MONSTERS

Sir,

In your editorial for P·N·R 89 you remark on the iniquities of publishing 'a partial record' of a poet's life, and comment on the distress which can result when a poet is 'appropriated by an interest group'. To turn from this to Robert Crawford's very partial record of carefully collaged extracts from carefully selected people who aspire to opinions about Hugh MacDiarmid's life and work, is to ponder how blinkered you, as editor can be.

MacDiarmid had never heard of either Robert Crawford or W.N. Herbert, the principal shareholders in this particular interest group. Alan Riach's hook-line-and-sinker approach explains why he was chosen to steer the Carcanet McD project. Why were not more people who were fully aware of his activities during his lifetime approached? Around 1950 or so, when the down-market 'Daily Record' published some of his rantings, reader response was a postively down-turned thumb. A blowhard chanty-wrestler was the majority opinion. I quote from memory one published sally.

Now Hughie drags in Latin tags
tae pad a shilpit text
let's hope this means his ither freens
may venture English next!

Implying that McD's stance as a Communist adversely affected that 1964 election result is simple naivety. The 24,000 people who preferred to vote for the three honest candidates had seen enough of McD's duplicity and humbug to know exactly where he stood. Only Robert Maxwell appears to have shown a greater degree of self-interest.

Are you aware that in 1954 Scottish poets such as W.S. Graham, Sydney Tremayne, lain Crichton Smith and Burns Singer were castigated by McD (under yet another pseudonym!) as writing feeble verses of the sort favoured by 'The People's Friend'? So what is this valuable 'legacy' we are invited to appreciate? Hypocrisy, lies, broken promises, suppression of rising writers, and persistent plagiarism! 'Is that bad?' asks Crawford. Ho hum.

Will the Complete Works still include the lines appropriated from E.E. Cummings, which both Walter Keir and Burns Singer quoted as their 'proof' of McD's greatness? Will the lines stolen from a long-out-of-print biography of Gandhi be allowed to appear again?

I think we should be told.

BILL TURNER
Lincoln

Alan Riach writes:

I'm sure that Bill Turner speaks for a significant hinterland of readers and writers whose evaluation of MacDiarmid is low for a number of different reasons. These reasons are confused in his letter so it would be as well to specify them clearly.

Although it is well attested that he could be personally one of the kindliest and friendliest of men, MacDiarmid was, more than most poets, deliberately provocative, both in his writing and on any public platform. Alistair Warren, writing in The Dumfries and Galloway Standard (5 June 1992), says: 'Between 1965 and 1974, as editor of the Glasgow Herald, I had a spasmodic, but to me entirely pleasing, correspondence with him. Although in print he affected to despise that newspaper and everything connected with it, I found him unfailingly courteous and considerate'.

One's response to MacDiarmid's memory and legacy will inevitably be affected depending on whether one has suffered personally from his castigation or enjoyed his courtesy and company. However, a response based solely on such experience can hardly be considered literary criticism. If Ezra Pound didn't answer his door to your knock or if Adrienne Rich once snubbed you at a party, it wouldn't mean that their poetry was bad.

MacDiarmid's provocation of other writers and his deliberate attempt to stir them up must have been a lonely and - evidently - a thankless task. Nevertheless it has clearly been effective. All the most significant work of the poets Mr Turner mentions was done after MacDiarmid's castigations.

Regarding MacDiarmid's so-called 'plagiarism': I have dealt with this at length in my book Hugh MacDiannid's Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991). The poem 'Scotland' to which Mr Turner refers does indeed include lines from e.e. cummings's 'N&: Seven Poems'. It is one of MacDiarmid's most effective and moving poems and is published in the Carcanet edition of his Selected Poetry, where cummings is acknowledged as a source-text. I discuss the nature of MacDiarmid's transcription in this poem in my book (pp. 175-176) and show how it works in terms of the poem's subject, form, and the author-function of MacDiarmid's name. As for taking lines from a long-out-of-print biography of Gandhi, doesn't MacDiarmid deserve credit for bringing to our attention material which otherwise would have slipped into the literary leafmould of history? If you took all that Shakespeare stole out of Shakespeare you'd be left with the Light Brigade after Balaclava, and did Yeats not copy lines from Walter Pater? MacDiarmid's case may be more extreme, but 'plagiarism' is a piffling complaint against something this big.

In short, Mr Turner's earnestness gets the better of him. If MacDiarmid displayed self-interest, he clearly had need of it. No poet of his calibre has had to face such critical hostility, negative judgement and neglect - and managed to survive in Scotland while doing so. What is most regrettable is that such hostility comes from critics and readers whose experience and training should have equipped them with the skills to extend a more generous and sympathetic reading with real intellectual curiosity. This may be too much to hope for from the author of The Flying Corset, but I do not think Mr Turner is incapable of it.

REGRETS

Sir,

T.J.G. Harris appears to have it in for me. In his review of Carcanet's volumes of Hugh MacDiarmid's Selected Prose and Selected Poetry (P·N·R 89), he makes a number of useful, detailed suggestions about textual discrepancies and punctuation. I am grateful for the corrections he notes and I shall see that they are implemented. He also makes a number of patronizing jibes at my introductions to these books and my critical book Hugh MacDiannid's Epic Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1991). According to Mr Harris, my work is 'strained in a familiar mode', crude in thought, cliched, 'academic' and displays an admixture of self-pity tainting hero-worship; apparently I also exhibit a desire to make MacDiarmid seem 'politically correct'.

All of these remarks are invidious, spurious and totally unsubstantiated.

However, there are two points worth taking further. When Mr Harris accuses me of attempting to locate MacDiarmid in a constellation of modernists he bumps into the idea that seeing MacDiarmid in this way might lead to a serious reconsideration of the current definitions of the modernist achievement, and that this would be an excellent idea. The fact of the matter is that my work on MacDiarmid is engaged in that process.

For political as well as linguistic reasons, MacDiarmid has been denied the discerning readership and critical attention many of his contemporaries of lesser significance have been accorded. If it is wrong of me to attempt to redress that injustice, I am patently culpable and will continue to be so.

I regret that Mr Harris misreads my work and exhibits such a patrician tone since we are in agreement about MacDiarmid's stature as 'one of the greatest and most exhilarating poets to have written in these islands.'

Finally, there is no excuse for regarding Scots as 'one of the many Englishes' - even for convenience and economy, as Mr Harris grandiloquently advises us to do. The sort of linguistic imperialism implied by such an Anglo-centric attitude to Scots is far too common to be allowed to pass silently among the footling quibbles which Mr Harris so generously provides.

DR ALAN RIACH
Scottish Studies Association,
University of Waikato,
New Zealand

LARKIN'S LETTERS

Sir,

Anthony Thwaite claims to be able to understand Donald Davie's 'ugly attitude' to the publication of Larkin's Selected Letters. Larkin apparently used to mock Davie. Oh, well, of course, that explains it. It obviously wouldn't occur to Thwaite - how could he tell? - that over the past 40 years Donald Davie has been incomparably our most intelligent poet/critic and is entitled to be heard with respect. Nor would it occur to him that his trivial and trivializing response entirely justifies Davie's sense of a coterie world of Oxford chumminess devoid of serious standards. For on the essential point Davie is right. The Selected Letters is a hateful and disgraceful book. At all events, I don't know any one who hasn't found it so persistently grubby and foul-spirited as not to have felt in some way diminished by it.

As to Mr Bloomfield's complaint that Donald Davie says nothing about 'the 'physical book itself,' doesn't comment on the price or the photographic illustrations, I do see that this is a fearful oversight. Not quite in the class of reviewing Mein Kampf and ignoring the quality of its binding, perhaps, but as Mr Bloomfield says, reviewers should do the job properly.

JOHN LUCAS
Beeston, Nottingham

Sir,

Your editorial and Donald Davie's review of the Larkin Letters (P·N·R 89) are welcome additions to the current Larkin controversy. In the welter of publicity, both pre-and post-publication, you stand almost alone in your emphases on the crude mercenary motives that seem to have impelled publication. You also draw attention to the problematic nature of the Larkin canon. The Letters are but the latest evidence for what seems to be a growing oeuvre: the four slim volumes of poetry became what has been called, with sad appositeness, the 'fat Larkin'; the Letters, a sprawling volume that could, problematically, have been both bigger and different, continues this parody of Larkin's early contention that big writers are known by their having produced (physically) big books. However unsatisfactory this history of expansion might currently be, it is interestingly analogous to and confirmatory of the central fact of Larkin's career and canonisation: the deft eking out of dwindling stock.

While it is true, as I have insisted in the TLS, that we must not be duped into thinking that this posthumous expansion automatically advances Larkin scholarship, and while it is also the case that the literary executors have placed the rest of us in a position in which it is not possible, for the most part, to comment authoritatively on the shape of what is offered, I'm not sure that it is quite accurate to claim that the Letters 'is by Anthony Thwaite' and that we have a book that Larkin 'didn't want published'. Nor am I convinced that the crucial question is that of 'the rights … writers … have over their private writings'. The Larkin controversy represents, in unfortunately lurid and ironically 'populist' ways, the resurgence of the delicate matter of the biographical relation (one the poet always insisted on and, during his lifetime, stymied in his own case) in assessment of a writer's work. Furthermore, and perhaps not unrelatedly, Larkin clearly did envisage an edition of his letters (this surely alters how we should read those written towards the end) and hoped for a meeting between himself, Motion and Thwaite to 'discuss implementation of whatever had been formulated'. Whether such a meeting took place Thwaite does not tell us. But the crux occurs in the same letter (14 April 1985) where Larkin writes to Anthony Thwaite, 'I see you dealing with my publishers as I should myself, and in general looking after my interests and good name and so on'. That conflation of Thwaite and 'Larkin' has its roots here. Requested to be a second self, Anthony Thwaite is clearly put, quite literally, in an impossible position, all the more so in that he is required to do what Larkin chose not to do in his own lifetime. (So much for role models!) Nevertheless, since Thwaite was offered what Larkin called 'power and responsibility', and since he has chosen to proceed, we are entitled and obliged to ask, as you and Donald Davie have done, whether the task has been performed 'responsibly'. Given the obvious power held by the literary executors it is perhaps unsurprising that very few interested parties have done so.

TIM TRENGROVE-JONES
Department of English
University of Witwatersrand,
Johannesburg

WHY, OF COURSE!

Sir,

Doesn't 'The Whitsum Weddings' hint that we shouldn't take its author's posthumously published correspondence too solemnly? Wasn't he only larkin' with the mails?

P. WARLOCK-WILLIAMS
Coventry

AGEISM, SEXISM AND THE TV GENERATION

Sir,

I'd like, if I may, to respond to Fenella Copplestone's review of Glyn Maxwell's Out of the Rain in P·N·R 89. Copplestone observed that Maxwell 'doesn't have much to write about' but, given time, he will find something 'to complain about'. Am I to assume from this that thirty year old poets are thin on subject matter and experience? And that the likes of Hoffmann, Romer and Armitage, whose first major books were published before they were thirty, are also liable to this criticism? Would that Keats were living at this hour.

However, I'm sure the comment was meant to be helpful. True, I once had a granny who said things like this, and she always meant kindly. But aren't we all missing the point about Maxwell by copping out via such commentary? Surely, one of the best reasons for reading him is because he has a great deal to say about a great deal of things. It's one of the keys to enjoying this poet's work to first understand that poets born in an age of total TV domination have inhabited, not inherited, a media-soaked language. Instead of allowing his work to be swamped by this experience, Maxwell deploys and parodies the same tricks and tropes to an artistic end. As a result, his work has sufficient contemporary integrity to deal with the experience of global information without making the poems either opportunist or second-hand. But come on, how second-hand does experience have to be in order to be thought redundant by reviewers? If Maxwell chooses to write an excellent poem about Aid Workers, do we have to assume that he has been an Aid Worker? The recent controversy in the high court over whether to award compensation to TV 'witnesses' of the Hillsborough tragedy is surely instructive to those who deny the validity of what experience is these days.

DAVID MORLEY
Sheffield

UTOPIA NOW

Sir,

Christopher Middleton is quite right to announce in the preamble to 'A Pasquil on the Poetry Scene' {P·N·R 90) that he proceeds 'with more than usual caution, because I'm not familiar with all recent developments and their contradictions.' Caution clearly got the better of him because he chooses a lecture given in 1940 as the starting point for a discussion of English poetry c.1992 and supports his argument with texts published in 1907, 1759, 1967 and 1933. Indeed, one can only admire his apparent indifference to appearing absurd. Despite Middleton's rather disingenuous attempt to disarm any response there is a great deal in his 'Pasquil' that just won't do but I shall confine myself here to three points.

First, it is ludicrous to continue to claim such disabling influence for Larkin when the 1980s and early 1990s have seen poets consistently looking outside England for spurs, models and permissions. Other presences are everywhere visible: Jean Follain in Stephen Romer, say, or Robert Lowell in Simon Armitage or Miroslav Holub in Charles Boyle or Hans Magnus Enzensberger in Michael Hofmann. Second, contemporary British poetry resoundingly refutes Middleton's charge that it fails to keep abreast of developments at the 'turbulent frontiers of the intellect'. Cutting edge research in science for example can be seen to be engaging the imaginations of Pauline Stainer, Helen Dunmore, Robert Crawford, W.N. Herbert, Paul Mills and David Morley. Third, it's even hard to agree that 'there is now a crisis affecting lyric voice'. What has been happening is that poets are merely locating it in different places and, in some cases, 'outing' it from the secrecy and silence Middleton deems so important. Again, one would point to the work of Pauline Stainer but also to David Hartnett and Eavan Boland to show that 'the lyric voice' has never been healthier.

However, all the above is perhaps only an argument about who has access to the best information. What is really objectionable about the 'Pasquil' is the way Middleton uses a diagnosis of the apparent 'crisis' to smuggle in an attack on poetry in the early 1990s as a plural, popular and eminently accessible art. He writes that 'The disposition, or gender, or ethnicity of the source seems to be accepted as a criterion for the value of the signal.' This is disgraceful: the rise and consolidation of black and women poets in recent years has been based entirely on the quality and originality of their work as it has been perceived by other poets, critics and general readers. To suggest otherwise is deeply insulting to both writers and readers and probably, in the case of black writers, racist. Similarly, Middleton flutters his hands in horror to see that 'poems are being annexed to an entertainment industry and come to be commodified: products not creations, frothy and diluted products at that, Kitsch not Kunst.' It's impossible to know what or whom Middleton has in mind here but two questions demand to be asked: is it anything new and is it necessarily a bad thing? Was Byron any less 'commodified' when he awoke and found himself famous? Don't we want to increase the audience of poetry and shouldn't it entertain as well as move and instruct? And as for Kitsch and Kunst, a quick glance at twentieth century poetry would suggest that much of it has been and continues to be both.

Middleton falls into the common trap of wanting poetry to be either one thing or another and either can't or won't see that it can be many things. We need our spiritual authority but we also need entertainment just as we need integration and deconstruction, passion and froth, etc. The rediscovery of multivalency in the 1980s and 1990s is why 'the poetry scene' is such an exciting place to be right now; but I had better explain that with a phrase from the recent past where Christopher Middleton clearly feels most at home: Crisis? What crisis?

DAVID KENNEDY
Sheffield

PROPER VOCABULARIES

Sir,

In his review of We Have the Melon (P·N·R 90), James Kirkup takes Gregory Woods to task for what he calls 'improper vocabularies', informing us how much he prefers 'cunt' to 'cock'. I need hardly remind him that the terms are far from interchangeable. And this from the man who has given us 'Ode to Male masturbation' and 'Hymn to the Foreskin'! More serious is the snide comment: 'And he gets top marks for never using the word "gay".' I never read of heterosexual poets being praised for specific words they avoid using. Nor do I see Afro-Caribbean writers being acclaimed for sparing us the word 'black'. In fact, Kirkup has himself been happily - and notoriously - published by Gay News, Gay Sunshine Press and Gay Men's Press. Nor is the offending word a stranger to his own verse. He has also contributed some fine poems to a projected anthology on AIDS by gay poets that I am co-editing with Martin Humphries. Self-censorship is not one of the distinguishing features of this book. Surely this way of jeering at gay men (and poets) - especially by gay male poets themselves - is just playing to the gallery. Who's out there these days, I wonder?

STEVE CRANFIELD
Islington, London N1

STAPLE POETRY COMPETITION

In the Staple Poetry Competition, judged by Fleur Adcock, this poem was awarded the first prize.

CAROLINE PRICE
UNDER SIEGE

Already they are breaking furniture
for firewood;
in the wrecks of high buildings,
beneath glassless windows,
they are cooking communally in tin boxes
on landings, fire escapes.

And in unlit apartments women are
  making
the decisions: which do we need
least - this cupboard?
this linen chest?

The luggage of twenty, thirty years
of marriage smashed to pieces
in as many minutes,
varnished splinters flying -

Everything around them reduced
to ashes. Table, wardrobe;
now at last the bed.
Its parts catch slowly,
slowly kindle the dozen faces
hung above, disembodied
over coats dark as mourning -

The bed, first possession, saved for
through courting years
for this -
for this exactly, the gift
of warmth, hot meals; for the small
  explosion
and gloved hands pattering like shrapnel
in the settling glow
skin suddenly healthy, faces filled.