W.S. Graham once struck out
through Glencoe, thinking he could hitch a lift at some point. But heavy
drifts of snow had made the road impassable. Eventually delirium set
in and Graham passed out on Rannoch moor. Most people would retell such
an experience as a semi-interesting anecdote, if at all, but it becomes
an important part of Graham’s private mythology. This not only
suggests that Graham led an outwardly uneventful life, but that, in
his troubled dissection of his own relationship to poetry and to the
poetry-reading public (such as it is), the episode is emblematic. How
exactly?
It is an intensely
lonely image, for one thing. Isolation, self-imposed or imposed by social
failings (the same thing, often), is a strong feature of Graham’s
life and work. But this isolation seems always on the verge of breaking
through to authentic communication, either with another human being
or with the best part of oneself. Delirium provides a sort of inner
companionship, Eliot’s ‘third who walks always beside you’.
It feels like company. Drink-induced delirium clearly helped Graham
to experience this inner company too, as his wonderful letters (collected
in The Nightfisherman, Carcanet, 1999) demonstrate. Alcohol oils the
wheels, gets him into the right frame of mind — a ready-made camaraderie
— for corresponding. Drink, of course, enlarges but eventually
diminishes the capacity for intimacy, which may in part explain the
co-existence of poignancy and emptiness in Graham’s poetry.
And then there is the
snow. Involuntary, overwhelming, like true inspiration, engulfing the
wilful little walker. Much has been made – following the poet’s
own lead — of Graham the engineer, the constructer of poems. In
an essay in W.S. Graham: Speaking Towards You, Peter Robinson
writes: ‘Graham was trained as an engineer, and many of his poems
have the separateness of made objects’. True, but so do many of
the poems written by people who were not trained as engineers. The idea
that a poem is a made object appealed to a man who had run away from
Clydeside to spend his life in rural Cornwall making marks on blank
pieces of paper (the snow again).
Not that there is no
evidence of uninspired writing in Graham’s New Collected Poems,
or indeed in any volume of his work. The previous Collected Poems was
a much leaner affair, and still represents the best introduction to
the writing of this important poet — one of the previous century’s
best ‘neglected’ poets. But it’s a very good thing
that Faber and Faber has now added to the main body of Graham’s
work his posthumously published volumes, Uncollected Poems (1990) and
Aimed at Nobody (1993), as well as the full contents of the early books
and a selection of poems left out of previous ones. This is an incomplete
Graham, but that (at this stage) is about right for a poet whose poetry
reads, twenty years on from his death, like a continual work-in-progress.
o
The progress was towards clarity.
Graham stubbornly refused to reject his early (Dylan) Thomasesque, ‘Apocalyptic’
work, angrily upbraiding the publisher Michael Schmidt when he praised
the later work at the expense of the earlier. The windy rhetoric of
the 1940s poets forming the movement known as the Apocalypse is almost
universally derided now. Graham and Dylan Thomas can perhaps be viewed
as special cases, however. That particular style was intrinsic to Thomas’s
gifts as a poet, and in Graham the early work prefigures the later to
such an extent that no one who values him as a poet would want to be
without it. It must be admitted, though, that it’s hard to take
a bellyful of the stuff. The idea seems to be that every line of a poem
ought to be a great line of poetry. And so they pile up, the ‘great
lines’, given momentum by Graham’s urgency and not by the
always-forward-drawing impetus of immediately discernible meaning. But
isolate a few lines almost at random and you have the essence of the
later Graham. These are from 1944’s The Seven Journeys:
Still I pass fathom-voyaged in
a volted thread
Rigged with a stay of justice devised in fables
Differently learning an avalanche of kin.
The sea imagery and accompanying mimetic
flow of the lines, the coining of phrases like “fathom-voyaged”,
the deployment of favourite words like “rigged”, the disorientating
shift over a line break that comes with the adverb “Differently”....
And then there is the overall sense of the lonely genius cast adrift,
having to make an internal and external journey away from kith and kin,
not in order to reject them but to learn differently, for himself, what
such a connection might mean. It’s all there, but obscured by
monotonous diction and syntax. Surrealist poems and automatic writing
are heavily peppered with noun phrases like “a stay of justice”
and “an avalanche of kin”. There seems to be a kind of default
setting in the brain which churns them out. Nowadays, with a different
sort of rubbish in the poetry magazines and slim volumes, it is tempting
to be magnanimous towards the Apocalypse. But imagine having to wade
through that mire every time. You’d probably go off and launch
a movement of your own.
A poet has to start
somewhere, and Graham’s start was better than most. There is a
creative welter of confusion which most real poets go through, until
they learn to be patient and let meaning arrive when it will or until
they become less frightened by what it is they are saying – a
stage which has its own dangers, however. The young Graham’s strident
tone can’t hide his bafflement. But then, the gift of poetry is
baffling.
o
Graham’s
early manuscripts reveal that he listed words he wanted to get into
the poem. So much for spontaneity. But Graham shouldn’t be condemned
out of hand for this practice. The words he chose seem to have contained
some sort of magic for him, to have been inherently poetic, runes almost.
In a fascinating essay from Speaking Towards You, Matthew Francis writes:
Language
[...] is a form of community that Graham strives to turn into a
home. The focus of a home for him is the mother, and therefore to
create a home in language is to discover a mother. Graham found
precedents for this maternal presence within language [...] in the
traditional concept of the Muse, particularly as expounded by Robert
Graves in The White Goddess.
Graham was, like Graves, absolute in his approach to poetry. In one
letter, he writes: “Who should I ever get my forces together to
reply to but GOD?” This statement is remarkable not only because
it indicates that Graham was one of those intensely self-communing writers
who can be said to ‘write for God’, but because of the use
of the word “reply”. “What does not reply is the answer
to prayer,” wrote C.H. Sisson memorably. But Graham reverses this.
God has spoken; how should one reply?
But God is not the
Goddess (or is she?). Francis is right to draw attention to the feminine
presence inhabiting Graham’s writing. Those favoured magical words
are like offerings to a feminine deity. It makes for an exciting tension
with Graham’s pronounced masculinity, that ‘Sauchiehall
swagger’ identified by Ronald Bottrall in an admiring poem. Like
Hart Crane, Graham assembles his industrially masculine imagery and
tilts it at the sea. He knows he is going to lose, but in poetry, to
quote a line by Sisson, “loser takes all”.
Graham attracts young
poets not because he is Keatsian but because he is dissonant, awkward,
ugly even. He had to be. He was capable of writing so lyrically that,
if he had gone on in this style, he might well have ended up at the
dead-end of facility. This is the first of ‘Two Poems on Zennor
Hill’:
Ancient of runes the stone-cut
voice
Stands invisible on Zennor Hill.
I climbed here in a morning of mist
Up over a fox’s or badger’s track
And there is no sound but myself
Breaking last year’s drenched bracken.
Who among his contemporaries could write so well? Even Larkin with his
“Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace” and his beginning
“afresh, afresh, afresh” could not. A poet this good has
little to learn, but might have things to unlearn, might first have
to, as Austin Clarke described his own method, load himself down with
chains, then try to wriggle free. This tortuous process cannot really
be called ‘thinking’. Graham wasn’t a thinker, despite
the intellectual apparatus and the longish ‘philosophical’
poems. The guise of philosophical poet helped Graham to be taken up
by Faber and Faber when Eliot was at the helm. Eliot, struggling towards
his own vision of a successful long contemporary poem, liked the fact
that Graham was ambitious in this direction too. Poets often do this
— overrate the worst, least natural elements in themselves and
others. Coleridge, even, misunderstood the nature of Wordsworth’s
genius (but then Wordsworth was all too happy to sacrifice lyricism
for length).
Graham has been called
an unlucky poet in terms of literary fame, his masterpiece ‘The
Nightfishing’ appearing in the same year that British poetry changed
course with the publication of Larkin’s The Less Deceived. Graham
fell into an even deeper neglect. He might have had the most prestigious
of poetry publishers, but it seems that they did little to promote his
work. In his autobiography, John Heath-Stubbs presents a picture of
Graham in a state of penury so severe that he had to trawl the beach
looking for shellfish to eat. It is as though he were one of the “loblolly-men”
Larkin looks down on in ‘Toads’ — a kind of literary
Rab C. Nesbitt.
There is truth but
also exaggeration in this. Graham was, after all, living the life he
had chosen, free to devote himself absolutely to his craft. He may be
said to have been lucky in that, as he puts it in one poem, he “found
Eliot and he said yes” — despite having written at this
time only semi-accomplished poems. And, after all, what would fame have
brought him? More ghastly poetry-reading tours of the sort described
in the very last lines of this New Collected? What a difference from
the lovely, moving ‘To My Wife at Midnight’ with which the
previous edition ends.
And how good is the
poem ‘The Nightfishing’ really? Even critics grudging in
their praise of Graham leave it alone. Ronald Bottrall in the poem already
quoted speaks of ‘the great height / Of his Nightfishing, / His
eyes letting light / In on our darkness’. It is a poem of the
sea (and of the writing of poems, naturally) in seven parts with a long
third section of over 300 lines. Sacrilegious to ask, but doesn’t
anyone else feel bored reading it? Or at least exhausted? Like Hart
Crane’s ‘The Bridge’, it is an ambitious failure,
not wholly redeemed by some very powerful lines. Maybe poets should
give the sea a rest and concede that nobody is going to surpass Hopkins
in evoking it. Even without Larkin’s inconvenient appearance on
the scene, ‘The Nightfishing’ probably wouldn’t have
gained Graham a wide readership. Larkin was bringing something freshly
direct to British poetry; Graham was perfecting a private meditation.
It is perhaps a greater shame that the quieter ‘Seven Letters’
in the same volume would have been missed by the poetry-reading public.
Who could resist lines such as these ones from ‘Letter VI’?
I put my childhood out
Into a cocked hat
And you moving the myrtle
Walked slowly over.
A sweet clearness became.
o
One cannot really complain of Graham’s
neglect and then go on to regret the appearance of a book of critical
essays devoted to him. And yet my heart sank a little on the publication
of W.S. Graham: Speaking Towards You, edited by Ralph Pite and Hester
Jones. The good thing about a neglected poet is that he can be your
own discovery. His corpse hasn’t washed up on the shores of academia
just yet. Well, now it has. Graham is no longer only a poet of the literary
anecdote. I recall an issue of Edinburgh Review back in the late 1980s,
with David Wright quoting a letter to his parents in South Africa complaining
that the trouble with Graham was that he was useless after even one
pint. These things stick in one’s mind, but do not constitute
a body of serious criticism. Pite and Jones have done all right. It
could have been worse.
At times it is very
good. Graham was, perhaps above all, a great elegist, and Fiona Green’s
essay ‘Achieve Further through Elegy’ is remarkably sensitive
and astute. ‘Dear Bryan Wynter’, written for his dead friend,
is one of Graham’s most moving poems, and I wouldn’t like
to go near it with a critical barge pole. Too raw. But Green goes near,
even teasing apart the linguistic details of a letter written by Graham
to a friend just after Wynter died. Green says much that is clever and
right about the poem, but her last sentence on it is the best: “In
its perfect control it is ungovernably sad”.
Not all of the contributors
are always as perceptive. Peter Robinson analyses the lines ‘I
leave this at your ear for when you wake, / A creature in its abstract
cage asleep’, from what is perhaps Graham’s best love poem,
as follows:
The second line, ‘A creature
in its abstract cage asleep’, relates ambiguously to two possible
antecedents: it could refer to ‘you’, who then are ‘A
creature’; or it could refer to ‘this’, the poem.’
One wants to say, “Have a bit of sense, man.” Sydney Graham
is not calling Nessie Dunsmuir a “creature in its abstract cage
asleep”; he is drawing an analogy between the tightly structured
poem he is composing — meaning contained within the abstract structure
of form — and his wife asleep in the structure commonly known
as a bed. He is offering his wife something beautiful and meaningful
(he knows this, and his bashfulness in the poem can’t hide the
fact), because she is, especially in this moment, beautiful and meaningful
to him.
Matthew Francis writes
well on the reams of unpublished prose, Graham’s automatic writing,
which the poet drew on for some lines and images. All the same, he goes
way too far in claiming that “The late unpublished writing constitutes
almost an alternative oeuvre to the poems of Malcolm Mooney’s
Land and Implements in their Places, one whose creative
energy and radical technique represents a remarkable avant-garde challenge
to the institution of literature.” An important source of cash
for Graham was the payments made by Robin Skelton for his private papers.
If someone were paying me for my private papers, I would do a lot of
automatic writing too. The passages quoted are interesting but not earth-shattering,
not likely to challenge the institution of literature. Graham’s
best poems mount a much stronger challenge. ‘Implements in their
Places’ begins and ends with the following couplet:
Somewhere our belonging particles
Believe in us. If we could only find them.
Francis finds evidence which suggests that the word “particles”
here was “constructed from a combination of “parts”
and “testicles”.... The poem is cut off from the poet like
genitals cut off from the male body.” Well, perhaps, but the lines
mean something, to both male and female readers, something — dare
one say it?— a bit more spiritual than this.
The essays putting
Graham into literary context are more disappointing. Tony Lopez in ‘Graham
and the 1940s’ has much to say about Larkin, but Larkin and Graham
are not really connected at all, not even as (say) sparring partners.
Graham absorbed (or did not absorb) certain influences early on. Dylan
Thomas and Rimbaud, certainly. But he made his own way after that. None
of the book’s contributors mentions Sisson, for example, although
the two poets had some limited correspondence, and Graham clearly respected
Sisson as perhaps the only equally serious poet of the time. But even
here, when Graham in two letters to that astringent and wholly different
poet quotes approvingly lines from Sisson’s poem ‘The Corridor’,
we can see that Graham really only had an ear for his own work. For
there is nothing more Graham-like in all of C.H. Sisson’s poetry
than those lines: “Nothing is what I have done / Where I have
been / These long years”.
o
Graham, let’s not forget, was
a Scottish poet. The Scottish literary establishment turned his back
on him, although it now coories up to his memory. It is shocking to
read, in the concluding essay of Speaking Towards You, even a sympathetic
critic and friend of Graham’s, Edwin Morgan, write: “I thought
that someone who came from Greenock and Glasgow ought not to have lived
so long in a telephoneless cottage in the wilds of Cornwall.... concentrating
on essentials may become a bad thing.” (It is almost as if Morgan
is indignant that Graham refused to make the usual compromises.)
Graham fell out with
the Lallans lobby. Yet he chose wisely in refusing to waste his energies
getting embroiled in nationalist polemics. Most young Scottish poets
probably feel more at home with Graham’s contemporary ‘Scottish
English’ than MacDiarmid’s Scots. Advocates of the use of
Scots once held, or thought they held, the moral high ground, but their
sand is sinking. Here in Ireland, one is used to northern politicians
who played a prominent role in suppressing the civil rights of Catholics
prating on about their ‘Ulster Scots’ heritage and language.
Scots is no longer, if it ever was, the language of an oppressed minority.
Given that language is other people, Graham simply could not have written
with so contemporary a voice if he were merely an eccentric solitary,
cut off from others. Or from his native land, to which he often returns
in his work. That walk through the snow took place in Glencoe.
Having spent three
days exposed to the cold, Graham was found by a shepherd who took him
back to his croft and gave him some brandy. Not a bad anecdote for such
a lyrically gifted poet after all.
