Was Johnson a Poet?

Browsing in the Johnson Society's 2023 Transactions, I found a piece with this arresting title. It's a transcript of the year's Presidential Address, delivered at the Guildhall in Lichfield by the Society's new President (succeeding Posy Simmonds), Robert DeMaria, Jr, professor of English at Vassar and an eminent Johnsonian scholar. 'Was Johnson a poet?' he asks, acknowledging that it seems 'a very irreverent question' – and a very unlikely one to come from the man who recently finished editing the Longman's Annotated English Poets edition of Johnson's poetry. However, it's a question that was asked of Johnson in his time – and not only of Johnson but of others, including even Alexander Pope: in his Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope, the literary critic Joseph Warton concluded that the leading poet of his age was not a true poet at all, but rather a 'man of wit'. He was not alone in denigrating Pope – Mary Wortley Montagu thought him 'thoroughly mechanical' – but Johnson was having none of it. His life of Pope is the longest, and one of the best, in the Lives of the Poets, and in it Johnson answers the question 'Was Pope a poet?' with another question: 'If Pope be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?' Where indeed.
  The charge sheet against Johnson was that much of his verse is not original, but comes in the form of translations and 'imitations'; that poetry was not his main vocation but a small part of his literary output; and that his method of composition was insufficiently rigorous. Johnson was one of those writers who (in his own words) 'employ at once memory and invention, and, with little intermediate use of the pen, form and polish large masses by continued meditation, and write their productions only when, in their own opinion, they have completed them.' This was altogether too coarse and unrefined, too easy a method for the more fastidious eighteenth-century critics, who preferred evidence of close work and high polish. For them, Johnson's method of composition was the mark of the mere 'versifier' rather than the 'true poet'.
  Was Johnson a poet? Of course he was, by modern standards – by any sane standards. Indeed, if the author of The Vanity of Human Wishes and London be not a poet, where is poetry to be found?

Aghast

I've just finished reading one of the most extraordinary novels I have ever come across, one that actually left me, well, aghast is the only word. It was described in a review as 'a very clever and very alarming novel' and both adjectives are right, especially the latter. Lord Jim at Home by Dinah Brooke was originally published in 1973, when it was greeted mostly with shock and incomprehension, and was duly forgotten, until it was recently reissued by McNally in the US and then by Daunt Books over here. It tells the story of one Giles Trenchard, born into the upper middle class, to a father who cordially loathes him and an indifferent mother who is content for him to be treated with brutal harshness by his nurse(s). He grows up entirely devoid of talent – except for cricket, which he plays to (minor) county level – and unable or unwilling to apply himself to anything, least of all a career. Wartime service in the Navy – as a rating, not an officer – gives his life some structure and purpose, but after the war he drifts helplessly,  drinks like a fish, and takes to crime to subsidise his rackety way of life. When at last he falls in love, in a strangely infantile, abject way, things begin to move towards a horrifying climax – and there has already been plenty of horror in Giles's wartime experiences, not to mention some deeply grotesque sex scenes. All of which sounds thoroughly uninviting. However, Brooke's skill in unfolding the story is such that you – I, anyway – are gripped from beginning to end, and keep turning the pages. There is even real pleasure, of a particular, almost painful kind, to be had in the experience. Brooke tells the story from no fixed angle; the perspective keeps shifting, inconspicuously but with dizzying effect, such that one moment we are with Giles or one of the major characters, and the next we are seeing things through the eyes of some purely marginal person or persons. Giles indeed is mostly seen from outside, and this seems right, as he has no self-awareness and seems most of the time entirely out of touch with himself. He appears to have no insight into himself, and to be observing his actions from the outside, at once calm and bemused, as his life reels out of control, hurtling towards a horrific climax. This is one of those books that somehow heightens the senses and makes you feel as if you are in a new world, whose existence you barely suspected. It is, I believe, an absolute one off: I can certainly think of nothing else like it.  
  As for Dinah Brooke, I was relieved to discover that the narrative of Lord Jim at Home was not wholly spun from her own imagination, but in its externals closely follows a case that was widely reported in the early 1950s. I shan't say any more for fear of giving away the plot (assuming anyone is still up for reading the book). Brooke, an alumna of Cheltenham Ladies' College, published a handful of novels in the early Seventies, having lived for some time in France and America, where she had an affair with Terry Southern, who helped launch her literary career. Back in England, she threw herself into the late Sixties/early Seventies counterculture, taking drugs and setting up a kind of feminist commune in Camden Town. When that (and her marriage) fell apart, she took off for Pune and became a devotee of the guru Osho (Baghwan Shree Rajneesh), living in an ashram for six years. Apparently her life there left her feeling no need or desire to write. Once, she told Osho that he had stolen her creativity. 'His response,' she recalled in an interview, 'was to hit me, really hard. The effect was to release my attachment to writing. That is what an Enlightened Master is for.' Hmm. Each to his own, I suppose, but it seems a shame that a writer capable of producing something so utterly extraordinary as Lord Jim at Home should have abandoned her gift so readily. Dinah Brooke, now 88, is still alive, very active and full of beans – not writing, but delighted that Lord Jim has been rediscovered. There's an interview with her here, but it should carry a spoiler alert for those hardy souls who intend to read the book. 

The Butterfly

 For Holocaust Memorial Day, this little poem, which was discovered at Theresienstadt when the camp was liberated. Written on a sheet of thin copy paper, it was the work of a young Czech Jew who was admitted to Theresienstadt on 28 April 1942 and murdered at Auschwitz on 29 September 1944, when he was 23 years old. He wrote 'The Butterfly' shortly after his arrival at Theresienstadt. This translation is one of many, and quite literal. (The butterfly in question is most likely a Brimstone.)

The last, the very last,

So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow.

Perhaps if the sun's tears would sing

against a white stone. . . .

Such, such a yellow

Is carried lightly 'way up high.

It went away I'm sure because it wished to

kiss the world good-bye.

For seven weeks I've lived in here,

Penned up inside this ghetto.

But I have found what I love here.

The dandelions call to me

And the white chestnut branches in the court.

Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.

Butterflies don't live in here,

in the ghetto.

 

Burra

 'Standing next to a small youth at the entrance scholarship examination at the Royal College of Art in London, Eric Ravilious could not help noticing that he had made no attempt to draw the life model on the unaccustomedly large page. Burra spent the day painting just one eye, in the middle of the paper, in meticulous detail.' (Christopher Neve Unquiet Landscape ).
The small youth was Edward Burra, and his working methods were to remain eccentric throughout his working life. He preferred to work with paper laid flat on a table, often joining several pieces together, and would invariably begin drawing in the bottom right hand corner and work his way towards the complete composition from there. Sickly as well as small, he hovered on the edges of life, haunting low dives and painting his favourite subjects – 'waiters, seedy decor, nightclubs, cheap suits', also prostitutes and spivs. 'A lifelong exhaustion made him prey on other people's fun, especially (what he really savoured) bad behaviour, unkind laughter, mendacity, waspishness, all-out malicious enjoyment and any kind of excess'. 
The Snack Bar, which hangs in the Tate, is representative of his style...

But then there are the landscapes, which he painted for the last 15 years of his life, and which are, in Neve's judgment, 'odder and more potent than anything else he did'. From what I've seen of them online and in books – and Neve stresses that they really have to be seen in the original – I'm inclined to agree. They are typically very large watercolours with a kind of 'dreamlike clarity of surface', and they were painted from memory, often months after seeing the scene depicted. They often have a menacing air, enhanced by 'roller-coaster perspective' and 'punishing' colour. 'It is as though,' writes Neve, 'Cotman were reborn specifically to see England in its worst light'. And yet, they can be beautiful. I think this late watercolour of Windermere – a fine demonstration of that roller-coaster perspective – is a glorious piece of work, and I would love to see the original, but I believe it is in a private collection...

I spotted Burra's Windermere on a picture-sharing site, which sent me back to Neve – and now I feel I know and understand this strange painter far better than I ever did before. 

It's That Day Again

Manet Day again (the anniversary of his birth in 1832) – they come round so fast...
In keeping with a long-standing Nigeness tradition, I'm posting one of his pictures – this year one of his most impressionistic, Woman Reading, a late painting (1880/1) which seems to show a well dressed woman at an outdoor table in a café garden. In fact, by this stage in his life Manet's poor health more or less confined him to his studio, which is where this picture was posed and painted. The leafy background is actually another of Manet's paintings. 

A Surprising Sestina, and an Upbeat One

 For some reason, I was reading about the sestina, a verse form created by a troubadour in the twelfth century, when I came across a surprising – and to me new – example of the form (which, classically, consists of six six-line stanzas followed by a three-line envoi, the stanzas not rhyming but repeating the end-words of lines in a fixed order). It's a form that, with all its repetitions, runs surprisingly close to the way people actually speak, so its structure tends to be inconspicuous. The sestina has been put to all sorts of uses – which bring me to the surprising example I stumbled upon. This is by a poet best known for his free-verse writings, John Ashbery (whose name cropped up in the Comments recently), and takes place in the weird cartoon world of Popeye...

Landscape with Farm Implements and Rutabagas

The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,   

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,

From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant   

To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched

Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinach

And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.   

“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder   

Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment

Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country.   

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach   

When the door opened and Swee’pea crept in. “How pleasant!”

But Swee’pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. “Thunder   

And tears are unavailing,” it read. “Henceforth shall Popeye’s apartment   

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched.”

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched

Her long thigh. “I have news!” she gasped. “Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment

And all that it contains, myself and spinach

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched   

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder.”   

She grabbed Swee’pea. “I’m taking the brat to the country.”

“But you can’t do that—he hasn’t even finished his spinach,”   

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment.

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment

Succumbed to a strange new hush. “Actually it’s quite pleasant

Here,” thought the Sea Hag. “If this is all we need fear from spinach

Then I don’t mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over”—she scratched

One dug pensively—“but Wimpy is such a country

Bumpkin, always burping like that.” Minute at first, the thunder

Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder,   

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

[A tangram is a puzzle in which shapes are created from seven flat polygons. The Sea Hag is an ugly witch-like figure who is one of Popeye's main enemies. 'For this is my country' quotes a patriotic song of the 1940s. Alice the Goon has a complicated history. ]

Reading about the sestina, I was reminded that my father – a great Kipling fan – more than once drew my attention to Kipling's very accomplished 'Sestina of the Tramp-Royal'. It's an upbeat piece, in the author's rather tiresome vernacular style, replete with apostrophes of omission, but it's beautifully done – and could hardly be more different from Ashbery's essay in the same form...

Sestina of the Tramp-Royal

Speakin’ in general, I ’ave tried ’em all—

The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.   

Speakin’ in general, I ’ave found them good   

For such as cannot use one bed too long,   

But must get ’ence, the same as I ’ave done,   

An’ go observin’ matters till they die.

What do it matter where or ’ow we die,

So long as we’ve our ’ealth to watch it all—

The different ways that different things are done,   

An’ men an’ women lovin’ in this world;   

Takin’ our chances as they come along,   

An’ when they ain’t, pretendin’ they are good?

In cash or credit—no, it aren’t no good;   

You ’ave to ’ave the ’abit or you’d die,

Unless you lived your life but one day long,   

Nor didn’t prophesy nor fret at all,

But drew your tucker some’ow from the world,   

An’ never bothered what you might ha’ done.

But, Gawd, what things are they I ’aven’t done?   

I’ve turned my ’and to most, an’ turned it good,   

In various situations round the world—

For ’im that doth not work must surely die;   

But that's no reason man should labour all   

’Is life on one same shift—life’s none so long.

Therefore, from job to job I’ve moved along.   

Pay couldn’t ’old me when my time was done,   

For something in my ’ead upset it all,

Till I ’ad dropped whatever ’twas for good,   

An’, out at sea, be’eld the dock-lights die,

An’ met my mate—the wind that tramps the world!

It’s like a book, I think, this bloomin’ world,   

Which you can read and care for just so long,   

But presently you feel that you will die   

Unless you get the page you’re readin’ done,   

An’ turn another—likely not so good;   

But what you’re after is to turn ’em all.

Gawd bless this world! Whatever she ’ath done—

Excep’ when awful long I’ve found it good.   

So write, before I die, ‘’E liked it all!’

Gratifying, Ridiculous, Sublime

 'You look like a local,' said the man who hailed me this morning as I strode along by Minster Pool. He wanted to ask me about the location of a launderette, and I was unable to help him, but I was strangely gratified to have been taken for a local, after little more than a year in the City of Philosophers. 

Lichfield is also, decidedly, a City of Dogs. They are welcome almost everywhere, and many pubs and eateries have a self-service display of dog treats, some confined to little bone-shaped morsels, others more ambitious. But this bill of fare, which I noticed yesterday, surely takes the (dog) biscuit –

The treats on offer from Sir Woofington's Canine Hospitality include, as well as various approximations of human meals (Bark Burgers, Bark Bangers, Sunday Roast and Fish& Chips), two 'alcohol-free and refreshing' drinks – Bark Brew Dog Beer (chicken flavour) and Paw Star Dog Martini (chicken and passionfruit), both of which can either be served a drinks or, er, poured over the dog's meal. Yum.

To move from the ridiculous to the sublime, I have been enjoying my Christmas-present CD of Benjamin Appl singing orchestral arrangements of Schubert lieder. Appl isn't my favourite Schubert voice (call me old-fashioned but it's Fischer-Dieskau or Hotter, with Gerald Moore, for me), but I loved his film of Winterreise, and I'm delighted he brought out this unusual lieder album. One of the most beautiful tracks, I think, is Webern's orchestration of 'Du Bist die Ruh' – this link should take you there...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBHTiJfDOuY