'Wilds to Alter, Forms to Build': The Writings of Sheila Wingfield

'Wilds to Alter, Forms to Build': The Writings of Sheila WingfieldAuthor(s): Alex DavisSource: Irish University Review, Vol. 31, No. 2 (Autumn - Winter, 2001), pp. 334-352Published by: Edinburgh University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25504881 .

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Alex Davis

'Wilds to alter, forms to build':

The Writings of Sheila Wingf ield

i Towards the end of her second volume of memoirs, Sun Too Fast (1974), Sheila Wingf ield recalls her feelings on learning that her 1954 collection of poems, A Kite's Dinner: Poems 1938-54, was to be a Poetry Book Society Choice. Her modest pride in the fact that '[t]hirty years of practising my chosen craft had resulted in this nice little tap on the shoulder', is

interrupted by the reflection that reviewers would find her difficult to

categorize: 'English father, Irish mother, an upbringing divided between

both countries ? what a tiresome combination to define. This duality was often a puzzle to myself.'1 Wingfield's bifurcated Anglo-Irish identity was not the only 'duality' in her life. Born in Hampshire in 1906, she was the sole surviving child of an indulgent and wealthy father, Claude

Beddington, and a cold and distant Anglo-Irish mother, Ethel Homan

Mulock.2 With the premature deaths of her two brothers and her father's

separation from Ethel, Sheila was brought up by her father to act as a

surrogate for both his wife and sons; to be proficient as both a hostess at

home and a horsewoman, angler and shot on their visits to others' houses.

Through marriage she became, on the death of her father-in-law in 1947, Viscountess Powerscourt, and her principal residence Powerscourt

demesne in Co. Wicklow, though winters were spent at the Homan

Mulock family home, Bellair in Co. Offaly, which had been made over

to Wingfield by her aunt.

Sun Too Fast and Wingfield's earlier, more conventional autobiography, Real People (1952), document these events in the course of their highly

diverting accounts of upper-class life in Britain and Ireland during the first half of the twentieth century. They are replete with anecdotal material

that is at once humorous and sociologically significant, as Wingfield details the often eccentric behaviour of her relatives and friends against the Georgian twilight of a social world she sees as 'coming to a natural

1. Sheila Powerscourt, Sun Too Fast (London: Geoffrey Bies, 1974), p. 270. Future

references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation STF.

2. Wingfield's representation of her mother in Sun Too Fast is unremittingly con

demnatory. Her previous memoir, Real People, published while Ethel was still alive, makes no reference whatsoever to her mother, though it discusses her relationship with her father at some length.

334



THE WRITINGS OF SHEILA WINGFIELD

close'.3 Though these are reminiscences of 'real people', there is some

thing larger-than-life about a character such as Wingfield's friend, Lord

Brabazon of Tara, whose achievements ranged from being a pioneer of

early flight to inventing an autogyro sailboat, propelled by eighteen feet rotor blades. ('This autogyro I refused to crew in,' comments Wingfield, 'Decapitation seemed certain' [STF, p. 185].) Claude Beddington's military

career is more extraordinary still. It extended from the Boer War, where he had been left for dead on the veldt, through the Great War, in which

he was wounded, to end finally in 1940, when, at the age of seventy two, and having 'remorselessly badgered' (STF, p. 281) friends at the

Admiralty, Beddington was finally killed in action ? his private yacht strafed by two German fighters as it undertook naval duties off Milford

Haven.

While Wingfield's detailed vignettes of the lives of family members

and friends do not preclude self-reflection, it would be fair to say that

the dominant mood of her memoirs is far from introspective. In his

preface to Real People, John Betjeman intriguingly argues that Wingfield's is 'a new kind of autobiography, a selfless one'. Betjeman's observation

might be taken as emphasizing a quality to Wingfield's prose that

corresponds to G.S. Fraser's identification of Wingfield as an 'objectivist'

poet in his introduction to her 1977 selected poems, Her Storms.4 Both

Betjeman and Fraser, I feel, overstate their cases; nevertheless they are

right to emphasize the crucial importance to Wingfield of facficity ? of

people, events, material objects: 'the actual untidiness of life' (RP,

p. 140). Where they go wrong is in not attending to the equal significance that Wingfield, in both her prose and poetry, accords the human subject's

desire to find order in the temporal welter of quotidian experience. In Real People and Sun Too Fast, Wingfield expresses an urge which

David G. Wright believes to be common to all autobiographers: 'to seek

to understand the forces which have made them what they are, to revisit

(sentimentally, curiously or in quest of what were once alternative

possibilities) the signposts pointing to their present position, to recapture from time moments which seem to have been stolen from them by the circumstances of their lives.'5 Wright is concerned with Yeats's

Autobiographies and related fictional prose, and draws our attention to

the 'highly idiosyncratic' or mixed nature of Yeats's writings in this genre, its devices including 'protracted discussions of people other than Yeats'.6

3. Sheila Wingfield, Real People (London: Cresset, 1952), p. 69. Future references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the abbreviation RP.

4. Sheila Wingfield, Her Storms: Selected Poems 1938-1977 (Dublin: Dolmen, 1977),

p. 11. 5. David G. Wright, Yeats's Myth of Self: The Autobiographical Prose (Dublin: Gill and

Macmillan, 1987), p. 9. 6. Ibid., p. 10.

335



IRISH UNIVERSITY REVIEW

Such a use of others as a way of documenting a past self is also present in an autobiographical text of which a portion of Yeats's Autobiographies functions as a rejoinder, George Moore's Hail and Farewell, a work which

Wingfield greatly admired. In Sun Too Fast, Wingfield states that, while

'a mass of inaccuracies', Moore's triple-decker is 'artistically so true it

gives the most just picture there is of Ireland' (STF, p. 132). Wingfield's

separation of aesthetic truth from literal fact is inherent in any auto

biographical project that wishes to be more than an amalgam of inchoate

data. Like Yeats and Moore, Wingfield looks for meaningful shape and

symbolic significance in the people and events represented in her

remembrance of things past. In the introduction to Sun Too Fast, which

documents a mere thirteen months, from September 1953 to September 1954, she writes: 'This is a modest study of that common human wish to

compress time, so as to feel near the past with its greener memory of

friends; and to expand time in order to enjoy it longer. Atqui scimus ?

well though we know ? time has us by the throat' (STF, p. 8). If Yeats's

Autobiographies constructs a 'Unity of Being' through diverse rhetorical

means, Wingfield's quasi-journal is governed by 'a hope that characters

and occasions which at first seem disparate might, on a closer look, show an underlying unity' (STF, p. 10).

Indeed, Yeats is one of those seemingly disparate characters who dot

the pages of Sun Too Fast. He makes his appearance subsequent to a

passage in which Wingfield asks the question, 'When will the written

word cease to have power?' Her answer ? 'Not Yef ? is substantiated by the quotation of a contemporary engineering company's advertisement:

Goggle Valves

Soaking Pit Cover Carriages Car Bottom Furnaces

Cinder Notch Stoppers Gas Atmosphere Furnaces

Coke Testing Tumbling Barrels

Slag granulating Mills Steel Ladders and Crams.

This Wingfield finds 'every bit as evocative as lines to nymphs or clouds

and certainly more cogent' (STF, p. 124). The found material functions as a sort of Futurist poem, and is an indicator of Wingfield's own poetry's

tangential relationship to literary modernism, to which I turn below.

Unlike the Italian Futurists' distaste for passeism, however, Wingfield chooses to compare favourably the lines with two lines from Walter de

la Mare and an extract from a medieval poem. In the paratactic fashion

typical of Sun Too Fast, this is succeeded by the reflection that the 'physical

appearance of writers' is 'the least important aspect of literature', at which

point Wingfield recalls meeting Yeats in 'a railway carriage' en route for

Euston:

336




He began talking of Symbolist poets; bereft of an answer, I did not dare admit that there was a copy of my first and so far unpublished verse burning in the rack. As if reading my thoughts, he shook a lock of white hair away from his weak eyes and remarked:

"I wouldn't help a young poet if he were starving in the gutter." (STF, p. 125)

At Crewe, Yeats suggests to Wingfield that they go to the restaurant car:

No sooner were we seated face to face than in trooped a lot of race

going, military looking chaps, all wearing billycock hats and very thick white mackintoshes. Our tea-cakes had come and the engine

was still silent as Yeats embarked, in a loud voice, on a detailed

story of two Galway fishermen of homosexual habits. This was before the days when such talk was ordinary and frequent, so the racegoers stared; my face and ears reddened; I couldn't stop Yeats; and when the train noisily jerked off again I found I had to pay for our tea. (STF, p. 126)

Wingfield's narrative strategy in representing this ? to employ Wright's term ?

'signpost' from the past comes into relief if one contrasts it with the technique deployed by Austin Clarke in his recollection of an encounter with Yeats in A Penny in the Clouds. Clarke depicts himself

glimpsing Yeats, clutching 'the rods and fierce tackle of his craft', in one of the Seven Woods at Coole Park. 'Bewildered by that unexpected encounter', Clarke loses his way on the fringes of the woods he 'no longer

wanted to count'; escaping their clutches, he finds himself by a 'small lake': 'This must be Shan-walla,' he reflects, 'but I saw with a pang that the wild swans had gone.'7 Clearly enough, Clarke recreates this scene

with an eye to its symbolic significance, specifically with regard to his

poetic relationship with his precursor. In brief, the bewilderment

experienced by Clarke is a metaphor for the charged mixture of depen dence and revolt which characterizes his response to Yeats, one which also finds expression in The Echo at Coole and Other Poems, a collection

published the same year as A Penny in the Clouds. (Clarke uses the same

episode at the opening of 'The House Breakers', a poem included in The Echo at Coole.) Such anxiety

? near-Oedipal in Clarke's case ? is absent

from Wingfield's recollection of Yeats. Though she was pleased that he would praise her first volume of poetry, Poems (1938), on its appearance, her reconstruction of her first meeting with Yeats does not pulse with the perturbation felt by Clarke, as he stumbles on the edge of those

Yeatsian Seven Woods.8 Clarke's Yeats merges with the latter's 'The

7. Austin Clarke, A Penny in the Clouds: More Memories of Ireland and England (Dublin:

Moytura, 1990), p. 81. 8. Wingfield proudly refers to Yeats's admiration for Poems in an amusing account of

her fate at the hands of an American publisher; see RP, p. 100.

337




Fisherman' into a figure of authoritarian power, clutching his phallic 'tackle', whose influence is quelled only by a great effort and, somewhat

ambivalently, 'with a pang'. In Wingfield's anecdote, by way of contrast, Yeats's symbolist poetic is implicitly perceived to be irrelevant to those

unpublished poems of hers 'burning in the rack' overhead. Furthermore, the older poet's representation of rural Ireland and its inhabitants,

including the idealized fisherman, is comically deflated by its refraction

through Yeats's ribald tale of the two gay Galway fishermen. Yeats's

unstoppable monologue embarrasses Wingfield, but it lacks the prob lematic authority Yeats's voice possesses in Clarke's poem 'A.E.', from

The Echo at Coole, in which George Russell's comment, 'The old man/ Is

talking to himself,' as he gazes on 'The Collected Poems of William Butler

Yeats/ Macmillan'd in a row/ prompts the speaker to anxiously ask, 'What of our common ill? / Do they explain it?'9 Wingfield admired Yeats,

describing him as a 'poetic giant' (RP, p. 100), and there are chimes

between the two poets: the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy connections of

Wingfield, as we shall see, enter her poetry in a manner that bears

comparison with Yeats; while, as Anne Fogarty has observed in a rare

appraisal of her oeuvre, the 'vividly concrete mode' of Wingfield's poetry is 'reminiscent' of Yeats's later poems.10 That said, there is no Bloomian

agon between them; no sense, as so often in post-Yeatsian Irish poetry, that the younger writer is the rebellious ephebe to the towering precursor

poet.

Sun Too Fast's desire for unity in diversity is a preoccupation that

equally informs Wingfield's poetry, among the concerns of which are

the relationships between the figurative and the literal, between fact and

myth. So too, her poems frequently explore the memoir's avowed, and

paradoxical, aim of compressing temporality with the hope of enlarging it. In turning to these poetic themes, however, the memoir's juxtaposition of Yeats with a found-poem, a scrap of Georgian lyric and a poem from a 1430 manuscript, is suggestive of the ways in which Wingfield's formal

procedures are liminal between those established by the English language

lyric tradition and those produced by the fracturing of such conventions

in the experimental works of high modernism. Marginal to the canon of

twentieth-century Irish poetry, Wingfield is also a marginal modernist.

II

At the close of 'A.E.', Clarke dismisses the shade of Yeats by means of

the entrance of Joyce 'from Night-town'. Clarke's strategic appropriation of Joyce's 'realism', as he construed it in the Portrait and Ulysses, is of

9. Austin Clarke, The Echo at Coole and Other Poems (Dublin: Dolmen, 1968), pp. 14,15. 10. Anne Fogarty, 'Outside the Mainstream: Women Poets of the 1930s', Angel Exhaust,

Vol. 17 (1999), p. 89.

338




course a critiquing of Yeats's supposed 'idealism'. Wingfield refuses the

Yeats /Joyce binarism common to many writers of her generation.11 If

Yeats's impact on her work is negligible, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake she

believed 'should be classed with the work of Gongora and Gaudi as a

definitely dead-end' (STF, p. 121). Yet she was not unresponsive to

modernism, counting among her friends Vita Sackville-West, Lady Ottoline Morrell and John Hayward.12 Talking to the latter, in the flat he

shared with T.S. Eliot, Wingfield states that her favourite critical 'triggers' are Virginia Woolf's The Common Reader and Eliot's The Sacred Wood: 'They never fail' (STF, p. 131). The Bloomsbury circle had passed into literary

history by the time Wingfield attended Morrell's Thursday afternoon

salon in Gower Street. But the influence of Woolf, alongside that of Eliot, is discernible in the marginal modernism developed by Wingfield from

her first collection on.13

The objectivism of Wingfield's poetry, as noted by Fraser, looks to

Eliot's theory of poetic 'impersonality', as adumbrated in 'Tradition and

the Individual Talent', and echoes Woolf's thoughts in The Common Reader on Greek literature, which, in 'On Not Knowing Greek', she labels 'the

impersonal literature'.14 Wingfield's own classicizing tendency is more

sharply defined by distinguishing it from the imagistic and rigorously

contemporaneous classicism of the English avantJgarde, including that of T.E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis, and instead relating it to that

which Lewis termed ? apropos Ezra Pound's use of the classics ? the

'"romantically" classicial'.15 For Lewis, true classicism precludes an

interest in the past, including the classical past, and instead evinces a

preoccupation with space rather than time. Wingfield, in Lewis's derisive

formulation, is a 'time-trotter'.16 Woolf s nostalgic evocation of the world

portrayed in the Odyssey, for whose inhabitants '[t]here is a sadness at

11. On this topic, see Terence Brown, Ireland's Literature: Selected Essays (Dublin: Lilliput,

1988), pp. 77-80. 12. On Morrell, see RP, pp. 93-8. Wingfield retells there the story of Morrell's flight from

home to Bohemia that she also draws on in her long poem, Beat Drum, Beat Heart; see Sheila Wingfield, Collected Poems 1938-1983 (London: Enitharmon, 1983), p. 55.

Future references to this text will be incorporated parenthetically using the

abbreviation CP. For Wingfield's friendship with Sackville-West, see STF, pp. 45-51.

13. Wingfield's admiration for Woolf is also testified to by her confession that she had

lived in Kent prior to the Second World War 'chiefly on account of Orlando and the

spell it had laid on me' (STF, p. 48). Incidentally her respect for Eliot was not

unreciprocated; he was one of the panel of judges which made A Kite's Dinner a

Poetry Book Society Choice; see STF, p. 279.

14. Virginia Woolf, A Woman's Essays, ed. Rachel Bowlby (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), p. 93. Fogarty adroitly draws our attention to Wingfield's 'anti-sentimental,

impersonal, objective style' of writing ('Outside the Mainstream', p. 89). 15. Wyndham Lewis, Time and Western Man, ed. Paul Edwards (Santa Barbara: Black

Sparrow, 1993), p. 71.

16. Ibid., p. 69.

339




the back of life which they do not attempt to mitigate',17 finds a chime in

Wingfield's 'Odysseus Dying', from Poems:

I think Odysseus, as he dies, forgets Which was Calypso, which Penelope, Only remembering the wind that sets Off Mimas, and how endlessly His eyes were stung with brine; Argos a puppy, leaping happily; And his old Father digging round a vine. (CP, p. 15)18

Opening in the first person, the emotions of the lyric subject become

increasingly irrelevant as the lyric progresses, as Odysseus's disinte

grating subjectivity is increasingly hypothesized. Such progressive

objectivism culminates in the final three lines, which possess an Imagistic

precision bringing to mind Pound's adage, in 'A Few Don'ts', 'that the

natural object is always the adequate symbol'.19 Yet the lyric I, and her

response to the dying Greek, cannot but permeate the poem as a whole ? this is, after all, purely speculative: 'I think Odysseus. ...' This

admixture of lyric emotiveness and Imagistic hardness also informs the

first poem in Poems, 'Winter':

The tree still bends over the lake, And I try to recall our love, Our love which had a thousand leaves. (CP, p. 3)

In this case, the 'natural object' precedes the lyric subject, the first-person pronoun in turn yielding to the possessive 'our' in a simple expression of reciprocal bliss; 'our love,/ Our love'. The repetition of the phrase over the line break makes it the structural axis of the entire text, its

poignant articulation of plenitude framed by the denuded image of the

winter tree and its fallen leaves, the final line movingly subsuming the

first line's literal extension within a figurative or symbolic meaning. G.S. Fraser felt that this poem and 'A Bird', also in Poems, 'if published around 1912, would have been recognized as masterly Imagist poems in

the manner of Ezra Pound or H.D/20 But they are more than belated

and, according to Fraser, unknowing exercises in a past poetic mode.

Their Spartan lyricism ? or romantic classicism ? is the signature of

Wingfield's finest short poems.

17. Woolf, A Woman's Essays, p. 106. 18. Wingfield attests to the importance classical culture held for her in Sun Too Fast ?

'Greek myths had seized me as a child' (STF, p. 128) ? but she had to wait until

1954 to visit the sites by which she was entranced. 19. Ezra Pound, Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1954), p. 5. 20. Wingfield, Her Storms, p, 11.

340




Poems was published in the same year as Woolf's Three Guineas, a

lengthy meditation on the contemporary position of women, written

in the context of fascism and the drift towards war. Towards the close

of her intricate argument, Woolf suggests that 'the daughters of edu

cated men' can combat patriarchal-cum-fascist authoritarianism most

effectively, not through feminine agitation, but by means of a 'Society of

Outsiders'.21 The role of 'outsiders' is to question the existing state appar atuses, to test their capacity to realize 'freedom, equality, peace' from

the perspective of 'a different sex, a different tradition, a different

education'.22 Written at around the same time as Woolf's polemic, though not published until 1946,23 Wingfield's long poem, Beat Drum, Beat Heart, also examines masculine aggression, as it manifests itself in warfare, from the position of an 'outsider' to the dominant literary cliques, Irish and British, of the nineteen thirties. The poem's pacifism, coloured no

doubt by the political context in which it was composed, is nevertheless

deeply qualified. For Wingfield's poem dovetails its exploration of

patriarchy with a complementary investigation of what it takes to be the

inherent violence of female desire, and of woman's desire for domination.

Wingfield's 'outsider'-poem does not radically challenge the cultural

concept of 'manliness' that is the object of remorseless scrutiny in Woolf's

tract. Rather, Beat Drum, Beat Heart ? as its title would suggest ? sees

authoritarianism as a constituent component of human behaviour.24 More

troubling still, while Woolf concludes Three Guineas by adducing Creon as a founding father of patriarchy's subjugation of women, the voice at

the close of Wingfield's poem, as we shall see, is very far from that of an

Antigone. Part One of Beat Drum, Beat Heat, 'Men in War', opens with a series of

snapshots of peacetime, the banalities of milk-round, baker, pub, now

'gone, a lost age,/ Gust-torn like a picture page/ That flutters down,

sidles, then lies' (CP, p. 20). The collective male persona of this section of

the poem is a transcultural and transhistorical figure, a 'time-trotter'

whose experiences of war are coterminous with human history. In each

and every age he comments 'war/ Rescinds what mattered, rends each

form' (CP, p. 22). He identifies with both aggressor and victim, with 'the men who pulled down Lorca/ Between shrubs' and 'a man dragged

21. Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas, ed. Morag Shiach (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 323, 320.

22. Ibid., p. 320.

23. Wingfield's general note to the poem states that, bar six lines, the poem was 'written

many years before World War II' (CP, p. 180). 24. It should be noted, in this context, that Wingfield's Sun Too Fast makes apparent her

antipathy towards Hitler? hearing a 'Nazi rally on the radio' she is repelled: 'Hitler's

raucous and entirely horrifying speech was punctuated by nearly inhuman roars

from the audience. Pure Milton ? Satan counselling war to his fallen angels' (STF,

p. 118).

341




and killed on the outskirts/ Of a town in Spain' (CP, p. 24). Wingfield's

deployment of this composite persona sharply distinguishes her poetic

procedure in Beat Drum from the documentary realism of much thirties

poetry. Beat Drum is, in Louis MacNeice's formulation in the preface to

Modem Poetry (1938), an 'impure poetry' to the extent that the poem is

strongly 'conditioned' by the decade in which it was composed ? the

poem refers to the Sino-Japanese War, Mao and the Long March, the

Spanish Civil War, among other contemporary events. However, Wing field's poem eschews the relatively stable consciousness of a poem such as Autumn Journal, that 'blend of the entertainer and the critic or

informer', whose aim is 'to record a fact plus and therefore modified by his [sic] own emotional reaction to it/25 Wingfield's more impersonal

approach, in this work, enables the kind of synchronic time-slices one

finds in Eliot's own time-machine, The Waste Land ('Stetson!/ You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!').26 At one point in this section of

the poem, Wingfield's narrator ? Tiresias-like ? observes a wounded

soldier in Allenby's campaign, writhing on the 'rocks/ And olive roots/ and conflates his pain with the 'desolation' of the 'dear land of Judah'

(CP, p. 27). Elsewhere, the text becomes dialogic, as a concatenation of

soldiers ? ranging from a Greek in Alexander's army, through a Venetian

warring against the Genoese, to a Catalan fighting 'near Teruel' ?

articulate the inequities of war (CP, p. 28). Towards the close of the section, a dying soldier's disordered consciousness sees the demise of 'great/

Warriors' ? 'Aruns with mouth against Etruscan asphodel', 'Pompey

caught in the shallows', Brian Boru, Sir John Chandos:

I let out my sap, With sobs, near rotted

Mangold roots that smell As sour as failure. (CP, p. 29)

This process of temporal conflation is strikingly conveyed in the pack of

French cards a routed English combatant finds 'scattered in a tomb':

Instead of Queen and Jack: Hector, Judith and Lahire, Lancelot, Alexandre,

Who should have never left the womb.

French. Throw 'em back. (CP, p. 30)

25. Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1968), p. 197. MacNeice's speaker is, nevertheless, dramatically stylized, as Edna

Longley rightly reminds us; see Edna Longley, Louis MacNeice: A Study (London: Faber, 1988), pp. xi-xii.

26. T.S. Eliot, The Complete Poems and Plays ofT.S. Eliot (London: Faber, 1969), p. 62. On

this dimension to Eliot's poem, see Alex Davis and Lee M. lenkins, 'Locating Modernisms: An Overview', in Locations of Literary Modernism: Region and Nation in

British and American Modernist Poetry, eds. Alex Davis and Lee M. Jenkins (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 14.

342




The speaker's contemptuous discarding of the alien court cards functions as a metonymy that encapsulates Wingfield's critique of warfare in this

section of the poem. By stripping warfare of a historical or diachronic

dimension, Beat Drum foregrounds its horror and waste of life, leaving

Trojan, Macedonian and other 'heroes' littered together like a fallen house of cards. The first part of the poem concludes with a prayer, as poetic

impersonality gives way to a restrained but nevertheless emotive lyric utterance: 'By any men who ever hung on trees / Or who were left, strung over wire,/ ... /I pray, never again' (CP, p. 31).

It is tempting to see in this subjective interjection a critique of warfare

comparable, in its poetic technique, to the 'lyrical resistance' mounted

by H.D. in her wartime 'Trilogy', The Walls Do Not Fall, Tribute to the

Angels, The Flowering of the Rod (1944-6). The 'Trilogy' dismantles

patriarchal myths of heroism, according to Melita Schaum, precisely

through stereo typically 'feminine' modes of writing, governed by subjectivism and introspection: 'Against the false "determinism" of war, inwardness becomes not escape but resistance; subjectivity is revealed to be not solipsism but rebellion, the remedial intervention of human

agency.'27 H.D.'s subversive lyricism, however, differs from Wingfield's in that this lyrical coda to Part One of Beat Drum is equally a dramatic

monologue, spoken by the composite male speaker of the entire section.

Its pacifism is thus 'staged', though not necessarily insincere, as 'imper sonal' as the valorization of battle voiced earlier in the poem. In this, we

get a glimpse of the ambivalence of the poem's response to war, a com

plexity which becomes more apparent with its second part. The second section, 'Men at Peace', deals with constructive as opposed

to destructive masculine endeavour. At its heart is an account of the

seventh Lord Powerscourt's creation of the Italianate Garden at his

demesne,28 Wingfield's representation of which bears comparison with

Yeats's similarly ambivalent act of homage to the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy in 'Ancestral Houses' in 'Meditations in Time of Civil War'. The poem

depicts Powerscourt as attempting to turn his wealthy idleness to pro ductive ends:

27. Milita Schaum, 'Lyric Resistance: Views of the Political in the Poetics of Wallace

Stevens and H.D.', The Wallace Stevens Journal, Vol. 13, No. 2 (1989), p. 198. The stylistic resemblance between Wingfield and the early H.D. has been noted by Fraser (Her Storms, p. 11) and Fogarty ('Outside the Mainstream', p. 89), but the two poets' shared lyrical impulse has gone unremarked. For detailed discussion of H.D.'s own

marginal modernism, see Susan Stanford Friendman, 'Modernism of the "Scattered

Remnant": Race and Politics in the Development of H.D.'s Modernist Vision', in

H.D.: Woman and Poet, ed. Michael King (Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1986),

pp. 91-116; and ? for a searching rejoinder to this tendency in studies of H.D. ?

Laurence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 146-68.

28. Compare the account given at STF, p. 250.

343




Past tufted bog, and past the baulk Of sloe hedge and wet bramble stalk He goes, to feel the hours that lag Beside him, run to the fore and drag

His wishes into being filled. With wilds to alter, forms to build. (CP, p. 37)

These lines contain a half-buried but suggestively appropriate hunting

image, owing to the momentary ambiguity at the fourth line-ending as

to whether 'drag' is to be taken as a noun or, as is grammatically the

case, a verb. Time lags beside the aristocrat like one of his hounds,

needing only the 'drag' or scent of the fox to spring into activity. The

element of ferocity implied by this ghost of a metaphor is reminiscent of

Yeats's concern, in 'Ancestral Houses', with the dialectic between

aesthetic beauty and its enabling Violence' he reads out of the building of the Ascendancy Big House:

Some violent bitter man, some powerful

man

Called architect and artist in, that they, Violent and bitter men, might rear in stone

The sweetness that all longed for night and day29

Yeats's fear is that such 'sweetness', in sublating its foundational violence, constitutes a diminution of the originating 'bitterness':

O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease And Childhood a delight for every sense, But take our greatness with our bitterness.

This part of Beat Drum is also preoccupied with the loss that is seemingly

inseparable from the architectural imperative: 'wilds to alter, forms to

build'. Of the completed garden at Powerscourt, we are told:

By each invention and device That tames the mountains at a

price, You'll wander, and by flickered shade Of statues in a beech glade, To let your inmost sadness fall

Blackly under ilex pall. (CP, p. 38)

It is at this point that the vacillatory nature of Beat Drum starts to come

into focus. Its opening part's denunciation of war is shadowed, in the

second, by a quizzical examination of the 'price' exacted by peace and

the activities it has historically given men the leisure to pursue. The

melancholy that the Italianate Garden produces in its visitor is pre

29. W.B. Yeats, The Poems, ed. Richard I. Finneran, 2nd edn (New York: Scribner, 1997),

p. 204.

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sumably owing to its 'taming' of nature through the contrivances of

'invention and device'. This leads into a broader diagnosis of the falsi

fication of human experience attendant on artistic, religious, scientific and philosophical activities. A song's 'structure of compassionate sounds'

(CP, p. 38); a Cathedral's 'Gothic window', in which 'Virtue with all force must press/ In power'; Spinoza's'understanding of our load/ Of human

plight' (CP, p. 39) ? all are viewed as representative of a desire for order

and certainty. In a deftly-chosen horticultural image recalling Powers

court's endeavours, the speaker says of such mental hubris that 'Such

fruit, clamped to the wall, Fills us till we're gorged' (CP, p. 39). Against this cloying satiety, the poem brings to bear the doubt these fruits of the

intellect vainly seek to allay:

We dip slow oars of thought into the night And find we have not moved; And what are libraries? Can printed page, Or even hassock and cold Stone smelling of piety, assuage

My inner tide of doubt? (CP, p. 40)30

On a darker note, the Italianate Garden, with its 'twisted fountain' and

'devious' ways, becomes the locus for an irrational urge, a 'whisper of

the growing/ Need for some harsh harrowing' (CP, p. 40). Without the

'harrowing' of war, society has dwindled to a cpndition of ennui,

imprisoned in the carapace of suburban mediocrity: 'Oh, lights are

showing/ In Guildford, and people/ Are yawning for tea' (CP, p. 43). The 'Need' for the 'knife's release' (CP, p. 44) the speaker articulates at

the close of Part Two resembles Yeats's fixation in the late nineteen thirties on the socially purgative power of 'human violence'. In On the Boiler, Yeats echoes the words of John Mitchel that 'Under Ben Bulben'

approvingly quotes ? 'Send war in our time, O Lord!'31 ? in his

reflection: 'Desire some just war, that big house and hovel, college and

public house, civil servant ? his Gaelic certificate in his pocket ? and

international bridge-playing woman, may know that they belong to one

nation.'32 Yeats's persona in these late texts is close to that which speaks at the close of this section of Beat Drum ? for this voice, as in Part One, is male, his closing prayer countering that which ends 'Men in War':

30. A passage typical of Wingfield's rather jaundiced attitude towards philosophical and other certitudes; see also her reflections on

reading the "more despondent German philosophers' in Real People: 'the fact that these truths and these certainties

would always fail and then be renewed by others quite opposite never lightened the burden of an almost weary omniscience' (RP, p. 33).

31. Yeats, The Poems, p. 334.

32. W.B. Yeats, Later Essays, ed. William H. O'Donnell (New York: Charles Scribner's

Sons, 1994), p. 241.

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Find me a cause

Or a catastrophe

To crack and shake the false, The phrased, the laggard pleas Of a restraining clause.

For now, thank God, no more

Dismayed by death

I'll fondly give My seamless skin and know her, Like a man. (CP, p. 44)

The concluding cliche reverberates back through the entire part, its

hollow machismo inviting us to read what precedes it as laced with

dramatic irony. The problem raised by such a response, however, is that

which confronts one whenever irony is sensed in a text: the interpreter is forced to posit or read into the text a discrepancy between authorial

intention and that of the speaker(s).33 In the case of Beat Drum, the second

part's misgivings regarding the sublimation of instinctual drives, through scientific and artistic pursuits, is a theme of other poems by Wingfield in

which irony is hard to detect. 'While Satyrs Hunted for a Nymph', from

the 1949 collection, A Cloud Across the Sun, portrays the arguments of

'Philosophers, their blood and lymph/ Excited by the search for Good', as 'Like sailors whistling for a breeze' (CP, p. 84). In 'Poisoned in Search

of the Medicine of Immortality', from the same volume, Wingfield firmly states the importance to life of struggle: 'To be at rest/ Is but a dog that

sighs and settles: better/ The unrelenting day' (CP, p. 86). Furthermore, the ambivalent representation of Lord Powerscourt's horticultural

endeavours in Beat Drum is surely a self-reflexive commentary on a later

Powerscourt's poetic 'invention and device'. Like that of the designer of

the Italianate Garden, Wingfield's desire for 'forms to build' finds

concrete realization. Yet Wingfield sees the pre-linguistic 'wilds' on which

she cultivates her poetry as not fully amenable to poetic expression, a

concern that one finds, of course, in those high modernists who, in

Michael Bell's words, 'saw language as being, like the moon in Joyce's "Ithaca" episode and Lawrence's "Moony" chapter of Women in Love, an inscrutable surface sustained by an invisible body whose dark side

cannot be known/34 In short, Beat Drum's pacifism is tied to a conception of human existence in which the shuddering violence of instinctual

33. On which topic, see Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and

the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1989), pp. 180-96. 34. Michael Bell, 'The Metaphysics of Modernism' in The Cambridge Companion to

Modernism, ed. Michael Levenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999),

p. 18.

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behaviour is central. It is no coincidence that Part Three of the poem, which deals with female desire in martial terminology, bears the

Lawrentian title, 'Women in Love'.

In this section, the female persona depicts love's 'battlefields' (CP,

p. 49) ? whether 'the country house', 'some Park' (CP, p. 49), a beach ?

as 'my Flanders, Valley Forge, Carthage' (CP, p. 50). The militaristic

imagery brings the third section's account of love's termination into

conjunction with the collapse of martial idealism detailed at the close of

Part One. As in the first part, history is flattened out, to become a tableau

vivant before the speaker's eyes:

I can see

Berenice dragging her robe Between bare pillars From the sun;

Heloise a nun

Still unconsolable; Kind Dorothy enduring Mist and rocks Colder than those of Cumberland And Mary sweet as phlox;

While Harriet has a scent Of water's edge (CP,p.57)

This waste land of women finds its spokeswoman in a ,'Fume-crazy

croaking sibyl' (CP, p. 49), whose concluding prayer ?

'By brutish things: snouts / Grunting at Circe; / . >. / For pity's sake, no more' ? echoes that

of the male speaker at the end of 'Men in War'. The comparison of love

and war Wingfield draws is conventional enough, and Part Three, it

needs be said, is the least interesting section of the entire poem. But it

provides an essential foil for Part Four, 'Women at Peace', in which the

vicissitudes of post-war concord function as a metaphor for passion's aftermath. While it continues the extended imagery of the previous

part of the poem, this section's specific rhetorical devices frequently defamiliarize their subject-matter in an arresting fashion. At one point, the speaker likens the traumatic failure of love to the Treaty of Versailles:

'What I've been through was the Hall of Mirrors, / Distorting mirrors of a fair' (CP, p. 63). This disorientating metaphor suggests the brutal pact that often attends the end of a love-affair: the humbling of one partner on terms greatly to the advantage of the other. The poem juxtaposes this

bold image with an anecdote of an Irish rural family, over the peaceful existence of which lies the shadow of the violence of the War of

Independence: '(And the mistress in bed seeing on the wall/ The flash

of the fired barracks across the way)' (CP, p. 64). The poem does not

extrapolate a moral from this narrative shard; instead, it lodges it next

to a repetition of a motif first heard in Part Two (CP, p. 39), of a 'pear,

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espaliered, nailed across a wall' (CP, p. 64). In 'Men at Peace', the staked

fruit symbolizes the systematic grid with which thought marshals and

curtails lived experience. In 'Women at Peace', the image evokes the

Irish mistress's need for stability 'after long/ Disorder, wreckage and

dark anarchy' (CP, p. 65). In this instance, one senses the extent to which

Wingfield's overall metaphorical scheme, in the final two parts of her

poem, is less rewarding than its constituent elements. The vignette's verisimilitude wrests it free from its subordination to the poem's rhetorical patterning, though it contributes to that too, as another example

of'peace' following'war'.35

Beat Drum does not rest content with domestic peace, however. Rather, in line with Part Two, 'Women at Peace' turns against the tranquillity and order it initially embraced, towards the attractions of a violent zone

in which 'philosophies/ Are arguments it's best to forget/ Or else to

remake each hour' (CP, p. 68). The speaker yearns to escape her 'narrow

room', in which 'terrible knitters' sit 'Under the lamp' (CP, p. 69). Yet

this need to escape the cramped confines of domesticity leads into a

desire for subjugation after the fashion of Constance in Lawrence's Lady

Chatterley's Lover, as the speaker's concluding prayer to this part con

stitutes an imploration for 'A yoke':

precise belief In the authority

And overbearing deeds Of a loved mortal (CP, p. 71)

Once again, it is difficult to judge the degree of ironic intent in these

lines ? if, indeed, there is any at all. The desire for an authoritarian

lover, after all, is at one with Wingfield's recurrent demand for 'The

unrelenting day': the imperative for a total involvement of being as a

counter to the existential emptiness that Beat Drum would appear to

view with horror. In the poem's final words:

Hold me, Pour back my soul, let me know Life the unfinished: so Reflood the desolate ebb: Renew me, make me whole. (CP, p. 72)

35. The inset narrative also makes one question the grounds for Gregory A. Schirmer's

claim that Beat Drum in no way concerns Ireland ? to which, in fact, Wingfield's poem refers on several occasions; see Gregory A. Schirmer, Out of What Began: A

History of Irish Poetry in English (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), p. 324. Though it is gratifying to see her poetry discussed at all in a work of Irish literary history,

Schirmer's somewhat cobbled-together interpretation of Wingfield omits any discussion of her major poem

? presumably due to its purported lack of Irish

'interest'.

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Wingfield's conflation of the drumbeats of war and the heartbeats of

passion is highly problematic, particularly given the decade of this

poem's composition. The poem's 'time-trotting' through centuries of war

and love in this manner may register her close reading of J. W. Dunne's

An Experiment with Time (1927), a work Wyndham Lewis thought representative, on the middle-brow level, of his culture's obsession with

time.36 Wingfield toyed with Dunne's theories of precognition, of

predicting the future through one's dreams. But the real influence of his

ideas on her poetry is his belief that time is the fourth dimension, or, in

Wingfield's words, 'the essential extra dimension of our lives' (STF,

p. 274). If so, muses Wingfield, the individual exists in a 'four-dimensional

space-time continuum where past, present and future co-exist/ In a

delightful image, Wingfield describes this continuum as a four

dimensional Swiss Roll, and considers that 'our lives can be looked on

as a succession of [three-dimensional] slices' of this infinite Swiss Roll, 'each slice being in turn Now' (STF, p. 275). Wingfield's confectionery

metaphor strikingly resembles Lewis's description of the kind of

literature produced under the sway of the time-cult, such as the 'prose

song' of Gertrude Stein's Three Lives: 'We can represent it as a cold suet

pudding of fabulously reptilian length. Cut it at any point, it is the same

thing; the same heavy sticky, opaque mass all through, and all along.'37 Lewis's image

? made possible, one feels, only by a thorough intimacy with English public-school dinners ? is intended to link disparagingly Stein's prose style to Bergson's notion of duree. Owing to its concoction

in a reading of Dunne and related thinkers, Wingfield's intuited four

dimensional Swiss Roll clearly has an aftertaste of Bergson; and the end

of Beat Drum certainly affirms something not wholly unrelated to the

Bergsonian elan vital. Of course, the form of her long poem is very far

from the 'flux' of Stein. Beat Drum utilizes a variety of metrical and

stanzaic patterns to score its male and female voices; and, in this respect, is comparable with the work of many British and Irish poets of the

nineteen thirties, for whom vers libre ? with which the 'repetition

permutation pattern'38 of Stein's 'prose-song' is interrelated ? is only

36. 'Mr. J.W. Dunne, the well-known inventor ... is one of the most amusing of the time-romancers (following in the footsteps of [C.H.] Hinton, like Ouspensky and

other highly picturesque fancy-thinkers)'. (Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 192). Lewis's critique of the 'time-romancers' extends to A.N. Whitehead, with whose

work Wingfield was also familiar as a young adult; see STF, p. 94. For a satirical

introduction to Dunne, see Lewis's short story, 'You Broke My Dream, or An

Experiment with Time' in The Wild Body (1927), a work contemporaneous with Time

and Western Man.

37. Lewis, Time and Western Man, p. 59. 38. Majorie Perloff, Poetic License: Essays on Modernist and Postmodernist Lyric (Evanston:

Northwestern University Press, 1990), p. 150.

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one option among a variegation of poetic forms. Yet the poem's slices of

'Now' work to bring past and present into an alignment which bursts

the categories of space and time, and signal the poet's restlessness with an orderly, sequential paradigm of history.

In her post-war poetry, this preoccupation surfaces on a number of

occasions, to which I can but gesture here. 'On Being of One's Time', from The Leaves Darken (1964), sees the present as suffused with the past,

rejecting chronological time ? 'That plain-faced clock whose stare/ Is a

big cheat' ? in favour of a more fluid sense of temporality:

histories In their divergence and entanglement Force their own pulse to beat

Along my arteries,

Hobbling, racing ahead, or in retreat

From that old ghost, the present. (CP, p. 106)

Paradoxically, 'the present' is a spectre, while the past pulses with life.

As Wingfield said of her liking for residing in Ireland: 'How could I fail

to enjoy living in a country where the past kept pushing its fingers, often

its whole hand, through the fabric of the present?' (STF, p. 63). Indeed, what life the torn fabric of 'Now' possesses derives from 'histories' too

interwoven with one another to constitute a linear progression of cause

and effect. Asking whether she is 'committed purely to the moment?', the poem's speaker demurs, instead envisaging herself as part of a White

headian process of 'events' each of which contains within itself its past determinants and future potential.39 In some such sense, she is thus 'with

carved Hittite kings flaying/ Prisoners alive' and coterminous with the

possibility of nuclear war, 'a fallout dread' (CP, pp. 106-7). Prefiguring the opening of Sun Too Fast, the poem ends by invoking Plotinus, who

'fretted about Time: its flow, / And if what's at our throats, and gone, are

fused' (CP, p. 107). To be aware of this fusion of time past, present and future, to envisage

one's life as a series of slices of a four-dimensional Swiss Roll, is to be

quizzical of the capacity of systemic structures to express lived experience in all its fullness. In 'No Entry', from A Cloud Across the Sun (1949),

Wingfield states that she finds inspiration in 'Moments that no one ever

sang', her romantic classicism invoking 'Hector's foot... creaking on a

stair' and 'Helen's breath steam[ing] in the frozen air' (CP, p. 75). Such

'Moments' she contrasts with the 'wide/ Imaginary fields' of others,

39. See the discussion of relativity-theory in Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the

Modern World (New York: Macmillan, 1925), pp. 119-28 ? a work of which Wingfield was almost certainly cognisant; see previous note.

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arenas of wish-fulfilment and denial ? in which 'little Hamnet hasn't

died' and 'Leander/ Steps out backward from the tide'. Such 'systems of escape' can be found in the voyeurism of poetic pleasure, as one

'gaze[s]/ At the full-bosomed Muse/ or in religious ecstasy, the 'shouts

and moans on Chapel night,'

Or other ways of sidling, groping back From the affront of living. Almanac,

Great pyramid and portent turn

The sluggard-rolling zodiac Into 'What month, dear, were

You born?' and 'Now it's clear:

We add ...' The invisible tide is slack

And lost Atlantis silent; but those ears Catch auguries which drown them in concern. (CP, p. 76)

In line with the close of Beat Drum, Wingfield's lyric announces her intention of facing 'the affront of living': 'my work', she concludes,

engages with the 'actual daily pulse/ Of stinging joy, short ease and

constant doubt' (CP, p. 77). In Wingfield's eyes, Hector's foot upon the

stair and Helen's steaming breath, for all their Homeric origins, pulsate to the beat of actuality, their reality for her is similar to that which Woolf

ascribes to characters in The Odyssey, 'alive to every tremor and gleam of

existence.'40

Yet to be thus 'alive' is equally to acknowledge 'the sour pleasure of

the incomplete', muses Wingfield in 'For My Dead Friends' (The Leaves

Darken); and this 'calls for metaphor' (CP, p. 113). Artifice, it would

appear, is consolatory; for all Wingfield's commitment to the 'actual',

poetry's function, like that of religion, is palliative. In 'Epiphany in a

Country Church' (A Cloud), Wingfield dismisses those 'wise men' who see ritual as rooted in superstition, declaring: 'I hold the Magi were the

wiser, yes/ To be believed in for so long' (CP, p. 86). Aphoristically, the

poem intones: 'Hard facts are overlaid by myth'. These 'facts' are the

'wilds' beyond the 'forms' of language in Beat Drum: that uncultivated

substratum of our being, for which, in the imagery of 'Cartography', in

The Leaves Darken, there is no 'chart' (CP, p. 109).

Wingfield's poetry is governed by a similar imperative to the memoir, Sun Too Fast: to 'show an underlying unity' in the most 'disparate' of

materials. Nevertheless, her increasingly darkening outlook on life in

the later poetry seems to admit that such 'unity' is always provisional. Indeed, the last poem included in the Collected Poems, 'No Instructions', even throws into doubt the belief that the post-Einsteinian worldview

40. Woolf, A Woman's Essays, p. 106. Woolf continues: 'it is to the Greeks that we turn

when we are sick of the vagueness, of the confusion, of Christianity and its

consolations, of our own age' (^4 Woman's Essays, p. 108).

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that conditions her view of temporality in Beat Drum, and related poems,

really cuts nature at the joints:

Once, Dr Dee's high-polished coal

Played mirror. We have quasar or black hole For marvel. Not a

thing Is understood. And, ripening

We die the moment that we start to learn

Just what we are, just where to turn. (CP, p. 177)

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'Wilds to Alter, Forms to Build': The Writings of Sheila Wingfield

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