Book Reviews
Reviewed by Sue Hubbard
This book attempts, like the new South Africa itself, to give expression to a range of different voices, from Ike Mboneni Muila's work - written mainly in 'isicamtho' (or 'tsotsi taal'), an amalgam of South African languages developed among both the criminal and artistic circles in the black townships in the 1950s - to Donald Parenzee's sophisticated philosophical poems of existential alienation. There are times when the alliance between these twelve very diverse poets can feel rather uneasy but, as with efforts at nation building within post-apartheid South Africa itself, one cannot but applaud the attempt to bring them to a wider public.
Martina Evans is both a novelist and a poet. Her narrative inventiveness and authenticity of voice, which characterise her new collection, Facing the Public, are evident from the first lines of the first poem in the book, 'Two Hostages'. 'In the photo/six bouncing babies, bonneted, sitting/in a pram outside Hackney Workhouse: 1902. /This was the year that my father was born.'
Born in Cork, the youngest of ten children, she draws us into a closely observed world of sectarian violence, as well as into the unspoken truths of childhood sexual abuse, with a bleak humour. In 'My Last Confession' a Franciscan monk, clad in brown robes and leather sandals, announces that she and her fellow school borders are 'misunderstood angels': 'I thought he was the liberated uncle I never had/so when he ask me to sit on his lap/I was genuinely sorry that I couldn't oblige.'
Her sense of period rarely falters, as when she evokes the death of Elvis announced on Radio Luxembourg with the words 'The King is Dead' or describes her 'Mammy forcing a 'fiver into Daddy's wallet.' You can hear the mother's shame in: 'there all night smiling at people/ and not put your hand in your pocket to buy a drink.' Perceptive and sharp, there are moments when one might wish that these warm, anecdotal poems, which so graphically conjure the daily realities of Irish life and politics, strove just that little bit harder for a deeper resonance.
After being educated at Harvard and Oxford, Douglas Skrief sought an alternative form of wisdom in the sweat lodges of the Ojibway Indians, also known as the Chippewa, who lived mainly in Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Ontario at the time of European contact. Skrief himself now lives on the border of Minnesota and Ontario. In his Stone Poems, he evokes the inner life of a great boulder that sits near the US/Canadian border, on the edge of a sparkling, freshwater lake that, like a granite Tiresias, has observed aeons of human behaviour.
There is a shamanistic quality to these poems. When the stone addresses the 'Word-Giver' and 'you', it is not speaking to some Everyman, but to the poet himelf, often reflecting his own thoughts and feelings. The utterances are timeless and universal: 'I, a boulder. /Congregate of starflakes. Brainshaped. Part dark matter/blacker than dung. /Womb of imagination infinite as a fern spore.'
Yet, despite this spare muscularity and the evocation of an elemental life close to nature where 'Husky wives stretched to lodge stripped ash poles/high in forked oak bows. Skinned whitefish dried/ to silver-aspen leaves glinting in bright sunlight', these poems occasionally run the risk of sounding portentous. The voice is rather monotone, with images tending towards archetypes rather than surprising particulars. Skrief has set himself a difficult task, which is only partly successful. One wonders who might have done it more convincingly. Ted Hughes, perhaps?
John Greening's Hunts: poems from 1979-2009 is a big book that runs to over two-hundred and fifty pages. Born in 1954, Greening has been published in numerous collections and appeared in many anthologies. This collection gathers together highlights from his eleven books, along with roughly sixty new or uncollected poems. At the centre are the 'Huntingdonshire Eclogues'. Far reaching in their ambition, they regret the passing of a landscape 'before electricity/sowed the village in its herbicidal shroud of light'. There are some wonderfully graphic moments such as the evocation of the wide Fen skies: 'Dancing on a dozen pin-sharp church spires, or swung out across/a high-voltage safety net, Huntingdonshire's sky outshines every one of its other acts.' In a kaleidoscopic effect, Greening conjures a landscape that is at once both ancient and modern. Not only does he create a convincingly inhabited landscape with a sense of history, with its blacksmiths and closed branch lines, but he peppers it with copious references to the writers he loves such as Dickens, Cowper and John Donne.
But it is Greening's ability to inhabit the minds and hearts of other men that is his particular strength. In 'The Winter Journey,' which is based on Captain Scott's thirty-six day trip with three men from his polar expedition, Greening describes the journey through a dark Antarctic winter to collect specimens of the Emperor Penguin's eggs. In these 36 sonnets he explores, with rare historic insight, the sense of Boy's Own heroism that propelled these men on in the harshest of conditions.
There is a sonorous lyricism to Glyn Hughes' Life Class, a full-length autobiographical poem that cover's the poet's life from his working class roots, through his time in the Pennines and Greece, and his three failed marriages. In ambition and scope there are echoes in the opening poems, where Hughes goes camping with a boyhood friend, of The Prelude. As for Wordsworth, nature is a defining love. Though it has to be said that Hughes' wanderings never feel quite so free and unburdened as Wordsworth's. The boys' suspicious mothers fret that all this outdoor camping and talk of poetry might betray an unhealthy tendency towards what, in the 1950s, was still a love that dare not speak its name: "homo, poufters/in too close a friendship'.
Hughes's sequence draws the reader in with the compulsion of good fiction. His sensitive, nuanced language evokes his parent's strained marriage and his father's clandestine affair with the exotic Gertrude, a 'Romany and a war-time bus conductress'. Emotional boundaries are complex and fluid, for: 'While my mother is cleaning others' houses/my father is explaining why he needs love.' Gertrude cooks eggs for the eight year old Glyn while his mother is out, desecrating 'Mam's new pressure-cooker with an inch of boiling lard.' His acknowledgement that her eggs are better than his mother's feels like a first act of erotic betrayal. Of Gertrude he admits that he 'loved her in secret ever since. /"Call me Auntie Gertie", and I did. / In fact I embraced her for my anima.' The The love of a son and a father for a woman called Gertrude brings to mind the oedipal backdrop of Hamlet's complex emotional life. Life Class is a wonderful accomplishment, moving, compassionate and deeply human. These poems conjure the landscape of a lived life with perception, economy and unfeigned, authentic emotion. This is the sort of memorable poetry that one constantly yearns for, and so seldom finds.
*
Brave Pamphleteering
Katy Evans-Bush, Oscar & Henry; Ian Parks, A Paston Letter; David Kennedy, Mistral; Philip Morre, Here's to the Home Country; all 12pp, £4, post free, from: Rack Press, The Rack, Kinnerton, Presteigne, Powys LD8 2PF
A pamphlet is a good way to publish a longish poem or a coherent sequence of shorter ones. For most purposes it has become the most appropriate unit of poetry publishing, and this is beginning to be recognised. The holy grail of the 'full collection' becomes less and less sustainable, with more and more publishable poets, and no matching increase in readership; while the random nature of magazine publication has drawbacks (ephemeral, subject to in-group politics, one damn poem after another), as well as advantages (serendipity, a loyal, regular readership).
Scotland has had the Callum Macdonald pamphlet award for a decade now, and Richard Price at the British Library has been influential in creating the Michael Marks awards for both individual pamphlets and pamphlet publishers. The Rack Press of Presteigne in Wales must be a contender for one of these, with good poetry in plain but satisfying grey covers, and luxurious creamy paper. Four of these, all reviwed above, are launched in January 2010.
Katy Evans-Bush in Oscar & Henry looks at Oscar Wilde and Henry James in their parallel gay sensibilities, and their fairly limited but significant interactions. Juxtaposing these two strong characters, the poems spark in various directions, mostly in light and entertaining rhyme, with the exception of the unrhymed second poem, '1882: An Anti-Social Call in Washington,' in which they meet. This gives us plenty of telling detail, but it did help me to check up what happened in Richard Ellmann's biography of Wilde, so I'm marking this down slightly on clarity (and presentation, where italics for both quoted speech and emphasis get in each other's way). The poem moves outwards from their meeting to a perspective on the two lives: this comes from Henry's point of view, and in fact throughout the sequence Evans-Bush gives more interior attention to him than to Oscar, despite the order and equal weight in the title.
It's an entertainment, not a treatise on literary history or queer theory, and makes a virtue of the need for 'Speculation and Conjecture' about one of them - which may be why he seems to get more attention:
The Master: did he, or didn't he?
Perhaps he simply didn't document
his nights of surreptitious devilment;
even now the biographers disagree.
Evans-Bush takes us outside the two lives, with Virginia Woolf unexpectedly calling James 'lewd' (inventive rhyming in this poem of 'get at her' with "editor"), and other 'Squibs from Later' which do seem to get rather off the point (Lytton Strachey's piles?), but maybe there isn't a point. Ending the pamphlet, the poem 'November 30, 1900' doesn't quite develop the Wildean observations it quotes, and the penultimate, 'Henry in Love', once again scores higher for the Master:
Oh, Henry, Henry, what is love?
your countesses would kill for it:
The dagger out, the velvet glove.
Betrayal was their favourite bit.
Betrayal? Was no lover kind?
'Love is betrayal; I am my mind.
I need to be alone!' he cried.
'Stop asking me. My heart has died.'
A Paston Letter by Ian Parks is a long poem in 13 sections, spoken in the voice of another historical personage, Margery Paston, with the Wars of the Roses going on around her. This is a very civilised kind of writing, but it mystifies me a little why our civilisation is visiting this particular corner of its rich tapestry, unicorns and all, in this particular poem. The high tone is set at the opening:
Three white roses - suns in splendour -
have their place linked on your shoulder,
not in my head where they rise, swim
and contend for prominence.
The verse moves with something of Eliot's eerie stateliness in 'Ash Wednesday', especially when it begins with the heraldic three white roses, which recall Eliot's leopards; in other places Margery's voice has an echo of 'The Waste Land':
head back, limbs spread,
my fingers restless on my gown
I am asleep but still aware
of urgent fingers on the bolt
and at the end there is ash on a sleeve, which I assume is a deliberate reference to 'Ash on an old man's sleeve' in 'Little Gidding'. Civilisation doesn't get much more conscious of its own resonances. Apart from that, it's hard not to think of Larkin's 'An Arundel Tomb' when she is imagining herself as one of two effigies - though not with the linked hands of Arundel:
Our eyes are closed; our hands
in an attitude of prayer.
What will they make
of your slender wrist,
my ankles, your hair?
The stuckness of Margery, between lover and arranged marriage, and of the 'country with two kings' is expressed well as 'The messengers / who pass between us bring no news', and there are physical descriptions that come alive:
Up to my elbows in the warm pool
trailed with branches, thrust through with reeds
or
The adder slithers out to nudge my hair,
its seventeen years' growth let down.
My puzzlement at this poem is mainly because I don't find it easy to believe this is being spoken either by Margery as a dramatic monologue, or as the 'letter' of the title. I have to find for myself a suspension of disbelief over an enormous gap. There's nothing wrong with writing on subjects a long way from the here and now, in fact we need more of it, but there has to be some kind of mechanism to make the connection work, which could be the sheer force of what's being said, or something in the artifice like the conventions of opera, where the audience is happy for heroines to warble and trill in all kinds of circumstances. I haven't felt Margery coming dramatically towards us across the centuries, only a well-wrought Ouija board with the wine glass being pushed a little too hard.
David Kennedy's Mistral is a sequence on Provence with poems that are more or less allowed to interact amongst themselves, with the weather, the food, the landscape, and not least Cézanne working on the landscape, 'Mont Sainte-Victoire's / turdy pile' (in the opening poem 'Cézanne: The Rage). This is an impressive achievement at the task of getting painting and light into a poem, so often resulting in a demonstration of how impossible it is. It is still impossible of course, but so is painting the light, and Kennedy gives us this in Cézanne's approach to
—the limitless sky,
the uncontainable light.
This is the end of rage,
thirty years
of nothing else,
in face of light's
changing expressions,
making contours
impossible.
Kennedy gives us multifaceted physical sensations - of light, of the flavours of food and drink, the sound of bells and the heat on the buildings:
—reading stone, reading brick, in the falling night,
telling them apart by what heat they hold at 10 o'clock,
and the suddenness of the Mistral itself, which snaps umbrella spokes
crack like a pistol
springs back and away
leaves us August's slow sizzle
The personal presence of an 'us' brings some advantages over dealing with the historical characters of Oscar, Henry, the Pastons and Cézanne, without the poems being particularly confessional, or buttonholing the reader with how sensitive we are to be experiencing all this so intensely for you. The poet is 'A guest in a body of light', and the reader is brought in to share what he sees and feels: everything is very much present. Cézanne's work on the landscape has become part of it, the actual 'interlocking wedges' of fields and woods 'half-buried cones, small sections of huge spheres', but these are also human, 'making dark laps, crotches'. None of Kennedy's descriptions are mechanistic or simplifying, and this is to do with his sensitivity to words, as well as to the sensations he is conveying with them. The senses are a form of reading - as with the reading of brick and stone, above - while of course they are not reading at all. 'Reading, not-reading, under white blossoms in a / French garden' is the beginning of 'Sonnet: Bright, Burning Wires,' in which all kinds of sights, sounds and feelings are perceived, and the words for them found, and perhaps re-negotiated as the perceptions change, or the words are improved:
microlight's buzzy whinge in the burning
blue, the lyric revealed as respite fiction,
microlight's whiney buzz in the burning white
around the words, reconnecting the poem, sounding
its serrated edge.
This pamphlet achieves real substance in handling what could have been utterly superficial, and how Kennedy does this is through tact. In the final poem, the subject-matter becomes poetry in a remarkable way, each village
is a local rendering,
a making
sense that stands
and will stand,
and as we clamber through the landscape 'ignorantly, / inattentively', like the poem
In front of us,
the road winds
into the countryside
and deepens it.
Utterly different from Kennedy, but equally impressive in handling of language and tone, Philip Morre's Here's to the Home Country has less of an obvious theme than the others, except the implied contrast of Britain with Italy, where most of the poems are set.
The title poem takes place at a works social where 'Dour days incline folk to a grim cheer', and everyone in it is behaving grimly the way Brits abroad are expected to (except they are actually in Britain), re-enacting World War Two, drinking, shrieking and vomiting. The first-person character puts up with them patiently enough, though it's rather hard to understand why he's there at all, apart from some long-ago connection - 'I walked with his daughter once under a full moon'. Ultimately
I linger alone, last bus gone and grudging
the cab-fare, another big moon bulging:
I could howl now for the army's daughter.
The characters ring true because they are all observed doing real things, however stereotypical, and the wit of the poem does compensate for puzzlement at the situation: Morre understands how lack of explanation, properly handled, raises the reader's interest.
'Ideology: 0. Faubourg St-Honoré: 5' starts with a rambling meditation on elephant ears and evolution which introduces a relationship with a woman and her sister that is still mysterious by the end; this is all illuminated somehow by a Russian woman's passionate shopping as a memento mori - 'Dear Eva. That it all goes to dust!' I enjoyed the way Morre has covered a lot of ground in this poem, even if I'm not sure where.
Other poems ('Fond Adieu' and 'Old Shoes') give us post-mortems on other unexplained relationships, with the 'post' touchingly set up with 'I would like to tell you the cypresses / grow a little taller round your plot' and 'You have been so long in my heart / I wear your absence like old shoes', each with a turn on 'Only…' and 'But…' and punchlines that it would be a pity to spoil. With circumstantial narrative stripped away, the miniature drama and the wit can enhance each other through their own energy. Something similar occurs in the deft 'Time to be Leaving', which is an un-ironic post-death poem with real love in it. The warmth of feeling in 'The House at Olgiate', a version from Eugenio Montale, sparks against the Montale squib about Ezra Pound next to it. Sometimes a conceit doesn't come off, as in the middle stanzas of 'How it Goes' where the combination of fleas and the walls of Jericho doesn't work (perhaps too compressed because of the technical demands of the form); and the phrase 'a fly urchin' in 'Palace Wall, Dorsoduro' is ambiguous enough to suggest for a moment that this is also about some kind of insect, at least on my own first reading. But altogether this pamphlet shows how a good poet can provide depth and entertainment at the same time.
*
A good poetry anthology is companionable for various reasons. The fact that it consists of many voices, and all operating in counterpoint to each other, means that it is not only constantly refreshing itself, but also refreshing the reader's appetite for what it contains.
The best anthology on offer in recent months - and, sad to say, there were not been too many of them last year - is by our Poet Laureate(sse), Carol Ann Duffy, and it is called To the Moon - an anthology of Lunar Poems (Picador, 188pp., £14.99).
Poets have been writing well about the moon for countless centuries, and it comes as something of a surprise to realise that this is the first anthology of moon poems to be published within living memory. Why has the moon so appealed to poets? The poets who contribute to this book - who include Shakespeare, Coleridge, Alice Oswald and Carol Ann Duffy herself - make clear the reasons for the poem's abiding pull in their poems.
The moon is our soothing, consolatory ghost-companion, a counterforce to loneliness, which seems to keep in pace with you as you walk. Or perhaps, if you are of a more melancholy cast of mind, it is the chilling embodiment of your loneliness… What is undeniable is the huge imaginative space that the idea of the moon continues to open up for poets.
The second extremely companionable anthology of this chill season is entitled A Century of Poetry Review (Carcanet Press, 372pp., £14.95), edited by Fiona Sampson, and it contains a wide selection of articles, interviews and poems from the pages of the Poetry Society's quarterly journal, The Poetry Review. Does this sound too specialised for your taste? In fact, anyone with an interest in the development of poetry over the last one hundred years will find it fascinating. It ranges from such jewels as a ferocious early pronouncement on the state of poetry at the beginning of the 20th century by Ezra Pound, to a late interview with T.S. Eliot, in which the old patrician proves to be surprisingly good natured and self-deprecatory. The most pleasing and surprising discovery of all is that the closer we get go the present, the better the poetry seems to become. So something in this world is perhaps getting better…
Speaking of huge imaginative spaces leads us quite naturally to the New Collected Poems of Charles Tomlinson (Carcanet Press, 740pp.), a cornucopia of a book which collects within its covers more than sixty years of fine writing. Tomlinson is one of the giants of post-war English poetry, and if you buy no other poetry book this spring, this is the one which is worth the not inconsiderable investment of £25. There is scarcely a single poem in this book which does not deserve loving and careful attention because Tomlinson is the most scrupulous and exacting of writers. His great subject matter is place and places - the observation of landscape, urban and rural, in a measured and ruminative way - how we become absorbed into what we see; how we are engulfed and transformed by it.
And then there are the smaller collections of poems by individual poets. Three of these are worth our attention: Spindrift by Vona Groarke (The Gallery Press, 75pp., 11.95 euros), Sinead Morrissey's Through the Square Window (Carcanet, 57pp., £9.95) and Picasso, I Want My Face Back (Bloodaxe Books, 63pp., £7.95) by Grace Nichols. Nichols' voice is spiky, fierce, urgent. The title poem is spoken in the voice of Dora Maar, Picasso's lover, who is both enraged and energised by the way he has distorted her features in his celebrated painting, 'The Weeping Woman'. Sinead Morrissey writes brilliantly about the astonishing impact of water - as rain, ice, or how a lake's surface 'laid flat again, sloshes and jerks/to a cat-lapped equilibirum'. Vona Groarke's voice is one of beguiling perplexity in an imaginitive world which never seems to stop renewing itself. Three truly savoursome talents.
*
Sylvia Townsend Warner New Collected Poems Carcanet Press 391pp £18.95
The first edition of Sylvia Townsend Warner's Collected Poems was published a little over a quarter of a century ago by the same publisher. At a stroke, here was proof that a writer who had been regarded primarily as an important twentieth-century novelist - some regard her, rather recklessly, as second only to Virginia Woolf - was also a substantial poet. Now Claire Harman, the compiler of that first collection, who also happens, in the interim, to have written a substantial biography of the poet/novelist, has unearthed a great deal of additional material. Does the quality of all this newly discovered work justify a Collected Poems quite as long as this one, a book, moreover, which is much larger than Yeats', Eliot's or Larkin's (it would be difficult to beat Auden's) editions of their respective collected poems? No. There is a fair bit of material - most of it is in the early sections of the book - which could well have been left undiscovered. The fact is that she matured slowly, and some of the early work is marred by archaisms. Nevertheless, there are important discoveries here too, and for that we can only be grateful.
Sylvia Townsend Warner was a poet of rural England, and her earliest work is often written in plain, ballad-like metre, and sometimes in tight Blakean measures. There is a certain lonely chill about her work from first to last - life as a communist and a lesbian was never likely to endear her to the literary establishment. Much of her poetry was addressed to herself, and it represents a kind of perfectly fashioned armour, a way of screening herself off from the world. Sometimes, her poetry often reminds us of Hardy in the doggedness and sourness of its moods. It is unconsoled, full of thwartings and frustrations. Her version of pastoral is often an uneasy, awkward, threatened one. But there were lessons of stoicism to be learned from nature - one has to recognise that life, like nature, can be numbingly, if not pitilessly, impartial. It all sounds almost too sad for words, but that is not quite the case. She could also write with humour and insight about the contemplative glow of boozing, and with great sympathy about the feckless life of an unloved and much misunderstood village flower-seller. She had been there herself.
After the love of her life, Valentine Ackland, left her, she lived, and wrote with much painful feeling, about her terrible after-life of lovelessness. So much of the poetry is a kind of extended exercise in self-communing. Much of her poetry was not published during her lifetime, so what we often read here is a kind of underground stream of writing, often sullen in temper in the manner of George Crabbe. Did she like nature? In some respects, she takes consolation of a kind from rural labour - its sheer, drudging purposefulness was somewhat akin to the way in which she practised her own life of writing. She persisted. Like the tramps which she writes about on a winter road, she had the courage and the resourcefulness to keep on going. But out of so much unhappiness, and in spite of the fact that she herself remained childless and unconsoled, by some miracle she managed to wrest many poems out of herself of a tremendous, consolatory power.
*
Life is a Dream: Forty Years Reading Poems Paul Durcan Harvill Secker £16.99 586pp.
Now here is the first interesting thing to note about this very substantial book of poetry: its title. Why should a book which gathers together forty years of published verse from umpteen separate collections specifically make reference to the act - and the fact - of reading those poems? Are not poems down there on the page to be read rather than absorbed in any other way? Did anyone in his or her right mind ever think otherwise?
It's not quite as simple as that. The title is referring to the fact that Paul Durcan's poems - more so than the poetry of any other poet of substance of whom I am aware - are given a peculiar life by the poet's own reading of them, and it is this undeniable fact of which the book's title wishes to remind us. Durcan is a brilliant, a spell-binding reader of his own work. I first heard him perhaps twenty years ago, and it was an unforgettable experience. He gathers a certain aura about him, like a magic cloak, when he reads, almost a sacred aura. It is as if he is totally, manically possessed by his own work. He reads with a mock-priest-like solemnity of delivery, never once referring to a printed text - they are all learnt by heart; they are all a part of him to a quite unusual degree - but the actual content is quite other than that manner of delivery. It is sheer, no-holds-barred humour of the most wonderfully bizarre and fanciful kind. The poems are serendipitous narratives, and often quite long, even quite shaggy-doggedly long from time to time. And Durcan himself, a lonely, misplaced creature, wholly and bewilderingly adrift in the universe ,is often at the heart of these narratives, skewering himself on his own blasted, crazed vision of the world.
So you could say that Durcan is a performance poet, could you? No, you could not quite say that either because to be a performance poet is something quite other than to be a poet for the page. Performance poetry, even the very best of it, seldom survives apart from its performance. It lives by the particular act of bringing it alive by means of the voice, and when you read it without that voice, when that voice is snatched away, and you are left alone with just the words for company, it seems thin and disappointing. The best example of this kind of a poet would be Linton Kwesi Johnson. His words can be spell-binding when carried on that voice and backed by a band, but not sufficiently rich to be read with much engagement when that voice leaves the stage to much raucous cheering.
Now the difficulty with Durcan is that, while he is not a performance poet of that thin and rather disappointing kind by any means, he is a performance poet in part. His poems, when viewed on the page, often have a shapelessness about them. Why are these lines being organised like this? We ask ourselves. It is also the case that Durcan's poems can be fairly hit and miss. Sometimes they work marvellously, at other times they seem flaccid or they peter away without having made much impact. You notice this much less when you are in the grip of a performer. So there are two things to say about this book.
One is that it is far too long for its own good. It should have been trimmed, severely. It is longer than the collected poems of W.B Yeats. It is longer than the collected poems of T. S. Eliot. It is longer than the collected poems of almost anyone barring W.H. Auden. It ought not to have been. And the second point wings us straight back to that issue of the book's title. If you are drawing attention to the poet as a performer, why not include a CD - or even a DVD - of the man performing, as other publishers do from time to time these days? It would have benefited this book enormously. It would have reminded all those who have not had the good fortune to see Durcan firing off on all pistons just what a tortured marvel he is when standing lonely in front of a crowd of rapt listeners.
*
A Genius for Failure: the life of Benjamin Robert Haydon Paul O'Keeffe Bodley Head £25
The painter Benjamin Robert Haydon was an exact contemporary of Wordsworth, Keats and Lamb, and some of the most vivid recollections of their lives and their conversations are to be found within the pages of Haydon's Autobiography, which he began to write late in life. Destiny, however, can be cruel. That Haydon should be remembered by posterity for his writings would have been an anathema to him. He regarded himself, first and foremost, as a history painter, on the grandest of grand scales, in an age when history painting was beginning to lose its importance. He dreamt of heroic subjects, and of great conceptions. He would be their equal. It was a matter of talent and destiny. He believed that god was on his side, that god approved of his strivings, and that god would enable him to triumph in the end. History painting and all that it represented meant everything to him, and he strove to succeed at it, quite obsessively, throughout his deeply troubled life, which ended in his sixty-first year with a particularly grotesque suicide.
His working methods were hopelessly self-destructive. A man of relatively poor sight, he worked ridiculously long hours in poor, dim light; he ate irregularly; his painting room was a perpetual fug of turps and paint fumes co-mingled. He found the great art which never failed to inspire him quite early on, and his allegiance to it never wavered thereafter - the Elgin Marbles, freshly arrived from Greece, and Raphael's Cartoons, which were then hanging at Hampton Court Palace. He had nothing but scorn for the idea of travelling to Italy.
Haydon, alas, a monstrously proud and egotistical Devonian (he grew up in Plymouth, amidst many stirring tales of naval heroics) was his own worst enemy. He picked quarrels with those who could have advanced his career, and reaped the cruel rewards of deserved neglect. When he found a cause - or some man - to tear at at, he would, like some frenzied dog, find it difficult to let go. But what destroyed him fundamentally were two things: a lack of talent to become what he believed it was his destiny to be, and an inability to live within his means. He suffered from the most tremendous delusions of grandeur. He piled up debt after debt after debt, and spent a good part of his life and his energies fending off those to whom he owed what would now be regarded as nothing less than a small fortune.
This is a good and thorough biography of the man, but it is far too long and too detailed. When we reach the point - and this happens fairly often - where Haydn has finished yet another enormous and unsaleable history painting, O'Keeffe will describe everything that we might have seen had we been present in front of it. It's all too much! And yet in some respects the book feels too little. It deals with the man and his paintings, one by one, year by year, exhaustively, but it says too little about the European context of the growth of Romanticism, and how Haydon himself was embedded within all this ferment of thinking and dealing.
The tragi-comedy which broke him - and much of his life was a kind of tragi-comedy - had to do with his yearning to embellish the walls of the newly re-built House of Lords with a cycle of frescoes on grand historical themes such as the birth of democracy and the merits of constitutional monarchy. He decided to mount an exhibition of two of the six great canvases with which he proposed to adorn their lordships' chamber at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, where he had had a success twenty-five years before. Alas, a touring American dwarf called Tom Thumb was performing elsewhere in the building, and Haydon's spectacle drew just a trickle of visitors. It was the final humiliation for this paranoid delusive. The only way out was to destroy himself. Never a man to do things by half, he shot himself, and then, having discovered that he was still conscious, he slit his throat, twice, first in one direction and then in the other.