First published in the Times Literary Supplement
An incomplete and often unreliable photographic record is the starting point for many of Jane Routh’s reflections in The Gift of Boats. Sometimes old snapshots are misleading. If the poet remembers “the exact shade of pink” her bike was painted, why is she “smiling and proud” next to a black Raleigh in “Memory’s Bicycles”? But when a picture could recover the lost “faces for names” in Routh’s notebooks, she finds “memory’s camera not even unpacked for ordinary days”. Getting the shot means being prepared at any moment and that is not likely, Routh suggests, in middle age, “when memory’s seen it before / and isn’t laying much down”. In these poems, taking a photograph is an event in itself, which alters its subject, except for the rare master “so light on his feet / as not to disturb even the air”.
While a poem on the page does not disturb the air, Routh’s poems ask to be read aloud, making much of plosive and onomatopoeic disturbances. Many begin with a jolt (“Better scuttled”, “World comes knocking”) and gather momentum through the modulations of alliterative lines (the “re-caulked and commodious hull”). With a broken photometer in her pocket, Routh embraces photgraphy’s imperfections and its blind spots. The darkroom replace associations “of endings, of night, of fear” with “the dark of beginnings / an orderly dark you know / your way round in” in “A Day’s Work”. Routh sees the risk in bringing something out of the dark or up from the depths. A boat would be better off “scuttled” than filled in with concrete and turned into a gaudy garden ornament amid a “square lobelia sea”, she insists in the opening poem.
Review: The Ache of Appetite by Rachel Hadas
First published in the Times Literary Supplement
The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:
A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.
The Ache of Appetite is firmly rooted in the everyday, as the opening “Home Remedy” suggests: “if life’s a loaf, a poem is a slice”. Yet Rachel Hadas hesitates to make sharp divisions in her real or imagined experiences:
A poem need not be a diary
entry or letter, dream report, or shred
of the observations of the day,
nor thumbnail answer to what someone said.
The poems that follow work through many of these forms, as Hadas recounts a dream about her doctor, meditates on a set of coasters and weighs Keats against Kafka while giving blood, all with journal-keeping closeness. The sense of an event, meanwhile, is staved off in the more self-conscious poems, with abstract titles such as “Attention”, “The Flow” and “Event Horizon”.
Hadas’s preferred mode is the list, running details together without explaining their relations to one another, and often doubting their reality. Starting with “A sneeze; a gull; an argument”, detail accumulates in “Event Horizon” until the eye is lost in “Remorseless foreground, / no one thing more real than any other”.
Slicing life’s loaf is not just problematic but also painful in the second half of the collection, as Hadas comes to terms with her husband’s early-onset dementia. After the “dream logic” of a chance meeting with his doctor at a railway station, Hadas is recalled “to a maimed mind / Back to a lopped life”. Writing a poem is a way of reclaiming excised experience, though falsifying memory is among its risks and it is, the short “Mnemonic” warns, all too easy to “Abstract the daily / quota; spread out; re- / distribute into parcels of energy”. Hadas is, instead, at her best when dispensing the “strong medicine” of wry humour—contemplating the loss of her husband and parents she jokes, “I’m nothing / if not an equal opportunity misser” — making light of the new language of illness and officialese that has “infiltrated” her “glossary”.
Review: A Book of Secrets: Illegitimate Daughters, Absent Fathers by Michael Holroyd
First published at The New Republic
WHEN IT COMES to reading other people’s diaries, biographers claim a sort of diplomatic immunity. In what he calls his final book, Michael Holroyd gleans salacious details from the life of Ernest Beckett, a womanising English nobleman (he inherited the title Lord Grimthorpe—a name Evelyn Waugh might have struggled to coin) and minor politician. “Ernest’s diary made it clear that an innkeeper’s beautiful daughter in Naples had fallen in love with him,” Holroyd writes half-admiringly. Yet the boundary between his world and Ernest’s is blurred when he discusses the diaries with Catherine Till, who believes that she may be the late lord’s illegitimate daughter. “I thought he was insufferably pleased with himself,” she tells Holroyd. “The diary was full of trite generalisations such as ‘Fringes and flirtations go together.’”
Personal links are in fact what drew Holroyd to Ernest’s story. Holroyd had already been entranced by Rodin’s bust of Eve Fairfax, Ernest’s abandoned fiancée, when he saw it in the early 1970s. Then he finds himself visiting the Villa Cimbrone, the palazzo in southern Italy where Ernest sought refuge from a disappointing career and financial embarrassment. He and Till search the house for clues to her paternity and drop in on Gore Vidal nearby. Holroyd returns seven years later at the invitation of Tiziana Masucci, who is organising a literary festival there. She is consumed by a passion for another of Ernest’s unacknowledged daughters, the novelist Violet Trefusis. “I don’t belong to them,” she says of her friends in Rome: “Violet is me!” Turning her “hypnotic gaze” on Holroyd, she convinces him of the novels’ importance.
This complicated, nebulous family promises more than a colorful cast of personalities. The family invites Holroyd to become one of the characters in its story, blending biography and autobiography. It is an irresistible invitation, as he has remembered that his first subject, the writer Hugh Kingsmill, “required of the biographer some account of his or her own life as a passport for travelling into the lives of others.” This spells the end of his diplomatic immunity, but the extended Grimthorpe family leads the way here too. Through their thinly disguised autobiographies and revisionist memoirs, they provide Holroyd with models of defensive secret-telling and keeping.
His book is named in honor of the enormous leather-bound volume that Eve Fairfax compiled over fifty years as a perennial country house guest. After her broken engagement, she drifted away from her family and lived on friends’ hospitality, “calculating exactly how long she could stay before her hosts became too irritated.” Each visit swelled her collection of autographs and wistful poetical tributes. Edith Sitwell’s ‘To Eve’ strikes the keynote: “I seek lost suns within your eyes;/ And find but wrecks of love’s gold argosies.” Hilaire Belloc, John Betjeman, and Somerset Maugham all left their mark on her book, as well as archbishops, generals and foreign royalty. Most intriguing perhaps is the signature of Mordaunt Milner—might he be Eve’s lost son, John Francis Mordaunt? Above all, Holroyd suggests, “this is a book of secrets.”
The potential for scandal in Eve’s book is contained by a web of tacit agreements and antagonisms, all of them relished by Holroyd. He is an expert reader of its “great empty spaces, its undergrowth of clichés.” This is partly because the biographer in him sympathizes with the book’s contributors. They were faced with the task of saying something insightful and original about Eve, but not so original as to be presumptuous, or so insightful as to be cruel.
Review: Maggot by Paul Muldoon
IN ONE OF Aesop’s fables, an overambitious frog tries to puff himself up to the size of an ox, and explodes. Paul Muldoon mocked this type of moralizing animal tale in his poem “The Frog,” in 1983. Attempts to find a “moral for our times” in the frog’s story are naïve, and threaten to turn sour, as Muldoon suggests:
What if I put him to my head
and squeezed it out of him,
like the juice of freshly squeezed limes…
The animals in Muldoon’s poems do not tell us how we should act, but they do allow us to “glimpse the possibility of what we might become.” This is how Muldoon puts it in his introduction to The Faber Book of Beasts. Writing about animals, he insists, comes with its own responsibility, the moral obligation to help people live their lives. “Nowhere is that responsibility thrown into sharper relief than in our accounts of the parallel lives of ‘our little kinsmen.’” In “Horses” (1998), for instance, Muldoon put this into practice, brooding on the parallel life of Chuang Tzu, who famously wondered whether he was a man dreaming he was a butterfly, or vice versa.
Muldoon’s new collection might be considered another “book of beasts,” an experimental bestiary. Almost all of the poems here are in some sense animal poems. Some of them—“Geese,” “A Porcupine,” “A Hare at Aldergrove”—announce as much. In others, such as “The Adoration of the Magi,” the approach is subtler. “A plume / of ox breath” and the braying of a child suggest the ox and the ass of the nativity scene. Throughout the collection, Muldoon tries to reimagine the natural world, the “sym- / biotic relationship” between man and beast, and the beastly side of man. The few poems concerned solely with people show them acting ruthlessly and evasively, as they “abbreviate / [their] most promising rlshps.”
It is unnerving that Muldoon places the maggot, a creature that feeds on the corpses of other animals, at the center of his vision. Yet he sees the process of decomposition as a source of vitality in these poems: death and decay unite all forms of life, as organic matter is eventually recycled. In reasoning this way, Muldoon himself recycles Hamlet's observation: “we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.” Of course, this view makes no special claims for human life and says nothing of respect for the dead. For Muldoon, a body “beleaguered by pupae” does not bear thinking about in itself. Instead it prompts the breezy reflection: “Who knew that humus might lie beneath ‘humane’?” There is a maggot-like etymology here, as Muldoon makes connections between words, as well as creatures, by breaking them down into their smallest parts.
Review: The English Opium Eater by Robert Morrison
First published at The New Republic
In a gesture of admiration, Charles Baudelaire devoted half of his Artificial Paradises to a translation of Thomas De Quincey’s memoirs. “The work on opium has been written,” he explained, “and in a manner so dazzling, medical and poetic all at once, that I would not dare add anything to it.” Would-be biographers have perhaps shared these reservations: of all the Romantics, De Quincey has received the least attention from the “life-writing” industry. He wrote so voluminously of his own experience, of the traumas of his past as well as the “shadowy world” of his opium dreams, that there is little room to speculate on his inner life. The biographer is largely consigned to rehashing De Quincey’s version of events in a saner, scientific manner, or to parodying him.
Robert Morrison’s biography somewhat daringly, then, takes its title from De Quincey’s most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium Eater. While he draws on De Quincey’s reminiscences and self-analysis, Morrison also shows what De Quincey’s life looked like from the outside. In an opening vignette, we meet not the introspective sybarite of the Confessions but a down-at-heel, elderly magazine writer, who has walked eight miles to hand in his copy. Indeed, De Quincey’s tendency to bring hardship upon himself (and others) permeates the rest of the book. Born in 1785 into a wealthy family with aristocratic pretensions (hence the ‘De’), he ran away from Manchester Grammar School at 16, choosing to live alone and penniless in London. He began to dissipate his inheritance long before he was legally entitled to it by living determinedly beyond his means. He was, for most of his life, pursued by creditors, whom he eluded with gusto, although he was imprisoned for debt once and publicly humiliated on several occasions. His long-suffering daughter Florence described leaving the debtors’ sanctuary where they spent seven years as “one of the most lively foretastes of Paradise I have had in my life.”
By tracing De Quincey’s public persona as “The Opium Eater” through to old age, Morrison avoids reducing his subject to The Man Who Wrote The Confessions. Soon after he was identified as the author of the hugely successful (and originally anonymous) memoir, which was one of his first published works, he was able to trade on “the magic prefix ‘by the Opium Eater.’” It was the name under which he published his Gothic novel Klosterheim: or the Masque, the signature on many of his London Magazine articles, and the name used against him in gossip columns.
To some extent, the persona took on a life of its own, adding to the myths around the man, even when he was doing nothing at all. De Quincey never defended himself against accusations, for example, that the “stories about celestial dreams, and similar nonsense” in his Confessions had caused an increase in opium-related deaths, but such was his notoriety that he did appear in fictionalized form in a sketch in Blackwood’s Magazine, which broached the subject. Questioned on the “fifty unintentional suicides,” the caricature responds cagily: “I have read of six only, and they rested on no solid foundation.” Meanwhile, his celebrity as a profligate and a sage was laughable to the literary Lake District circle. Noting his indulgence in drugged solitude, Mary Wordsworth jibed, “The Seer continues in close retirement”.
Review: The Last Lingua Franca by Nicholas Ostler
First published at The New Republic
While English is the most widely-spoken lingua franca in history, so-called common or working languages can be much less pervasive. Elamite, for example, was the submerged administrative language of the Persian Empire in the sixth century B.C.E. All official documents were written down in Elamite, but they were both composed and read out in Persian, the language of the illiterate ruling class. Then there is Pali, the language of Theravada Buddhism. No longer used in everyday conversation, Pali is written in different scripts in Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Burma, and sounds different when read aloud by Thai and Burmese speakers. The identity of the language is almost obscured by its profusion of forms.
Pali is a tantalizing case for Nicholas Ostler, because it suggests to him the possibility of a “virtual” language. A “virtual language” would not be read or spoken itself. It would allow the user to understand what is being written or said without learning the original language—in much the same way that “virtual reality” allows the user to have an experience of something without actually doing it. Pali is not “one language” in the concrete sense that it has one set of words, but those who know any of its forms can access exactly the same information. Yet on closer inspection this is not because it is a “virtual language.” It is because the differences between its forms are largely superficial. However the words are pronounced or written down, they mean the same thing. It is one language after all.
Despite this setback, Ostler has faith in a virtual system, which he claims will revolutionize global communications, and make foreign language learning a thing of the past. The traditional culture of Theravada Buddhism may not be the most receptive context for such radical change, but the internet serves as a low-cost, low-risk testing ground for new translation technologies. Google Translate, Babel Fish, and Microsoft’s Bing Translator all offer instant, automatic translation across a range of languages, and are constantly expanding their services. The results are often riddled with mistakes, sometimes amusingly. But Ostler believes that improvements in the technology will eventually “remove the requirement for a human intermediary to interpret or translate.” Printed texts and recorded speeches will be accessible to anyone with the right software as “virtual media.”
It is a bold vision of the future, and a particularly attractive one to Ostler, who is chairman of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. A technological revolution could save declining tongues from extinction. Those who now neglect their traditional regional language in favor of English would no longer need a lingua franca to access the same commercial and cultural opportunities. For Ostler, this is not just a desirable outcome. It also affirms “the social order created by mother tongues, where each community has its own language, as if by nature.” He does not admit the irony that this natural order could only be enforced by digital means, but the belief in its enduring integrity is perhaps enough. Such beliefs, he argues, can be a powerful force for change: “The survival of a lingua franca is always a matter of confidence and ideology as much as reasoned calculation.”
Before Ostler’s own ideology—entailing a fanciful technological determinism—takes hold of his argument, The Last Lingua Franca is wide-ranging and insightful. He is on firm ground when he uses historical examples to question the future of English as a global language. He shows repeatedly how governments abolish even well-established lingua francas “at the stroke of a pen” for ideological reasons. An especially neat case is the relegation of Persian both in India under British rule and in Central Asia after the Russian Revolution. For the British, this was as simple as changing the language of the courts, on the principle that “justice should be comprehensible to those being judged” and not just to the Persian-speaking elite. In the new Soviet republics of Central Asia, the lingua franca was edged out on the grounds of ethno-linguistic self-determination. The revolutionary government drew up the borders of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan according to the language spoken in each region, and raised literacy in these from less than 10 percent under Tsarist rule to almost 100 percent by 1959, at the expense of Persian.
Given how easily a language can be dethroned, Ostler does not share the optimism of David Crystal, David Graddol, or Robert McCrum, in thinking that, in one form or another, English will “find itself in the service of the world community for ever.” Historically considered, English has little chance of outlasting the economic and military dominance of Anglophone powers around the world. Emerging powers will remain loyal to their mother tongues and will be unlikely to “indulge the nostalgia of their Western suppliants by speaking to them in English,” as Ostler puts it, contemplating with special glee the decline of the language in which he is writing.
YM: Histories
I was guest editor of the second issue of the Poetry Society's newly-relaunched online youth magazine. We published the best poems by the society's under-18s on the theme of "histories", plus essays by Ben Wilkinson and Daniel Hitchens, with a workshop set by Jack Underwood. Charlotte Goldney shot the cover.
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