Double Vision

Behind Iceland Spar, John Greening’s eleventh collection of poems, lies one wartime narrative and one remarkable mineral. In addition, I must own to a particular, almost jealous interest in the parallel between Greening’s relationship with Iceland and my own, such that, in what follows I will both review his book and write myself into the story it tells.

The wartime narrative records how Greening’s father enlisted in the RAF in 1941, then served as a wireless operator in Iceland, principally in the northern town of Akureyri. Though scarcely out of his teens, W/Op Greening was already engaged to a girl living in the London of Blitz and doodlebug. His duties at this Arctic outpost required he transmit weather reports and other information useful for the protection of the convoy traffic between America and Britain, essential work but dull. This might make for a rather humdrum narrative were it not for the poet-son’s role in the story who, travelling to Akureyri some sixty years after his father’s active service, and now in possession of the parent’s diary, tries to retrieve his experience of The North, and the tensions of wartime separation.

So the intrigue in the narrative is essentially about time-magic, how time past superimposes itself on time present in a register that does not quite match and therefore disturbs the present with a sense of unfinished business. The son searches for the three garrison Nissen huts where his father listened through earphones and wrote entries in his red diary. We are given some context of northern Iceland’s spare, volcanic landscape in all its allusive strangeness, the prolonged dark and semi-light of winter, the prolonged light and semi-dark of summer. As he prowls, Greening the poet sets the archaeology of a locality into his short poems, Akureyri’s church, a derelict whaleship, the town’s founder, Helgi Magri.

Framing these meditations on his parents’ war and his own quest are lyrics that reach back more anciently into the warring perplexities of Norse mythology, for instance the tension among the Norns between Fate, Being and Necessity, where

it makes no difference. Fate still blares
as you trip wittily downstairs.
(“The Norns”)

There is a quiet tension between this worldview and the mediation offered by Christianity in poems such as “In Akureyri Church”, while a further frame is provided by the poet’s consciousness that a new war, that on terror, has begun just as he meditates his parents’ experience of past conflict.

So the method of the poems is prismatic. Menace in our own time bends light backwards onto the menace of the world where his parents in their separation were helpless to alleviate the perils each faced. This in turn bends light onto the fatalistic world of the Norse pantheon and the convulsions of Ragnarök, that World’s End portrayed as a computer war game in Greening’s “Coming Soon”, a retrieval of the Old Norse Eddaic poem, Völuspá. Indeed, The Sybil’s Refractions might have been an alternative title for this collection.

Refracted light brings me to the remarkable mineral Greening sets, as it were, at the optic centre of his poems. This is the Iceland spar, a form of calcite, usually transparent but with a crystal structure to offset lightbeams such that images seen through the rock appear double. Perhaps the most adept quality of the poems where he delves his parent’s wartime lives is the poet’s misplacing of his own self with his father’s self in the course of wandering the hinterland of Eyjafjord. The double-image occurs, for instance, in “Aurora”, where he encounters the daughter of a German soldier garrisoned in wartime Norway. By the last of the poem’s three stanzas the present generation of tourists have quietly elided into their military forebears, and the power of this elision is effective.

I tell her tentatively
my father was here
because her father was there,
how mine spoke little
about his experiences, except
to conjure the northern lights.
The U Boats are rising
as we talk. She cannot
find the word to describe
a husband who is not.
My headset picks up urgent
signals from the Northern Lights.

At this point I begin to write myself into the story. My own father served in Iceland as an education officer in Reykjavik and Akureyri, at a date slightly earlier than Greening senior. He too kept a diary. In Akureyri he was billeted in a house on Strandgaeti that fronts the serene Eyjafjord, and here he met and successfully courted my mother. War and love were the theme, though in my father’s case the trials of separation began only after he was posted to India in late 1942. Both my parents died in the early 1990s.

What of the diary? It is an SO 129 exercise book, written, like Greening senior’s journal, in perilously soluble fountain pen ink, and it covers the months in 1941–42 prior to his meeting my mother. One day in the late 1970s, while my father was still alive, I came upon it under our Canberra house and began to turn its pages. Now my father and I had an oddly mismatching relationship, so when I began to read the entries, something vulnerable in their ebullience and candour made me feel I was prying and that properly, I should put the book back where I found it. This I did, very exactly, and there the volume stayed for fifteen years until after my father died. While clearing the house for sale, I returned to the diary and found a leak had developed in the pipe immediately above it. That volatile ink had spoiled the entries of the first several pages, turning the paper to mâché.

In the ensuing weeks I dried it, and began the infinitely delicate business of retrieval. The process was like rescuing a document from the first century. With tweezers and magnifying glass, I pieced the legible remnants together and copied them. Some fragments contained no more than a couple of letters in my father’s minuscule handwriting. Where sentences were unsalvageable, I tried to fill in from what I knew of their author’s rhetorical style, and I reckon I managed to get about 80 per cent of the whole onto my computer screen. The result of this, heartrendingly, was to discover in their contents all the questions I might have asked my father, had I read the record when I originally came across it.

For there were mysteries, Icelandic businessmen with whom he discusses poetry, Icelandic girls in whose company he feels “entirely happy”, a Canadian officer called George with whom he has a warm friendship and who he describes as “the most complete man I know”. How, I could ask now it was too late, could any friendship thus described not surface in normal family conversations during the fifty years my father survived his war? Why were there no letters, no postcards? In other words, my sense of loss was identical to Greening’s in Iceland Spar. It concentrated itself in a son’s unattainable wish to know a parent in his wholeness, including that portion of a life before my own life had possibility.

In my relationship with The North, I have enjoyed some advantages that Greening did not. I have visited Akureyri four times, twice as a child, twice as an adult. I created Red Indian camps beneath the very table where (it dawns on me only in this moment) my father and mother would first have watched each other and ventured speech across their language gulf. Where Greening walked as an adult beside Eyjafjord, I once stood as a five-year-old, pushing a hulking fishing boat out onto the mirror water, then retrieving it by hauling on its long painter, observed by its kindly shock-haired owner, utterly mesmerised by the vessel’s smooth glide in and out. I have inspected that very rusting whaler mentioned in Greening’s haiku, “Suspension”, while being mindful of a 1920 photo of the same ship tied up at the exact same wharf.

In my own prowling of Akureyri and its surrounding slopes, I found no Nissen huts, though I have seen a newspaper photograph, and I was taught Latin, Maths and Seamanship in three East Anglian counterparts, so can affirm the inadequacy Greening mentions of the braziers used to heat their tubular interiors. Of course my visits did not have the deliberate purpose of Greening’s period in Iceland. I was there to meet a grandmother, uncles, aunts, cousins, explore my birthright and learn what I could of Helgi Magri, son of Eyvind the Easterner and Princess Rafarta of Ossory (who earned his nickname, Magri—“the lean”—because he was starved by foster parents on the Orkneys). Helgi was the first settler on Eyjafjord at the end of the ninth century and my direct ancestor in the thirty-first generation.

I know Akureyri only from its summers, though these impinge on my consciousness from pre-memory to maturity. The fjord, the wharves and boatyard, the hunched mountain, Sulur (meaning shawled woman), the long vista northward towards the snowy peaks of Latrastrond, these things are, for me, hallowed ground. They entered my own writing from the first, in The Skald Mosaic, and recurred in more recent years when I recreated my mother’s early life in my “creative memoir” Life Drawing that no publisher hitherto seems to care for. My fascination with Ultima Thule lies in the tension between chill edge and warm centre, inclusion and exclusion, and in chapter 6 of Life Drawing, my protagonist, Ralf Sebright, describes the country thus:

“Iceland. Any atlas open upon the North Atlantic will show this volcanic island afloat like a human embryo in the first weeks of its growth. One scarce-formed foot kicks toward Greenland, another protrudes into the Faxaflói. The first hint of an arm fists toward the North Pole, while the round of a formative backbone is turned toward Europe. This is Iceland’s physical aspect. But in the island’s solitude of ocean spaces, its austere landscape of treeless heath, mountain, lava desert and fjord, there is too its significance as Ultima Thule,an embodiment of spirit that welcomes as the true predicament of existence a cold, a remoteness beyond the claims of companionship or love.”

Before returning to Iceland Spar, I’ll add one more fold of personal light to my entanglement with Ultima Thule, and it is prompted by Greening’s “U Boats rising” in the above-mentioned poem, “Aurora”.

My father’s English family came unscathed through both world wars but my mother’s family from non-belligerent Iceland did not. After two of her uncles migrated to Canada in the 1920s, a cousin, Magnus Gislason, joined the Canadian Airforce as a W/Op, and was shot down in June 1944 when his Canso aircraft engaged a German submarine above the Arctic Circle at 64