BLAKE MORRISON 43

In defence of minimalism Today we have naming of parts. Yesterday We had daiiy cleaning. And tomorrow morning We shall have what to do after firing. But today, Today we have naming of parts. (Henry Reed)

It has been customary since the early sixties to apologise for the state of British poetry. Faced with American visitors eager to discover what our contemporary poets are getting into, he is a brave man today who recommends Larkin, R. S. Thomas, Heaney, Hamilton or Dunn. More usually the abashed host will mumble something about a ‘betrayal of the advances of modernism’ or ‘servility to the native tradition’, and offer instead that safe double-bet, Tomlinson and Hughes. The defiant few (for example, Alan Brownjohn in The Review, No. 24) who point out that our mini-talents can actually be more efficient and economical than their Cadillac counterparts tend to sound crankily xenophobic. Much the safest thing to do (and several recent studies - among them Spender’s Loue-Hate Relations and Thurley’s The Ironic Harvest - have continued to do this) is to own up, say sorry, and promise, rather half- heartedly, an improved tomorrow.

This United State of Apology is, of course, quite unnecessary. A careful look at British poetry written since 1940 reveals that our poets have been con- fronting a totally unprecedented situation, one which has necessitated the practice of what I would call minimalist art. ‘Minimalist’ is a term that has sometimes been applied to the work of Samuel Beckett, with its urge towards silence. More recently, it has begun to be used in reference to a group of poets in this country (Ian Hamilton, Colin Falck, David Harsent and others) whose taciturnity is less the product of an Absurdist Weltanschauung than the natural culmination of a modem British poetic tradition. In fact, minimalism, used in t h i s sense, could be said to have begun around the time of World War Two, and to have become an important, if not the dominant, manner in British poetry since then. To put my cards on the table: since 1940 the more grandiose roles traditionally available to a poet have been found in this country to be no longer exercisable. With the myth-kitty ransacked, the social commentary-box finally handed over to the media, and heroism, since Auschwitz, out of place, the most representative and important post-war poets have been forced into an articulation of small, personal experiences, the significance of which may or may not (it depends on how minimalist the poets are) be made apparent. What has, principally because of an over-use of traditional form, been widely diagnosed as a ‘retreat’, is, in fact, a small but unmistakeable advance into new territory.

44 Critical Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2

One is rightly suspicious of Termination Theories (who really believes in the dissociation of sensibility, say, or pre-Somme innocence?) but it does look as if the history of t h i s country since about 1940 has put paid to whatever lingering sense of presumption the poet in Britain possessed. Never again the massive historical collages of The Waste Land or the Cantos, never again the airman’s sweeping overview on a troubled European landscape. The dismal failure of those 1940’s poets like the neo-Apocalyptics, or like Sitwell in ‘Still Falls the Rain’, who did try to provide panoramic commentaries on World War Two, has at least left us with this invaluable lesson: the use of myth and allusion to give a poem historical significance actually reduces the real historical signifi- cance of the subject under consideration. To explaii World War Two in terms of ‘original sin’; to garnish it, as the neo-Apocalyptics did, with Christian symbolism; to proclaim, like Nicholas Moore, that ‘Hitler is love’s taunting fable, the earth gone wrong’, or like F. T. Prince, in the overrated ‘Soldiers Bathing’, that ‘because to love is frightening we prefer / The freedom of our crimes’; to take any of these approaches was to ensure that little would be conveyed about the experience of living through the war, and nothing at all done to help our understanding of the social and political factors that led up to it.

This, in fact, is one of the major crimes of modernism, for the inevitable outcome of mythic allusion is an emphasis on universality and timelessness which muffles the cry of the particular moment, the particular place. In the right hands - Eliot’s - the connections and continuities can, of course, be instructive; in less able hands, the hypermetropic (long-sighted) view of history is uninformed, unintelligent and anti-humanist, blurring more than it reveals. It’s arguable that since 1940 no British poet, not even Hughes in Crow, has handled myth with conviction: it seems to have lost its resonance. To my mind the personal anecdotes in Part II of Seamus Heaney’s North carry far more weight than the elaborate Scandinavian bog myths of Part I. And certainly those forties poets who came at World War Two by way of myth (usually the crucifixion) had little to offer.

Not all the World War Two poets, however, went in for misplaced Bardic audacity. The best poets of the forties, those who lead into the fifties and sixties, accepted that the only responsible thing to do in the circumstances was to write honestly of their own experiences, and make what sense of them they could. The distrust of large rhetorical gestures and authoritative moral pronouncements which characterises most post-war poetry, can be traced back to the war poetry of Keith Douglas, Roy Fuller, Nun Lewis, Norman Cameron, Bernard Gutteridge, R. N. Currey and Alan Ross. The concern of these poets to describe, in Douglas’s words, ‘true things, signdicant things’, forced them into necessarily restricted areas of experience, where to be honest

In defence of minimalism 45

is to forgo the right to be comprehensive. Even where the actual physical circumstances of war (as for Keith Douglas in his tank) permitted a broad panorama which had not been available to the entrenched World War One poets, the opportunity to write correspondingly panoramic poetry was refused. For R. N. Currey’s fighter pilot (was Auden taking note?) the airman’s overview is dehumanised and therefore undesirable :

He cannot see the people on the ground; He only knows that on the sloping map Of sea-fringed town and country people creep Like ants - and who cares if ants laugh or weep?

The solution for Currey and others was exactly that kind of ‘self-imposed and stubborn loss of nerve’ which Donald Davie was to describe ten years later : one forced oneself to be modest in aim, one confined oneself to a naming of parts. Yet the poetry is none the worse for that. The sense of real time and place that one gets from, say, Lewis’s ‘All Day it has Rained’, Ross’s ‘Messdeck’, Cameron’s ‘Green, Green is El Aghir’, Tom Scott’s ‘Canteen’, and Douglas’s ‘Behaviour of Fish in an Egyptian Tea Garden’ is worth a good deal more than the prefabricated Christian setting of a poem like ‘Soldiers Bathing’. Better myopia than a false perspective seemed to be the general feeling; as Douglas Bain put it:

We in our haste can only see the small components of the scene, We cannot tell what incidents will focus on the final screen. A barrage of disruptive sound, a petal on a sleeping face, Both must be noted, both must have their place: It may be that our later selves or else our unborn sons Will search for meaning in the dust of long deserted guns. We only watch, and indicate, and make our scribbled pencil notes. We do not wish to moralise, only to ease our dusty throats.

The late forties did not, however, bring a frenzied search for meaning, and it could certainly be argued that the next identifiable group of poets - the Movement - continued to make notes (albeit more academic ones) in the manner of their predecessors. This essential continuity of the fifties tradition is often forgotten: we’ve tended to swallow Robert Conquest’s distorted account of the forties in the introduction to New Lines, and to believe that those ostentatious Movement gestures towards a new beginning (‘Nobody wants any more poems on the grander themes for a few years . . .’) are indicative of a radical departure. In fact, as the Amis quote confirms, the Movement carried on a tradition already begun, and the New Lines insistence on intelligence, discipline, humour and integrity owes as much to the forties poets I’ve mentioned as to the acknowledged ancestry of Orwell, Empson and Graves.

46 Critical Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2

Norman Cameron, for example, an anti-modernist whose poems tend to be semi-ironic inner debates along jokey lines, made a deep impression on Philip Larkin, and his ‘The Disused Temple’ (reprinted in Larkin’s Oxford choice), a study of the continuing impact of a place of religion in a time that seems to have no use for it, almost certainly acted as a model for Larkin’s ‘Church Going’ :

It stays as a disquieting encumbrance. We moved the market-place out of its shade; But still it overhangs our whole remembrance, Making us both inquisitive and afraid. (Cameron)

A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air a l l our compulsions meet, Are recognised, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete. (Larkin)

There are equally useful comparisons to be made between Davie’s ‘Remember- ing the 30’s’ and Gutteridge’s ‘In September 1939’ or Wain’s ‘Don’t Let’s Spil it all . . .’ and Capetanakis’s ‘Detective Story’ : the Movement was not the revolt it pretended to be.

Certainly in the best Movement poems, those that step out past all the clever-clever ironies, the emphasis is, as in the forties, on the particulars of the real world. The rejection of a modernist approach to history seems to have a good deal to do with this. Kingsley Amis’s whimsical and unjust attack on The Waste Land contains a serious point :

I think a few mentions of (say) Nestle’s condensed milk, Woodbine’s, Spink’s plum- and apple jam, and Smtch-and-Apollinaris would have done The Waste Lutzd a world of good. As it is, the poem by setting out not to be limited to or by its immediate period, has no social-temporal context either, and has become just one mo:e of the featureless, flavourless lumps of cultural lumber it purports to be superior to.

Hence, of course, the popularity of the partidarising Betjeman, for the word ‘real’ (Larkin’s ‘real girl in a real place’, Enright’s ‘real cities, real houses, real time’) occupies an unusually important place in the Movement’s aesthetic vocabulary. Indeed, the regularity of its appearance suggests that empiricism is as important to an understanding of the fifties poetry as the more pejorative ‘-isms’ - rationalism, Georgianism, neo-Augustanism - commonly applied to it. The connection between this emphasis on the real (as opposed to the phoney, the ideal, or the romantic) and a minimalist art is spelt out very clearly in Kingsley Amis’s attack on the Grand Manner, ‘Against Romanticism’ :

In defence of minimalism 47

Over all a grand meaning fills the scene, And sets the brain raging with prophecy, Raging to discard real time and place Raging to build a better time and place . . . Better, of course, if images were plain, Warnings clearly said, shapes put down quite still Within the finger’s reach, or else nowhere . . .

Wter, Amis says, to stick to what one knows, to what is within the finger’s reach. And safer as well, since, to paraphrase Donald Davie, too much daring brought, the Movement thought, the war. The result is a benumbed, shell- shocked, intentionally timid poetry, in which the right to make any statement, however small, has first of all to be earned. This explains the emphasis on intellectual control and a mastery of traditional forms : one has to be qualified to make qualifications. It didn’t always work. At worst, Movement poetry is a tedious lesson in How-to-be-Ironic-and-Avoid-Saying-Anything. But at best the understatements and self-deprecations reflect not merely a post-war, Welfare State tentativeness, but something of the larger condition of cautiousness and scepticism which any modem democracy imposes. By the mid-fifties even G. S. Fraser, one-time shareholder in the Apocalyptic enterprise, had to admit that Movement poetry was perhaps better adapted than any other to the new conditions of society:

And if it is true as you say that most of this stuff Is a squiggle on the margin, or the sort of remark One thinks of but doesn’t quite get a chance to develop . . . . that may not be very good for poetry But it is good for society on the whole. And these neat little bitty poems may say more to us, At the moment, I mean, they may, Than the most portentous effort at the great ode Or the solemnest peroration with nobody listening: Though great poetry is something eke, at the moment they may.*

A good many other critics share Fraser’s one reservation (’great poetry is something else’) but this should not prevent, and, twenty years on, the time has surely come for, a generous re-assessment of Movement poetry. In New Lines, for instance, we have some of the best of Larkin, Davie’s ‘Rejoinder to a Critic’, Enright’s ‘On the Death of a Child’, Amis’s ‘Something Nasty in the Bookshop’ and Gunn’s majestic ‘On the Move’, all poems which are worth their place in an anthology of English poetry. And if we’re still not quite happy about the status of some of these poets, Larkin at any rate of those who emerged from the Movement is a major poet, and has continued to provide a voice for the sixties.

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The Movement manner did not die with the fifties and its influence can be seen most clearly in the purportedly anti-Movement A Group Anthology (1963). The real sixties contribution to post-war minimalist tradition, however, came not from the Group, nor from Liverpool and Newcastle, nor even from the neo-Poundians. It came from a number of poets - Ian Hamilton, David Harsent, Hugo Williams, Michael Fried, Colin Falck, and to a lesser extent Douglas Durn and Peter Dale - whose work received most of its exposure in The Review, and who brought into existence a poetic phenomenon - the mini-poem - which looked curiously like several social phenomena - the mini-skirt, the mini-cab, the mini-bus - of the time. Partly because of this fashionableness, none of these poets has, to date, been taken very seriously. Anthony Thwaite, for example, thinks that their poetry approached ‘threadbare banality’;’ and in a hostile attack in Phoenix (No. 8) Edna Longley suggested that they ‘have striven to achieve an utterly pure art, returned to a Georgian-Imagist first base, which reduces poetry to its bare essentials of object or image’. As the two criticisms suggest the typical ‘Review School’ poem, with its sparse record of a momentary insight, makes the writing of a sonnet look like an epic achievement. In these poets, the post-war paring down process had been carried one step farther. George Steiner’s arguments in the Language and Silence essays, which first appeared in the early ~ O ’ S , look very relevant :

This revaluation of silence - in the epistemology of Wittgenstein, in the aesthetics of Webern and Cage, in the poetics of Beckett, is one of the most original, characteristic acts of modem spirit. . . . In much modem poetry silence represents the claims of the ideal: to speak is to say less. ‘

An awareness of what Steiner calls the ‘paradox of silence as the final logic of poetic speech’ is central to an understanding of the sixties poe-try, for these poets (thanks more to Alvarez than Steiner, though the two oftp overlap) are much more aware than fifties poets of the damage to language this century’s history has done, and are consequently a good deal more grudging in their use of words. Meanness, in fact, is part of their meaning, and with it has emerged a new value system in which reticence gets top marks. A Review review of Hugo Williams’s Sugar Daddy, for instance, commends the poems for their ‘stringent self-awareness’, for having ‘the courage of their constrictions’ , for offering a ‘furtive but intense glance’, and for managing to look like ‘the single frame of an arrested film’.5 The less the modem poet allows in the poem, it seems, the better he is.

In this recognition of the implications of recent history for contemporq literature, and in their insistence on the precise notation of particulars, the Hamilton-Williams-Harsent group are a natural continuation of the post-1940

In defence of minimalism 49

minimalist tradition, and it’s no coincidence that Ian Hamilton has used a series of essays and an anthology of war poetry to bring attention to those forties poets who initiated it. But it would be misleading not to point out several other quite new influences at work in the sixties. One of these is the new receptivity to various other European poets (Machado, Herbert, Ritsos) who seem to be working in the same tradition. Another, more important, is the absorption of the American Plath-Lowell-Berryman achievement, and of the Extremist thesis which Alvarez, who did most to bring those three poets to attention, spent much of the sixties putting across. This last influence hasn’t always been salutary : for a time the Confessions-of-a-Failed-Suicide-and- Mental-Patient poem became as obligatory as the literary-critical villanelle had been in the fifties. But the new concentration on what Ian Hamilton, in a note on his own poems, called ‘the intense climactic moment of a drama’ has helped produce some of the best poetry in recent years, Hamilton’s ‘Curfew’, for instance :

It’s midnight And our silent house is listening To the last sounds of people going home. We lie beside our curtained window Wondering What makes them do.it.

This is the kind of poem that, to borrow a phrase of Larkin’s, ‘leaves nothing to be said’, and will probably leave cold those readers whose approach to poetry is exclusively cerebral, and who derive their pay or pleasure from interpreting more complex works of art. Its haunting brevity, pushed almost to the point of inconsequentiality, inevitably recalls Imagist poetry, and though there’s generally more concern for dramatisation in the minimalist tradition (some- thing nearer to Joyce’s epiphanies, in fact) the intense, visual pressure which Imagist poetry is capable of - the sense of the other words which have been warded off, and of the space and silence which lean in on the poem, giving additional force to what is there - has been something which several sixties poets have attempted to re-introduce. Colin Falck, for one, has called for ‘an amended Imagist poetics’ ; his key essay, ‘Poetry and Wittgenstein’ , provides us with the central statement of the new minimalist school:

What we need most of all today, perhaps, is to remember our obligation to the essential: to this end we must undo the work that went into the exaggerated up-grading of the metaphysical poets earlier in this century - and all the tacit support it gave to over-intellectalised academic readings . . and to re-relate ourselves to the theorists of early Romanticism (above all Coleridge and Keats). We ought to consider the possibility that some of the very best poetry might be scarcely susceptible to

50 Critical Quarterly, vol. 18, no. 2

explication at all . . . Wl& we seem to need today is an amended Imagist poetics which would give the proper, central place to what might be called ‘internality’ - the felt presence of the poet (or of someone) in the poem. Most of the points outlined in the Imagists’ programme seem valid still . . .‘

The anti-rationalism of Falck’s critical position and the lyricism of his poetry seem to indicate a significant departure from the fifties and in part this is the case: elsewhere, for example, Falck calls for a new barbarism to replace Larkin’s ordinariness (the political implications of this are contradictory and disturbing) and attacks Larkin’s method for being a ‘basically descriptive approach, depending as it does on argument rather than the individual moment of perception’.’ But the similarities are perhaps more fundamental: a refusal of rhetoric, a distrust of generalisations, an avoidance of public themes, and a belief that since the poet is no longer able to command a view of the whole, he had best stay alone with his insights: these are the characteristics of our post- 1940 tradition.

f can’t believe this tendency towards minimalist art is a bad one. It is, at the very least, in tune with an important post-war climate of feeling. As Donald Davie says in Thomas Hardy and British Poetry, a book which almost had the courage to speak up for contemporary English poetry:

Larkin and others like him, in the fifties and sixties seem to have been facing in different ways and with different degrees of honesty and awareness, an issue which h e anthologists and editors and commentators of that period hardly perceived at all.’

The issue which Davie refers to is the industrialisation of the English landscape, and ‘Larkin’s poetry of lowered sights and patiently diminished expectations’ should be seen, he believes, as the appropriate, if regrettable, response to an increasingly urbanised environment. It’s an interesting idea, but I can’t go along with Davie firstly because of his pejoratives (in Larkin’s work the lucid examination of how expectations become diminished is a real strength) and secondly in his identification of the new post-war issue as the rape of the English countryside. That particular rape (or should we call it something else, since we seem to have consented?) has been going on for so long now, and has marked us so permanently, that it’s on the one hand presumptuous of Davie to call it the province of a handful of post-war poets, and on the other unduly reductive of their real achievement. What is genuinely new in post-war poetry is the awareness of the place a poet and hidher poetry must occupy within a modern social democracy. The place is not an unimportant one, but since 1940 the idea of the poet as an inspired Bard not answerable to the laws of society (a Romantic assumption legitimised by Imperialism, and therefore still popular in America) has ceased to have valid currency here, and those who depend on

In defence of minimalism 51

such ideas have had to get their pleasure gratuitously (along with the liberals and anti-communists) from the Soviet rebels. In place of the Keats-Treece fallacy, a sense of modesty and responsibility, a scrupulous attitude to language, and a genuine, if still rather taciturn, social sensitivity, have begun to emerge, against which big brave attempts like Crow, Artorius and the Mercian Hymns seems a hopeless, reactionary tide. We can still enjoy Hughes, true, but if we are to move on from modernism, and most of the important post-war poets believe we must, his are probably not the right credentials.

Minimalist art is fragile and could disappear very quickly. The six-line poem may become (may have already become) a mere fad. Journalistic jottings and institutionalised intuitions may take over from the genuine article. And for the most severe minimalists (this is good news for the unconverted) silence may prove an irresistible temptation. There is a possibility, too, that the fore- shortening of historical perspective which characterises much post-1945 poetry will turn out to be as damaging as modernist long-sightedness. If, as Donald Davie suggested recently, ‘Ian Hamilton’s historical imagination reaches back no further than 1930’ ,’ we are probably right to feel that this is a heavy price to pay for particularity and immediacy. These are the dangers and in the face of them it is encouraging to see that a number of promising new poets - one thinks particularly of John Cassidy - are simply ignoring such considerations, and pushing ahead in their own idiosyncratic directions. All the same I think there is much to be gained from an awareness of the special capacities of the short poem, and from a close reading of Colin Falck’s call for a new imagist poetics. Whatever our views on the state of contemporary poetry, we can’t afford to ignore what has been happening these past thirty years: the development of a minimalist art has been an important feature of post-war poetry, needs I believe to be taken seriously, and ought, with due qualification, to be affirmed.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Amis, The James Bond Dossier (Cape, London, 1965), p. 104. Hartley (ed.), Listen (No. 2, summer 1954), p. 5. Thwaite, Poetry Today 1960-73 @ngman, London, 1973), p. 70. Steiner, Languuge and Silence (Pelican, London, 1968), p. 70. Stephen Wall, The Review (No. 23, September-November 1970), pp. 62-3. Falck, The Review (No. 18, April 1968), pp. 13-15. Z6id. (No. 14, December 1964), p. 9. Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (Routledge, London, 1973), p. 71. Davie, Poetry Nation (No. 2 , 1974), p. 75.

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