Subduing the reader (2)
In Magma 23 Laurie Smith argued that Robert Potts, writing in The Guardian, failed to see the similarity between Anne Carson who won the 2001 TS Eliot Prize and Geoffrey Hill who, to Potts' dismay, did not. According to Smith, both poets use their learning to subdue the reader but, while Carson is fanciful in the Coleridgean sense, Hill, like Pound, is fascist.
We publish two replies – by David Boll, Chairman and Editorial Secretary of Magma, who gives a personal view on the general basis for the charge of fascism and on Pound, and by Robert Potts, now joint Editor of Poetry Review, on Hill.
David Boll writes:
The main subject of Laurie Smith’s stimulating article is the poetry of Ann Carson and Geoffrey Hill. But he broadens his argument to include Ezra Pound, who was personally a fascist, and to say that that Hill and Pound share features symptomatic of fascism, which are:
a view of culture in which the past is held up as admirable and the present dismissed as worthless
and the idea that
…’high’ culture should be accessible only to a small educated elite.
This is a serious accusation, and also involves a major misunderstanding of Pound, and I think calls for a reply. Robert Potts has written on Geoffrey Hill; I will base my reply on the general issues and on Pound’s poetry - I have not space here to treat of Pound the man.
To my mind Laurie Smith is wrong whichever way you look at it – as to what Pound thought, as to what the fascists thought, and in logic – even if he was right on the facts, his case would still be flawed.
The logical flaw is that the poets cannot be seen as fascist unless fascists alone thought what Laurie Smith says they thought. Otherwise the logic of the argument is that blackbirds have yellow bills and these birds have yellow bills, and so they must be blackbirds – a mistake if they happen to be common gulls, which also have yellow bills. Many people over many centuries, and long before fascism was thought of, have thought the things to which Laurie Smith takes exception – the first because it has often arguably been true, and the second as a fact of life if not exactly an objective. We may think differently to-day and view people who think the same as out of date, but that scarcely renders them fascists.
And in fact Pound himself did not hold these beliefs.
We have to see his later work in its context, the period after the first world war when European civilisation seemed destroyed or invalidated, to be replaced by communism, fascism, sheer chaos or an apparently mindless mass culture. As Pound wrote in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, what had this so-called war for civilisation really been for?
For two gross of broken statues
For a few thousand battered books.
What use were such things? The question was one he devoted the rest of his poetic life to trying to answer. Pound was above all a teacher, and a very American sort of teacher – didactic certainly, considering himself a great deal better informed than his audience certainly - he often was – but passionately trying to pass on his learning to others, and thus the opposite of someone who thought culture should only be accessible to an elite. Publications such as his ABC of Reading set out to spread the word, not confine it. Before the war he had set himself to teach English poets to de-upholster their idiom, with remarkable success and to our lasting gain. He now took on a greater task - to pass on what was worth preserving in the culture of the past, political as well as artistic, American and Chinese as well as European, and from the immediate past he had known before the war as well as from more distant times. And these would not be a jumble of fragments – his “broken statues”, or the “fragments I have shored against my ruins” of Eliot’s The Waste Land - but cohered by his methods of sculpting, metamorphosis and the ideogram into a new whole. Culture was not just knowledge – it was achieved only when knowledge was assimilated, “when one has forgotten-what-book”. The Cantos would engage in the poetic work of assimilation; they would not be a versified encyclopaedia.
He set about this task partly because he could not take civilisation for granted as perhaps we think we can, but thought it threatened with destruction. Pound was by no means alone in such fears. To quote only Yeats, of many possible examples,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Among other things, The Cantos are a Noah’s Ark designed to carry what was needed for the future across the floods and catastrophes of what was then the present. Such a project requires a certain megalomaniac heroism – no wonder Noah’s contemporaries thought him crazy.
Of course only a minority might take in what Pound was doing. But there is a great difference between thinking one’s poetry ought to be the preserve of a few, and recognising that in the world we know only a few may take the trouble to master it.
Did his project mean he thought the past superior to the present? That would be to misunderstand his focus. In the mess and transition of the war and its aftermath there was no settled present to serve as a basis for comparison. What preoccupied Pound and his contemporaries was the future, and Pound feared for it if it lost contact with the achievements of the past, as seemed very likely to happen.
As for the fascists themselves, they too did not think what Laurie Smith says they did.
They looked to the future, but one which was to be achieved by violence, action, the state and its leader. They were not interested in what to them would have been fancy speculations about culture. When they used the past it was through a crude populism which would have failed in its purposes if it had only reached a minority – Mussolini’s citations of Imperial Rome to justify his coup and his dictatorship (the word itself is drawn from Roman history), or the Nazi’s use of the Teutonic Knights to endorse their Drive to the East. Some individual fascists valued the culture of the past or at least its spoils and some did not, but respect for it was not part of fascist beliefs as such. No doubt fascists may have believed high culture was the province of a few people, but scarcely of an elite in the sense of being superior or as identical with the political elite.
One cause of the confusion is that several of the great talents of Pound’s day were for a time sympathetic to fascism, at least in its Italian form in the 20s if not in the later Nazi version – among them Eliot and to a lesser extent Yeats. How do we account for this? For we do need to account for it. Labels can serve as a substitute for thought – if we label people as fascist, chauvinist, elitist or whatever, then we can reject them and save ourselves the fatigue of thinking about them. Yet this is where thinking should start, not stop. Why did men of their calibre have such views? Because they valued the culture and life of the past as educated people are likely to do, and feared for its survival with an intensity we need to use our historical imagination to grasp, and so welcomed any conservative force that might preserve it. Their true affinity was less with the fascists themselves than with the conservatives who facilitated fascism’s rise to power because they thought it would help advance conservative ends. They were very wrong in both their political expectations and their ethical judgements. But for all that, cultural conservatism is not the same thing as fascism.
And how far did the fact that Pound was personally a fascist limit his poetry? In content, only tangentially. For example he expects a lot from great men, yet the men he praises are often far from the fascist ideal – the American President John Adams or the Chinese sage Confucius. In its basic cultural aims, I do not see that The Cantos are inherently fascist at all – as I say, it was no part of fascism to attach great value to the culture of the past.
Where Pound’s poetry does fail, it is for quite different reasons. Laurie Smith himself puts his finger on the key critical point, without realising that it undermines his own argument. However close to fascism Eliot and Yeats came, he accepts their poetry because they “speak to the individual” and have “the humility of self exposure”. And here he is right. When The Cantos fall short it is not because they are fascist or deter the ignorant but because they are didactic and impersonal. The stones of knowledge from which they are constructed have not been assimilated and metamorphosed into something new. Pound has set himself the colossal ambition of doing for his own age what Dante had done for his, and Dante’s poetry is didactic, but it is also intensely personal. He encounters the inhabitants of his vast landscapes and responds to them. Pound follows him in trying to make historical figures real to us, but often we do not feel we have truly met them, we have only tried to pay attention as they lectured us. Similarly, Laurie Smith’s most telling criticism of the poetry of Ann Carson – a criticism with which I entirely agree - is not that she flourishes her culture but that she does it to so little poetic effect.
But although Laurie Smith sees in part what is wrong with Pound, he is blinded to what is right, to all that is far from the hectoring figure to which he reduces him. To The Pisan Cantos, for example, written when Pound was in a prison camp in Italy after the war, full of personal feeling and reminiscence, and with all “the humility of self-exposure”. Or to his style - at his best Pound is a delicate and exact poet, with an exceptionally sensitive ear. His great stylistic achievement was to emulate in English the liquidity, the purity of diction and the musicality of the early Provençal and Italian poets he so admired and about whom he wrote his best criticism. And in the process he liberated himself from the gravitational pull of the iambic pentameter. These achievements increased the resources of the language for his successors as well as himself, though more American poets than English have made use of them.
So why has Laurie Smith got up such a head of steam in attacking these poets, and why does he use the term fascist with so little justification? I think because of his suspicion of poetry which he feels could only be grasped by a highly educated minority. Even if he is wrong about fascism, is he right about this?
Such a view misunderstands the issue. Poetry is a repository of experience, and in grasping it the more experience the better, but experience of reading is not distinct from experience of life - the two continually interact and become one. Different poets call upon a different balance for their appreciation. Wide reading enhances the appreciation of Milton; a spirited sex life is more relevant to the appreciation of Catullus. Similarly there is no reason why poets should not write about their experience in reading provided it is the experience which is their focus rather than simply chunks of quotation or whatever. It is for this reason that the cultural references work in T.S.Eliot’s The Waste Land. They tell us that although they have helped him articulate his dark night of the spirit, they are of no more use to him in dispelling it than anything else in his life. It is Eliot’s boldness in including them that communicates the comprehensiveness of his distress.
Laurie Smith says that Eliot’s dense use of allusion in The Waste Land and other poems of the same period was due to the influence of Pound, without which he would have used it as sparingly as in his pre-and post- Pound poems. This may well be true, but surely it was a beneficent influence, and it is no accident that it led to Eliot writing his most adventurous poem - not only because of the bold sweep of its references, or the fact that Pound improved it by cutting some of it, but because the Poundian break up of the rational surface of the poem enables Eliot to articulate fragmented mental states better here than any other poem I know. His later poetry backs off from such tensions and, however eloquent, inhabits a more comfortable terrain. No wonder The Waste Land has been called the most successful of The Cantos. Along with the later poetry of Yeats, it is the greatest tribute we have to Pound the teacher.
Besides which, we do not need to grasp all of a poet’s knowledge to grasp the gist of its effectiveness in a poem. The Waste Land is a case in point. I first read myself it as an adolescent and thought it wonderful, though I certainly had precious little knowledge myself. In any case, why should a poet not address a minority? A fine enough poet to challenge Laurie Smith’s distrust of such a conception did just that when he started the last third of his great poem by urging most of his readers to read him no further, and only the dedicated few to persist – Dante, in Paradiso lines 1-15.
Readers of Magma know Laurie Smith as a scrupulous and penetrating critic. Yet he seems to have gone astray here. I wonder if one clue as to the reason lies not in what he says about his chosen poets but in what he implies about their readers. For what are we to make of these people who must not be challenged by what lies beyond the range of their own immediate knowledge and period lest they be intimidated by it, or with any display of learning because they cannot tell whether it is poetically effective or not? And does he really want all poetry to be tailored to fit such limitations? I suggest he is being unduly protective. Readers would benefit from and enjoy a more bracing regime.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
Robert Potts writes:
"We need always to be alert", Laurie Smith says, "to writers who claim that good poetry must be difficult, accessible only to the educated few, and see this claim for what it is - fascist." This is the climax of his argument against the poetry of Geoffrey Hill. It is a shoddy piece of work, inaccurate in ways which I will try to correct, abusive in ways that cannot be allowed to stand. Years ago, a handful of critics decided (against much evidence) that Hill was a reactionary writer, imperialist, nationalistic, Tory. Although this was and is not the case (as a reading of Hill's poetry, essays or interviews would make obvious), the accusation stuck. To call someone fascist is a more serious accusation, and requires the right of reply that Magma have courteously offered me.
Hill has written a great many poems about fascism. He has written, time and again, of the fate of Jews in the Second World War; about martyrs like Bonhoeffer and von Haeften, who died opposing Hitler;
he has written about those who failed to stop the Holocaust. He has written of the bravery of the soldiers who fought against fascism, and of his anguish that their sacrifice is being forgotten. He has written, time and time again, of the importance of remembering and understanding tyrannical regimes.
He has also written about working-class people, unnamed by history, suffering at the hands of brutal regimes or under the iniquities of class division or commerce. He has written about slaves on the plantations, of people tortured because of their religion, of people starved, tortured, maimed and murdered in conflicts not of their making. He has written of his own working-class family, and of his grandmother, "whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg", her face scarred by hot wire. Hill has educated himself in these matters, and has determined to remember and memorialise them, and to properly understand them.
Hill does not patronise his audience. He has been able to learn these things, and credits his readers with the same ability. Laurie Smith, on the other hand, knows this to be "fascist". Smith is in no doubt that "the reader" (or "we", as he occasionally and ingratiatingly has it) is monoglot, uneducated, uninterested in anything she did not know already. So, to refer to history, or culture, or theology, and not to provide notes and glosses, is to be "inaccessible", to appeal only to "an educated elite". Such work is fascist because of the effect it will have on this reader. In Smith's words
...the reader loses confidence in her ability to understand, therefore to judge, what she is reading. Faced with a plethora of references to 'high' culture which she feels she ought to know but does not, the reader feels increasingly ignorant and unworthy. She is forced to accept the poem on the poet's terms or not at all; her critical faculty is subdued.
One might feel there are alternatives; that the reader might want not simply to understand or judge poetry, but also to experience it; and, thereafter, that her ignorance - especially if she feels oddly guilty about that ignorance - is remediable by doing a little rewarding research. Libraries and the internet and, indeed, university places are more "accessible" than ever before in history.
Nonetheless, Smith speaks for this notional, critically subdued reader; but he does not entirely identify with her. His own ability "to understand, therefore to judge" is evidently unabashed, and towards the end of his piece he guides his reader through one of the 120 passages of Speech! Speech!. "The reader needs to know", Smith confidently and condescendingly begins, "that this refers to Epstein's
Madonna and Child in St Matthew's Church, Northampton". The reader needs to know no such hing, because it is not true. The sculpture in St Matthew's, Northampton, is by Henry Moore. (Epstein's sculpture can be found in Cavendish Square, London.) Smith may accuse Hill of not giving glosses or notes, but Moore is identified by name in the passage, which makes the error less forgivable: (1) it is a piece of information that takes only a minute to check.
Smith's reading of Hill's words is no more reliable. Taking the lines "Absent even the unfocused selving / close to vacuity - Stanley Spencer's fixation - / crazed-neighbourly | which is a truth of England / among manifest others, / an energy altogether | of our kind", Smith states "this celebrates near mindlessness as a particularly English strength. The idea that near mindlessness is a strength is fascist, stemming from an awareness that ignorant people are more malleable". Hill's word, "truth", has oddly been interpreted as "strength", allowing the rest of the assertion to follow.(2) Hill is accused of "celebrating near-mindlessness" in a book which has insistently expressed dismay at wilful stupidity and cultural amnesia, precisely because of his fear that the ignorant can be manipulated into dulled compliance: his desire is the antithesis of that attributed to him by Smith.
There are other related strands to Smith's accusation that Hill's work is "fascist". Firstly, that a certain aesthetic approach is, by virtue of its apparent attitude to the reader, fascistic; and secondly, in a false syllogism, that this aesthetic approach was that of Ezra Pound, that we know Pound to have supported fascism, and that Hill (it is asserted) is a Poundian, and ergo a fascist. Other Modernist figures with genuine fascist sympathies (Yeats) and anti-semitic leanings (Eliot) are excused; their work contains the "humility of self-exposure", as evinced by two quotations, respectively: "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart" and "these fragments I have shored against my ruins". On the other hand, according to Smith, "For Pound and Hill, the fragments are ammunition and the heart is unmentionable."
What does this piece of rhetoric actually mean? If the "humility of self-exposure" can be read in "these fragments I have shored against my ruins", then why not in Pound's "I cannot make it cohere"? If it can be seen in Yeats's "foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart", why cannot Smith locate it in Hill's self-mockery and almost abject presentation of his failures and guilts in The Triumph of Love and Speech! Speech!? How can Smith assert that in Hill "the heart is unmentionable" when it appears on only the second page of the book, and in numerous references thereafter, along with unusual (for Hill) amounts of evidently personal material, as was the case in The Triumph of Love also? (Finally, one might note that self-exposure does not inevitably entail "humility", as the preening narcissism of certain confessional poets testifies.)
The linking of Hill to Pound (guilt by association?) is also devious. Smith describes Pound as Hill's "acknowledged master". This acknowledgement of mastery had escaped me; it does not occur in Hill's writings, where he is careful to appraise Pound scrupulously in terms of his successes and failures (see "Envoi" in The Enemy's Country). Indeed, Hill's other essay on Pound, in The Lords of Limit, is a painstaking examination of Pound's treason trial, and one which refuses to allow Pound off the hook: it is notably harsh on Pound's later expression of regret, in which Hill discerns an inadequate level of honesty and penitence. But Hill is able, as Smith is not, to tease apart Pound's unforgivable prejudice and the value of some of his work, writing with measured care: "The moral offence of his cruel and vulgar antisemitism does not call into question the integrity of his struggle; neither does the integrity of his struggle absolve him of responsibility for the vulgar cruelty.
" I must move on to the question of "accessibility" and fascism, and Laurie Smith's curious sense that when cultural reference reaches a certain "density" (amounting to a "plethora" of references, perhaps) the poem is fascistically subduing the reader. Hill has commented on this matter himself, on several occasions. Like Smith, who cites Primo Levi, Hill (who cites Theodore Haecker) believes that the Nazis deliberately brutalised the German language:
The German ethicist Theodore Haecker points out that the first thing the tyrant does is to drain intelligence from language, and that tyranny and verbal one-dimensionality go together; which I believe to be largely true. That's what Goebbels did to the German language; and that's why poets like Paul Celan had such a terrible time with the German language; because it had been deliberately drained of its semantic intelligence .. The state of poetry and the common weal are intimately connected. Because at its best poetry is the semantic intelligence of the national language being understood at its fullest and deepest; and if you switch that off, you've switched off a whole area of the human intelligence...
Hill does not condescend to his readers. Rather, as he says, "In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. If you write as if you had to placate or in any way entice their lack of interest, then I think you are making condescending assumptions about people. I mean people are not fools. But so much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together …”
Hill's art is "accessible" to anyone who can open a book. His references, where unfamiliar, can be uncovered: this is a country with libraries, internet access, and unprecedented levels of university education. (Education has never been less elitist, in this sense.) Yet Smith seems to believe that any artist who does have an extensive understanding of history, culture, philosophy and politics is not to be admired but despised. He believes that those artists have acquired this knowledge solely to aggrandize themselves, and that their references are not integral to their understanding of the world but are merely shibboleths to repel potential all readers except for a small "academic elite". (What is one to make of that adjective "academic" and the contempt it seems to convey?) Smith cannot imagine that such a writer, knowing about, say, the Biafran war (which Britain was not innocently involved in), or the art of Anselm Kiefer, might want to share some considerations and observations with the interested reader. Rather, Smith finds it intolerable that such a writer might trouble the complacent ignorance of his own notional reader.
There are a few other assertions by Smith that need correcting. Twice, he suggests that Hill "finds the culture of the past infinitely preferable to the present". To say this of a poet who has constantly and painstakingly rendered the atrocious brutality, tyranny and suffering of previous centuries is as bizarre as Smith's contempt for Hill's alleged "belief that what interests the poet is all that matters": it is hard to see how any artist could escape that accusation, and one wonders what the alternative is. Is Smith dictating what poets should and shouldn't focus on? (And is not such a demand itself fascistic?) Does Smith not realise that Speech! Speech! is, in part, a consideration of precisely this issue?
Geoffrey Hill is a scrupulous writer and an attentive reader. Laurie Smith would appear to be neither. He cannot even spell the name of his subject correctly, although the book must have been in front of him while he was writing. Throughout the piece, and in his covering letter to me, Smith renders Geoffrey as 'Geoffery'. In one way, set against all his other errors, this is a trivial point; but it does suggest a dismaying lack of care and attention in someone who practises as both a critic and a teacher. We need, after all, always to be alert.
(1) The lines to which Robert Potts refers are:
TAKE TWO: the Northampton MADONNA AND CHILD:
an offering-up of deep surfaces; chalk
sleepers from the underground | risen to this.
(Moore also became a figure.)
where the reference to Moore seems ambiguous (Editor).
(2) “strength” is intended to refer to “an energy altogether | of our kind” (Editor).
Page(s) 53-62
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