There has been no diminution in the flow of letters about PNR 13. Here we print another of the few letters critical of ourstance and one of several representative and unsolicited petitions.

Dear Sir: I have been reading PNR 13 with considerable interest, and with mixed feelings. In general I share the regret of your contributors over the weakness of language in many of the newer translations of the Bible, and the revised services. I entirely disagree, however, with their suggestion that the remedy for this is to retreat back to greater use of the Book of Common Prayer and the King James Bible.

Yes, of course these are great works of English prose, and their contribution to both church and nation have been enormous. But, whatever the needs of the literary establishment, the church certainly cannot bind herself to them forever.

They may mean much to your cultivated contributors, and to others steeped in them from childhood, but among ordinary congregations up and down the country it is increasingly recognised how much they fail to communicate. Mary Warnock rightly stresses the importance of all that is conveyed by the 'obscurities, the ambiguities, the suggestions' of a language, over and above the bare sense; but these are the very things that are lost for many people in listening to the language of four hundred years ago. In the fog of unfamiliar phraseology those subtleties and overtones are difficult to pick up. We shall only recover that dimension of language when we have a new version which is rich and allusive enough to do for people today what the Authorised Version did for people of previous generations.

David Martin says that 'a modern rite could have been devised which was taut, powerful, hard-wearing and invoked the spirit of poetry',-and this is very much the nub of the matter. I am optimistic enough to think that he is probably right. Certainly a 'spirit of poetry'-in the sense of language which is rich in feeling, innovative, and able to embrace more than one shade of meaning-is something lacking from the liturgical revisions. They are mostly very timid, and rarely venture beyond a re-hash of safe biblical phrases. It is interesting that the one prayer Basil Cottle found a good word for, in Series 3 Holy Communion, was the only piece of really new composition in the whole rite.

I suspect this lack has some relation to the general gap between poets and the public today. This is not the place to discuss who may be to blame for that gap,-but whilst those responsible for the new versions might not have been unversed in English poetry, there is a good chance that they would not have read anything much later than Hopkins, or Eliot at most. Philip Larkin's comment underlines how far they may have been from making effective use of the poets grappling with the language today. David Martin's accusation about 'a reluctance to tap the creative genius available to the Church' could well be a valid one.

Nevertheless the question still remains as to how far it will really be possible for anyone to write a 'taut, powerful, hard-wearing' text for today, until we have been able to get the dominant rhythms of the sixteenth century out of our heads. More than one of your contributors implicitly underlined this when, in analysing weaknesses of the language of the new services and translations, they showed that the source of the trouble so often comes from trying to compromise with the earlier wording, instead of striking out with something genuinely new.

I think it is not accidental that some of the better modern texts,-e.g. the Gelineau psalms, the Jerusalem Bible-have come from the Roman Catholic tradition, so much less in the shadow of the King James Version and Archbishop Cranmer.

I suspect that if there are to be effective new forms of the liturgy and the scriptures in the English language, a painful break may first have to be made. Periods of iconoclasm have been a recurrent feature of the history of the Church. They are always distressing to our aesthetic sensibilities. Still people have found more compelling spiritual compulsions to set aside an art whose richness and age have turned into an encumbrance, making it possible to begin again from basics, in however crude a way. Possibly it is a kind of linguistic iconoclasm that the English-speaking churches have to go through, on the way to renewing themselves from the doldrums of the mid-twentieth century.

The process has happened often enough before, in language as well as art. C. H. Sisson asks 'what were Jesus and his disciples doing in the synagogue?' Well, part of the time they were probably listening to the Septuagint,-a Greek translation of the Old Testament, still little more than a century old at that time, and not-so far as I know-noted as a great classic of the language. And then, of course, one was always given to understand, by the Greek scholars, that the prose of the New Testament was execrable by Classical standards!

I happened to be reading T. F. Powys's novel Mr Weston's Good Wine at the same time as PNR 13, and a character there speaks of 'the Bible that had once, when it was in Latin, frightened the people into good behaviour. But as soon as this book was translated into the vulgar tongue the people feared it no more; it was become a King Log to them, and they treated it with the contempt that so many modern Anglican bishops say it deserves. . . .' I wonder how many of the fears your contributors voice could have been heard four hundred years ago, when these texts were new?

Basil Mitchell makes some extraordinary remarks, suggesting, it seems, that what the Bible has to say is 'trite' enough to need to be allusively wrapped up in order to make it sound interesting. If that is the case, why are we bothering at all? If the content and message are so thin as to be wholly dependent on the quality of translation, then is it really worth trying to propagate? If, on the other hand, the Bible is in any real sense the living word of God, then it must be powerful enough to speak, regardless of the quality of translation; (which is not to say that a good rendering will not do much to enhance its impact).

No liturgy or translation can be regarded as a static 'treasure', in quite the same way that a painting or a piece of architecture might be regarded. Christian worship has undergone adaptation throughout the centuries; this is vital and is bound to continue.

Those writers who appeal, in one way or another, to the role that the Book of Common Prayer has played in embodying an Anglican consensus, are apt to pass over the fact that for at least a century now it has, more and more, ceased to be a common text in practice. Increasing numbers of people had felt the freedom to depart from it. If you had gone round the parish churches of this country just before the revised services began to be introduced, the number of places to be found using the Prayer Book strictly as the rubrics dictated would have been small indeed. There was a wide range of accepted variations and departures, and wholesale incorporation of material from other sources, whether the never-legalised 1928 Book, the English Missal, or the revised liturgies of overseas churches such as South India. The effect of the introduction of Series 2 and 3 was probably to pull things together again, rather than to increase diversity!

And is the Book of Common Prayer still able to give all the nourishment needed today? It was noticeable that more than one of your contributors made some dismissive reference to a 'social gospel'. It was done rather in the way that popular newspapers once used the phrase 'kitchen sink' to shrug off a whole area of contemporary drama. What is being sneered at under this catch-phrase includes a good deal of costly commitment and dedication by men and women trying to work out the gospel in some of the more difficult areas of modern society; they may not have too much time for preserving 'Cranmer's masterpiece', but they have won some important renewal of conviction and deepening of theology for our own day. That this can be so cheaply dismissed by those who cling to the Book of Common Prayer could possibly be taken to suggest some deficiency in their spiritual diet.

Another important point of growth and development in the church today, of which no account is taken in your pages, is the enrichment many people have been finding in small groups, meeting for worship, prayer, study and action together. The Book of Common Prayer has little to offer to the informality of the house church, and what it has brought into the life of parish churches.

As to Roger Homan's horror stories of manipulating vicars, it was hard to know whether to laugh or weep. I don't question his bad experiences, but I would like to put them in perspective by setting against them two facts from the broader scene:-

1) far from the imposition of sacred contexts upon political discussions being a pervasive tendency today, there has been a strong current in the theology of the past twenty-five years which has stressed how the whole sacred/secular dichotomy may be an intrusion into christianity, and which has drawn out the important strands of Biblical teaching that run toward the breaking down of any such divide;

2) and as to the picture of the clergy as a radical vanguard, dragging reluctant laity into reforms they want no part of,- the fact is that most of the important proposals for change or reform which have been lost in General Synod, (from the Anglican/Methodist reunion scheme, to the ordination of women, and the remarriage of divorced people in church), have been blocked by 'no' votes in the House of Clergy.

I do not under-value the rich heritage we have had in the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, and can understand why those professionally concerned with English Literature wish to maintain their currency. But the Church itself has different priorities,-just as it may need to abandon an architecturally handsome building which has become pastorally redundant. No living theatre could be nourished on a diet of Shakespeare alone, nor a living poetry by just re-reading Milton; so too a living church has got to find its own voice, even if it does lack the fine cadences of our forefathers.
THE REVD. TONY LUCAS
St Michael's Vicarage, London SW 9

C. H. Sisson writes:
'A living church has got to find its own voice'-precisely, and the profound disillusion some of us feel is due to the fact that, when it claims to have done so, it speaks so trivially. If we cannot hear its voice any longer, it must in part be due to the fact that we have not ears to hear-but surely also in part because the church has no tongue to speak? It is not only the form of the Bible and the Liturgy which is at stake. The disagreements over that are signs of something more: a sheer lack of seriousness, a sheer lack of intellectual force and coherence, in ecclesiastical pronouncements. It is no use justifying the present messing about with the liturgy by references to the sixteenth century. There is no crisis now of theological understanding comparable to that which Cranmer's liturgy in a manner resolved. If there is a crisis in the church now, it is on account not of wide-spread concern, but of un-concern: and it has been met in the way in which politicians and other advertisers meet such crises in their affairs -by a public relations exercise.

That is something which serious literature is not. Any serious work, whether in verse or prose, is done by people who have something to say, not by people who are out to persuade for some ulterior purpose, such as to sell a policy or a new drink or to increase the size of a congregation. I have no doubt that had the order of need for a change in the liturgy been what it was in Cranmer's day, it would have found a voice we could listen to. Of course there is need for some change with the times, and of course diffident insertions and modest variations in the use of the Prayer Book are not out of place although-as Mr Lucas suggests-the sheer indiscipline of the clergy for many years past has prepared the way for the present frivolities. That some additions, of like seriousness with that of the original, should end by finding a permanent place in the liturgy, as the twentieth century's contribution, is much to be wished.

Mr Lucas thinks we should throw away the Bible and Prayer Book so that we can forget them and so not be bothered by their rhythms when we try to write something new. Here he really has touched on a literary problem. The writer of any worth is one who manages to undergo profound influences from the past and then to find the small, new voice for what he has to say himself. That voice is not found by a voluntary ignorance of the past. Writing and speaking well are functions which have to be painfully learnt, and the teachers are those in the past who have spoken and written best. In suggesting that we learn by refusing to listen to our best teachers Mr Lucas may have the consolation of drifting with the times-as the church, some think, now does so readily-but he should remember that the church itself is a tradition. Should he be so eager to hand on less than he was given?


The January 1980 number of the Musical Times carried an article by Ann Bond describing the St Cecilia Petition, as a result of which PNR received well over a hundred further pledges of support from a wide variety of individuals concerned with the effect of liturgical reforms on our musical heritage.
MS

WORD AND IMAGE
A reply to Alan Munton's 'History and Change', PNR 12

Dear Sir: If it is Geoffrey Hill's ambition to discover the one word that will sound all History, it might be said of Jeffrey Wainwright that his ambition is to discover the one image that will sound all History. Their concerns as poets are very similar, a fact that went unnoticed by Alan Munton in 'History and Change', which incorporates his review of Wainwright's Heart's Desire. To compare his work with that of A. L. Morton, a comparison prompted, it would seem, only by their supposed shared politics (and there, in the case of Wainwright, I would take issue with Munton), gives rise to gross misjudgements of Wainwright's work. Needless to say, Wainwright's first vocation is as a poet, and that his chosen themes and subjects have a 'political' content says no more to me than that the work of every poet has a 'political' content (including the work of Philip Larkin if his recent Observer interview is anything to go by!).

That Wainwright is true to his vocation, there is no doubt, as Munton adequately reveals in his more perceptive comments on 'Thomas Muntzer'. However, I must take exception to his opening premise that Wainwright's 'first necessity is to engage with History'. Rather, his 'first necessity' is to engage with History through language, its 'styles of expression' (as Wainwright said in an article on Hill, Agenda 17.I); and by doing so, to engage our received perceptions of History that are formulated and transmitted by those styles. Hill's method of poetic engagement is through artifice; Wainwright's is through irony. Wainwright enters the mind of Muntzer, not simply to articulate Muntzer's despair with the world, nor indeed his own, but to dramatize the brutalised locutions of an institutionalised language, a language whose fierce censoriousness is intoned in those heresies of Muntzer.

Such then is the tragedy of Muntzer's life: that though acutely sensible (in an intuitive rather than a literal way) of the possibilities for social change embedded in language, he is forcibly driven to arms, his sword echoing his inquisitors' voice: 'dran dran dran'. For Muntzer, as much as it is for Wainwright, the 'final image' is a hollow celebration, precisely because it is an image ('. . . the voice cannot be composed free of styles', Agenda). The image as a device for rendering truth is also, as an artifice, a device for dissimulating truth, by its Midas touch. The irony is that we witness the display, not the word. The image Wainwright seeks is the image made of a language free from its 'making', and free from its magnetic past-the language of men that raises no ghosts. If History is a problem of consciousness, then it is also, for Wainwright as it is for Hill, a problem of language.
ROBERT STUART
Manchester

G. S. FRASER
Nicholas Moore writes:
I first met G. S. Fraser at St Andrews in 1937. He was a senior, and editor of College Echoes, and I only a bejant, so I may well have been somewhat overawed, but I have the distinct impression that he had already formed his characteristic style, both as a poet and a critic, by that time and, when a year later at Cambridge I helped to found a little magazine, he contributed to the first issue. Later, when he was abroad in the army, he sent me his poems to distribute among the magazines and, when I arranged with Tambimuttu to publish the first PL pamphlets, George Fraser's first book, The Fatal Landscape, was one of them.

When he was editor of College Echoes, the business manager was a very extroverted, lively political man (Communist at that time) and George learnt from this association, I'm sure, his later realised gift for being able to get at what his subject's ideas were almost from the inside before making a criticism or a judgement. Thus his criticism was always both considered and fair, and he was able to encompass ideas other than his own, and give them often a better exegesis than their promulgators could themselves. Thus it was with the New Apocalypse, under whose banner he sat as uneasily as I, but whose ideas he could express in a form far more amenable and reasonable than they were able to themselves. This attribute, and his knowledge of philosophy and philosophic method, led to his being both a good close critic-his great admiration was Empson-and a 'balanced' general one, though, in an early poem, 'Problems of a Poet', he sneers ar himself for this:-

The poem is there, the poem is not in the distance,
For in this too heroic age, alas,
I never swam the Channel, crossed the Ebro,
Or fasted for a year on meadow grass.
Old men admire me for a pleasant manner,
Old men admire me for a 'balanced' air . . .

If his prose is characterised by an easy, conversational style and a flow of considered and stimulating ideas-apparent too in his personal discourse; he was a gregarious man and an excellent, amusing talker-so too is his poetry. In his criticism he lays bare the modes and manners of literature as related to his time and makes his judgements on them. In his poems he observes equally acutely the modes and manners of himself, his friends, and humanity in general and makes reflections on them; in each case with equal candour and fairness.

The state of humanity, and to some extent the ambivalent relationship between body and mind or heart and mind-between what we wish to do, what we do do, and what we are able to do -has bothered him from first to last, and, from his personal point of view, while he has been very successful, with the help of his wife, as a critic and teacher and encourager of youth, I feel he would have liked to have had, and indeed should have had, a bit more appreciation as a poet; an appreciation which his rather self-deprecating attitude may have had something to do with preventing. Also, he was never one for following the fashionable trend. In this he resembled Horace: candid and humble, but proud of his profession as a poet.

In one of his best early poems he writes:-

My simple heart, bred in provincial tenderness,
And my cold mind that takes the world for theme,
With local pain, with universal remedy,
Avert the real, disturb the noble dream.

In a long poem published in 1969 he is still exploring the same theme, 'The Human Situation', from much the same standpoint-

The case for the poetic word
Is not, then, perfectly absurd.
It is against self-righteous rant
And ever-broken promises
That a slow argument like this
May fill a really long-felt want.

He recieved a good obituary in The Times, and of course your PNR news-note, but again not very much about his poetry. Even your news-note needs interpretation. I was not entirely convinced by what your correspondent said about what George saw 'as his central task'. In 'Elegy for Freud and Yeats' he wrote:-

The sober and inquiring mind,
And the enchanting charlatan
Moulded with tales and rhetoric
All that our age will or can.

But, he concludes, 'Both ignored the gathering general doom'. He himself certainly had a sober and enquiring mind and he believed in poetry and its felicities. But as a therapy? I should have thought he merely wished to be a poet and to teach others the delights and the nature and the difficulties of poetry.

A CONFESSION

In response to Graham Martin, the General Editor writes:

When he wrote his dramatic investigatory letter to PNR 12, Graham Martin blew the cover off the cut-throat (but hitherto concealed) conflicts that rage between the editors of this magazine. It must be confessed: much of what he implies is true, has been true, will remain true! Until his letter reached us we felt safe. We presented to the world a kind of united front, a single face, fissured to an almost Audenesque degree by polemic sometimes, but not seriously cracked since the resignation of one colleague three years back.

Now, in the interests of public safety and information, a little (certainly not all) can be told.

When Jon Silkin assaulted C. H. Sisson for alleged 'hegemony' in the pages of Stand, he showed less insight than Graham Martin has done. There is little money in PNR, and certainly no hegemony. On the other hand, Mr Silkin expressed incredulity when, defending ourselves against his allegations in the TLS, we spoke in different voices. Had Sisson been a hegemoniac, we should have spoken with one voice. His. But we are three people, not a Trinity but a kind of coalition, like the Labour Party, largely united in our objectives but at odds about the means, and representing different interests. Yorkshireman, Bristolian and Mexican, our constituencies, like our histories, are distinct. Only the General Editor can be held wholly responsible for what PNR publishes. Though, in taking credit, we practice collective responsibility, in taking blame the General Editor is, quite rightly, the fall-guy.

Where Graham Martin erred was in the stress he laid on the word troika, teasing out its Siberian nuances. Better, I think, to have compared us to a triptych-say, the famous Uccello triptych, 'The Rout of San Romano', whose three panels are housed in different museums (London, Paris and Florence) and subjected to different atmospheres, lighting, and the regard of discrete audiences.

One panel in our triptych hangs in Somerset, above the river Paret, remote from academic institutions, and over its retirement play, mature garden shadows (fruit, flower and herb). It 'Discourses with the breathing Trees'. Another hangs in Tennessee, 'Like nothing else in Tennessee', high on an academic hill:

It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.

As for the third, it hangs in an old commercial pile in Manchester, behind the cathedral, up among chimneys and seagulls, '-Till elevators drop us from our day.'

Inevitably time (I should say 'age') and circumstances make the three panels which are nominally one reflect the world in different ways; even their frames don't match. When they are brought together for the infrequent exhibition, they appear to agree, but soon they return to their distinct pegs.

For the sake of clarity, in this confession I shall adopt what George Steiner, in his excellent essay "Critic"/"Reader" ', calls 'the fiction of contrastive absolutes'. A more detailed, less allegorically simplified approach would necessarily occupy several issues of PNR if it were to include the relevant documents (telegrams, letters, affidavits, Christmas cards, proofs and very rough drafts). It would be as tedious for the reader to pursue as it has been taxing for the protagonists to enact.

This eliptical account is necessary if the reader is to understand that the magazine is not the fruit of strict tactical or critical consensus among the editors but, on the contrary, of a complex trialectic in which, to avoid the malaise (so British and so literarily debilitating) of compromise, we resort instead to a process of thesis, antithesis, anti-antithesis, and occasional synthesis. Some poems and essays reflect so clearly the judgement of one editor, are so at variance with the expressed desires of the others, that the reader will wonder why more resignations have not as yet vexed the coalition. Let him read on. He will find oblique responses and counter-thrusts. The skirmishes are fought-or the trialectic process evolved-either in the editors' first persons or vicariously through the contributions of other writers. Since we publish in England we have good manners, we always conceal the rapier under the cloak. But even in the most umbrageous dell attentive readers may discern scuff-marks of conflict.

The first naked evidence of tension appeared in PNR 2 with Richard Swigg's essay 'Descending to the Commonplace', an essay with which I was generally in sympathy but which, in PNR 3, Donald Davie dissented from. In PNR 3 Donald Davie took strong issue with my anthology Ten English Poets, several of the ten being contributors to PNR. Donald Davie was properly alarmed at the appearance of poems by, and an advocacy of, John Ashbery in PNR 4, while C. H. Sisson, quite as properly, was disappointed by the academic tone our essayists frequently adopted. His own disagreement with Donald Davie came out clearly in the editorial to PNR 9, in which he questioned Davie's statement in PNR 7 (in an essay on Yvor Winters) that 'Nobody, one might think, has ever seriously advanced a theory of poetry as unconsidered statement.' Sisson reports that his 'eyes started out of his head' when he read that.

And this is certainly the point of radical disagreement between the editors: the nature of poetic statement. It is a conflict between temperaments, between attitudes to the academy, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, between two readings of Pound and Eliot, between three generations, three distinct attitudes to tradition and to time. What could be more radical to a journal whose principal concern is language, and more specifically, poetry? How can three editors who disagree on this score still cling doggedly to the same masthead?

Donald Davie and I have conducted a long correspondence on whether or not a poet can use language 'innocently' in the latter half of the twentieth century, my contention being that he can and perhaps must, while he argues strongly against me, for my own and the magazine's sake. Though in other respects we do not see eye to eye, I side with Sisson in the 'deliberacy' debate: the presence in the magazine of the Kleist essay and the forthcoming translation of one of Schiller's great essays are clauses in this debate. Indeed, in its contents PNR often covertly pursues this argument, progressing as a kind of three-sided chess-game in which the players advance their counters, though there is no king to be taken (but knights and bishops were involved in PNR 13).

The disagreements are substantive. PNR cannot be narrowly polemical because of them, and this is fortunate. We avoid parti pris by continuing in our subversive ways to advance each his own argument by means of the contributions each solicits, or by careful selection among the hundreds of submissions that arrive each month. Thus we remain catholic without becoming eclectic, for we are bound in a kind of positive conflict which involves concerns of moment to all writers.

Having evoked this Macchiavellian scenario, let me reassure the reader that there are areas of broad agreement between the editors, certain common values and valuations, hopes and objectives of which every reader will be aware, issue by issue. PNR 13 was a point of complete consensus.

I regard my colleagues differently One is a force, a chastening whirlwind, an energy 'like one of nature's'. The other is a presence, classical and calm, coolly defined and defining. Between them I stand like Faust: they whisper at my ears. In George Steiner's terms, I am more a 'reader' than a 'critic' and tend to trust that counsel which promises the better poems rather than that which offers the more attractive arguments. I am fortunate in my counsellors: they offer the best of both and often agree in the matter of poems where they disagree in the matter of poetics. But then, about poems, both of them often disagree with me. And so it goes . . . and so it is.