OUT OF APOCALYPSE, ALMOST
By David Hackbridge Johnson
(Scroll to bottom of article for older posts about Iain Sinclair, Margaret Drabble, Doris Lessing, etc.)
Several years after the Carcanet publication
of James Keery's anthology Apocalypse,
aftershocks continue. Right on the edge
of the fallout zone lies The Penguin New
Writing 39 published in spring of 1950.
As is usual for the series, the editor is John Lehmann. The ban on new magazines, presumably due to
paper shortages, has just been lifted and he looks forward to the emergence
from ‘a stunted shadow existence'.[1] Lehmann peers into 'our crystal ball' and
fantasizes about a number of publications to be earnestly expected, propagating
the artistic ideals of partnerships forged in war, and including a magazine
named Plato's Cave.[2] But then scepticism creeps in; the artistic
purity of these endeavours will surely be undermined by 'a Woman's Page, a
Week-end Gardening Talk, and a Film Star Competition'.[3] Leaving such priggishness to one side,
Lehmann goes on to wonder whether a new war is needed 'to revive interest in
the battles of the spirit, the arts of peace'.[4]
Cordoning off the prose selections
from TPNW 39, allows a closer look at
the poetry on offer. Not thought of as
an apocalyptic, having forged his style in the leaner 1930s when overt political
agendas were much to the fore, C. Day Lewis suddenly produces verse sprouting
forth with all manner of exotic blooms, as he takes a bus of Florence, which
act provides him with the title of his poem.
The bus gets barely a mention, being a rather prosaic conveyance for the
plethora of nature images that follows.
In a traditional conceit, the white piazza that awakens naked, and the
day that dawns are 'musky with love' and an 'enchanting creature' respectively.[5] This is to be a bus journey through a
feminised landscape. The poetry is very
quickly hot under the collar with 'a flutter of meadowsweet thighs! – the
exclamation mark is the poet’s own, perhaps a knowing addition suggesting that
he knows he goes too far. It is not long
before we have an 'armful of roses and mignonette'. The bride of the day goes forth into 'a
zenith of shameless azure'. The sudden
appearance of a wristwatch reminds us of down-to-earth contingencies, like the
bus timetable. The bus is not
gendered. The approach of Tuscany is an
excuse for a list of wildflowers. They
needn't be listed here – some poets were born into flora, others have to look
them up in order to pack their poems with the appropriate blooms. We must assume that Day Lewis knew what he
was talking about, but the effect is heady in the extreme. Sometimes he runs away with himself, as with
'the tambourine shaking / Of sunlit leaves.
You tatterdemalion townships – / Elegance freaked with decay'.[6] It is as if having come late to the late
romantic effusions of the 1940s, he wishes to make up for lost time. But Day Lewis is too good a poet to make mere
touristic lists of things seen on a holiday bus ride; he does at last start to
ask questions of the sensory data flooding in:
The wreck of cloud, the surly ruinous
tower
Stubborn upon the verge of
recognition –
What
haunts and weights them so?
Memory,
or premonition?
Why should a mouldering finger in the
sky,
An hour of cloud that drifts and
passes, mean
More
than the flowering vale,
The
volcanic ravine?[7]
‘Ruinous’, ‘haunts’, and ‘mouldering’
might make the reader pause on elements of destruction in the landscape, not so
much defined as suggested by the poet.
The past, ‘memory’, and the future, ‘premonition’, are held in tentative
balance. Finally Florence is achieved –
'the nonpareil / City'.[8] The day closes with 'the traveller’s
trance'. 'Visions or masterpieces' are
outbid by 'the pure sense of arrival'. The
apotheosis of the poem is also the consummation of the conceit. The 'bride of a day' has gone through the
centuries of landscape and history 'hand in hand'. The traveller finds himself on a cusp of the
past and the future: 'a cloud vibrating / In the wash of the hull-down-sun. /
My heart rocks on. Remembering, or
awaiting?' The moving conclusion of this
poem offers a foil to its earlier effulgence.
Like Lehmann, Day Lewis is looking into his own crystal ball as he sits
in the edgelands of experience and expectation.
The two poems of Lynette Roberts are
shorn of purple patches. The opening lines
of the first could even constitute a pre-echo of Sylvia Plath: ‘He alone could
get me out of this / But he neither knows nor cares, / After hell there is a
full stop.’[9] There is a longing for peace but not among the
rolled out countryside of Day Lewis’ Italian hills. The landscape, despite offering 'enchantment,
and plentiful rest' is 'some trespassed
spot'. Spring, as for John Lehmann, is
for Roberts an opportunity, 'a new note and thought'. If Day Lewis wants to embrace huge vistas,
Roberts restricts herself to a land 'Where there is no access to these painful
and / Immediate idiosyncrasies:'. Refuge
is required for 'The storm in my brain'.
The second poem might be a gloss
on Psalm 130's De profundis: 'Let the man of darkness out / That he may be
free'.[10] The image of an overgrown tree with
'uncontrollable branches' might be the briars that bind in William Blake’s ‘The
Garden of Love’. The trunk of the tree
wishes to 'Merge imperceptibly / Into light.’ The Christian message of the soul emerging
from the dark depths into the light above, is made explicit with the
capitalized His and Him, the very death of Christ being 'His illuminating
Resurrection'. 'Victory over degree, / Man's
livery of things unseen' might be the acquisition of a raiment that finally
reveals the secrets of our earthly lot.
After Day Lewis, it is something of a shock to feel the acute condensation
of Roberts' language. She has done away
with the panoramic scenery and come very close to her own heart.
Anne Ridler did not eschew Christian
themes. The poem ‘Dead and Gone’ might
be said to be on the cusp of a poetics of Resurrection. As the superscription from John Webster's The
Duchess of Malfi suggests, the poet wishes for 'some two dayes conference with
the dead'.[11] The poet immediately wishes to go beyond 'The
coffin’s typical shape' and delve into the uniqueness of each life thus
enclosed: 'Hidden but known, lifeless but still the precious being.' It is the 'absolute negative' of reason that
stalls the thoughts that 'the imagination dares' – that there is a possibility
of life beyond the coffin’s finality. She
wishes 'the dead could tell' of all life's journeys and its plethora of
symbols. With the end of life 'The
speciality of time and place'[12]
so dependent on love, becomes an unfocused blur and a shrug of
indifference. What remain behind are mere
things, 'Archway, tree or moving-stair’ – and to these things we attach the
agonies of loss and the annihilated moments that can never return. More perhaps than in things, it is in dreams
that the dead return and how true it is that Ridler says 'they make awaking
grief'. In a remarkable reversal of
traditional haunting, the poet suggests that 'it is we who haunt the dead / And
not the dead haunt us'.[13]
In the final stanza there is the
suggestion that 'death is double-faced, and turns / An opening look towards
another world / That’s out of sight.' The
saying goes, out of sight out of mind, but this might be too closed-off an
ending for a poet of Ridler's hopes. Yet
with the uncertainty of the Resurrection, it is only and perhaps always 'for
love to recognise the end.' It doesn't
require much effort from this reader to say that this is a remarkable poem by a
modest poet almost two reticent to acknowledge the praise of T. S. Eliot.
Fine though they are, I don't want to
dwell on the two translated poems Umberto Saba, since they can't really contribute
to the theme of the British phenomenon of the Apocalypse and its wake. Neither will I rehearse the criticism
contained in the essays on the poetry Angelos Sikelianos, Michael Roberts and
Rilke. There are three poets that remain
for consideration. Much published but
now rather forgotten, J. C. Hall is represented by two poems. ‘Death in the Mountains’ pairs some vivid
imagery of slaughtered farm animals with lines that seem fleshed out with
rather weak words just to make up the numbers.
A powerful message can be weakened if reduced to a jog trot: 'And all
the sheep stood around in simple fear, / The valleys shook with thunder far and
wide.' I don't think fearful beasts just
stand around, and 'far and wide' is an unnecessary commonplace. The figure of death comes in as a rather tame
apostrophe – one wishes for the grinning skulls of Henry Treece, but instead we
get, 'And yet, O Inscrutable Mystery, O Death, / How should I speak, how else
could the tale be told?’[14] One is tempted to answer, not like this. The second poem, ‘Suicides’, fares rather
better, with the generic deaths of the unknown read about in the evening papers
somehow given an individuality: 'She who turned the gas on her sorrow, / He
whom the Thames / Left one night more derelict on its shore / Than a child at
the convent door.’[15] These lines, which might be worthy of John
Betjeman, don't save J. C. Hall from lapses.
Would people really kill themselves for 'solemn / Dilemmas'?
And is the archaic 'drove them thither' a sufficient lever by which the
tormented end themselves? The last two
stanzas redeem such carelessness. We see
the drowning man reliving 'all / His history there / In a fleeting moment',
where 'a mirror / Reflecting his first true self' gives too-late a revelation
of the self to forestall the urge to self-destruction.
There are two poems in TPNW 39 of an
entirely different order and they are by Denton Welch. Some of the artworks of this more than merely
interesting figure have recently come up for sale in a small gallery in
London. He has a way of painting
landscapes and animals that suggest roots going back as far as The Ancients of
Shoreham, Kent. There is no romantic
mysticism about the two poems here however.
They are in the style of nursery rhymes and hark back to the word-play of
John Skelton. ‘Condemnation in the Castle
Gardens’ begins 'Bah Bah Blister Sheep / All the Pigeons in the Keep' – this
gives a flavour of the whole. In ‘Greedy-Guts’,
Death turns up just after the appearance of the Gospel Chapel. The style of poetry goes a long way back,
beyond Skelton, back to the Exeter Book Riddles. The poems stand out as light relief amid much
soul-searching.
Hal Summers is the only poet hitherto
unknown to this reader. By 1950 he had
already published two volumes of verse, Smoke
after Flame (1944) and Hinterland (1947). On the strength of the poem included here,
these volumes might well be worth seeking out. By the telling reversal of, 'a garland of
guns, a battle of roses' the poet shows a world whose values have been sent
haywire by years of conflict and post-war uncertainty. Images flicker as on a screen, 'then that reel
is gone'.[16] A remnant of the airborne war lies in the
line 'No pilot at the controls, the plane flies on.' There then emerges the dark brother, who
gives the poem its title. With
psychoanalysis in fashion as it was then, it is easy to see this as the
emerging Id. There is a desire in the
final stanza to unite the conscious and the subconscious: 'One day we will
reign together and make flower / The ground at our coming'. But the idea of a single day is emphasized – even
less time than that: 'in a day also, in an hour / We will abdicate together,
and then goodbye.' The hoped-for unification of the disparate parts of a personality
are here seen only as the single flight of a mayfly, the bright shimmering in
the air of a creature that only sees the sun rise once.
This reader admits to being somewhat
overwhelmed by the dazzling virtuosity of C. Day Lewis but in the end comes to
settle on the more contained intimacies of Lynette Roberts and Ann Ridler. John Lehmann’s impeccable taste ensures that
none of poems are rank. As usual with
charity shop pickups of The Penguin New Writing series, the copy in my hands is
falling apart. A third of the spine is
missing, the paper is yellow and brittle, and the black and white photographic
inserts can hardly do justice to some of the artists thus displayed, the most
impressive among them being Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Bryan Winter, Tom Early
and Denis Mitchell – all four working out of West Country experiences of the landscape
and man's effect on it by means of tin mining and fisheries.
As John Lehmann stares into his
crystal ball, he might have been able to detect a glimmer of what indeed comes
next, The Movement. Here was a group of
poets determined by proselytizing as much as writing, to put a full stop beside
the untamed antics of the Apocalyptic period. Of this group, only Elizabeth Jennings, with
Christian themes not alien to those of Lynette Roberts and Anne Ridler, carried
forward some of the ideas seen in this 39th volume. I am sure that none of the poets included
here stopped dead as soon as The Movement put up their No Entry signs. But there is a sense in which some green
shoots of revival were stamped out by voices clever enough to mark out their
patch with strictly demarcated lines. There
is plenty of leeway in a revisionist history to find circumventing routes
around such redoubts. An in-depth study
of female poets who came through the Second World War might be a good place to
start.
©David Hackbridge Johnson ix.2026
[1]
TPNW 39, p. 7.
[2]
If this is real magazine, I can’t find it.
[3]
TPNW 39, p. 8.
[4]
Ibid. p. 8.
[5]
Ibid. p. 18.
[6]
Ibid. p. 19.
[7]
Ibid. p. 21.
[8]
Ibid. p. 24.
[9]
Ibid. p. 37.
[10]
Ibid. p. 38.
[11]
Ibid. p. 48.
[12]
Ibid. p. 49.
[13]
Ibid. p. 50.
[14]
Ibid. p. 68.
[15]
Ibid. p. 69.
[16]
Ibid. p. 71.