What a great post & conversation. How lovely to read Edward & Raffaela’s memories in response. I will look forward to the Slightly Foxed piece, remembering how vivid & wild & inspiring I found By Grand Central Station when I was 15 or so and chose it as a prize in a writing competition. Lured by the title, & kept reading by the beautiful prose (so there, Carey - whose writing in other contexts I admire - but not here!)
I reached down my copy of the Elizabeth Smart biog by standing on a ladder passing The Intellectuals and the Masses 1992…à book that made me squirm with delight
My reading of this is that the pursuit of celebrity and fame is futile and damaging. Why does a poet need to be famous. Why even do they need other people to read their work and tell them how good it is. And if they achieve fame despite not seeking it then the fault lies not with them but with a society that feeds on publicity and parasitic chatter.
"Anodyne praise is the death of criticism, and indeed of reading pleasure, and if the review pages were more enlivened by stylish vitriol perhaps they would be more avidly read." I agree. One critic (also a fine poet and translator) who does say what he thinks is Michael Hofmann (see his review essay on Stefan Zweig in the LRB a few years ago). He's also a good critic. So is CH Sisson, so I would respect his views on Barker. Carey was a a good lecturer as I recall and I admired the energy of his reviews. But he had a few demons of his own.
You had Carey as a lecturer? That must have been interesting! I don’t know a great deal about him beyond what I read in the obituaries, but there were certainly some sharp edges beneath the surface. I haven’t read much of Hofmann’s criticism – I’ll read the Zweig essay you mention later – but I do like his poetry. I liked his comments at the TS Eliot Prize awards ceremony, as reported here: https://thelittlereviewuk.substack.com/p/fluff-and-puff-at-the-ts-eliot-prize
To be honest, I didn't go to many lectures... but I heard him lecture a couple of times. He was refreshingly unstuffy in those days. I also like Hofmann's poetry. And I know he is a fan of Solie who just won the TS Eliot.
What a great, enlightening article Mathew. I have By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept on my bookshelf for years. I have always had this romantic idea of the book and the relationship between Smart and Barker. I must read it soon. Looking forward to your article 😀 👍
I hope this won’t be taken for “anodyne praise,” but: good read! Delighted you did decide to post. We need more literary criticism, and it needs to be better. Pictures of bookshelves and books are nice, but they’re not sufficient. Criticism means telling good stories to interested readers and having the courage to offend them. You remind us, though, that there isn’t just a book at the end of a critic’s pen: there’s a writer.
Thanks Michael! Yes, I think Carey clearly got it wrong here and was rightly taken to task for it, but we do need more incisive critics to pick up his baton. We need more, better books and arts criticism generally. The available space has fallen away dramatically in the last decade or two and too much of what coverage there is is essentially PR.
As another of the off spring of George Barker, and the niece of the brilliant Allan Massie, and indeed the avenger of the ‘apparently still alive’ arrow, I’ve got to say this is all so great. These days critical language is often pretty milky and bland, and it’s excellent to read and remember all the above . Especially the savage pleasure we felt the evening we realised we could hunt down something that had stung our flesh when our hearts were hurting. That something was John Carey. I can’t recommend highly enough the sport of critic baiting to salve some of the many wounds of fresh grief. I had forgotten my mother had come out with the curse. Love that especially. My father’s poems, Elizabeth Smart’s novels, any novels, any poems, are not to everyone’s taste. That in no way reduces them. I’d say the fact that their shenanigans as well as their work are still being sifted through decades after their deaths suggests that they, more than John Carey have the edge. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks anyway and I can’t wait to read your Slightly Foxed piece.
Thank you so much for this, Raffaella. I’m reeling a little that not one but two of George Barker’s children have responded to my post within hours of its airing. And, more generally, I’m surprised how strongly people have felt – whether with regard to Elizabeth Smart and her writing, your father’s poetry, or, in one or two instances, the quality of Carey’s criticism. (I wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested at all, which tells you all you need to know about my judgement in these matters!)
As you say, individual taste in no way reduces the life of the work. That’s the important bit, isn’t it, in the long run? The persistence of value, the persistent importance of the choices they made. That the writing – and, yes, the lives themselves, the shenanigans – still challenge, inspire and perplex people long, long after those lives are over.
I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly get behind critic-baiting as a sport; I review a lot of books myself. But on the other hand I think it’s easy to see a kind of savage, exultant pleasure in Carey's own assault on ES here – and in his determinedly casual dismissal of your father – and while that can make for good copy, I think it ultimately reflects more poorly on him that it does on his subject(s). I’m glad that you and your mother had the opportunity to explain that to him in person.
I hope you like the Slightly Foxed piece! I think you will, but what with one thing and another, I’m a little anxious. What I would say is that my thoughts and feelings are always in flux, which is to say their work is very much alive to me.
On another note, my parents’ first flat as a married couple was in the same building as Elizabeth’s on Westbourne Terrace. I remember my mum telling me about her and By Grand Central… when I was a teenager. In fact, I have an idea that my paternal grandmother was the landlord, but I can’t prove that either way at this point.
Anyway, thank you again. What a lovely, unlooked for pleasure this post has proved to be.
Thank you so much for this, Raffaella. I’m reeling a little that not one but two of George Barker’s children have responded to my post within hours of its airing. And, more generally, I’m surprised how strongly people have felt – whether with regard to Elizabeth Smart and her writing, your father’s poetry, or, in one or two instances, the quality of Carey’s criticism. (I wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested at all, which tells you all you need to know about my judgement in these matters!)
As you say, individual taste in no way reduces the life of the work. That’s the important bit, isn’t it, in the long run? The persistence of value, the persistent importance of the choices they made. That the writing – and, yes, the lives themselves, the shenanigans – still challenge, inspire and perplex people long, long after those lives are over.
I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly get behind critic-baiting as a sport; I review a lot of books myself. But on the other hand I think it’s easy to see a kind of savage, exultant pleasure in Carey's own assault on ES here – and in his determinedly casual dismissal of your father – and while that can make for good copy, I think it ultimately reflects more poorly on him that it does on his subject(s). I’m glad that you and your mother had the opportunity to explain that to him in person.
I hope you like the Slightly Foxed piece! I think you will, but what with one thing and another, I’m a little anxious. What I would say is that my thoughts and feelings are always in flux, which is to say their work is very much alive to me.
On another note, my parents’ first flat as a married couple was in the same building as Elizabeth’s on Westbourne Terrace. I remember my mum telling me about her and By Grand Central… when I was a teenager. In fact, I have an idea that my paternal grandmother was the landlord, but I can’t prove that either way at this point.
Anyway, thank you again. What a lovely, unlooked for pleasure this post has proved to be.
Fantastic storytelling. That image of Carey cornered at the Christmas party, climbing over a table with nowhere to go, captures something essential about how words catch up with us. Massie's point about believing in Art feels more radical now than it did then, when poetry barely registers asa cultural force. I've always wondered if critics who go hard on dead or out-of-fashion writers are compensating for something, dunno what exactly, but the pattern is hard tomiss.
Thank you! Agree with you re: Massie. Such a belief is almost unthinkable now. I don't think this is true for Carey, but I think it's much easier to make a reputation as a critic by attacking, and the formerly famous or fashionable provide easy pickings.
As one of his many children, it is more than weird to see this little anecdote surface after so long. GB did not spare his critics in the pub, and its easily possible he may have been insulting to Carey and Carey was paying him back. I remember an evening in the French pub in the late 70s (when the soho bohemians were hardly distinguishable from down-n-outs) that was basically conversation as drunken boxing. Having said that, GB was of all the poets i've come across the most committed to poetry as the ultimate form of experience/arbiter of reality. Its impossible to describe how thrilling he made 'the business of living'. His Roman Poem III descibes an event that actually took place (he did build the birdcage in our garden). Its really about Byzantium (obv).
Roman Poem III
A SPARROW’S FEATHER
There was this empty birdcage in the garden.
And in it, to amuse myself, I had hung
pseudo-Oriental birds constructed of
glass and tin bits and paper, that squeaked sadly
as the wind sometimes disturbed them. Suspended
in melancholy disillusion they sang
of things that had never happened, and never
could in that cage of artificial existence.
The twittering of these instruments lamenting
their absent lives resembled threnodies
torn from a falling harp, till the cage filled with
engineered regret like moonshining cobwebs
as these constructions grieved over not existing.
The children fed them with flowers. A sudden gust
and without sound lifelessly one would die
scattered in scraps like debris. The wire doors
always hung open, against their improbable
transfiguration into, say, chaffinches
or even more colourful birds. Myself I found
the whole game charming, let alone the children.
And then one morning – I do not record a
matter of cosmic proportions, I assure you,
not an event to flutter the Volscian dovecotes –
there, askew among those constructed images
like a lost soul electing to die in Rome,
its feverish eye transfixed, both wings fractured,
lay – I assure you, Catullus – a young sparrow.
Not long for this world, so heavily breathing
one might have supposed this cage his destination
after labouring past seas and holy skies
whence, death not being known there, he had flown.
Of course, there was nothing to do. The children
brought breadcrumbs, brought water, brought tears in their
eyes perhaps to restore him, that shivering panic
of useless feathers, that tongue-tied little gossip,
Interesting how for me this draws on Eliot's Four Quartets the abstraction, long line, bathos and prayerful domestic detail. The "apocalypse poets" didn't get it from nowhere.
I wonder how the world would look if more of us took ‘poetry as the ultimate form of experience/arbiter of reality.’ Thank you all for this wonderful, reading-list-expanding conversation.
Here's an example; we were driving along the Norfolk lanes in autumn. He was old at this point but still spry in the head. A pheasant ran across the road, stopped in the middle, looked both ways nervously, then froze. I had to break to avoid it, and GB said as an aside, as if he'd just recognised a friend of a friend; 'aha, the lunatic prince'. In other words Hamlet manifesting via the princely feathers and the inability of the bird to make up its mind. Then we went back to whatever it was we were talking about. Only later did I realise this was a typical example of his mind working on several levels, at least one of which was some projection of the mythological but treated as deadly serious, not 'nice story' but the real thing. The secret is that poets don't take metaphors as metaphorical; the art of reading their way is to take what a poem says literally, then rearrange the world. When we do that the effect is far stronger than most hallucigens, because we are committing our imaginative reality to this version of what is.
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment, Edward. I'm very grateful to you. It's lovely to read of your father through your eyes and understand a little of what made him such magnetic company. (I share Massie's romantic nostalgia for the vanished world of the Soho bohemians, though I am under no illusion that I would have fitted in!)
I know very little about Carey's life beyond what I read in the recent obituaries. Perhaps, as you say, there was a little personal grudge behind his remarks.
And thank you too for sharing that superb poem, which I hadn't encountered before. One of the reason's Carey's dismissal of your father as a 1930s poet rankles is that he produced so much of his best work later in life. (I have always loved Anno Domini, for instance.)
Its almost possible to look back with nostalgia at these episodes where critics and poets sparred, compared to the milquetoasty smirr-whirr we revel in today, this bland porridge of blanket-praise cookie-cutted out for the waltz of jostle and position. For my part, I seem to represent (at least to my reflected self image) some kind of forgotten border-guard/defender of that ludicrous New Romantic/ New Apocalypse movement, eg early Barker, D Thomas, Gascoigne and more (heavens, even the adolescent Sydney Graham). Early Barker is easiest to get into if one hears the poems as a graft between Wallace Stevens, Yeats and a generous dollop of 'neo-confessional' Wordworth. 'Allegory of the Adolescent and Adult' for instance. But much more. My favourite of the genre is actually Geoffrey Hill (I will die on the hill that 'An Apology for the Revival of the Christian Churches of England' sonnet cycle is the linguistic equal of the Sistine Chapel ). Its hard to find an movement/style more out of fashion than this lot. Maurice Riordan says it takes two cycles of taste to pass before things settle. Which means if they are to come back from the oblivion of disrepute, now is the time. I would buckle up the horses but they bolted long ago. And in truth so much magnificent 20th century poetry has been carted up to the attic for trunk liner, there's no point complaining...
I certainly am nostalgic for a time when poetry and writing mattered so intensely to people that they might argue vehemently over such things. Ludicrous? Perhaps, but wonderfully so. It is hard to see those times returning, although were they to do so, I see no reason why the mid-century writers you mention shouldn't return with them. It feels to me that the contemporary culture is somewhat exhausted, and I would like to think that renewal must eventually come.
I will bear your recommended contexts in mind next time I attempt early Barker! Yeats seems a frequent comparator.
I have Hill's Collected Poems at my bedside waiting for me to finish the Collected Ted Hughes. It may be a while until I get to them because I'm finding that latter hard going.
Foolishly I think it still does, like a massive altered state of collective consciousness floating just below the surface. One of the recent delights in my life is waking (after the discovery that the gap between first and second sleep is not insomnia) at 2 am, getting hold of my 900 page Broken Heirarchies (Hill's total oevre, not the first collected) and just doing a random walk; being half in a dream state seems to add to the drug like intensity and wonder. The things he is doing with language; the sheer fun he has...
If it's foolish, it's a rather beautiful kind of foolishness… Broken Hierarchies is the Hill book I was thinking of. I'm awake a lot in the middle of the night these days. I've never been good at keeping time in music so it's no surprise to find myself off-tempo with circadian rhythms either. But I'm always so intent on getting back to sleep, no matter how many hours it takes, that picking up a book at that point is almost anathema. Also, I do like drifting on the tides of that hypnagogic state, and how giving the mind is to the pressure of suggestion… Next time though, I really need to pick up that book, don't I?
Wait ok, the idea that musical tempo and circadian rhythms are related in the nervous system is a lovely, astonishing stretch. I'm trying to imagine each night as a beat, the song as a year of nights. Two pushbacks; one is that 'not being good' is the same as 'opportunity' or 'low hanging fruit' especially with the nervous system; two is that a ton of musicians aren't good at timing either, and that is their secret sauce; we would not have advanced jazz/ECM without off-tempo shenanigans. Isn't the whole pleasure of half sleep due to these hypangogic drifts, where we get to walk our lobsters on leashes made of poems - I find Broken Heirarchies sets me up just right for that - something about his deliberatly mangled rhythms, the way he stops a line with the thought only half finished, inviting us to complete it. Just so much pleasure to be had when we don't have the energy to resist what we are being asked to do.
What an amazing poem, and thanks for sharing, Edward. My own introduction to GB was Yeats’ Oxford anthology, and, if I’m not mistaken, Larkin’s. I’ll have to grab his collection off my shelf and read more assiduously.
Excellent piece, and one I largely agree with - though I also agree with Carey’s estimation of Smart’s writing. Their private lives should not have come into his strikingly nasty critique, surely. I love Alan Massie for defending them.
Thank you! I think Grand Central… is a remarkable book. I'm less sure how good it is. (I'll post my Slightly Foxed piece – where I try to work out what I think about it – on here in due course.) But yes, I agree Carey over-stepped the line on this one. It's flat-out unpleasant in places. And three cheers for Allan Massie too!
An excellent but little known poet, Elaine Randell, uses lines from Smart's The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals as stepping off points in her poems. I wrote about her on my Substack
Thank you for this excellent piece, Mathew and it makes me feel very angry at the unfairness – and downright nastiness – of John Carey towards Elizabeth Smart. I did love Allan Massie's retort (the professor enjoying easy targets) and Raffaella Barker's rage.
Oof. I didn't know this story. I must admit I don't often go back to the energetic early Barker that Yeats and Eliot admired, but the deliberately purged style of his late poem, 'At Thurgarton Church', makes for a very resonant and memorable meditation -- as I think Carey might have agreed, had he known it: https://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/Norfolk%20Poems/at_thurgarton_church.htm
Thank you for such an enjoyable and fascinating piece and I loved the description of him being cornered! I am just reading his collection of reviews "Sunday Best" and what a treat it is.
The Dell, where Smart lived , is just a few miles away from me in Norfolk and was bought from her by the artist John Lidzey, and then from him by a friend of mine. I have several of his charcoal drawings of the house, which I treasure.
What a great post & conversation. How lovely to read Edward & Raffaela’s memories in response. I will look forward to the Slightly Foxed piece, remembering how vivid & wild & inspiring I found By Grand Central Station when I was 15 or so and chose it as a prize in a writing competition. Lured by the title, & kept reading by the beautiful prose (so there, Carey - whose writing in other contexts I admire - but not here!)
Thank you, Felicity! That’s probably a perfect age to read By Grand Central… Hope you like my essay in due course.
I think Carey was a superb critic, but he surely got his approach wrong here.
This post is wonderful…it restored me!
I reached down my copy of the Elizabeth Smart biog by standing on a ladder passing The Intellectuals and the Masses 1992…à book that made me squirm with delight
Thank you! I haven’t read The Intellectuals and the Masses. I should rectify that!
My reading of this is that the pursuit of celebrity and fame is futile and damaging. Why does a poet need to be famous. Why even do they need other people to read their work and tell them how good it is. And if they achieve fame despite not seeking it then the fault lies not with them but with a society that feeds on publicity and parasitic chatter.
"Anodyne praise is the death of criticism, and indeed of reading pleasure, and if the review pages were more enlivened by stylish vitriol perhaps they would be more avidly read." I agree. One critic (also a fine poet and translator) who does say what he thinks is Michael Hofmann (see his review essay on Stefan Zweig in the LRB a few years ago). He's also a good critic. So is CH Sisson, so I would respect his views on Barker. Carey was a a good lecturer as I recall and I admired the energy of his reviews. But he had a few demons of his own.
You had Carey as a lecturer? That must have been interesting! I don’t know a great deal about him beyond what I read in the obituaries, but there were certainly some sharp edges beneath the surface. I haven’t read much of Hofmann’s criticism – I’ll read the Zweig essay you mention later – but I do like his poetry. I liked his comments at the TS Eliot Prize awards ceremony, as reported here: https://thelittlereviewuk.substack.com/p/fluff-and-puff-at-the-ts-eliot-prize
To be honest, I didn't go to many lectures... but I heard him lecture a couple of times. He was refreshingly unstuffy in those days. I also like Hofmann's poetry. And I know he is a fan of Solie who just won the TS Eliot.
What a great, enlightening article Mathew. I have By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept on my bookshelf for years. I have always had this romantic idea of the book and the relationship between Smart and Barker. I must read it soon. Looking forward to your article 😀 👍
Thank you so much, Lucy. Let me know if/when you read the book!
I hope this won’t be taken for “anodyne praise,” but: good read! Delighted you did decide to post. We need more literary criticism, and it needs to be better. Pictures of bookshelves and books are nice, but they’re not sufficient. Criticism means telling good stories to interested readers and having the courage to offend them. You remind us, though, that there isn’t just a book at the end of a critic’s pen: there’s a writer.
Thanks Michael! Yes, I think Carey clearly got it wrong here and was rightly taken to task for it, but we do need more incisive critics to pick up his baton. We need more, better books and arts criticism generally. The available space has fallen away dramatically in the last decade or two and too much of what coverage there is is essentially PR.
As another of the off spring of George Barker, and the niece of the brilliant Allan Massie, and indeed the avenger of the ‘apparently still alive’ arrow, I’ve got to say this is all so great. These days critical language is often pretty milky and bland, and it’s excellent to read and remember all the above . Especially the savage pleasure we felt the evening we realised we could hunt down something that had stung our flesh when our hearts were hurting. That something was John Carey. I can’t recommend highly enough the sport of critic baiting to salve some of the many wounds of fresh grief. I had forgotten my mother had come out with the curse. Love that especially. My father’s poems, Elizabeth Smart’s novels, any novels, any poems, are not to everyone’s taste. That in no way reduces them. I’d say the fact that their shenanigans as well as their work are still being sifted through decades after their deaths suggests that they, more than John Carey have the edge. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks anyway and I can’t wait to read your Slightly Foxed piece.
Thank you so much for this, Raffaella. I’m reeling a little that not one but two of George Barker’s children have responded to my post within hours of its airing. And, more generally, I’m surprised how strongly people have felt – whether with regard to Elizabeth Smart and her writing, your father’s poetry, or, in one or two instances, the quality of Carey’s criticism. (I wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested at all, which tells you all you need to know about my judgement in these matters!)
As you say, individual taste in no way reduces the life of the work. That’s the important bit, isn’t it, in the long run? The persistence of value, the persistent importance of the choices they made. That the writing – and, yes, the lives themselves, the shenanigans – still challenge, inspire and perplex people long, long after those lives are over.
I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly get behind critic-baiting as a sport; I review a lot of books myself. But on the other hand I think it’s easy to see a kind of savage, exultant pleasure in Carey's own assault on ES here – and in his determinedly casual dismissal of your father – and while that can make for good copy, I think it ultimately reflects more poorly on him that it does on his subject(s). I’m glad that you and your mother had the opportunity to explain that to him in person.
I hope you like the Slightly Foxed piece! I think you will, but what with one thing and another, I’m a little anxious. What I would say is that my thoughts and feelings are always in flux, which is to say their work is very much alive to me.
On another note, my parents’ first flat as a married couple was in the same building as Elizabeth’s on Westbourne Terrace. I remember my mum telling me about her and By Grand Central… when I was a teenager. In fact, I have an idea that my paternal grandmother was the landlord, but I can’t prove that either way at this point.
Anyway, thank you again. What a lovely, unlooked for pleasure this post has proved to be.
Thank you so much for this, Raffaella. I’m reeling a little that not one but two of George Barker’s children have responded to my post within hours of its airing. And, more generally, I’m surprised how strongly people have felt – whether with regard to Elizabeth Smart and her writing, your father’s poetry, or, in one or two instances, the quality of Carey’s criticism. (I wasn’t sure that anyone would be interested at all, which tells you all you need to know about my judgement in these matters!)
As you say, individual taste in no way reduces the life of the work. That’s the important bit, isn’t it, in the long run? The persistence of value, the persistent importance of the choices they made. That the writing – and, yes, the lives themselves, the shenanigans – still challenge, inspire and perplex people long, long after those lives are over.
I don’t know that I can wholeheartedly get behind critic-baiting as a sport; I review a lot of books myself. But on the other hand I think it’s easy to see a kind of savage, exultant pleasure in Carey's own assault on ES here – and in his determinedly casual dismissal of your father – and while that can make for good copy, I think it ultimately reflects more poorly on him that it does on his subject(s). I’m glad that you and your mother had the opportunity to explain that to him in person.
I hope you like the Slightly Foxed piece! I think you will, but what with one thing and another, I’m a little anxious. What I would say is that my thoughts and feelings are always in flux, which is to say their work is very much alive to me.
On another note, my parents’ first flat as a married couple was in the same building as Elizabeth’s on Westbourne Terrace. I remember my mum telling me about her and By Grand Central… when I was a teenager. In fact, I have an idea that my paternal grandmother was the landlord, but I can’t prove that either way at this point.
Anyway, thank you again. What a lovely, unlooked for pleasure this post has proved to be.
Fantastic storytelling. That image of Carey cornered at the Christmas party, climbing over a table with nowhere to go, captures something essential about how words catch up with us. Massie's point about believing in Art feels more radical now than it did then, when poetry barely registers asa cultural force. I've always wondered if critics who go hard on dead or out-of-fashion writers are compensating for something, dunno what exactly, but the pattern is hard tomiss.
Thank you! Agree with you re: Massie. Such a belief is almost unthinkable now. I don't think this is true for Carey, but I think it's much easier to make a reputation as a critic by attacking, and the formerly famous or fashionable provide easy pickings.
As one of his many children, it is more than weird to see this little anecdote surface after so long. GB did not spare his critics in the pub, and its easily possible he may have been insulting to Carey and Carey was paying him back. I remember an evening in the French pub in the late 70s (when the soho bohemians were hardly distinguishable from down-n-outs) that was basically conversation as drunken boxing. Having said that, GB was of all the poets i've come across the most committed to poetry as the ultimate form of experience/arbiter of reality. Its impossible to describe how thrilling he made 'the business of living'. His Roman Poem III descibes an event that actually took place (he did build the birdcage in our garden). Its really about Byzantium (obv).
Roman Poem III
A SPARROW’S FEATHER
There was this empty birdcage in the garden.
And in it, to amuse myself, I had hung
pseudo-Oriental birds constructed of
glass and tin bits and paper, that squeaked sadly
as the wind sometimes disturbed them. Suspended
in melancholy disillusion they sang
of things that had never happened, and never
could in that cage of artificial existence.
The twittering of these instruments lamenting
their absent lives resembled threnodies
torn from a falling harp, till the cage filled with
engineered regret like moonshining cobwebs
as these constructions grieved over not existing.
The children fed them with flowers. A sudden gust
and without sound lifelessly one would die
scattered in scraps like debris. The wire doors
always hung open, against their improbable
transfiguration into, say, chaffinches
or even more colourful birds. Myself I found
the whole game charming, let alone the children.
And then one morning – I do not record a
matter of cosmic proportions, I assure you,
not an event to flutter the Volscian dovecotes –
there, askew among those constructed images
like a lost soul electing to die in Rome,
its feverish eye transfixed, both wings fractured,
lay – I assure you, Catullus – a young sparrow.
Not long for this world, so heavily breathing
one might have supposed this cage his destination
after labouring past seas and holy skies
whence, death not being known there, he had flown.
Of course, there was nothing to do. The children
brought breadcrumbs, brought water, brought tears in their
eyes perhaps to restore him, that shivering panic
of useless feathers, that tongue-tied little gossip,
that lying flyer. So there, among its gods
that moaned and whistled in a little wind,
flapping their paper anatomies like windmills,
wheeling and bowing dutifully to the
divine intervention of a child’s forefinger,
there, at rest and at peace among its monstrous
idols, the little bird died. And for my part,
I hope the whole unimportant affair is
quickly forgotten. The analogies are too trite.
Interesting how for me this draws on Eliot's Four Quartets the abstraction, long line, bathos and prayerful domestic detail. The "apocalypse poets" didn't get it from nowhere.
I wonder how the world would look if more of us took ‘poetry as the ultimate form of experience/arbiter of reality.’ Thank you all for this wonderful, reading-list-expanding conversation.
Here's an example; we were driving along the Norfolk lanes in autumn. He was old at this point but still spry in the head. A pheasant ran across the road, stopped in the middle, looked both ways nervously, then froze. I had to break to avoid it, and GB said as an aside, as if he'd just recognised a friend of a friend; 'aha, the lunatic prince'. In other words Hamlet manifesting via the princely feathers and the inability of the bird to make up its mind. Then we went back to whatever it was we were talking about. Only later did I realise this was a typical example of his mind working on several levels, at least one of which was some projection of the mythological but treated as deadly serious, not 'nice story' but the real thing. The secret is that poets don't take metaphors as metaphorical; the art of reading their way is to take what a poem says literally, then rearrange the world. When we do that the effect is far stronger than most hallucigens, because we are committing our imaginative reality to this version of what is.
What a thought! That would be a world entirely remade.
Certainly – I probably will. And will of course link back. Thank you, Matthew.
Absolutely – your post has made me think about teasing out where that understanding and devotion connects with and departs from the Soho-boho bit.
Do let me know if you write anything as a result!
Thank you so much for taking the time to comment, Edward. I'm very grateful to you. It's lovely to read of your father through your eyes and understand a little of what made him such magnetic company. (I share Massie's romantic nostalgia for the vanished world of the Soho bohemians, though I am under no illusion that I would have fitted in!)
I know very little about Carey's life beyond what I read in the recent obituaries. Perhaps, as you say, there was a little personal grudge behind his remarks.
And thank you too for sharing that superb poem, which I hadn't encountered before. One of the reason's Carey's dismissal of your father as a 1930s poet rankles is that he produced so much of his best work later in life. (I have always loved Anno Domini, for instance.)
With thanks again.
Its almost possible to look back with nostalgia at these episodes where critics and poets sparred, compared to the milquetoasty smirr-whirr we revel in today, this bland porridge of blanket-praise cookie-cutted out for the waltz of jostle and position. For my part, I seem to represent (at least to my reflected self image) some kind of forgotten border-guard/defender of that ludicrous New Romantic/ New Apocalypse movement, eg early Barker, D Thomas, Gascoigne and more (heavens, even the adolescent Sydney Graham). Early Barker is easiest to get into if one hears the poems as a graft between Wallace Stevens, Yeats and a generous dollop of 'neo-confessional' Wordworth. 'Allegory of the Adolescent and Adult' for instance. But much more. My favourite of the genre is actually Geoffrey Hill (I will die on the hill that 'An Apology for the Revival of the Christian Churches of England' sonnet cycle is the linguistic equal of the Sistine Chapel ). Its hard to find an movement/style more out of fashion than this lot. Maurice Riordan says it takes two cycles of taste to pass before things settle. Which means if they are to come back from the oblivion of disrepute, now is the time. I would buckle up the horses but they bolted long ago. And in truth so much magnificent 20th century poetry has been carted up to the attic for trunk liner, there's no point complaining...
I certainly am nostalgic for a time when poetry and writing mattered so intensely to people that they might argue vehemently over such things. Ludicrous? Perhaps, but wonderfully so. It is hard to see those times returning, although were they to do so, I see no reason why the mid-century writers you mention shouldn't return with them. It feels to me that the contemporary culture is somewhat exhausted, and I would like to think that renewal must eventually come.
I will bear your recommended contexts in mind next time I attempt early Barker! Yeats seems a frequent comparator.
I have Hill's Collected Poems at my bedside waiting for me to finish the Collected Ted Hughes. It may be a while until I get to them because I'm finding that latter hard going.
Foolishly I think it still does, like a massive altered state of collective consciousness floating just below the surface. One of the recent delights in my life is waking (after the discovery that the gap between first and second sleep is not insomnia) at 2 am, getting hold of my 900 page Broken Heirarchies (Hill's total oevre, not the first collected) and just doing a random walk; being half in a dream state seems to add to the drug like intensity and wonder. The things he is doing with language; the sheer fun he has...
If it's foolish, it's a rather beautiful kind of foolishness… Broken Hierarchies is the Hill book I was thinking of. I'm awake a lot in the middle of the night these days. I've never been good at keeping time in music so it's no surprise to find myself off-tempo with circadian rhythms either. But I'm always so intent on getting back to sleep, no matter how many hours it takes, that picking up a book at that point is almost anathema. Also, I do like drifting on the tides of that hypnagogic state, and how giving the mind is to the pressure of suggestion… Next time though, I really need to pick up that book, don't I?
Wait ok, the idea that musical tempo and circadian rhythms are related in the nervous system is a lovely, astonishing stretch. I'm trying to imagine each night as a beat, the song as a year of nights. Two pushbacks; one is that 'not being good' is the same as 'opportunity' or 'low hanging fruit' especially with the nervous system; two is that a ton of musicians aren't good at timing either, and that is their secret sauce; we would not have advanced jazz/ECM without off-tempo shenanigans. Isn't the whole pleasure of half sleep due to these hypangogic drifts, where we get to walk our lobsters on leashes made of poems - I find Broken Heirarchies sets me up just right for that - something about his deliberatly mangled rhythms, the way he stops a line with the thought only half finished, inviting us to complete it. Just so much pleasure to be had when we don't have the energy to resist what we are being asked to do.
What an amazing poem, and thanks for sharing, Edward. My own introduction to GB was Yeats’ Oxford anthology, and, if I’m not mistaken, Larkin’s. I’ll have to grab his collection off my shelf and read more assiduously.
Excellent piece, and one I largely agree with - though I also agree with Carey’s estimation of Smart’s writing. Their private lives should not have come into his strikingly nasty critique, surely. I love Alan Massie for defending them.
Thank you! I think Grand Central… is a remarkable book. I'm less sure how good it is. (I'll post my Slightly Foxed piece – where I try to work out what I think about it – on here in due course.) But yes, I agree Carey over-stepped the line on this one. It's flat-out unpleasant in places. And three cheers for Allan Massie too!
An excellent but little known poet, Elaine Randell, uses lines from Smart's The Assumption of the Rogues and Rascals as stepping off points in her poems. I wrote about her on my Substack
I’ll look out your essay, Ira. Thanks for letting me know. I’m afraid I don’t know Randell’s work, but it immediately sounds an interesting project.
https://open.substack.com/pub/iralightman1/p/randell-madeleines?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1n0v50
Thank you for this excellent piece, Mathew and it makes me feel very angry at the unfairness – and downright nastiness – of John Carey towards Elizabeth Smart. I did love Allan Massie's retort (the professor enjoying easy targets) and Raffaella Barker's rage.
... and that of Elsbeth Barker. I hope Carey felt ashamed of his dismissal of George Barker.
Oof. I didn't know this story. I must admit I don't often go back to the energetic early Barker that Yeats and Eliot admired, but the deliberately purged style of his late poem, 'At Thurgarton Church', makes for a very resonant and memorable meditation -- as I think Carey might have agreed, had he known it: https://www.literarynorfolk.co.uk/Norfolk%20Poems/at_thurgarton_church.htm
One of my favourites, and the church it’s written about is also worth a visit
Thank you for such an enjoyable and fascinating piece and I loved the description of him being cornered! I am just reading his collection of reviews "Sunday Best" and what a treat it is.
Thank you, Deborah! I didn’t know there was a collection. I should get hold of that.
The Dell, where Smart lived , is just a few miles away from me in Norfolk and was bought from her by the artist John Lidzey, and then from him by a friend of mine. I have several of his charcoal drawings of the house, which I treasure.
How wonderful!