Short Takes XI

10/5/03
Those old soldiers I happen to like 

Cantankerously I have responded to my friend Geoff Page’s “ReVerse” column in the Canberra Times where he colludes with Jonathan Swift’s stereo­typing of the Duke of Marlborough in the former’s poem, “On the Death of a Famous General”. My e-mail ran as follows.

Geoff,
Marlborough was not an old style Tory and Swift draws no defence either from this, or anything else in his “Satyrical Elegy”. The more I contemplate Swift’s poem, the more I dislike it.

Marlborough’s allegiance was to the Whigs, not the Tories. His defection from James II in 1688 was decisive in allowing the Glorious Revolution to happen with its Bill of Rights, Acts of Settlement and Toleration, those foundations of our modern liberal society. I’ve no doubt Marlborough’s views were not those of a dissenter like Defoe, or any of the earlier radical fellows of the English Civil War. For some years around 1688 he may have kept his options open—you could lose your head rather easily, after all. But he had genius, which albeit military, was on a par with Swift’s literary genius. His singularity of mind was to do with speed and dexterity of manoeuvre, diplomacy in keeping a disparate coalition together, and care for the common soldier’s condition that may have been without precedent in the history of regular armies.

Yes, Blenheim cost him a quarter of his strength—some 13,000 out of a coalition army of 52,000. This may have been partly because the Marlborough/Eugene force engaged a larger French/Bavarian army. But Marlborough was no heedless butcher, as a quick scan of his care and painstaking in manoeuvre will disclose. Crucially, and unacknowledged by Swift in his reference to “ill-got honours”, the victory at Blenheim prevented an autocratic France occupying Vienna and dominating Southern Germany and Austria for what would have been decades. Marlborough’s subsequent victories at Ramillies, Oudenarde and Malplaquet prevented French autocracy being imposed on the Low Countries, whose struggle to establish and preserve liberal institutions was almost as long as that of England.

Another aspect of Marlborough’s genius, slurred by Swift, was his establishment of efficient quarter mastering. The “famous general” in fact had an uncommon concern to see his troops well fed, well housed and regularly paid, and took inordinate trouble in this. In whatever esteem the widows and orphans held him, his troops loved him, and gave him a higher degree of loyalty than most British commanders have ever enjoyed. “Corporal John” was their endearment for him, which suggests their sense of his being one of them in their lot in life. The charges of corruption against him are often thought to have been Tory inventions. He was certainly reinstated by George I before his death.

And Swift? While initially Whig, Swift was enmeshed with the Tory aristocracy who engineered the fall from grace of both Marlborough and his wife in 1711.

Here’s the point. Far from being a timeless masterpiece, the satiric elegy is flagrant party propaganda, and I think a re-appraisal of the poem for a popular audience needs to take this into account. Had Swift applied the moral finesse which he brings to, say “A Modest Proposal”, or “Gulliver”, he might have acknowledged that it is not generals who foment wars, but politicians of the kind from whom writers like himself often sought patronage. And if (perhaps justly) he mentions that there were widows and orphans who did not thank Marlborough for losing their husbands/fathers to war, the smug elegist might have acknowledged that the fellows themselves followed him devotedly, and that large populations in The Netherlands and middle Europe were grateful to John Churchill for saving them from the overweening ambitions of the aged Louis XIV.

Besides, is the poem itself such a wonder of art? For all your talk of tetrameter, reverse feet, echoes of “sprung” and “dung”, surely the versification is no more than we expect a versifier to have as the basic tool of trade. As for the thought, and the elegance of the argument, I say it is ordinary, formulaic stuff along the Juvenal “Vanity of Human Wishes” style, complete with superior ironic sneer.

How might the Australian public react today, I wonder, if a satirical elegy, embracing that point-scoring derisive/ironic tone, was written for the last Gallipoli veteran, piously pointing out he died in bed, not in a trench, and that the widows and orphans of the Turkish soldiers he bayoneted were not weeping around his hearse? Would this cause affront? I think so. Thus do we comprehend how the veterans who fought with Corporal John might have had a poor opinion of Swift’s attempt to seize the high moral ground for poetry, and therefore ban the defamatory thing for forty-two years. The poem is not “savage”, nor is it venerable. It is unjust, and was evidently recognised to be so in its time. As it happens, Marlborough came within a snick of being hacked down by French cavalry at Blenheim. Hacked down. That’s a sabre cleaving the skull, not a pen cleaving reputation.

Here’s the clinching point. I believe we are required, as poets and critics, to ensure the past is allowed to speak for itself with as much exactitude and fullness as its surviving records allow. We live in an era that prides itself, complacently I think, on being anti-colonial, but we make one exception. We happily colonise the past, disable the complexity with which bygone times speak in favour of the glosses that allow us to feel we own it, have control of it, know what’s good for it.

But if I have any business on this planet it is to be in the chorus that says the past will not be owned. Rather, if we are tactful and attentive, it can be disclosed with some degree of likeness. Swift’s ageless satire, when the context is illumined, is an opportunistic slur that proceeds from a tightly meshed political dialectic. Its cheap shot, its pedestrian argument, its blatant triumphal opportunism, do not reflect well on what Alec Hope rightly called that “bitter, lucid mind”. Nor do these artistic flaws allow Swift’s “Satyrical Elegy” the high moral ground or the agelessness of its truth that poets try to establish over other (as they would claim) more time-bound professions. I would have told the readers of the Canberra Times exactly that, and I would have reinstated something of Marlborough’s real presence from the cynical caricature within which Swift has attempted to enclose him, together with the necessity of the politics that entangled both men.

Cheers, Alan

Well, in my divided nature, I’ll stand by Marl­borough on this occasion, rather than Swift, who otherwise I value enormously both as an artist and a man of abundant charity. In times of off-stage war, soldiers are the easiest target for poets and idlers. Soldiers do the hack-work of high policy. Yes, I’m uneasy when I see military men seek political office—Cromwell, Wellington, Eisenhower, Powell—even though their record is not invariably bad. But I think it fair they should have protection from the caricaturing of poets, and the glib subsequent defence of such caricatures by other poets. Owen and Sassoon earn their right to speak on such matters. So does Horace, who ran for his life. Swift and Page do not.

6/10/03
Graham Greene’s human factor

On first encounter, the dialogue and action in this novel—The Human Factor—appear a little pedestrian and slack until Graham Greene establishes that The Ordinary is in fact the novel’s presiding subject and presence.

Once this occurs, the work turns out to be a very accomplished feat of constraint and concentration. A Philby-like defection forms the climax, but it emerges as a result of small, competing initiatives and mismanagements that are incremental and credible at all points. Wickedness is bland, hope and the opportunities for human goodness are gradually extinguished, to be replaced, not by rampant evil, but by an equilibrium that allows the routine to be secure. Religious faith hovers ineffectually.

I know novelists in the canon more searching, more daring, more acute than GG. Nonetheless I applaud him for this finely-worked, if bleak novel because his art lies in creating suspense from the ordinary and the undramatic.

No! Rather that last assessment needs to place things arsi-versi. Like Anthony Trollope, Graham Greene has a profound understanding of the usual, and so can allow it to find its own resources of suspense. Indeed, there are some recently polemical Oz playwrights could learn wherein lies passionate commitment from GG’s patience and trust, for both these and the novelist aspire to naturalism. Greene’s sense of wickedness arises, one perceives, directly from observation of human behaviour. The contemporary dramatists I have in view derive from comic books or children’s television. The difference is between life-drawing and disingenuous topical whimsy.

But one must account for why the latter, and not the former, will win more ready approbation from a modern audience. Do we now accept the virtuality we encounter on television, play-station, in newspaper stories with a greater trust than we accept the day-to-day evidence of our observation? Does a popular issue subvert the trust we have in what we have seen of a particular relationship? I think so. Weak artists will paint a character with reference to the topical because they have lost their hold on what an individual looks like. This means that the writer who is scrupulous in following the weft of how human behaviour actually appears before the eye is dealing with a disbelief in more modern sensibilities who cannot believe that behaviour can be free of the effect of topicality.

9/5/05
Decrypting at the Menzies

Are libraries like the veldt, quick with wiliness and counter-wiliness of hunter and hunted?
Recently Anne has visited the Menzies Library in search of a book to help son George with his essay. Eight copies of this title were supposed to exist on the shelves. None were listed as under loan, none could be found.

So Anne enlisted the help of D, a cheerful woman with a round, bespectacled face, who would have been at home at wartime Bletchley, and who could explain student veldt behaviour.

“A book gets prescribed, the student searches for it,” she said. “If they borrow it and it is in heavy demand, it will be subject to recall with large fines if late. So they will place it on a shelf. It will not be the correct shelf, but one where the library numbers are an easily recalled variation of the book’s number. This also prevents their fellow students using the book and risking thereby a loss of marks. Yes, my dear, feral, very. Well, I’m onto them! I decrypted one variation, found the book where it had been misplaced, and left the person a note. ‘Ahah! Caught you,’ I told them.”

Now D and Anne searched for the book useful to our son’s essay, to no avail. “Don’t despair,” promised D when Anne left, “I’ll try a trick or two,” and had turned up a copy by knock-off, which I collected from her, allowing me to meet this redoubtable code-breaker and animal behaviourist.

15/6/05
How the nitty gritty will always confound

Whenever, in a morbid compulsion, I feed the dejection aroused in me by my vocational fortune, I ask myself, “So! How many people are there in the world under thirty who read my books?”

Not a bloody one, is the prompt answer my grievance supplies.

On my customary walk to the shops today, I saw a young fellow advancing along the footpath towards me, lean, tanned, fair-haired, in his early twenties. I have no recollection of ever having seen him before. As he came near, I saw he had his eye on me, and feared he was about to try and touch me for $5, such is my neighbourhood.

Instead he stopped, as one who must deliver himself. “I want to say how very much I enjoyed reading your novel. The Tazyrik Year. If I had my copy with me, I would ask you to sign it. Thank you.”

And in return I thanked him, and reeled away, my sense of fortune enlarged.

28/9/05
A gene for churchgoing?

In his e-mails, my recently retired military cousin, RCG, informs me that he has “given away” one of the women priests being ordained recently at Bury St Edmunds Cathedral. And he is confident the perpetrators of the London bomb outrages will face justice from God. In the early seventies, when he was one of three lieutenants in a company of the East Anglian Regiment on duty in Belfast, the IRA let it be known they had targeted these three young men. Subsequently they killed one, badly injured another, and threw a bomb at RCG from which he escaped unscathed when it failed to explode. He returned to barracks and, understandably, prayed.

We are close to the same age, RCG and I. We grew up together for a period in our teens, and I do not recall him having discernible interest in the churchgoing and Sunday-schooling imposed upon us by my devout uncle. I do recall how the effect of this on me was to isolate Sundays from the experience of other days and make them intervals of time when I felt I should go whispering.

Now here we are in our mid-fifties, my cousin at ease in the ceremonies of the church within which he was raised, while I cannot contemplate churchgoing without recalling the boyhood boredom, and later in my teens the fierce anger I felt as, attentive to the actual words of the litanies and hymns, I tried to understand how anyone could want me to repeat such substance so complacently.

My father did his best to continue the practice of churchgoing with us that he had inherited from his own Baptist family. Was he a believer? He probably was, for I have no evidence to the contrary other than that his cast of mind was inclined to rigorous questioning. Nor can I conceive how he might have imagined the Godhead; perhaps this is his most mysterious part for me. I can well imagine he preferred to remain within an idea of faith because he was contemptuous of the manner, either facile or strident, with which so many of his century have espoused atheism or agnosticism. The tilt of his humour was away from facility.

And now in my fifties, my own inclination lies that way, even though I can see and feel, not only the ground upon which bio-chemistry and psychology dismissively summarise religious faith, but the moral nerve of those who, fully sensible, choose to make reality on that waste ground from which the angels have decamped. That is to say, convenient unbelief makes me scornful, fully sensible unbelief has my respect.

A little to my own surprise, nightly and easily, I turn to prayer. Prayer addressing what? The “good powers”, I reply to that interrogation, nebulous as I accept these powers to be, though they include, not Christ the person so much as Christ the junction-box of fair and wise values.

Yet this exercise of prayer is profoundly helpful. It allows Self and Other to take their measure against each other. It allows thanksgiving, which is to say a searching of the day for the events or observations that have endowed it with value. It allows me to ask for good fortune in matters where I would like the intercession of good fortune and for bad fortune to be deflected where I worry that harm is nearby.

And it allows the idea of “In the Sight of God” to enter upon how I assess the way in which I have behaved or might behave. I am intrigued to see how, for instance, when I contemplate that idea, “In the Sight of God” in the light of what I might wish for Saddam, Mugabe, and all the vicious spoilers of human happiness, I find it easy to wish them dis­abled, but baulk at wishing to see them harmed. And these prayers are wished into a dark where I have no certainty of the Presence addressed, and indeed do not court that certainty.

Prayer can be distorted by any of the dangers that hover around other behaviour. But being deliberate, taking its time, is prayer, I wonder, more watchful of itself, and therefore close to that watchful co-ordinator of our persons we might venture to call the soul? Or is prayer merely a construct, a swimmer in the human chemicals?

15/2/1
Old drill

Behind me in the supermarket queue this morning was a gentleman with short, balding hair, a certain unseeing intentness in his eye, and a good polish on his black boots. He stood, feet apart, hands clasped behind his back in the military posture of “at ease” and whenever the queue shuffled forward he came smartly to attention, took a step forward, then again smartly resumed the “at ease” position. As we waited this drill was performed perhaps four times.

And should I admit how I liked it, its clean-cut sense of the self, its click, and how sometimes, privately, idly, half-in-parody, I go through such drill myself having learned it as a fourteen-year-old Sea Cadet. So I turned to him, having a mind to make some comradely comment on his punctilio. But something in that intent eye deterred me in the seconds before the cashier called out “Next please!” and I heard the click of his black boots as I went forward.

4/3/11
Efficiently

We die in our sleep? I wonder if it is so calm. A sleeping body, turbulent with the processes of its breakdown, must surely rouse the tigers-of-dream like no other stimulus. We know this from observing the effects of bodily discomfort on dreaming from our first self-consciousness.

So image and narrative attach to the bodily dysfunctions and the old terrors get unleashed—chase, threat, bafflement. But we are a species—not the only one—where the body will react to the virtuality of dream with the same active and counter-active chemistry as it does to actuality. Only at this extremity it is not rehearsal for life that the dream intends, but to flick the stress-switch that will take us out efficiently. The mouse or bird hooked in the cat’s claw will die of a heart attack before any actual spoiling of its body. And so we snuff it, perhaps having suffered a long decline bravely, but at the end, frightened to death by a figment, dream, death’s switch-man.

7/3/11
Bloc

Here is the pathological crux. The more we grow conscious we want to embark on a writing task, the more that very consciousness disables us. The state of mind we look for in writing is a contradiction, to enter upon that most intent part of thinking and feeling, wholly but casually, all of us present, but as if not so.

The man with his jackplane taking a shaving from a plank, the woman ironing the pleats on a frill, is making this identical mental adjustment of commitment to a task, but minus those mischievous spoilers, How am I witnessed? How does this measure up? Think of the authors who could compose novels with the same kind of labour, arduous but insouciant, with which women ironed frills on a complex costume, or men hewed coal in their subterranean galleries. I conjure Dickens, Balzac, Stevenson, where composition was wired direct to the mechanism for construing, with no circuit-breaker called self-consciousness in sight.

28/3/11
Queensland flood

In the supermarket today I stood beside a grizzled man at the banana stall. We checked the post-flood prices together: $11.98 per kilo.

“Strewth,” he said, bagging a dozen, “any bloke buying bananas should be up for financial investigation.”

“Too right!” I agreed, choosing more modestly.

29/3/11
The invisible

Might I turn the tables on The Reductionists like this …

… When I say I believe in God, in fact I say I wonder about God. This is because wondering is the only natural mental activity possible when trying to come to terms with a super-natural subject; God, being invisible and unimaginable, can only be meditated by means of wonderment. What is wonderment? A striving to match the possible with the actual. To wonder is not to believe, for all that it is intelligent engagement with what asks to be called whole, and might require that verb “to believe” as a useful means of protecting the wondering against the world’s derision and distraction.

By contrast, if I say I do not believe in God, I am saying my view of reality is sufficiently determined for me to trust what it contains and what it does not. I may wonder about some of those contents, but I can invest belief in the fact I do not need to wonder about deity.

So, deism as wonderment, reductionism as belief. And all their kindred fervencies. A topsy-turvy world.

4/5/11
On Auden

“He is all pyrotechnics.”

In my presence, magisterially, and years ago, thus did one of my colleagues dismiss the poetry of Auden. What glib nonsense! Prominent among the several qualities of Auden’s work is that he made discussion native to poetry.

That is to say, behind the eloquence of the Auden poems—“Letter to Lord Byron”, “Homage to Clio”, “In Praise of Limestone”, “Horae Canonicae” and so on—one has the sense of others waiting to speak when the author takes pause. This is part of the Auden phantasia, the wholeness of utterance we are asked to imagine. That is to say, Auden’s own brilliance does not exclude the possibility of others, as many more directively discursive poets do—Blake, Wordsworth, Whitman, for instance. Auden’s manner of speech includes mindfulness of the symposium—that moderation of the poetic ego towards a Christian allowance of Other.

31/5/11
One swoons from the sheer energy …

Today MB of Text Publishing returned my Poets’ Stairwell with a knockback and the comment of how very much she admired “the disreputable energy” of my prose.

I grow inured to my accomplishment being altogether disconnected from my benefit.