Can You Describe This?
Peter Forbes (ed.): Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Verse. Harmondsworth: Viking, £20.
On 15 April 1912, according to Thomas Hardy, “the Spinner of the Years/ Said “Now!” And each one hears,/ And consummation comes, and jars two hemispheres”. In the collision of human technology (the Titanic) and oblivious Nature (the Iceberg) accident becomes event. After “Now!”, Hardy’s ‘Convergence of the Twain’ ends in the present tense to become a continuous memorial to the lasting pressure of what has become an event in the Twentieth Century which will no doubt be remembered beyond its centenary in the next. Hardy’s ending tells us not only that his contemporaries now live in the knowledge of what happened, but also of what the future would make of this event in the past. The moment is already ‘historic’ and as such a part of contemporary experience. The best of Scanning the Century recreates this sense, of living through the major events of the century along with those who wrote poems about them, so that however distant the past may seem, it can come forward and be experienced “Now!”.
The trouble is that many events need a little more than poems to be re-experienced, and the original purpose of many poems here might not entirely have been to bear witness. Hardy’s poem is as much the old man’s told-you-so as it is a sudden response to what he could have read in the newspapers. What poems make of events may tell us less about events than the poems themselves: scanning poems is not exactly the same as scanning the progress of history or science. Forbes is quick to dismiss William Carlos Williams when he says that it is not so presumptive “to state that such an apparently minor activity as a movement in verse construction could be an indication of Einstein’s discoveries in the relativity of our measurements of physical matter”. But Williams knew that poems are in as well as about the world. In Scanning the Century, poems work with a history which is date and decade, process and response. The poems become documents of this approach to time, the witness of contemporaries to sudden catastrophe and rapid change, war and progress, holocaust and apocalypse, liberation and oppression.
I don’t know whether Thomas Hardy would have agreed with Peter Forbes’s objections to ‘postmodernism’, that “science does not consist of individual, refutable and sometimes self-contradictory propositions” (his emphasis), or that, “As for history, we know from direct experience it is real”. But Hardy might have felt that the jarring of two hemispheres was experienced as historical event, and that poetry has a part to play in glossing that event. Whether this can justify Forbes’s claim for his selection of poems, that it amounts to “documentary realism”, is another matter. Although some poems here write about events from the past, Forbes’s prime criterion for selection seems to have been that they are either immediate responses to contemporary events, or dragged out after social change, long trauma or even boredom.
Forbes attempts to resolve the conflict of these two impulses in public poetry, immediacy and endurance, contemporaneity and considered response, by prizing the active before the detached, the engaged rather than the neutral. He ends his introduction with Donald Davie suggesting a tentative alternative to the “neutral tone” of the Thirties, and he gives us all of Auden in the “neutral air” of ‘September 1, 1939’. The poems on many horrors and wars in the post-1945 majority of the book, only briefly pause on moments such as John Hewitt’s hope that warring opposites may “on a neutral sod renew the old debate/ which all may join without intemperate speech”.
“Documentary realism” has its drawbacks, but in its direct engagement with the world, much is to be said for it. It is practically impossible these days to escape from Adorno’s interdiction on poetry post-Auschwitz, but Forbes at least meets him head on: “Adorno was wrong”, he tells us (before spoiling it by saying that Keats had “blithe assurance”). There is consolation in documents, representations must be made. In Anna Akhmatova’s Requiem a woman asks the poet: “‘Can you describe this?’ And I said: ‘Yes I can.’ And then something like the shadow of a smile crossed what had once been her face.” As Forbes’s selection of poems on the Holocaust shows, the moment of response, of the trust of the reader in the truthfulness of the writer, must not be lost.
It is not that consoling to think that without intemperance there might have been little to write about. Yet where Scanning the Century succeeds is where it gives us poems engaged in their sense of an unthinkable yet banal “Now”. Another famous “Now” in the book is Keith Douglas’s moment of pulling the trigger in ‘How to Kill’: “Now in my dial of glass appears/ the soldier who is going to die [...] I cry/ NOW. Death like a familiar, hears”. I suppose that this is an experience shared by millions throughout the century, as is that of being on the receiving end. Douglas’s immersion in his own act can be matched by this, for instance, from Miguel Hernández’s ‘The Wounded Man’, contemplating the whimsy of being wounded, watching yourself bleed:
The wounded stretch across the battlefields.
And from the long length of these fighters’ bodies
A wheatfield of warm fountains springs up,
Spreading into raucous jets.Blood always rains upside down, toward the sky.
And wounds make sounds, just like conch shells
when the rapidity of flight is in them,
the essence of waves.Blood smells like the sea, tastes like the sea, and the wine cellar.
The wine cellar of the sea, of hardy wine, breaks open
where the wounded man, shivering, goes under,
blossoms, and finds himself.
Responses like this, the surreal edging into epic simile, are much older than the Twentieth Century. The testament is not so much to the event described as the quality of the response, the particularities of the experience of those who have experienced it. Time recedes as the reader pauses to attend to those who suffer within it.
Yet time cannot always recede from an anthology committed to the “Now”. Consequently, there is a compromise at the heart of Scanning the Century. ‘The Wounded Man’, has a subtitle ‘(for the wall of a hospital in all the gore)’, but whether it was written on that wall the anglophone reader can’t tell, since there is little textual apparatus to go with Forbes’s brief biographies and skeleton annotations. Forbes’s proper emphasis on historical events as prior to poetic texts lessens the suffering those texts, as texts, record. So much of the detail of the individual moments in the stories behind the poems and their often suffering authors cannot be given. Although such assistance would have meant that the appendix would have overwhelmed a book of nearly six hundred pages, poems themselves have a documentary history, that is not always apparent here. The reader may be one of the casualties of a vast, sometimes striking, always eccentric, anthology which strives to put before the widest readership possible the widest number of views of the widest number of possible topics.
Vastness is all, even if comprehensiveness cannot be attempted. Scanning the Century is split into thirty-nine themed sections, covering topics from the obvious – ‘Younger Than That Now: The Sixties’ – to the flip – ‘All the Lonely People: The Individual’. We get ‘My Back Pages’ but are spared the rest of ‘Eleanor Rigby’; the lyrics of popular songs, by the way, cease to be poetry after Woodstock. After a breathless twenty-five page introduction which drops, by my count, a round one hundred names, the anthology presents work from nearly three hundred poets from all over the world. Only fifty or so are women. Feminism does not appear to be a social phenomenon which warrants its own section, although Forbes does find consolation in “The one strong positive tendency” of the “depressed and aimless” Seventies, “the rise of the Women’s Movement”. Like all anthologies, Scanning the Century has those who are in and those who are out, losers and winners. With only one extract each, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are out. In general, “documentary realism” is at odds with many parts of twentieth-century culture, the Right, modernism and the avant garde. The joint winners, with thirty pages between them, are Louis MacNeice and W. H. Auden.
Page(s) 68-71
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