Presiding spirits: E. A. Markham
In Presiding Spirits, we ask a contemporary poet to write a poem drawing on work from the past. For this issue, E.A. Markham has written a poem influenced by T.S. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”. Tim Robertson asked E.A. Markham about the poem’s origin and more generally about his work.
Born on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1939, E.A. Markham has lived mostly in Europe since the 1950s. His jobs have ranged from builder to theatre director. He has published a novel, short stories, plays, travel books, anthologies and eight collections of poetry, the most recent of which are A Rough Climate (Anvil) shortlisted for the 2002 T.S. Eliot Prize and John Lewis & Co
(Anvil, 2003). He is Professor of Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University.
Woman on the Verandah, Reading
At the book-signing he spells out the name
and the novelist, practised at this art
writes a tribute to the unseen reader
trying for a moment to prevent her image flickering
and blurring with the crowd that are part of the book’s success.
The woman is said to have lived in this country
and worked in its hospitals
and has now gone back to reclaim her island
of high-swaying palms and fresh colour.
He liked to imagine this new recruit a fit
for prose controlled to the casual eye
managing its oceans ebbs and tides.
And there he sees her on the verandah
of a new house. Inside, the painting on the wall
is of men linked together by a rope
round the neck, hands tied at the wrist
behind them, an African village
in the background: the solitary woman,
head bowed, brings up the rear. Even here the young
are beautiful. But why are bodies, long enchained,
so fit and wholesome after capture, different
from the dignity earned on the wards?
Now that a space is cleared, the woman sits
on her verandah aware of the whispering
of the sea, of chunks of her life
left elsewhere, of a big book sent to her
by someone who might be here: there’s a lizard
on the wall, the cat wandering off; though a boy with a cutlass,
in her sights, threatens the grass next-door.
There she sits, book in hand, like a portrait.
How did you come to write “Woman on a Verandah, Reading”?
I wrote it on a recent trip to Birmingham when I went to the Midlands launch of Austin Clarke’s novel, The Polished Hoe. Austin is a writer from Barbados who lives in Canada. I’ve known him for many years. At the end of the proceedings I bought some copies of the book, one intended for my sister, who now lives in Dominica after spending most of her adult life in England. As Austin dedicated the book to her – someone he'd never met – I wondered what sort of image he conjured up of this potential reader, far away.
When I visited my sister a few months before, she was in the process of reading a rather substantial biography of John Wesley (though she tended not to do this on the verandah) and she complained of not being able to concentrate on the book.
I suppose I've been, if you like, contesting some of the visual images – the painterly images – that have been coming out of the Caribbean. Don't get me wrong; I don't have a problem with pioneers like Wilfredo Lam, the great Afro-Cuban fabulist who established our claim to modernism – a claim reinforced, memorably, by Aubrey Williams, our man from Guyana. No, I'm talking of the decorative or the figurative strains in Caribbean painting and their absence of domestic detail. Perhaps what I mean is the lack of people doing normal things in the home, inside the house – you know, like Vermeer’s people at music practice or women reading or writing letters or whatever. The natural, living detail seems always to be missing. Lots of iconic or symbolic figures are represented, yes, or else people are shown out of doors – at the beach, at carnival or in the fields (as Austin’s novel recalls). The portrait referred to in the poem, a popular print of Omowale Stewart's Lest We Forget (painted in the 1970s), is another version of this. As are the many images of idealized peasant women in landscapes, straight-backed, with bundles or pails of water on their heads. This is very different from Caribbean fiction of “growing up”, where interiors are presented in more complex naturalistic detail: just think of Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin or Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. But even these interiors conform to a pattern, portraying extreme privation as if it were the only reality.
True, a verandah, strictly speaking, isn’t an interior – more a link between interior and exterior – but these are the visual traditions that lie behind the setting of the poem. They also explain partly why the woman is reading. There is a character in an early Derek Walcott play who carries a book as a prop: he is a comic character and raises a laugh with the audience. I thought it was time, with the long West Indian obsession with learning (not, on the whole, replicated by Black Britains) that we had a figure, in repose, with a book, and not find it funny.
So the Caribbean tradition is central to the poem?
Having been born in the West Indies, I am still in some ways emotionally attached to the place. But it’s too easy to fall into mythologising about nationhood. I am from the eastern Caribbean – calypso country – but, in music, I relate more to the reggae of the far north, though I feel less emotionally engaged with Jamaica per se. Reconciling disparate Caribbean traditions is one of the tensions that’s usually absent in the work of Caribbean and Caribbean heritage writers – Walcott, of course, excepted. There is something called Black British Literature, for instance, which is authenticated in the work of Linton Kwezi Johnson precisely because his impact is not limited to the small percentage of people in Britain who can claim to be black. Andrea Levy, too, seems to avoid being parochial.
In “Woman on the Verandah, Reading”, we have the Caribbean setting, we have something of Europe, and we also have Africa. Now, Africa is interesting. Africa is represented by the picture on the wall inside – a familiar picture of the slave experience, which you will find in many middle-class homes in the Caribbean. It’s an idealized picture of slavery, much favoured by Africans in the diaspora. The comment in the poem “Even here the young are beautiful”, is, I hope, telling. It is a comment on the sentimentalising of the African slave experience. It is a hint that this woman on the verandah, who has worked in hospitals in the West, is a woman of experience and intelligence: she knows that bodies trapped, brutalized and force-marched cannot be idealised in this way. Returning to the island, then, she is not going to succumb to ethnic chic and denial: she knows the texture of this reality. Nor is she herself idealized: book in hand, she is not, you will note, reading: she is distracted. Her use of the term "dignity”, you know, in the last line of the second verse – I think that that consciousness must be attributed to her – conveys the (perhaps so obvious) irony.
In what way does your poem relate to Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”? Not perhaps in its tone or in its form. And one runs the risk of self-parody in trying to relate one’s own effort to Eliot. I first came across Eliot at school in Kilburn, and found a haunting quality in “Portrait of a Lady” which has never quite left me. The drama of two people in a room – so different from most poems I was reading at the time, which seemed to go it alone – captivated me. I was struggling to write plays, so I suppose that that sort of scene-setting appealed. But more than that: the problematic nature of the relationship between the younger man and the older woman was so
much more sophisticated than the sniggering appeal of the kind of liaison a Grammar School boy might imagine with his Form Mistress.
It was also the indoor setting that struck me. The lady’s room hints at suppressed passion. “Among the smoke and fog of a December afternoon”. Think of London in the late 1950s when I first encountered this poem. We lived in Ladbroke Grove. When I got home from school, being the youngest in the house my job was to
light the fires. Damp coal. Odd bits of wood. Rolledup newspaper. Sometimes I was lucky; other times, the smoke in the sitting-room rivalled the summer smog which in those days killed thousands of people every year. It was in this context that I read about wax candles leaving rings of light on the ceiling of a room of a lady who will shortly be nostalgic about her life in Paris. This setting, with the couple in question just back from a Chopin concert, seemed a good swap for Ladbroke Grove.
And then there are the flowers. I’ve struggled all my life to name flowers. Initially, I set out to identify them to improve my A Level grades. Then an odd, novelistic thing came to my aid. One summer after coming down from university - thinking what to do - I got a job delivering flowers in Kensington. “She has a bowl of lilacs in her room” – nice: got it. “And twists one in her fingers while she talks” – ah, so that’s how it’s done! By that summer of delivery I could identify hyacinths. It must have been 1965, because Eliot had just died. And on one of my rounds I had the anxiety of delivering a bouquet to the flat of Mrs Valerie Eliot. What do I remember? She came to the door in a russet outfit, the smartly-tailored jacket showing off an imposing figure. She was larger than the Portrait of the Lady I had in mind. And, though she was apparently on her way out, she graciously took the flowers and thanked me. (This might sound obvious but I did have an occasion – in the same area – where the recipient, on looking at the label on the bouquet, informed me with some sourness, “I don't want flowers”.)
In the poem, the lady is "older" but I didn’t think she was literally “one about to reach her journey’s end”. That was finesse, that was vaguely arousing. The libel of the voice “of a broken violin” merely characterized an inadequate man who, approaching his lover, feels as if “I had mounted on my hands and knees”. And that haunting line, “I shall sit here serving tea to friends” has the "timeless" quality of a portrait.
In these nebulous ways, Eliot stays with me. The timbre of his voice still excites me. I like the urban, contemporary feel of his poems. I’m one of those unfashionable people who likes everything urban (if it’s not violent or decaying) and am bored by most things rural. Yeats might be a finer poet than Eliot, but I admire Yeats more from a distance. Brathwaite excites me, but his designs on me are too palpable. I love the literariness of Eliot.
How did you decide on the poem’s form?
I’m playing a little game at the moment of “finding the form”. Over the years I’ve written a series of “family” poems that I haven’t felt confident enough to publish, partly, I suspect, from dissatisfaction with their form. They weren’t tight enough, or they seemed arbitrary.
Recently, looking at the mess of them, I decided that the alcaic was the answer. So I’m restructuring all the material into one – rather substantial – “Alcaics for the Family”. A form used, I seem to remember, by Philip Sidney, and, effectively, by Ovid in the Odes.
At the same time, I’m experimenting with lighter forms. The poem I first thought of submitting to this discussion is called “A Few Lines from Philoctete’s Epic”, a metrical exercise in Walcott’s terza rima. Philoctete is a very Caribbean character, with his inflated name and a sore on his leg which won’t heal, and the poem is an affectionate send-up of Walcott’s epic, Omeros – that combination of Homeric sprawl and Dantean form, sustained for 325 pages. You may recall that Walcott, in that poem, extends the Dante line from five stresses to the Alexandrine, and I try to be loyal to that.
In the last few months I’ve written some 14-liners which I’m slowly converting into sonnets. But then there are poems which get revised in the opposite direction. The first version of “Woman on the Verandah, Reading” was in unstressed syllabics, and successive versions freed themselves from that, leaving only about seven lines from the original discipline. Poems like this seem to come with a sort of external bracing. When I can’t justify that form of containment, as with this poem, I free them up.
How much does “Woman on a Verandah, Reading” include themes that are recurring concerns in your work? In much of my prose (certainly in the short stories), there seems often to be an elusive (from the ancestral house) woman at the centre – grandmother, mother, now sister. Another recurrent theme is the tendency to identify and preserve a concrete space back there – for your life is that of traveller, migrant, refugee – from closing up. This is something of an obsession. In one way or another I have kept recreating the house in which I grew up as a child in Montserrat. Room by room. All twelve rooms of it. Not just the house but its environs. The more obsessively now that the house has long vanished, and the island (due to a volcano) has become a disaster area.
Individual figures like the lady on the verandah, caught here and there, are like survivors bearing witness. But, unless they bring with them something of the drawingroom (where visitors have been entertained) or the kitchen area (where bread is made) or even the servants’ room (which, in our time, housed the cassava mill), then only one strand of the experience – that of the exotica of migration – is conveyed.
Who or what else is influencing your poetry at the moment? How do you talk about influences, except perhaps in retrospect? Things that you consciously aim at might never be achieved, in which case an acknowledged influence might actually be misleading. And things you achieve generally happen despite yourself. So, accident, really, is the influence.
It’s good to see that Magma is connected to the Troubadour Coffee House in Earl’s Court. In the early 1970s I used to turn up there to read poems from the floor when other floor readers were introducing Neruda and Borges and Dennis Brutus: I’m sure that that had an influence on me, though by now I find it hard to detect. Or I’m prepared to believe that you could trace somewhere the effect on my work of the three years I spent in the south of France with a socialist co-operative, where we built and restored houses, and discussed Jacques Prevert and Louis Aragon over lunch. Did that cancel out the early influence of the church service in Montserrat, the endless hymns of Charles Wesley?
For the moment I like to think that one of the main influences on my work is the National Health Service, to whom I’m struggling to write a decent love poem, because it seems bafflingly good to me in granting me the use of its resources. (The malcontents who pillory the NHS have a point, too. But for the moment, I'm in the other side.)
The main influences on my work? This is a bone for a dog to worry over. Although I’ve lived in this country and sometimes in France for nearly fifty years, I feel no real ownership of either place, and this is a concern that I need to find new ways of addressing. For certainly, paying more taxes and feeling personally less safe doesn’t do it: that just brings on, not resentment, but a feeling of – what's the word? – exhaustion. Only that’s a form of selfservicing you can’t really encourage. It may make you realise that your own sense of instability is echoed in something writ larger, but you pull back from recognising that this or that country is falling apart, or that the abused will in time inevitably become the abuser, or that the decline of learning in England is permanent.
So let’s try and be normal and say that my main influences are the health of my family, both old and new (scattered, yes; detached, alas); the generosity of my friends; the horrors in the news and, hopefully, my (fairly random) reading matter.
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