women as well as men) thenI thinkit should be less surprisingthat there is still a depressinglack ofwomen poets and, more important,of women's poetry,in the currentgeneration (and fromthe account of that generationthat follows here). Carol Rumens and Elaine Feinstein have writtenfine elegies fortheir fathers;Vicki Feaver and Selima Hill have explored the tangled relationship between mothers and daughters. But there is no evidence here or among a number of other talented young women poets of a commanding figurelike Sylvia Plath, whose denunciatory 'Daddy' was the key feministtext of the previous poetic generation;nor is therethe obsessive, multi-layeredfiliality to be found in Heaney or Harrison. Filiality is currentlya matterfor sons not daughters,or so a reading ofcontemporary poetry (if not ofthe contemporary novel or shortstory) would suggest. The omission of woman poets is none the less one reason why this essay cannot purport to be a comprehensivesurvey of currentwriting. There are male poets, too, who deserve to be included in any overview but whose

4John Haffenden, Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation (London, 1981),pp. 57-75 (see especiallypp. 6o-6i). Page-referencesto Haffendenare insertedin texthereafter.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 184 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry achievement would only be distortedwithin the thematicframework of this essay. Douglas Dunn, Peter Reading, Christopher Reid, Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, and Tom Paulin are among them. Longley has, in fact, writtenmoving poems about his father.And in Paulin's case it was tempting to develop the briefcomments on his fatherwhich he makes in an interview ('My father'sa headmaster. . .. He's also in fascinatingways a utilitarian' (Haffenden, p. 158)) and to link them to a pedagogic case against utilita- rianism in his work. But this, I think, only illustrates how tidy parento- biographical interpretationscan infiltrateand distortcomparatively minor aspects of a poet's output: in Paulin's case 'history' is considered an honourable subject fora poet, but familyhistory (as the poem 'Descendancy' implies) a distractionand obfuscation: All thosefamily histories are likesucking a polo mint- you'repulled right through a tightwee sphincter thatloses you. In the mini-essays that follow I have tried to focus on what Leavis might have called the central 'problem' in a writer's work and, while drawing where appropriate on biographical information,to heed Paulin's warning about the dangers of becoming lost in the beguiling minutiae of family historiesand filialsongs.

II I willinherit his vest, its Englishrose, one petal darned,his boxinglicence withthe rusty staples, thesilver-plated cup presentedby von Ribbentrop whichstands on thesideboard, confidentlyarms akimbo butworn away byDuraglit Touchingtheir terror, I gaze at themnow, longerthan someone in love. (Craig Raine, 'A HungryFighter') It is Craig Raine's fate,and perhaps misfortune,to have become labelled by a poem which, if we accept it as his chief contributionto contemporary poetry,classifies him as writerof light verse. Some of the responsibilityfor this must lie with Raine himselffor having entitledhis second collection A MartianSends a PostcardHome (London, 1979), and thus accorded the poem of that title an importance he mightnot wish forit now; and some withJames Fenton, who as adjudicator of the New Statesman'sPrudence Farmer Award

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 185 in 1978 coinedthe term 'Martian school' to describethe work of Raine and ChristopherReid: 'a schoolthat ought to be noticedsince it has enrolledtwo of the best poets writingin England today'.5Fenton has since writtena manifestoagainst manifestos;Raine probablyfeels about the poem as Larkinsaid he did about 'ChurchGoing' and Hardy did about Tessof the D'Urbervilles:'If I'd knownit was goingto be popularI'd have triedto make it better.'6But thelabel has stuck,and so (unlessrescued) is Raine. Not that'A MartianSends a PostcardHome' is a bad poem,but its inner logic does not happilysurvive close scrutiny.The visitingMartian of the poem has a freshand observanteye. He also has a linguisticquirk tanta- mountto nominalaphasia: he knowsobjects by their prototype or inventor, notby their name; car and booksbecome 'Model T' and 'Caxtons'.This is a refinedkind of description,and otherparts of his vocabularyare more sophisticatedstill, as whenhe describesmist as makingthe world 'dim and bookish like engravingsunder tissue paper', a simile which seems too maturein its earthlyknowledge and whichshows he has the word 'book' afterall. The poemis a cleverriddling comedy, with a hauntingevocation of the telephone('If theghost cries, they carry it to theirlips and sootheit to sleep') whichis rathermore than that, so thatwe don'tresent the inconsis- tenciesin the narrativeviewpoint: the main pointis the humorousOstra- nienie,the world made funnyand strange.But it has to be said thatthere is nothere the same concertedapplication of 'limited vision' as can be foundin a novelthat certainly influenced Raine, William Golding's The Inheritors. The emphasison the 'childlikevision' of Raine's writinghas also been misleading.Children are, of course, important in hiswork: he has dated his suddenpoetic fertility to thebirth of his first child, and partof his distinctive contributionto thecontemporary scene has been his admissionof children intopoetry written by men,against an orthodoxystrengthened by Larkin's notorioushostility to 'theirnoise, their nastiness, their boasting, their back- answers,their cruelty, their silliness'.7 The 'limitedvision' of childrenis obviouslysimilar to thatof visiting aliens, as Raine himselfimplies when he describes children as 'foreignersin our world until they become naturalised'.8But childlikeinnocence of viewpoint in Raine's poetryis more apparentthan real. 'Layinga Lawn', forexample, from that same collection and about thepoet laying turf in thecompany of his daughter, certainly does have 'innocent'analogies: teeth like 'segmentsof sweet-corn', a caterpillar 'ruckedlike a curtain'.But theadult subtext meanwhile accumulates images ofmortality: the adjectives 'wrinkled' and 'crumbling',the image of 'the thin charcoalcrucifix Iher legs and buttocksmake', the biblical nouns 'earth' and

5 'Of the Martian School',New Statesman,20 October 1978, p. 520. 6 London no.8 Ian Hamilton,'Four Conversations', Magazine,4, (November1964), 71-77 (p. 73). 7 Larkin, 'The Savage Seventh', in RequiredWriting: Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-82 (London, 1983), pp.'At Ange1-16a Slight(p. uarto(October1981),p.).theUniverse', 8 'At a to the Slight Angle Universe', Quarto(October 1981),p. 15.

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'grass' which in this contextsummon 'earth to earth' and 'all fleshis grass'. The poet ends by asserting: For themoment, our bodies are immortalin theirignorance - neitherone ofus can read thisDomesday Book. The 'ignorance' does not go very deep: assuring us that he cannot read the Domesday Book the poet simultaneously does read it, bringing us the message that life is shorter than we think. It is a poem strictlyfor adult consumption. The same strategy (the poet and his daughter 'reading' nature, where emblems of mortalityare everywhereto be found) underlies 'Pretty Baa Lamb' fromthe same collection; the ironic gap between what the innocent sees and what the adult knows is indeed one which Raine frequently occupies. So, too, 'In Modern Dress', fromthe later Rich (London, 1984), is 'childlike' only in the sense that children once again featurestrongly. The key here is that the images all evoke the Elizabethan or Shakespearian era: the poet's baby son becomes Sir Walter Raleigh 'trail[ing] his comforter about the muddy garden', or a criminaloffender stuckin thehigh chair likea pillory,features peltedwith food. The task forthe adult and (of necessity) highlyliterate reader is to identify the Shakespearian allusions planted in the text:from the blackbirds 'warring in the roses' throughthe 'ruff'on a glass of beer to (Shakespeare at another remove) the copy of'Sylvia Plath's ArielI drowned in the bath'. The conceit is ingenious, the child as explorera persuasive thesis,the disorderedhome and garden neatly suggestiveof the social unrestof an earlier epoch. But finally the process (or procession) of allusion is too relentless,the detectionof clues too much like the solving of a crossword puzzle. It would be hard to make serious claims for Raine, other than as an ingenious light versifier,on the basis of this poem. There is a thirdmisconception about him which needs to be corrected:the opinion, firstexpressed by Derek Mahon in his review of Raine's firstbook The Onion,Memory (Oxford, 1978), that he is a cold and 'heartless' writer.9 Poems that are ingenious in the manner of the Metaphysicals must always face this charge, a point Raine recognizes in his appreciation ofJohnDonne when he notes that an early complaint against Donne was that his poetry lacked feeling:Raine defends Donne (and by implication himself)when he describes the image of the surgeon in 'The Comparison' as 'genuinely tender,without wearing its tendernesson its sleeve', a defencehe would also

9 'Have a Heart', New Statesman,23June 1978, p. 852.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 187 want to apply to his own 'In the Mortuary'.10It is indicative ofhow original Raine's voice was, and how entrenchedis the English equation of cleverness and coldness, that early reviewersshould have reacted as theydid: for,on the contrary,Raine is a warm and effusivepoet, almost too prone to display his softerfeelings. There are repeated images of tendernessand delicacy, albeit in unexpected places: 'Delicately, the foreman's tongue feels along his bottom lip', 'each breast, a tender blister needing to be dressed'. His portraits of children and the old come perilously close to sentimental caricature: 'the dear old thing afraid of a khaki envelope', 'the child who remembers nothing,land weeps with holly-pointed lashes'. Even his tough-seeming and tightlywritten narratives ('In the Dark', about a girl becoming pregnant, or 'Oberfeld Webel Beckstadt', about a Nazi who has burntJewish corpses but whose wife,when he returnshome afterwar, 'will call him Otto I and make him cry') skirtthe edges ofmelodrama, whetherof a Victorian or more modern kind. All this leads me to say that Raine is a very differentpoet fromthe one described by his reviewers.What sortof poet is he then?One hintis given by James Fenton when, in penance forhis earlier Martian manifesto,he calls Raine 'an erotic poet'."l Another and fulleranswer lies in the prose memoir of childhood, and in particular the account of his father,to be found at the centreof Rich. That Raine's fatheris a remarkableman by any standards the second sentence makes clear: 'In the thirties,my fatherhad been a painter and decorator, plumber, electrician, publican and boxer, but when I was growingup, he was a Spiritualistand a faithhealer, talkingabout his negro spirit-guide,Massa, and explaining how he knew when people were cured because he feltburning coals in the palms of his hands'. We hear more: how his fatherhad boxed for England against Germany in 1937 at the Albert Hall, and had fought for the British featherweighttitle against Micky McGuire; how he was a brilliantraconteur and could peel an apple in one piece; and how, after an accident in a munitions factoryduring the war which required fiveoperations on his brain, he was subject to epileptic fits. Raine's motheris a subsidiary figurein the memoir: a devout Catholic, who took in sewing to make ends meet, she is said to have had social pretensions, 'a classic Lawrentian motherwho wanted her childrento do well', the author puts it elsewhere (Haffenden,p. 175). Raine has claimed to be influencedby both parents 'equally' (Haffenden, p. 176), and there are indeed an equal number of poems devoted to them: the most memorable about his motheris 'A Season in Scarborough', about her lifeas a servant among the rich; and about his father'A Hungry Fighter' in Richand the 'Anno Domini' sequence in The Onion,Memory, the fragmentedbiography of a faith-healer.

10 'Making Love with the Light On', The Listener,5 April 1984, pp. 12-15 (p. 13)- 'A Manifesto no. 1' Against Manifestos', PoetryReview, 73, 3 (September 1983), 12-15 (p. i5).

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A critic-biographerin search of easy hereditary 'explanations' could make muchof the faith-healing. Like his father, Raine specializesin miraclesof the imagination:his writing,it could be said, heals and transformsthrough an act of faith,in his case the faiththat visual analogy can be endlessly productive.Something could be made of the pugilism,too: the Raine persona is aggressiverather than receptive,actively pursuing meanings ratherthan waitingto be struckby them.But thisis dangerousground. What thememoir does usefullyunderline is Raine's capacityfor finding the ordinaryworld extraordinary. He is notalone amonghis generationin this emphasis:in thefiction of Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, and in thepoetry of Fentonand Muldoon,one can detecta widespreadreaction against the decent, dogged 'ordinariness'of the Movementgeneration. For Raine, Fenton, and Muldoon, backwatersrun deep: one need not be bored, unhappyand resignedto them,as Larkin'scharacters are, since theyare awash with eccentricityand bizzarerie.(Equally, Raine implies in his domesticcelebration 'An Enquiryinto Two Inchesof Ivory',one need not feelas Larkindoes that'Home is so sad' and thatwe all hate 'havingto be there'.) This looks like an anti-Movementprogramme, but withRaine at leastthe sentiments date back to childhood,as a keypassage shows: The townI grewup in was a typical,ugly small town in the north of England ... It feltan ordinaryplace, but my father's friend, Billy Llewelyn, could play the saw, growblack carnations, go withoutsleep for three weeks at a timeand expandhis chestfrom thirty-six inches to fifty-two inches in three breaths. The last accomplish- mentand the saw-playing were a featureof the concert parties. When his chest was fullyexpanded, he was unableto speak. When he did sleep,he simply went into a trancefor five minutes. The night hours he spent gardening by floodlight. I accepted all ofthis without thinking itin any way unusual.

Characteristically,the adult voice intrudesat theend thereto registerthat all thisclearly was unusual. But what the adult voice does notintrude is class consciousnessor invertedsnobbery: the paternal influence prevents Raine frompatronizing or being patronized;his prose,like BerylBainbridge's, leaps clean over the social (and socialist)considerations to be foundin a worksuch as TheUses of Literacy. This, indeed,is partof the thesis of Rich, which plays subtly and ironically withnotions of what it means to be 'rich'.We learnthat, though poor and working-class,Raine wenton a scholarshipto publicschool, and thatone effectof this was tomake him look down on hisfather, whom he had formerly idolized:he didn'thave a professionor evenajob, and Raine lied to conceal thisbefore regaining pride in hisfather in lateradolescence. These awkward truthsare retailedwith honesty and giveshape to thebook. The memoiris entitled 'A Silver Plate', which mightseem to denote privilegebut refersin fact to the plate inserted in Raine's father'sbrain during surgery.Taking theircue fromthis irony,the sections on eitherside of the memoirare called 'Rich' and 'Poor'. In the firstare poems about wealth, 'high' culture,power,

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 189 sexual fulfilment,luxury, and kingship:in the opening title-poem,for instance,to the poet's 'muse', we have a Steinwaypiano, a thoroughbred racehorse,a snooker-table,and land. The 'Poor' sectionmoves downstairs, not just into the world of the workingclass, but also to otherkinds of 'poverty':exile, bereavement,illness, criminality, terror, and death. The categoriesare not inflexible,however, and thisis Raine's point:his book redefinesrichness, triumphing in theworld of invention, indicating how it is possibleto be imaginativelyrich while being economically (or in otherways) deprived.The structureof Rich becomes an argumentor dissertation, though thepoems retain individual integrity. Richalso makesclear thatthe keyto Raine is not analogyor correspon- dence (as the 'Martian' reputationsupposes) but an appetitefor physical description.As a child,we learn,he enjoyeda passed-downEagle annual not forits 'moral rearmament propaganda' but for its pictures, and likewiseread a pictorializedversion of Stevenson's Kidnapped (he hasn'tread thenovel to thisday). Raine stillreads and writesin pictures,and hispoetry and indeed criticalprose is peculiarlyincapable of abstractthought, moving swiftly fromone concreteimpression to the next. If the weaknessof this is that 'ideas' in hispoetry tend to be fewand simple,with memento mori uppermost, the strengthis the resistanceto clicheand convention.Accurate physical descriptionbecomes a formof candour,cutting through moral and social pieties,as in thecontroversial 'Arsehole'. Simile is partof this, since what it boldlyyokes together can be shocking.But Richdemonstrates that Raine's visual powerscan also focuson thething itself, not thething as resembling anotherthing or everythingbeing like everythingelse. Though Richcon- tinuesto 'fishfor complements', as he putsit, it also includesa poem called 'Plain Song'. Thereis plainnesstoo in suchimages as 'thegreen on a fielder's knee',or in thedescription of the man 'gardeninga grave'in 'A Walk in the Country': Hisjacket is folded, lining-sideout, andlaid on a headstone as hetends tohis fainted plants, carefullyunwrapping thedark, moist newsprint. That succeedsbecause so literal,just as the'limited viewpoint' of a poem like'Again' succeedsbecause so faithfuland fittingto the subject, a manwho has had a strokeand is paralyseddown one side,and whose'innocent' eye proffersneither Martian comedynor childlikememento mori but sombrely evokes a world ofpain and semi-consciousness.But thereis a price to pay. As the lines above suggest, the baggy inventiveness of The Onion,Memory is replaced by stanza formswhich are preeninglyslim and well-achieved, a bit too pleased with their own shapeliness. The development is one which

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 19go A Readingof Contemporary British Poetry betraysa deepertension in Raine's work,between a generouspopulism on theone hand and a narrowaestheticism on theother, a conflictwhich again showsup in his memoir.For Raine it is notenough that his backgroundis richand extraordinary:it mustalso be shownto be thebreeding ground of thefuture poet. 'Inspirationran in thefamily', he saysin his thirdsentence, and latervindicates his fatherby sayingthat such and such a thinghe did (peelingan apple in one piece,telling bedtime stories) was 'artistic',surely theleast interestingaspect of those activities. In thesame spiritthere is the acknowledgements-pageofRich ('As mostreaders will realise, I have freely adaptedto myown purposes work by Dante, MarinaTsvetayeva, Rimbaud, the anonymousAnglo-Saxon poet of "Wulf and Eadwacer" and Ford Madox Ford') whichlooks miscalculated, not because ofthe list itself, but because ofthat (naive? disingenuous?) phrase 'as mostreaders will realise'. The anxietyto vindicatehimself and claim theright to enterthe worldof 'high culture'is evident,too, both in Raine's abundant and sometimes pointlessuse of epigraphsand in his excessiveand sometimesdistracting allusivenessin thetexts themselves. Against this one can set the simple and affectionatedescription of tradesmenin the'Yellow Pages' sectionof TheOnion, Memory and theloving use of brand-namesin his poems: JohnnieWalker, Wrights Coal Tar, Imperial Leather,Duraglit, Saxone, Typhoo,Sunblest, Cadbury's Flake, and so on. Betjemanand Larkinuse brand-namestoo, and Rainehas someof theirpopulism. At times,indeed, his phrasemaking about 'hearts' and 'tears' is reminiscentof Cole Porter;I'd liketo hearFrank Sinatra set loose to sing someof the following: 'It is theonion, memory, that makes me cry','It's no use tryingto be sad Iabout thedead', 'We neverclose I the branch line of the heart','I have a headachein myheart', 'trying to makelove we onlymake adultery','Someone else, not here, someone Iknows her hair is partedwrongly'. Perhapsthe best way to put thiswould be to say thatRaine is a naturally vulgarpoet trying (at timesproductively, at timesnot) to be an elegantone. 'Vulgar' need not be thepejorative it has widelybecome. 'Nothing pleases me morethan vulgar sentiments, vulgar expressions, and vulgarityitself', G. Cabrera Infantewrites in his autobiographicalnovel Infante'sInferno ((London, 1984), p. 252), and proceedsto list some of the great 'vulgar' artists:Cervantes, Sterne, Dickens, Joyce. The list would not displease Raine either,who has beenmuch influenced by the last two names on it,and who seemsto me 'vulgar'in thesense of being effusive, sentimental, careless ofmoral and social convention,immensely physical in his imagination,and endowedwith a 'commontouch' and commandof the language of common men. It is an uneasyreputation to have,and theformidable apparatus that surroundsRaine's workstrenuously plays it down. But he is thatkind of writer, and nothing demonstrates it more than his supposition that his parents, his home, and, by the same token,his children,are fitand moving subjects forart.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 191

III Back in our silencesand sullenlooks, forall theScotch we drink,what's still between 's notthe thirty or so years,but books, books, books. (Tony Harrison,'Book Ends') It is not surprising,given his conviction that being economically deprived need not preventus frombeing imaginativelyrich, that Craig Raine should have expressed reservationsabout the work ofTony Harrison.12 Both poets grew up in working-classfamilies in the industrialNorth (Harrison in Leeds, Raine in County Durham), but where Raine in 'A Silver Plate' presentshis parents as participants in a colourful drama of small-town life, Harrison treats his as emblems of class and cultural underprivilege. And where Raine's tone is freeof resentment,Harrison's bears grudges and (socialist) anger. His role, ratherlike Heaney's, is that of an avenger speaking forthe silent or dispossessed. Yet, again like Heaney, he is also conscious of the distance between himselfand his parents, and feels guiltyfor having been assimilated into a literate bourgeois culture which exploits and ignores the likes of them. Guilt must always be a strongfeeling in relation to parents, especially when theyare dead: fiftyyears aftersome apparently trivialact of contumacy, SamuelJohnson made belated amends to his fatherby standing bareheaded for an hour in Uttoxeter market, where his fatherhad run a bookstall. But Harrison's is more than reparation of this sort. He casts himselfin his poems as a sort of prole-princeof Elsinore, a brooding figure separated through education fromthe parental home, accusing himselfof inaction and unfilialityyet determinedto avenge his fatherand his father's class. Some of these tensions are explored in a poem called 'Illuminations' (the title, in typically punning Harrison fashion, links the famous Blackpool lightswith spiritualinsights), the second section ofwhich shows him and his parents grippingthe pier machine that gave you shocks. The currentwould connect. We'd feelthe buzz ravelour looseningties to one tensegrip, thefamily circle, one continuousUS! That was thefirst year on myscholarship And I'd be theone to makethat circuit short.

The familyunity here is beautifulbut dangerous, the intimacythrilling but also potentially fatal. Even as Harrison celebrates, and then (later in the poem) desperately strives to preserve, his relationship with his parents ('Two dead, but current still flows through us three'), so he admits his defection. His poems about his parents are more atonement than recollec- tion. As he puts it in 'Confessional Poetry','I'm guilty,and the way I make it

12 'Subjects',London Review ofBooks, 5, no. 18 (6-I9 October1983), 5-7 (P. 5).

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 192 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry up's in poetry'.The guiltstems not simply from 'abandoning' his parents, as most childrennecessarily do in some degree,but frompractising an art which, no matterhow heartfelt,fails to communicatewith them. The insurmountabledifficulty is set out in two lines of 'The Rhubarbarians': 'Sorry,dad, you won'tget thatquatrain I (I'd liketo be thepoet myfather reads).' 'Turns' putsthe self-accusation more bluntly still: 'I'm openingmy trapI to buskthe class thatbroke him.' The pointto be made hereis thatHarrison's poems about his parentsare morethan simple elegies, and thatto praisethem for being 'moving' (as most reviewersand criticshave done) is to emasculatethem of their hard political edge. PhilipLarkin is one admirerof Harrison,13 and whenin 'Book Ends' we see Harrisonand his fathersunk in theirsilences and sullenlooks on the day ofMrs Harrison'sfuneral, 'books, books, books' between them, it is hard not to be remindedof Larkin's 'Reference back', wherea similaremotional and culturalgap opens up betweenparent and childas theson, on a brief visithome, 'idly' plays jazz records.But thedifference between the poems is instructive.The pain in Larkin'sis theillusion that mother and son could have preservedthe more intimate relationship they had whenhe was a child, that'by actingdifferently we couldhave kept it so', inevitablethough it was that theywould become separated.Harrison's is a more blamingpoem, withoutthe same senseof inevitability. 'We nevercould talk much, and now don't try':the son a 'scholar',the father 'worn out on poorpay', theyhave been forcedapart not by the passing of time but by a systemwhich assimilatesbright working-class boys into the middle class. The poem,like manyof Harrison's, is an elegy,but it showsthat the elegy need not be an apoliticalform. 'Who am I', Douglas Dunn asks in his collectionElegies, about the death of his young wife, 'to weep for Salvador or Kam- puchea When I am made theacolyte of my own shadow?'.But Harrison's differentcircumstances allow himto writeelegies which do have a political conscience. The political importof Harrison'sfilial art becomes clearer,I think, throughan examinationof the structure of his majorsonnet sequence, 'The School of Eloquence', which has grownfrom ten poems publishedin a privateedition (London, 1976),to eighteenin Fromthe School ofEloquence and OtherPoems (London, 1978), to fiftyin Continuous(London, 1981), to sixty- fourin theSelected Poems (London, 1984).Two keypoints emerge. The firstis thatthough in principlecommitted to an open-endedstructure, like Berry- man's sonnets,capable ofinfinite extension, Harrison has graduallyevolved a clear, thematic,tripartite frame for his sequence. The intimatecom- memorativefamily poems of Partii are precededby the densely-wrought politico-historicalpoems of PartI and followedby a looser set of poems (about politics, history,art, and mortality) in Part III: the elegies at the

13 See Larkin, 'Under a common flag', Observer,14 November 1982, p. 23.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 193 centreacquire theirmeaning from the contextin whichthey are set. The second keypoint is thatthis context was actuallyuppermost in Harrison's mindwhen he began to writethe sequence: of the eighteen poems in Fromthe Schoolof Eloquence, the first public airing of the sequence, thirteen belong to what later became PartI, threeto Partin, and onlytwo to Partii. At this earlystage the sequence was moreblatantly and single-mindedlya thesis about politicaland linguisticoppression than it appearsin SelectedPoems. The threeepigraphs to thesequence emphasize the balance of the political and the familial.(Continuous also carriesa dedicationin memoryof Harri- son's motherand father,who died in 1976and 1980respectively.) The first, explainingthe title, comes from E. P. Thompson'sThe Making of the English WorkingClasses (London, 1963),and illustrateswhat will be a majortheme of thepoems, the suppression of working-class speech. The secondis in Latin, and is footnotedmerely 'John Milton, 1637'; in fact,the verses come from Milton's'Ad Patrem'(the date ofwhich is problematic),the poem in which he pays tributeto his father('my greatestgifts could nevermatch yours') whilealso justifyinghis intentionto becomea poet:Harrison includes only theopening and concludingpassages, though it is clear thatmuch of what comes in betweenis also of pertinence:'Do not, then,I pray,persist in contemptfor the sacred Muses', forexample, an invocationwhich ghosts suchpoems of Harrison's as 'A Good Read'. The thirdepigraph, Harrison's own,merges the political and familialstrains: Howyou became a poet's a mystery! Whereverdidyou get your talent from? I say:I hadtwo uncles, Joe and Harry - onewas a stammerer,theother dumb. These twouncles reappear later in thesequence: Harry in PartI, a deaf-mute who had 'eloquent'recourse to a dictionarywhen refuting 'Tory errors'; Joe in PartIII, a printerwho could 'handset type much faster than he spoke'.The poet's inheritance,this epigraphimplies, is linguisticstruggle, awkward articulacy,'mute ingloriousness',and the poems thatfollow are rifewith imageryof stuttering,spitting, and chewing,the mouth'all stuffedwith glottals,great lumps to hawk up and spit out'. If the metreand syntax sometimesseem strained, this is preciselyHarrison's point: his poemslet us knowthat they have comeup thehard way; they are written with labour, and out ofthe labouring classes, and on behalfof Labour Partyaspirations. The poems of Part I are about linguisticand politicalstruggle, refracted (at timesjokily) throughHarrison's own experiencesas a scholarshipboy. There are allusionsto his family,but he deliberatelyrefrains from mention- inghis father, whose grand entrance in thefirst poem of Part ii is preparedfor in the final two poems of this section: both these are about miners and enlarge our notion of the tribe or community to which he belongs. Thus when Harrison refersto 'His, his dad's and hisdad's lifetimedown below', he is not in fact talking about his own father,a baker, but about a retired

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 194 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry colliery-worker.Yet the phrasealerts us to the historicalrealities, of lives spent'underneath', in exploitationand servitude,which underlie the filial elegiesof Partii. A similaremphasis is presentin PartIII, whichafter the interludeof familyintimacy begins with a poem called 'SelfJustification' thatreturns us to thepolitico-linguistic imagery of Part I. Once again thereis a searchfor heredity, as Harrisonseeks out 'lines' to his grandfathers('Fell farmer,railwayman and publican')and is assumedinto an ancientNorthern 'male' traditionthat includes such men as thepaperhanger in Wordsworth's Dove Cottage.Within the intellectual framework of this concluding section Harrisoncontemplates 'extinction': that of his parents, but also oflanguage, art,and variousspecies of girds and animals. I do notmean to underplaythe importance of the elegies of Part ii. In the latestversion of the sequence in theSelected Poems these make up thebulk of 'The Schoolof Eloquence' (thirty-fivepoems out of a totalof sixty-four) and provideits plainest and mostpowerful passages. But it is no coincidencethat theopening poem of Partii shouldbe called 'Book Ends': withoutintellec- tual support on each side the central section would not stand up so convincingly.Nor shouldone overlookthe theatricality of these apparently vulnerablepoems. Harrison, who has writtenand translatedfor the theatre, here transformshis home into a stage-set.His fatheris cast as a figureof tragi-comedy:with his footballand darts,his flatcap and longjohns,his grousesagainst 'Pakis' and againsthis son's long hair, and his touching refusalto believe his wife is reallydead (he renewsher bus pass and keepsher slippers'warming by the gas'), he threatensto become a 'character',a GeorgeFormby figure, the sad-but-funny stuff of Northern working men's clubs. Harrison'smother, a lesserfigure, plays thewife to his AndyCapp, indignantlyunappreciative of her son's firstbook, TheLoiners ('You weren't broughtup to write such mucky books'), a cruelirony since the aggressive sexuality and low dictionof that book wereintended not to shockher but to epaterles bourgeois.Harrison dramatizes himself, too, as a poet easilymoved to tears and ends thesection with an imageof himself, at his writing-desk,reflected in theglass ofa photo-frameof his dead parents. The self-consciousnessis an importantelement of the sequence: if Part I is thegrowth of the poet's mind, Part ii bringshis schooling in eloquence,as he is made to recognizethe limitsof his classical education:its divisiveness ('ah sometimesthinkyou read too many books', his father complains) and itsfailure to instructhim in lifeand death.In thesecond half of 'Book Ends' Harrison strugglesto supplyan epitaphfor his mother'sgravestone; his father proves less emotionallyinarticulate: I've gotthe envelope that he'd been scrawling, mis-spelt,mawkish, stylistically appalling, but I can't squeeze morelove into their stone. This is reminiscent of Pope's tribute to his father in the 'Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot': 'Unlearned, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,INo language

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 195 but the language of the heart.' By the middle of the sequence, though,when he comes to write about his father'sdeath, Harrison has himselflearnt the language of the heart, has inheritedthat gift.When in 'Marked with D.' his politico-historicalgrudges reappear theyhave a new emotional directness: Whenthe chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven notunlike those he fuelledall hislife, I thoughtof his cataractsablaze withHeaven and radiantwith the sight of his dead wife, lightstreaming from his mouthto shape hername, 'notFlorence and notFlo butalways Florrie'. I thoughthow his cold tongueburst into flame butonly literally, which makes me sorry, sorryfor his sake there'sno Heaven to reach. I getit all fromEarth my daily bread buthe hungeredfor release from mortal speech thatkept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead. The baker'sman thatno one willsee rise and Englandmade to feellike some dull oaf is smoke,enough to stingone person'seyes and ash (notunlike flour) for one smallloaf. Harrison is a punning poet, and the puns here go close to the bone (bone/bone up on being a pun he uses elsewhere): cataracts(heavenly waterfalls/aneye defect), daily bread (food/intellectualsustenance), and rise,which is what bread does, but what (so the atheistic son believes) the soul fails to after death, and what his fatherfailed to do in life,too. In that last use, the word becomed an accusation against the rigid social stratificationof the country,a charge that there is somethingrotten in the state of England. Harrison's tears do not, it seems, drown his verbal resourcefulnessor preventhim coolly retreatingfrom his own metaphors: 'I thoughthow his cold tongue burst into flameI but only literally.'As Chris- topher Reid remarks in a perceptive review, 'the truthof the poem is to be found in that prosaic and killjoyphrase'.14 So, too, the understated'sorry' is an expression both of deep sorrowat his father'sdeath and of a scarcely less passionate disappointment that his father's ('and his father's, and his father's') social and linguisticaspirations will not now be realized. What is 'moving' about such elegies is that, ratherthan let us languish in surrogate guilt and grief,they move us to a potentiallyconstructive anger. 'The School of Eloquence' is such a peak in Harrison's writingthat it is difficultto see what else he can achieve, except extend the sequence indefinitely,as the titleContinuous implies he might.But he does appear to be moving away from his favourite verse-form,the Meredithian sonnet, towards a more circular and ruminativemode. The SelectedPoems end with a number of pieces set in the United States. In one, 'The Lords of Life', an

14'Articulating the Awkwardness', TLS, 15January1982, p. 49.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 196 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry aggressive Southern redneckneighbour identifies the poet as a 'fairy',just as the schoolfriendsin 'Me Tarzan' had found him a 'cissy', and expresses suspicion of his Hamlet-like inaction and bookishness,just as his fatherhad done: familiar anxieties, about effeminacy,art, and unfiliality,are here re- explored and newly dramatized. But Harrison has also returned more directlyto the matterof his parentsin a long and importantpoem, 'v.', which is set in the Leeds graveyard where his parents lie buried. On a briefvisit home the poet finds'UNITED graffitiedon my parents' stone', the workof a Leeds-supporting skinhead with an aerosol can. In dialogue with this skinhead Harrison is forced to reflecton the forces of division in British society and in himself: divisions of class, sex, religion, language, and employment (the setting is 1984, the year of the Miners' Strike). The skinhead (or 'skin', one of the poem's many wordplays) is profane,yobbish, and brutalized; but his frustrationsare skilfullyarticulated, and the poet recognizes him as an alterego as well as an enemy, the vandal he himself might have been and to some extent is. Harrison paints a bleak picture of contemporaryEngland but retainsthe hope that the aerosolled 'v.' ofversus, emblem ofthe schisms in our society,may become the 'v.' ofvictory, as those polarities merge and unite. There is comfort,then, even in the desecration of his parents' grave, which carries the half-promise,as 'Marked withD.' could not, that all will ultimatelybe well. It is as much as any son can wish forhis dead parents, and forhis society: ThoughI don'tbelieve in afterlifeat all and knowit's cheatingit's hardnot to make a sortof furtive prayer from this skin's scrawl, his UNITED mean 'in Heaven' fortheir sake. an accidentof meaning to redeem an act intendedas meredesecration and makethe thoughtless spraying of his team applyto higherthings, and to thenation. IV Whateverit is, it all comesdown to this; My father'scock Betweenmy mother's thighs. (Paul Muldoon,'October 1950') Paul Muldoon's firstbook, New Weather(London, 1973), appeared when he was twenty-one,and its dedication reads: 'formy Fathers and Mothers'. His work has sometimes been described as ostentatious, and no doubt his detractors (those who regard him as facetious alongside Heaney, evasive alongside Paulin, lightweightalongside Longley and Mahon) would be eager to see the plural in his dedication as an example of showy precocious- ness. In the event, though, Muldoon here provides a clue to his subsequent achievement, pointing on one level to the differentmen and women who have made or shaped him, and on another indicating that his mother and

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 197 fatherare people who come (or come in his poetry) wearing many different guises. Muldoon is much concerned with plural genealogy: his poetry uncovers the diverse forcesin his life that have brought him to this pass; it has a fascination with mixed or shiftingidentities. The evidence of this is already present in one of the bafflingfirst poems of that firstbook, 'The Waking Father', which makes typical use of a real or imagined childhood memory ('My fatherand I are catching sprickliesI Out of the Oona river') and then offersus an equally typical metamorphosis as the river fillswith piranhas and his father,'maybe dead or sleeping', becomes 'a king'. New Weatheris an elusive firstbook, maddening not least in its being printed in italics, which is one metamorphosis too many. But Muldoon has already marked out his territory:the tactics of the last poem, for instance, a long narrative which draws on Red Indian myth,are to be the tactics of the last poems in his subsequent books. Muldoon's terraincomes more clearlyinto view in the firstof his poems in which his parents appear together.'The Mixed Marriage', fromhis second book, Mules (London, 1977), is not as one mightsuppose about a marriage of mixed religion (both his parents were Catholic) but about a marriage of people fromdifferent social and cultural worlds. Muldoon has described his parents as being 'somethinglike the Morels',15 and in the poem we learn that while the father'left school at eightor nine' and 'took up the billhookand loy' ('loy' being an Irish spade), the motherwas a schoolmistressinhabiting 'the world of Castor and Pollux': She had read one volumeof Proust, He knewthe cure for farcy. I flittedbetween a holein thehedge And a roomin theLatin quarter. All marriages are mixed to some degree, all partners can be said to be opposites. But the gap between Muldoon's parents was unusually wide, or was feltby the son to be, and this gives him his model forpoetry, a mixed marriage, a flittingBlakean progressionthrough contraries. He is a learned and sophisticated poet, but his learning extends to countrylore as well as classical allusion, and his sophisticationlies in knowinghow to mix thingsup a bit. He confesses to an interestin exploring 'lives caught between heaven and earth' and has a habit of juxtaposing apparently unrelated (and unsuited) themes. 'I've become very interested',he has said, 'in structures that can be fixed like mirrorsat angles to each other' (Haffenden,pp. 131, 136). In WhyBrownlee Left (London, I980) and Quoof(London, 1983) this technique takes several differentforms. Sometimes a title is enough to indicate the boldness of thejuxtaposition: 'My fatherand I and Billy Two

is Haffenden,pp. 130-42 (p. 131). See also 'A TightWee Place in Armagh',Fortnight, July/August 1984, pp. 19, 23.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 198 A Readingof Contemporary British Poetry Rivers'.At othertimes the crossover amounts to littlemore than a Martian visualanalogy: 'the under-arm rash of sparks' in 'SkyWoman' is a shooting starbut also a girlpulling offa nylon or rayonblouse. Typically,though, there will be twostrands of imagery or narrative,in no apparentrelation to each otheryet suggestive enough to challenge the reader to discover the secret flow of intimacybetween them. In 'Whim', for instance,two strangers with a mutualinterest in translationof the Cuchu- lain legendpair off,get 'stuckin each other'(literally), and are stretchered away 'like thelast ofan endangeredspecies'. Is thisan allegoryof Ireland and England,to be comparedwith Seamus Heaney's 'Act ofUnion'? It is more lightlyand obliquelydone, but no poem whichuses the Cuchulain legendcan be entirelylight or oblique: Muldoon's,moreover, begins in the Europa, a hotel in Belfastmuch used by Englishjournalists (and much bombed) duringthe Troubles. There are similarlybeguiling juxtapositions in 'Truce', 'Palm Sunday',and 'Cuba'. In thelast of these Muldoon's father reprimandshis daughterfor arriving home late and skimpilydressed from a dance; latershe confesses a mildsexual misdemeanour to a differentpaternal figure,the priest:'He brushedagainst me, Father.Very gently.' The link betweenthis incident and theCuban missilecrisis seems to lie in an unstated or a hoveringword-play: both the sexual incident and thepolitical one have been a 'close' thing,a 'brush'with fate. If theelegance of Muldoon's poetry gives us confidencethat such connexionsexist, its chargecomes fromthe difficultywe have in discoveringwhat exactly they are. The progenyof a mixedmarriage can be expectedto have mixedfeelings and Muldoon oftenpresents himself in this way, unsure like Prufrock whetherthese things are rightor wrong,ignorant like Larkin of what is true or rightor real.To be dividedin oneself need not be disabling,however, or so he is anxiousto assert.'Mules' is about a creaturethat is neitherhorse nor ass, 'neitherone thingnor the other': may this not be 'to havethe best of both worlds'?Muldoon appears to thinkso, notleast in thematter of politics. Like mostcontemporary poets in theNorth of Ireland he has comeunder pressure to writecommitted, sides-taking verse, to 'mix it', but he has been the one moststrenuously to resist.'Where (I wondermyself) do I stand',the poet asks himselfin 'Lunch with Pancho Villa', then typicallydeflates and deflectsthe question with a changeof line: 'Where(I wondermyself) do I standI In relationto a tableand chair.'Wondering (thinking over, but also freelyimagining) is somethingwhich committed poetry makes impossible. 'Of course thereis a place in poetryfor opinion', Muldoon has said, 'but there'sno place forthe opinionated'(Haffenden, p. I37). Opinionation, gettingcross, inhibits the poet who wants to crossfreely from one side to the other.Muldoon knowsthat in NorthernIreland todayone is supposed to takesides, but asks whether it is illegitimateto siton thefence when, as 'The Boundary Commission' suggests, the fence has been so arbitrarilyposi- tioned:

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Youremember that village where the border ran Downthe middle of the street, Withthe butcher and baker in different states? Today he remarkedhow a showerof rain Had stoppedso cleanlyacross Golightly's lane It mighthave been a wall ofglass That had toppledover. He stoodthere, for ages, To wonderwhich side, if any, he shouldbe on.

It is not that Muldoon's poetry evades politics (in Quoof,for example, there are allusions to terrorists,hunger-strikers, dirty protesters,and the victims of tarring-and-feathering)but that it refrains from parading its colours: there is neither Paulin's dream of a pure Republic nor Heaney's conscience-laden search for true filiation. Muldoon's is a poetry not of introspectionbut ofinterception, not brooding solemnlybut catching things on the run. This lends it coolness and obliquity, but in the end it is no less concerned to track down ancestrythan is the poetryof Heaney. 'I too have trailed my father's spirit', his poem 'Immramma' begins, with a nod at Heaney as well as Hamlet. The fatherwhom Muldoon locates in that poem ('That's him on the verandah, drinkingrum With a man who might be a Nazi') does not bear much resemblance to his own: as he explains in an interview,it is a poem 'about never having been born ... the fatherleads a totallydifferent life (which he mighteasily have done) in which I would not have figured' (Haffenden, p. 140). This is consistent with Muldoon's method: like mirrors set at angles to one another, his poems offernew glimpses and multiple images of the figureswho appear withinthem. The fatherin 'Immramma' lives in Brazil, and thus bears a resemblance to the fatherin 'Immram', who is at one point imagined 'sittingoutside a hacienda somewhere in the Argentine': both men defect,as Brownlee also does ('flitting'in a differentsense), and establish alternative families. The source for 'Immram' is a long early Irish tale called ImmramMael Duin, or 'The Voyage of the Maelduns' (you can hear why it should appeal to Muldoon), and Tennyson is one of a number of poets to have made use of it (Muldoon considers Tennyson's version 'dreadful' (Haffenden, p. 139), which is no doubt whyin his poem a Mr and Mrs AlfredTennyson registerat a hotel reception). In the original the hero sets out to avenge his father's death and, aftermany adventures, meets a hermitwho tells him to turn the other cheek. In the Muldoon version, set in contemporaryCalifornia, the narrator is taunted at the outset by a black billiard-player:'Your old man was an asshole. I That makes an asshole out ofyou.' Wanting to 'know more about my father'and this 'new strainin my pedigree', the narratorembarks on a quest which takes him to his mother (in hospital afteran overdose), a club where his fatherused to 'throw crap', a sexual assignment, a Harlem church, and finallyto the hotel where a Howard-Hughes-like hermitcroaks 'I forgiveyou... And I forget'.

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The tough-guynarrative voice and the detective-huntowe more to Chandlerthan to earlyIrish: there are jokes about a carpetso deep you can swimin it and about 'a mile-longwhite Cadillac'. One critichas writtenthat Muldoon's versionis to theoriginal as Joyce'sUlysses is to the Odyssey,and certainlythe poem is infectedwith an allusive(and elusive)post-modernist spirit.16Little is discovered,and eventhat cannot be reliedon: Thiswas how it was. My father had been a mule. He hadflown down to Rio. Timeand time again. But he courted disaster. He triedto smuggle a wooden statue Throughthe airport at Lima. The Christof the Andes. The statue was hollow. He stumbled.It wentand shattered. Andhe had to stand idly by As a coolfifty or sixty thousand dollars worth Was trampledback into the good earth. The fatherin 'Immram'flees 'from alias to alias', and thisis typicalof a poemin whichidentities shift like sand: a girlgoes by the name of Susan and Suzanne and Susannah; 'I alreadytold you his name', thenarrator says of one character,but he has not,or does notappear tohave. The longnarrative poem, 'The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants', whichconcludes Muldoon's next collection,Quoof, plays similartricks: the chieffigure is called Gallogly,Golightly, Gollogly, Ingoldsby, and English.(Such etymo- logiesinterest Muldoon: in 'The RightArm' he writesof how the place-name is betweenecclesia and We also have a of 'Eglish' 'wedged gglise'.) string womencalled Alice,Alice A., AliceB, and AliceB. Toklas,as wellas an Aer Lingusgirl 'with an embroideredcapital letter A Ion herbreast'. The similar namescreate the sort of paranoid atmosphere, in whichcoincidences add up to suggestsome underlyinguniversal 'key', that can be foundin Thomas Pynchon's novel The Cryingof Lot49. 'Gallogly' is echoed again by a homophonicvocabulary of verbs and nouns:girlie, galoot, gallivant, gallow- glass,and gelignite. In thispoem, too, the hero is on a genealogicalquest: he is an Oglala Siouxbusily tracing the family tree ofan Ulstermanwho had some hand inthe massacre at WoundedKnee. The poem is said (on thedust-jacket) to be 'looselybased on theTrickster cycle of the WinnebagoIndians', just as 'Immram' has its mythological base, but this statementmay itselfbe a kind of trick:like the heroesof Amerindianmythology, Muldoon likes making mischief, as thatplayful but bloodthirstytransformation of the cliche 'have a hand in' ('had some hand in the massacre') makes veryapparent.

16 LesterI. Conner,'Paul Muldoon',Dictionary ofLiterary Biography, Volume XL, Poets of Great Britain and IrelandSince edited Vincent B. 196o, by SherryJr (Detroit, 1985), PP. 400-05 (p. 403).

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Yet the threepoems about his fatherin Quoof forall theirtricksiness, tap a deep source offilial feeling. These are anticipatoryelegies (his fatherdid not die until afterthe book's publication) and thus, because open to be read by theirsubject, the best sort. 'Gathering Mushrooms' derivesfrom the peculiar fact of his father'swork as a mushroom-grower.But the Heaney-ish evocations ofpaternal labour ('He carries a knife,two punnets,a bucket') give way to passages describing the use of the magic mushroom,psilocybin, and the hallucinatoryexperiences to which it gives rise.17 This in turnis complicated by a third strand of reference, sectarian Belfast: the 'dirt' where the mushrooms grow becomes the excrementof protestingprisoners in Long Kesh; and the plea 'come back' in the strangefinal section could be read as personal elegyor as invocation to the Republican goddess. The elegiac note is also presentin 'Cherish the Ladies', which claims (unreliably) to be 'my last poem about myfather': the fatheris recalled as a farmworkercaring for 'three mooley heifers',the finalimage ('the salt-lickof the world') being a movingly expansive metaphor of tears and grief.'The Mirror' is the plainest of these paternal tributes,though nothing is ever plain with Muldoon. The poem is a translation fromthe Irish of Michael Davitt, who wrote it in memoryof his father.The primarymeaning ofthe titlehas to do withthe subject-matter:the fatherin the poem has a heart attack while takingdown a heavy mirrorwhen decorating, and the son, completing thejob afterthe funeral,imagines the father'sghost returning to help him. (The'cold paradox' withwhich thepoem opens ('He was no longermy father but I was stillhis son') is not dissimilarto thatfound in Kingsley Amis's elegyto his father, 'In Memoriam W.R.A.': 'I'm sorryyou had to die I To make me sorryI You're not here now.') But another meaning of the poem's titleis that Davitt's elegy becomes a mirrorin which Muldoon can discover his own father'simage. Plural paternityhas been a themeof his workfrom the start, and 'The Mirror'provides a finalimage of his fathermultiplied, dispersed, and re-imagined,an act ofartistic revivification which offsetsthe mortalityimplicit in the closing lines: And we liftedthe mirror back in position above thefireplace, myfather holding it steady whileI drovehome thetwo nails.

V 'Hey', I said. 'Your dad, he's a writertoo, isn't he? Bet thatmade it easier.' 'Oh, sure.It's just liketaking over the family pub.' (MartinAmis, Money) Hugo Williams and Michael Hofmann are thetwo prosiestof our contemporary poets. Though fifteenyears apart in age, they are linked in their

17 See Paul Pickering('Pscilly Season', New Society, 4 October 1985, p. 21) foran interestingarticle on the 'magicmushroom' and fora possibleexplanation of the mysterious image of a frogbeing 'squeezed' in M uldoon'spoem 'The Frog'.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 202 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry acceptanceof Cowper's challenge 'to makethe verse speak thelanguage of prose without being prosaic ..., one of the most arduous tasks a poet can undertake'.'8They are also, it will come as no surpriseto report,obsessed with theirfathers, both of whom (a departurefrom the patternso far observed)were literary men who achieved modest fame. Hugh Williams was a comedyactor of stage and filmwho laterbecame a successfulplaywright. Gert Hofmannis a Germanplaywright and short-storywriter who after years of struggleachieved success in his own countryand has since been translatedinto English. Both fathers seem to have led insecure,changeable lives; both are strongand domineeringpersonalities, alongside whom the sonsfeel to be timidsuccessors. In recentsequences about their fathers both poets dredge up childhood memoriesand narratethem with deadpan authenticity.Both sequences exhibitthe conflictingfeelings to which a famousfather must necessarily expose an emulativeson (love/resentment, pride/shame,idolatry/moral superiority) and theflatness of the poetic voice is in each case a strategyto subdueintense emotion. For Williamsflatness is also a means of checkingan impulsetowards theatricality,camp, dressiness, performance. Early on in hiscareer, when he practisedand was associatedwith the minimalism of Ian Hamilton'sReview, the theatricalitywas less apparent. But with his fourthbook, Love-Life (London, 1979),the ambiguities of his work became clear. On theone hand Williamswrites with a seeminglyartless candour about firstmeetings and finalseparations, romantic love and painedmarriage. Reading the poems is like beingforced to hear someone'slife history in embarrassingdetail. On theother hand theboyish simplicity of a poemlike 'Holidays' ('We spread our thingson thesand I In frontof the hotel') is subvertedand complicated by itsending: Ourholidays look back at us insurprise Fromfishing boats and fairs Or whereverthey were going then In theirseaweed head-dresses. To whatdoes that'they' in thepenultimate line refer? How do holidays'look back' - throughphotographs? What exactly are seaweedhead-dresses, and can theyhave anythingto do withthe 'seagirlswreathed with seaweed red and brown'in Eliot's 'The Love SongofJ. Alfred Prufrock'? Williams'spoems often work in thisway: the real suddenlyshifts to the surreal,the literal turnsinto a literaryallusion. The cupboard which 'contain[s] the sea' in 'Impotence' may be the same one which holds a glacier in Auden's 'As I Walked Out One Evening'; the rhythmsand questionsof 'Bachelors' ('What do theyknow of love I These menthat have never been married .. .?') take us straightto the opening of Larkin's 'The Old Fools'; 'Love at Night' ends with a lover's paradox thatmight have been

18Quoted byWilliams in PoetryBook Society Bulletin, 126 (Autumn1985), unpaginated.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 203 used by Donne: 'Mercilessangel, it has beenyour task I To teachme how to live withoutyou finally.'Also enrichingLove-Life is a motifof playing to the audience.As titleslike 'Stagefright','Once More WithFeeling', and 'After the Show' suggest,Williams is veryconscious of puttinghis sufferingon display: 'And so you cryfor her, and the poem fallson thepage', 'Come, tears,and fallIFor othernights like this'.In theend, forsuch a directand vulnerablecollection, surprisingly little hard informationis surrendered: like thosein Jessica Gwynne'saccompanying Expressionist drawings, the facesofWilliams's protagonists remain blurred, waiting to be filledin byour own experience. In WritingHome (Oxford, 1985), a collection of poems devoted to his schooldaysand hisrelationship with his father, the theatricality of Williams is more pronouncedstill. We watch him participatein schoolboyadven- tures,act out adolescentfantasies; and we learnhow he wishesto becomean actorlike Alain Delon and ofhow his fatherdiscourages him, disputing his devotionto the profession('When I was yourage I'd seen everyplay in London ...ICan you say that?'). There is much concern with sartorial correctnessor defiance:four consecutive poems findhim in frontof the mirror,parting his hair or 'tyingand re-tyingties'. Stage metaphors predominate:his father's 'push button' cremation becomes a fantasticfinale, a last 'curtaincall'; less obviously,coming onstage becomes a metaphorfor theadolescent emerging from his father's wings: 'as ifI couldstill go on and make a start in life'. There is, too, the superb mimicryof his father's mannerismsin 'An Actor'sWar', a ventriloquismno doubtmade easierby an heirloomof letters Williams was able to drawon, butstill requiring some skilfulediting and inflectionin therecreation of this languid, elegant, actorly voice: Had a letterfrom the Income Tax askingfor some quite ridiculous sum. Nexttime you see Lil tellher to write and say I'm unlikelytobe traceable untilquite some time after the war, if then. I thinkwhen I dieI shouldlike my ashes blownthrough the keyhole ofthe Treasury inlieu offurther payments. The theatricalityinfects even thestructures and strategiesof the poems: theirsudden lift-offsfrom the literal,as in the firstpoem, 'At Least a Hundred Words', where Williams recalls the surreptitiouspassage of a marbleover his school desk-top, through an inkwell,along a systemof books and rulers,'Then a thirty-yeargap as it fallsthrough I the dust-hole into my waiting hand': their quiet wordplayand allusiveness;their occasional startlingmetaphors, as in a descriptionof smells'racing ahead of us like spaniels', retrievingthe past fromthe present, 'turning and waiting by a riverI fortheir masters to come true'. Theatre in Williams's workmay be an inheritedtrait, but it goes beyond the subject-matterof the poems deep into

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 204 A Readingof Contemporary British Poetry their behaviour. Like a good actor, the poetry seeks to be 'natural' while being carefullyrehearsed. This means eschewing rhetoricand large gesture except when special occasion demands, as it does in the sly double-sonnet 'Before the War', which sustains a finemetaphor for the 'gap' between father and son, and moves from a rather confined and privileged milieu to an emotional terrainwhich any son should recognize: Then youmourn the fact once more thatyou missedknowing him then, thatyou hardly recognize this man who somehowjumped thegun and startedahead ofyou. It isn'tfair, but there'snothing to be done. The casinosare dead and thenights are drawingin. Thoughyou followthe road map south on thespur of a lifetime you'llnever catch up withthe fun and he won'tbe backfor you. You're strungout likerunners acrossthe world, losing ground, in a race thatbegan when you were born. A journey through Europe with or in pursuit of a restless, domineering fatheris the sort of image that mighteasily be found in Michael Hofmann's work. His one collection, Nightsin theIron Hotel (London, 1983), includes a shortbut powerfulpopem, 'The Nomad, My Father', about a man who lives in one countrybut works in another: Fused withyour car, a moderncentaur, you commuteto worklike the Tartar hordes who sweptacross Europe, drinking their mares' milk. Half theweek in a neighbouringcountry, then,laden withspoils, home to yoursmoky tents. Michael Hofmann is himself'divided', born in Germany but educated in England. This culture-splitis a less significantfeature of his work,however, than its peripateticism. There is no drama of a divided soul but rather a fascinationwith people on the move, with Wanderlust;and whereas Williams has a typicallyEnglish preocupation with mobilityupward or downward on the social scale (a key episode in WritingHome is his father'sbankruptcy), Hofmann's is a mid-European preoccupation withmovement back and forth across frontiers.His poetry ranges globally for its imagery and ideas: Japanese poets, 'Gandhi's Indians', the Amazon, the Gallipoli Offensive, American and Soviet films,'captains of German industry', British darts- players, 'petrol pump attendants in Yugoslavia': all find theirway into his work. The places that most attracthim, however,are somewhere (anywhere) in Northern Europe, like the autobahn he fetches up on, its blue signpost marking the distances ('Nurnberg Ioo, Wurzburg (home of the

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Volkswagen) 2oo, Berlin 500'), and the people he writes of are people passing through:the couple in the titlepoem, or the industrialistand his wife 'in a hotel in a foreigncountry where the morals are different'.(Even the actress-girlfriendlovingly delineated in a poem ofthat titlehas to be part ofa 'touring company'.) Border towns, being places not to be lived in but travelled through,exert a special charm, as 'Fiirth i. Wald' makes clear: These stripsof towns, with their troubled histories, theyare lostin thewoods like Hansel and Gretel. Countersat peace conferences,they changed hands so often,they became indistinguishable, worthless. Polyglotand juggled like Belgium, each ofthem keeps a sparename in theother language to fallback on. Only theirwanton, spawning frontier tells them apart. Hofmann is most at home with homelessness, most rooted in his art when exploring rootlessness. His language has some of the prose-likeneutrality of translationese,never gettingabove itself,according equal status to whatever it sees flashing randomly by. There is restlessness,too, in his technique of cuttingrapidly and filmicallybetween differentimages, turningup bizarre correspondences in the process: the analogy between his fatherand Tartar hordes is by no means the boldest. His fatheris glimpsed in only one other poem in Nightsin theIron Hotel, 'Family Holidays', where the 'fecundityof his typing'mixes with the sound ofcicadas. But in a number ofpoems published piecemeal in magazines, and to appear as a sequence in Acrimony(London, 1986), the fact of his father's writingcareer is explored more fully,in particular its damaging effecton the restof the family.The tone becomes accusing ('acrimony' is Hofmann's own word for it) as the father's nomadic ways are reappraised as an act of monstrousself-gratification. The family'safely parked across the border', he leads a 'double lifeas a part-timebachelor' and evades all familyties: Like a man pleadingfor his life, you putnovels between yourself and yourpursuers - Atalanta, alwaysone stepahead ofthe game. The image echoes not only Hugo Williams's in 'Before the War' but Seamus Heaney's in 'An Afterwards',where the poet's wife,betrayed by her husband's dedication to the muse, has a similar thought: 'You leftus first, and then those books, behind.' But the angle of vision here is different,the tone less affectionate:the son expresses not only his mother'sresentment as a wronged wife (two of the poems are spoken in her voice) but also his own as someone who deserved better,first as a dependant and intimate,then later as an equal and fellow-practitioner.The father'sabsences and uncommuni- cative half-presences;his contemptuous dismissal of the familyas 'abase- ment and obligation'; his absurd egotismand remoteness('Once you offered me your clippings file- the human touch! What next: a translator'sessays,

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 206 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry a printed interview?'): these are the objects of the son's acrimony. 'Fine Adjustments', the concluding poem of the sequence, summarizes the relationship with some bitterness: All at once,my nature as a childhits me. I was a movingparticle, like the skidding lights in a film-still.Provoking and ofno account, I keptup a constantrearguard action, jibing, commenting,sermonising. 'Why did God giveme a voice,' I asked,'if you alwayskeep the radio on?' It was a fugitivechildhood. Aged four, I was chased roundand roundthe table by my father, who fell and brokehis armhe was goingto raiseagainst me. In that last stanza, punningon 'fugitive',the father is foronce pursuer,not pursued. It is not the only point at which Hofmann's poems become a distorted mirror-imageof Williams's, indeed of most contemporarypoems about fathers.Corrosively strippingthe fatherof all glamour, they are an implicit critique of a generation of pious family hommages.Yet what Hofmann, at one end of that generation, shares with Williams, Harrison, and Raine, at the other is a belief that the fatherhas had too decisive an - impact on his offspringto be neglected as subject-matter can be more easily ignored in life,in fact,than in art.

VI This was thecode: betweenfriends, trust; Betweenelder and younger,respect; between husband and wife, Distinctionin position;between father and son, Intimacy..... (JamesFenton, 'Chosun') James Fenton might seem to be an odd figureto include in this company since thereis littlemention of mothersand fathersgenerally, and none ofhis mother and fatherin particular, in the modest output of fifteenyears' work gathered (fromtwo separately-publishedtitles) in his volume 'TheMemory of War' and 'Childrenin Exile' (Harmondsworth, 1983). Yet it is precisely this absence, this apparent lack of the filial, that defines his achievement. In a television interview Fenton once said that the sort of poem he no longer wanted to see was (here he paused fora moment to findthe most excruciat- ing example) one about a fathercoming out ofthe woodshed. No such poems can be found in his work; yet the abundance of not dissimilar poems elsewhere in contemporaryBritish poetrygives his own work its rich and peculiar vacancy. Some absences are merely absences; others, as Fenton himselfsuggests in 'A German Requiem', speak volumes: It is notthe houses. It is thespaces betweenthe houses. It is notthe streets that exist. It is thestreets that no longerexist.

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It is notyour memories which haunt you. It is notwhat you have writtendown. It is whatyou have forgotten,what you must forget. What you mustgo on forgettingall yourlife. As withpost-war Germany,so the power and characterof Fenton's poems lie partly in what they omit and suppress: 'It is not what they say. It is what theydo not say.' Seamus Heaney findsFenton to be 'at his most characteris- tic in secluded, hintingnarratives of repression and isolation.'19 The isolation springs directly from their repression of intimacy, a quality which Fenton admires in others (Raine, forexample) but does not exhibit himself. One of his pamphlets is called A VacantPossession, and Fenton is particu- larly good at possessing vacancy, where most of us let it slip through our fingers.In a poem fromthat pamphlet, 'Nest of Vampires', we have a house being vacated and sold off,and a familydispersed, the fatherhaving lost his money. Though the titlesuggests some formof bloodsucking, and a picture in the boy's bedroom shows 'an imperial Family in its humiliation', the poem's 'situation' remains mysterious: it may be that, as one critic has argued, there has been 'mismanagement of [the] estate which has earned them [the family]the hatred ofthe villagers', but thisseems too confidentan explanation of the poem, which supplies no such obvious links between the 'story' and the feelings explored.20 The poem proceeds by hints (hints of madness, loss, and guilt especially) so that forall the precise details of place the ambience remains Gothic and murky.In this the poem stays true to the viewpoint of the child who narrates it, who perceives the adult world only dimly, and whose last lines are 'I'm going now And soon I am going to find out'. The poem's movement is towardsa discovery: it does not vouchsafe us one within the text. Where Craig Raine's poetry knows but isn't telling, Fenton's is still findingout: as Fenton has said in an interview,'I do think that writinga poem is verymuch workinginto the unknown'.21 The pamphlet's title-poem'A Vacant Possession' has a similar country- house setting and appears again to be about the decline of the bourgeois family,examining it at a point in historywhere it must surrenderwhat it owns or, put another way, come into the ownership of nothing,of vacancy. Yet this is a poem about moving in, not moving out, and as such might be expected to be affirmative,to avoid sounding like the conclusion of The Cherry Orchard.A vacant house has been possessed, the gardens are being cleared, and at the end thereis the sound of the house fillingup with guests: And nowa slammingdoor and voicesin thehall, Scrapingsuitcases and laughter.Shall I go down? I hearmy name beingcalled, peer over the bannister And remembersomething I leftin mybedroom.

19 'Making It New', New YorkReview ofBooks, 30, no. 16 (25 October 1984), 40-42 20 (p. 410). Dana Gioia, 'James Fenton', DictionaryofLiterary Biography, XL, 122-29 (p. I25). 21 Andrew Motion, 'An Interview withJamesFenton', PoetryReview, 72, no. 2 (June 1982), 17-23 (p. 21).

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What can ithave been?Thewindow is wideopen. The curtainsmove. The lights sway. The cold sets in. Is thata happyending? Or does thelast imagesabotage the affirmation of precedingones? Are theseeven the rightquestions to ask? Fenton'swork containsso manyexamples of nonsense-verseand practicaljoking that to treatthese mood-pieces or fragmented narratives as ifthey were decodable is to riskfalling into a booby-trap.A sectionof The Memory of War and Children in Exileis called 'The Empireof the Senseless', and evenpoems elsewhere in the book ('A StaffordshireMurderer', for example, which has moreto do with potteryreplicas of murderers than with real ones) takedelight in elaborate, 'senseless'free invention. The chiefvacancy of'A Vacant Possession'may be meaningitself, then, or meaningwhich can be exhausted.But againstthis absence is its presenceof mind,its perfectcommand of pacing and technique: the same savage strengthlies behind 'A StaffordshireMurderer', whichshares with its assassin a powerto overpower,to lead itsaudience by thenose or thehand. Many ofFenton's poems take us nowhere,but they do so withsinister omnipotence. In thisFenton resembles the God ofhis 'God: A Poem', a practicaljoker whose cruellest trick is tofail to exist:the ultimate Absence. Anotherway ofdescribing 'absence' in Fentonwould be to use theword 'impersonality'.He has some of the impersonalityof Eliot and the modernists,their doubts about 'roots',their refusal to exhibitfeeling. The heartof his work is itsreluctance to show the sort of heartfelt 'family' concern exhibitedby Raine, Harrison,Heaney, and othercontemporaries. Even when,in 'The Skip',he movesdown in socialclass and forwardsin timeto a contemporary,urban, working-classworld, the tone is no less alien. 'I couldn'tstick at home.I tooka strollI Andpassed the skip, and leftmy life for dead': the bleak irreverencehere is farfrom Raine's 'Laying a Lawn' or Harrison's 'Illuminations'or Heaney's 'Sunlight'.Yet Fenton,if he lacks warmth,cannot fairly be accused oflacking humanity. Indeed, one of the consequencesof his silenceabout his own familybackground is a concern with otherfamilies, or even with the 'familyof man': childrenin exile, displaced communities,nations coming to termswith a traumaticrecent past. 'Concern' may suggest an obtrusivecaring. With the exception of 'Childrenin Exile', Fentonprefers to workmore obliquely: in 'Wind', for example,he broacheshuman catastrophe through the image of a cornfield. Seamus Heaney ('Making It New', p. 40) has recentlycompared this poem withone byTed Hughesof the same title, seeing Fenton's orderliness as part ofa hostiledialogue with A. Alvarezand his 'extremist'anthology The New Poetry(Harmondsworth, I962) (a dialogue Fenton initiatedmany years ago in his verse-letterto John Fuller). But the more strikingdifference between these poems is surely theirscale: the 'we' at the centreof the Hughes poem experience the wind as a threatto theirdomestic comfortand psychological

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions BLAKE MORRISON 209 stability: the disturbed elements express or reinforceinner Angst.Fenton's poem is not inward-lookingand microcosmicbut takes us out into the world of historyand politics: This is thewind, the wind in a fieldof corn. Greatcrowds are fleeingfrom a majordisaster Down thelong valleys, the green swaying wadis, Down throughthe beautiful catastrophe of wind. Families,tribes, nations and theirlivestock Have heardsomething, seen something.An expectation Or a giganticmisunderstanding has sweptover the hilltop Bendingthe ear ofthe hedgerow with stories of fire and sword.

This is not Raine's Martian view, but Auden's airman's, surveyingmore than earthlingsdo, but a bit aloof, in danger of sacrificingthose small-scale close-ups on which the successfully panoramic poem depends. It is a problem Fenton understands. He has said that he considers certain subjects intrinsicallymore 'interesting'than others,22and for 'interesting'here we can substitute 'important', a word he avoids as too hubristic. But how to keep big and important subjects in focus? In a review of two books about Hiroshima he implies an answer: How can themind possibly permit itself to imagineHiroshima? It is hardenough to imaginethe effectsof a conventionalwar, let alone to grasp the experienceof an instantholocaust. You can standby, and see a villagebeing burnt to theground and itsinhabitants fleeing, without actually being able toimagine the significance of this particularevent in thelives of these people, if the people themselvesand theirlives are foreignto you. Reallyto imaginesuch an event,you have to turnthe village into yourhome, and the fleeingvillagers into your family. ('Looking Bleaklyinto the The 8 Soup-spoon', Times, August1985, p. 9) Fenton spent from1973 to 1976 in Indo-China and was presentduring the fall of Saigon. The skill with which he draws on his Cambodian experiences in the second section of The Memoryof Warand Childrenin Exile has, I would argue, a good deal to do withthe imaginativeact described above (which has in turn something to do with the methods of Auden's poems in the I930s). 'Cambodia', the first of these poems, remains too much a proverb or epigram, scaling events down to individual numbers but not to individuals. 'In a Notebook', which contrasts (draft) descriptions of a village 'before' enemy attack with the narrator's (revised) self-accusingreflections 'after', is a more successfulscaling-down because of the more localized detail ('In the dark houseboats families were stirring And Chinese soup was cooked on charcoal stoves'); but the use of pastoral, evident especially in rhymessuch as trees/breeze,swallows/willow, eaves/sheaves, is too obvious a vehicle for conveying the narrator's sense of loss. 'Dead Soldiers', which features Pol

22 Fenton,'A ManifestoAgainst Manifestos', p. 14;compare Motion, 'An InterviewwithJames Fenton', p. 22.

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Pot in person, throwsodd and brilliantlight on a much-documentedsubject not so much throughthe absurdityof the occasion it describes (a lavish lunch on the battlefield)as throughthe presentationof the Cambodian conflictas a 'family war'. The drunken aide who later confides in Fenton is Pol Pot's brotherand enemy; and Prince Norodom Chantariangsey,who provides the lunch, is 'fightingSihanouk, his nephew'. With its gastronomic luxuriance ('pregnant turtles,their eggs boiled in carapace, I Marsh irises in fishsauce') and the snobbish boasting of 'connections', the lunch is a mad parody of those once enjoyed by Roman emperorsor European monarchs, and forces us to see this 'modern' televised war afresh. 'Children in Exile' is the longest and most ambitious of the poems in this section,and concerns the aftermathof war: a Cambodian family'once happy in its size', now reduced to four,has been transplantedto Italy, into the care of some American volunteers. The poem observes how the children slowly 'unfurl', altered from cold, dislocated, nightmare-haunted exiles into inquisitive young students grappling with European language and history; they do so against a backdrop of Tuscany in spring: 'The brave bird-lifeof Italy began planning families.I It was the season of the selfishgene.' The poet, who is a visitorto the house where the childrenare staying,describes at one point how 'A tinyphilosopher climbs onto my knee I And sinkshis loving teeth into my arm', the legacy of violence defused into a playfulbite. It is a tender moment, more tender than many love poems, more tender certainly than Fenton's own solitarylove poem 'Nothing'. And 'Children in Exile', for Fenton a suprisinglydirect and didactic work,has as its theme the redeem- ing power of human love. The theme is spelt out in analysis of the jealous behaviour of the house-dog Duschko, which resentsthe family'sintrusion: He thoughtthere was a quantumof love and attention Whichnow he wouldbe forcedto sharearound As firstthree Vietnamese and thenfour Cambodians Trespassedon hisground. It doesn'twork like that. It neverhas done. Love is accommodating.It makesspace. Fenton's poetry,empty early on as the large countryhouses it was set in, here fillsits vacancy, accommodating a familywhich in its hope and growth can be set against thebeleaguered and decayingfamilies of'Nest ofVampires' and 'A Vacant Possession'. It is a reconstructedand adopted family,and the poet watches it at one remove, celebratingit forits own sake, not (as Raine, Heaney, and Harrison would) because it is his own. Only the crudest sortof Christian or Marxist criticwould suppose thatthis new fullnessand optimism makes thelater poem richerthan theearlier ones; formyselfI find the absences and mysteriesof the earlier work at least as interestingand suggestive. But what these poems share as subject-matteris more important than their relativemerits, for it shows that,despite an apparentrejection of contemporary codes ofintimacy, it is withfamilies too thatFenton is above all concerned.

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VII Jumpinga ditchout of a wood, mymother's horse had stumbledand thrownher forwardover its shoulder,knocking her hat off.She clungon as thehorse galloped acrossmost of a field,and whenshe eventuallyfell, it was ontoa concretefarm track. She was knockedunconscious. My brotherwas in frontof her. The firsthe knewthat somethingwas wrongwas herhorse careering past riderless.... thefall had made a bloodclotform on her brain. If theydidn't operate,she would die. If theydid operate,she mightlive, but possibly with serious brain damage.... She was cutout ofher clothes, her head shaved,and thebloodclot was removed.A pieceof her brain brokeaway withit. (AndrewMotion, 'Skating')

In The LondonReview of Books (6-19 October 1983) Craig Raine began a review by asking whethersome poetic subjects 'are inevitablymore interesting than others'. ('Subjects', p. 5). A month earlier, in the PoetryReview, James Fenton had raised the same question. 'Have we lost the taste for subject matter?', he asked, and wanted us to 'imagine a poem that was so intrinsicallyinteresting that it never occurred to people, when discussing it, to mentiontreatment, method, tradition,influence, forms or any otherof the usual critical categories. The only thingpeople wanted to talk about was the subject. Would not that be, in its way, revolutionary?'('A Manifesto against Manifestos', p. 14). That same issue of PoetryReview carried a prose memoir of childhood by Andrew Motion ('Skating', later reprintedin his Dangerous Play: Poems 1974-84 (London, 1984)). As the above extract fromit makes clear, Motion has inheriteda subject-matter,his mother's tragic accident, the grimaftermath to which he spells out a fewpages furtheron: 'My mother will stay more or less comatose for the next three years, then gradually recover her speech beforedying withoutleaving hospital almost exactly ten years afterher accident.' A subject-matterlike this is a mixed blessing to a writer, a fertilecurse, the 'use' of it (as Peter Porter and Douglas Dunn acknowledge in poems about the cruelly premature death of their wives) both agony and purgation. Motion's poetic development can best be under- stood as an attemptto escape his 'given' subject-matterand its given mode, elegy, and to embrace the freeinventions of narrative. Motion's preoccupation with his motherputs him at odds withmost ofthe poets discussed so far. Though his fatheris farfrom absent (he is movingly described, forexample, arrivinghome fromhis wife's bedside), he remains on the whole a cardboard figure,kindly but remote. It is she who commands Motion's imagination, and her strongif spectral presence is one reason why Motion seems the most 'feminine'of the currentgeneration of Britishpoets, at odds with the metrical muscularity of Harrison, the metaphor-hunter gatheringof Raine, the hard sophisticationof Muldoon, the impersonalityof Fenton. It is not only that Motion often adopts female personae (ones, moreover,which feelas the 'gorilla girl' does: 'I'm throughwith living in the lousy world of men'), but also a matterof technique. His weak endings and enjambments; his preferencefor a softand yieldingvocabulary ('fade', 'slip',

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'disappear'/'suspended','faint', 'lost'/'dust', 'mist', 'shadow', 'silence'); his evocations of ghostly twilit landscapes; his use of Larkinesque and Edward-Thomas-likenegatives, 'un-' and 'never'and 'not': all thismakes his a gentlerand moretentative poetry than theirs. The contrastwith Raine is particularlystriking, notjust because theyhave in otherrespects followed parallel careers (boardingschool, Oxford,prize-winning-poem celebrity, firstcollections in 1978,academicjobs abandoned for careers in publishing) but because theircollections of 1984, Richand DangerousPlay, are held togetherby such differentprose memoirs. Motion's begins with exactly the sortof eccentricdetail one findsin Raine, as he describesa photographof himselfas a babyin a pramon a frozenmill-pond, his mother wearing skates as she pusheshim. But what follows is notRaine's proletarianoddland but a worldof prep school,dorms, tuck shops, riding, and largecountry houses, familiarfrom countless haut-bourgeois novels and autobiographies.Motion's proseis looserand moreconventional than Raine's, sloppily so at times,but also as befitsan impressionthat what it has to relate mightalmost be Edwardiancountry-house fiction. Motion'smemoir, no lessthan Raine's, is a portraitof the artist as a young man,showing the child as fatherto thepoet. If theepisodes of being bullied markhim out as a sensitiveand isolatedSpenderian, a posturealso adopted by some of the poems,his childhoodconsumption of 'bloodthirsty'adven- turetales ('melodramaticaccounts of car accidentsand Indian massacres', 'Dennis Wheatley,then Hammond Innes, thenAlistair Maclean') antici- pates the sensationalistelements in narrativepoems such as 'Bathingat Glymenopoulo'.The tastefor narrative stands in interestingrelation to his mother,even before her accident: 'I can see nowthat the stories were ways of imaginingthe worst: ways of trying to prolongthe idyll of her company by dreamingup someradically appalling alternative.' Yet the fictionis notjust an alternative:it infectseven the 'real' events Motion describes,which come over as the creationsof a novelistor film- maker.'It was straightout of Conrad but true', one ofhis poems ('The Great Man') begins,and theprose memoir, too, occupies a shadowlandbetween the real and imagined. The motherlanguidly brushing her hair each morningand takingto her bed each afternoon;the haunting,guilt-ridden 'Freudian'coincidence that took Motion away from home to thebrink of his firstsexual experienceon the veryday his motherhad her accident;the aftermathof thataccident, the riderless horse (as his poem 'Anniversaries' describesit) returning'alone to theopen stable,Iits reindragging behind': thesedetails are authenticonly because we knowthem to be true;as writing, they don't have the authenticityof, for example, Motion's 'irrelevant' memory of passing a man cuttinga hedge on his way to see his mother in hospital forthe firsttime. Yet the fictionalquality of Motion's truthshelps distance him fromthe eventshe unfolds,casting him as an imaginaryorphan or as the tragic hero of an adventure story.

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This interdependenceofelegiac realityand fictionalmotifin Motion should caution us against any simple interpretationof his development.It is truethat he draws more directlyon personal experience in the early work than in the later: 'Anniversaries', 'A Dying Race', and 'In the Attic', all fromhis first book, The Pleasure Steamers(Manchester, 1978), are about his mother's accident and death; and in the other,lesser, poems fromthat collection one can be confidentthat the 'I' is Motion himself.But thesection in DangerousPlay which reprints some of the early poems adds three others which show narrative and drama creeping in. 'Wooding' is set on the eve of his mother's funeralbut withdrawsto watch thebereft father and sons as an outsidermight observe them,ignorant of their feelings. In 'The House Through' thespeaking 'I' is the poet's mother,returning as a ghost to her husband's house. In 'The Lines' we catch the poet in the act of fictionalizing:alone afterhis mother's funeral and seeking distraction,he picks up 'a paperback you never read', unnamed but apparentlydescribing the layingof railway lines in the summer of 1845: In 1845200,000 navvies, 3,000 miles of line. Lost faceslift - a mania,a humanalligator, shovelsclinking under high midsummer sun. The heat-hazedances meadowsweetand may, wholecliffs collapse, and lineby line I bringyour death to lonelyhidden villages, red-tiledfarms, helpless women and timid men. 'I bring your death to .. .': time and again in Motion's later work the feelingssurrounding his mother'sdeath (grief,anger, destitution) are brought to otherless personal contexts:to 'Anne Frank Huis', forinstance, which uses the phrase 'her lifetimeof grief' and explores feelingsof sadness, seclusion, and guilt;or to theneglected, lonely, expatriate wife in 'One Life', nostalgicfor homely England; or to 'Independence', the speaker ofwhich loses his young wife in childbirth and, like the bereaved speaker of 'In the Attic', sorts helplessly through her clothes. DangerousPlay, Motion calls his Selected Poems; 'dangerous' because his inventionsdraw on emotionstoo deeply feltto mess around with. Yet 'play' or narrative is a necessary escape from the repetitionof his 'given' subject. His narrativepoems seethewith the power to invent, 'relish the act of fictionas it is being performed':23the artificeis self- consciouslyadvertised, in themanner of'academic' post-modernistfiction. In 'The Great Man', based on a broadcast byJames Cameron about his visit to Albert Schweitzer,thejournalist fudgesthe depressingtruth about the man: 'If I had said he was a fake,who would have believed me?' The speakers of 'The Whole Truth' and 'Open Secrets' are equally if more deftlyfictive, tellingtales which turnout to be more true than tall:

23 ThePenguin Book of Contemporary British Poetry, edited by Blake Morrison and AndrewMotion (London, 1982), p. 19. The phrase was almost certainly Motion's.

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 2I4 A Readingof Contemporary British Poetry Andall ofit lies, just as mypictures ofyou at yourkitchen table were lies - onetender imaginary scene succeeding another,but only to prove what is true. ('The WholeTruth')

Justnow, prolonging my journey home to you, I killed an hourwhere my road lay over a moor,and made this up. FlorrieI saton a grass-growncrumbling stack of peat withthe boy by her side, and as soonas shewhispered Comeon. We've done it before, I made him imagine hisfather garotting the stag, slitting the stomach andsliding his hands inside for warmth. He wasnever myself,this boy, but I knowif I tellyou his story you'llthink we are one and the same: both of us hiding infictions which say what we cannot admit to ourselves. ('Open Secrets')

The selfmay be hiddenbut it cannotbe escaped from:so the last line suggests,admitting what it says it cannot. 'Hiding' for Motion takes the form of inhabitinglives whichin theirconfidence, adventurousness, unscrupu- lousness, and even dishonestyare the opposite of the shy, vulnerable, integral,painfully honest 'I' ofthe early lyrics. Hence therather desperately aliensettings of the later work (Scottish grouse-moors, colonial Africa, South Americanforests, a New York Hotel room)and a set ofcharacters in flight fromthemselves. But we come back to thesame fewinescapable emotions and thesame searingself-knowledge, as the gorilla girl finds when looking at the animals is enough to start 'the huge, involved machineryof tendernessI and let myselfbe knownfor what I am'. Tendernessis theleast escapable of feelings in Motion'spoems, and 'love' a wordthat recurs at climacticmoments: 'the way love looks,its harrowing clarity','telling myself it was Ikindness,and mighteven turninto love', 'what hope she had forordinary love and interest','Whoever loves best loves bestby remaining themselves', 'I love her house; I loveher twins; I love(I lovethem a bit) herdogs'. Yet forall thesesightings of the word love, and forall thegentleness of his lyricvoice, love remainsmore a notionthan an emotion,something thoughtimportant rather than deeply felt. Motion is attractedto characters and personaewho know the ache and voidof unrequited love, the same ache and void of unrequitedlove as underliehis elegiesfor and memoirof his mother.The nearesthe comesto fillingthat void is in 'These Days', a poem of achingsexual longing.Motion's work exhibits an interestin twins,and here thereare two males (the speakerand a cat) and twowomen, one the speakerwants to sleep with,the othera figureon a willow-patternplate. Motion also exhibitsan interestin ghosts,Hardyesque femalespectres, and here it is the woman on the willow-patternplate who, in the poem's fluid syllabics, comes miracuously to life:

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you pour milkin a shallowdish forthe cat, as he frisksin out ofnowhere, his hollow lap-lap-lappingan almost welcomedistraction to stopme piningfor you, his tongue steadilyclearing the milk likea tinyfog, revealing a womancrossing a blue bridge settingout on a journey, perhaps,or comingback, herparasol raised in salute, herblue cross-hatchedhat tippedto deflectthe wind, and hereyes distinctly narrowed to blue expressionlessflecks by a suddenonrush of light. In his memoir of childhood, Motion describes how his sexual longing fora young woman was dissipated by his mother's accident. Here the woman on the willow-pattern plate, 'setting out' or 'coming back', appears not to frustratethe speaker's relationship with another woman but to give it her blessing. It is a poem which has nothing to do with his mother at all, of course, but alone among Motion's elegies and narrativesit is the one which trulylays her ghost. VIII They fuckyou up, yourmum and dad. They maynot mean to, but theydo. They fillyou with the faults they had And add someextra, just foryou. (PhilipLarkin, 'This Be The Verse') Philip Larkin's disenchanted vignette, with its picture of misery handed down from generation to generation, remains the most incisive post-war contributionto the literatureoffiliality. Its 'less deceived' tone highlightsthe respectfulnessand even piety of those who have come afterLarkin: Heaney and Harrison, with their guilty reflectionson 'following'; Raine and Mul- doon, with their heirloom of miracles and metamorphoses; Williams and Hofmann, laconically entangled with their writer-fathers;Fenton and Motion, searching among the ruins offamily life for a source of stabilityand love. Yet theirsis not the pietyof, for example, Thackeray's daughter,who is said to have been so exasperated by the badly-executed bust of her fatherin Poets' Corner that she finallycommissioned a sculptor to trimthe whiskers. Their portraits may look idealistic alongside Larkin's, as almost any parental portrait must, but they do not conceal imperfectionsor deny the

This content downloaded from 134.208.29.220 on Wed, 03 Feb 2016 06:54:42 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 216 A Readingof ContemporaryBritish Poetry tensionsthat can exist between parent and child. Indeed, one of the surprisingpoints about thissupposedly cool and anti-confessionalgenera- tionis the intimacyof theirpictures of familylife. The inclusionof prose memoirsin Raine's Richand Motion'sDangerous Play consciously echoes the structureof that most confessionalof collections,Lowell's Life Studies; Williamsgives us his 'shit-stainedunderpants' and Muldoon his family's privateword for the hot water-bottle; only Fenton keeps his distance.First impressionsof this generation of poets, some of them traceable to ThePenguin Bookof Contemporary British Poetry, will clearly have to be revised. A more difficultquestion concerns the supposed conservatismof these poets.A preoccupationwith parents may indicate acceptance of inheritance, tradition,the statusquo; it may also indicatea reverencefor one's literary parents,a reluctanceto behave badly (as all innovativewriters must) towardsthe preceding poetic generation. But thisdoes notfollow automati- cally. Heaney's unearthingof his heritagehas radicalizedhis work,which began in harmless neo-Georgianismand became in Northa poetryof unsettlingpublic utterance;Harrison's parents force him to expose social divisionand injustice;Muldoon's poems on his 'fathers'are challenging formalexperiments; and evenRaine, who far from 'killing' his poetic fathers now edits themat Faber, has none the less broughtabout a significant reorientationin currentwriting. These poets look conservativenext to Pound and Eliotbut they are notin all respectsthe worse for it. At bestthere is somethingchallenging in theirbelief that the family and domesticityare matterswith which poetry may legitimatelybe concerned,a beliefwhich runscontrary to Romanticismand Modernism. Pre-RomanticEnglish literature does not,of course, lack examplesof the filial art. In Pope, forinstance, one can findtributes even the current generationmight think too pious: that to his fatherin the 'Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot'(11. 390-405) and to his motherin the 'Essay on Man' (Iv. Io9-Io). We knowtoo that Pope's actualbehaviour towards his parents was solicitousto thepoint of suffocation, his mothercomplaining that whereas 'mostchildren plagu'd theirParents with Neglect; that He did so as much theother way, perpetually teasing her with his Overfondnessand Care, and pressingher to Eat thisand that;and Drinkanother Glass ofWine; and so assiduousas neverto let herbe at Liberty,and chusefor her self. Gave her greatUneasiness this way'.24 But ifPope and otherssuggest a precedentit remainstrue that no otherpoetic generation one can thinkof has collectively been so obsessedwith its parentsas thepresent one. Nor is thisobsession merenostalgia for childhood: Heaney and Harrison,in particular,explore theiradult relationship with their parents, and thisgives their poetry more layersand tensionsthan would any simple re-creation of the past.

24 Quoted in MaynardMack, Alexander Pope: A Life(London, 1985),p. 548.

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Ifcritics and reviewershave paid surprisinglylittle attention to thisaspect ofcontemporary poetry, among poets themselves there are nowthe stirrings of parodic complaint.On facingpages of theJanuary 1985 issue of Poetry Review(74, no. 4, PP-44-45) are poems by SylviaKantaris and Steve Ellis which pay embarrassedtribute to theirNorthern working-class fathers, consciousthat Tony Harrisonand Craig Raine have got therefirst. Kan- taris's'One Upmanship'is a pasticheof Harrisons's dialect, half-wanting to be a seriouspoem itself.Ellis's 'Ad Patrem'glances at Ted Hughes's 'Her Husband' and Harrison's'Cremation' (where a macho worker'hawks his cold gobful'on thefire), and in the teethof those elegies to strongmen he writesa gentlerelegy of his own. It has a wearinessabout it, a sag of the shoulders,as ifit wantedto close thesubject and to have,as it can do here, thelast word: Otherpoets have dads done in by Fate, notfeathering cosy corners; linedmen who gob in a bucket, 'thee'and 'thou' at thefire, filla roomwith rugged destiny. I couldhave inherited itall, beingYorkshire and working-class; butthough you still bike off t'club to herddominoes through a dourfog ofsmoke and beer, remaining years ofroses and bowling-greens seemyour choice and remembrance. You mighteven get a littlecar! Oh Dad, watchhow you go in retirement'srenovating lake; at leastleave unchangedthe bicycle-clips forold sake's sake.

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