Poetry and Exhaustion

I recently wrote an article for The Redbrick, the student newspaper at the University of Birmingham, which talked about how poetry is received nowadays. This includes thoughts from Simon Armitage who read from  his new book Walking Home  at an event organised by Birmingham's Book Festival.

The resilience of poetry in the modern world is an exhausted topic, but it won’t go away regardless of how many times it’s discussed. It could be thought that examining its role gives it vitality; if it’s being debated then it surely still exists in our conscience and has an important part to play in life. When Michael Gove announced last June that he intended to introduce the recital of poetry for children in primary school on the national curriculum it seemed like an attempt to resuscitate an interest in poetry by indoctrinating people at a young age. However this treatment doesn’t do poetry any favours. Not because suggesting that its popularity is wavering is an acknowledgement of it as an ebbing art form, but because the perception of poetry as a rival to X-factor or iPhones is a fallacy. It’s much healthier to see poetry as something that runs parallel to all of this; something which adapts to the present day and remains significant to those who seek it. This perception was put to the test recently by poet Simon Armitage who in his most recent book, Walking Home, stretched the lengths of its value. Travelling as a modern troubadour along the 256-mile Pennine Way, he relied on his poetry as currency, replacing Pound Sterling with verse.

Starting in Kirk Yetholm on the Scottish border, traditionally the end of the route, Armitage gave poetry readings in village halls and church function rooms in return for board and lodging as he made his way to the Derbyshire village of Edale via his home in Marsden, Yorkshire. After each of these readings a sock was passed around as a receptacle for donations, allowing each person to give their own personal valuation. At the end of 19 days, with 18 readings conducted, Armitage accumulated a gross profit of £3,086.42. At a simple glance this quantifiable figure may be enough to say that ‘yes, poetry still remains an important concept amongst people.’ So much so that someone is able to earn (according to Armitage’s sums) £1.11 above minimum wage, which is even more impressive when one considers this was done in villages with relatively small populations. However greater testimony to the undwindling appreciation of poetry can be seen amongst those who travelled with Armitage on his route. Most of them there were strangers who endeavoured the challenging terrain and temperamental weather simply for the chance to accompany one of the country’s most popular contemporary poets.

Speaking last Friday at an event put on by Birmingham’s Book Festival at Adrian Boult Hall, Armitage stated the journey made him feel that his chosen art form had been validated. ‘I’ve always wanted to appeal to anybody and everybody with my poems. Whether that’s somebody who is studying literary criticism with a scalpel or whether that’s somebody picking up a book of poems for the first time. It is an impossible ambition, but a worthy one I think, and in that respect I felt that there was still an appetite out there for somebody saying things in, what I hope is, a memorable way.’

Armitage’s desire to appeal to anybody and everybody is admirable, as is his acknowledgement that not everybody will be drawn to it. It’s treating poetry not as an essential part of life, but something that is readily available. It can be seen in his own experience with poetry; he wasn’t entrenched amongst literature all his life, he studied geography at university and then went on to work as a probation officer. His passion for language and poetry was helped by being exposed to it at school, but its growth was organic, rather than it being forced upon him. ‘I started being interested in poetry when I was about 14 or 15 at school and we started reading Ted Hughes’ work. Up to that point I was asleep, I thought the world wasn’t a very interesting place. Those Hughes poems woke me up, and they woke me up to language and the power of language.’

The other night I asked him what his thoughts were on Gove’s plans and how he thinks poetry should be administered within the education system. ‘I think it’s good to be exposed to good things at school, that’s how I got in to poetry. But my feeling is you need to find or to be shown the poems which are meaningful or exciting to them and my worry about what Michael Gove was saying is that we’ll all be forced to recite ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’. If it’s about giving people the access to forms of language which they understand, which excites them, or gets their imaginations going and is meaningful to them in some way rather than completely alienating and putting them off poetry forever, then I’m completely in favour of it.’

Armitage has recently been involved with a project called ‘Stanza Stones’ which saw the placement of stones engraved with his poetry throughout rural Yorkshire. The depth of the engraving on these particular stones means that they’ll remain there for at least a 1,000 years. This innovative display of public art acts as the perfect metaphor for poetry. It will always be there, it is there to be read just as the Pennine Way is there to be walked. However it must be approached, rather than forced upon people, otherwise it’s an unwelcomed challenge.

Simon Armitage's Walking Home
Faber & Faber
£16.99

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The Sun Also Rises

This summer I was between universities and was finally able to read something I chose myself, rather than it being on a reading list. The first book I read independent of a degree was The Sun Also Rises (1926) by Ernest Hemingway. I had been planning on reading for a long time and found it liberating to be able to read something without a deadline looming in the distance. Whilst I enjoyed reading a lot of the books on my course, this was a different kind of enjoyment. I wasn’t constricted to a certain time limit, nor did I feel I had an agenda whilst reading – I wasn’t looking at how Hemingway presents European cities, or reading it amongst feminist theory. I had carte blanche on how to approach it. So the experience was less focused, but I could attain a panoramic vision of the novel.

I hadn't read any Hemingway before this but I had been eager to. I accumulated an impression of him through various sources, such as conversations with friends, reading snippets about him and also the Any Human Heart TV series, which is brilliant and something all people should watch. The impression I had of Hemingway was reinforced by his writing. It was indeed full of drinking, boxing and bull fighting and so the 'man's man' image of Hemingway continued to exist for me. But at the same time there was an ever present feeling of disillusionment and loss which accompanied the protagonist Jake Barnes and his circle of friends - a tension in the book which is constantly felt and rarely seen. I saw Hemingway's young, rich and lost generation of the interwar period as a blend of Evelyn Waugh's degenerate and debauched Bright Young Things, and Jean Rhys's troubled Sasha Jensen in Good Morning, Midnight (1939).

The decadence of Jake Barnes' circle of friends meant that they very rarely fell into boredom, especially that which is invoked by lack of money; perhaps a state of exhaustion or a sense of tediousness in their actions, but never genuine boredom – Jake Barnes always seemed happy to go fishing in the middle of nowhere or fraternise with the locals and drink wine. This is where we can see parallels with Waugh's depiction of the Bright Young Things in Vile Bodies (1930). Adam Fenwick-Symes’ group of friends gallivant through the streets of London, using places such as the Ritz as nothing more than rest stops, and 10 Downing St. as a party retreat. Both groups lived their lives as well as they could; jazz and drinking, debauchery and perversion - anything to allow them to ignore – to forget – the pain of that the first half of the twentieth century brought and instead enjoy life.

However there is a huge difference in the characterisation and the way that the generations are presented. The Sun Also Rises attains far greater depth, and the characters are more human than those in Vile Bodies who are better described as caricatures. This distinction in the presentation of both parties simmers own to one of the key differences which is their involvement in the war.

Those in The Sun Also Rises have experienced the war, such as Jake who was in fact wounded and whose wound serves as a physical reminder of the persistent devastation the war has had, particularly to the individual. The Bright Young Things’s generation have avoided this – their anxiety comes from living in the wake of The Great War, which they were too young to experience, and the shadow of World War II which loomed in the distance. They were living in Eliot’s Wasteland and stood on the precipice to further disaster. Not only that but their generation was sandwiched between their fathers and their sons who experience these, but they will see but not be involved. They lack that opportunity for 'glory' which was so valued amongst the upper-classes, and in fact all of Britain during their lives.

In my opinion this why Waugh could not convey the omnipresent anxiety or trauma of interwar Europe as well as Hemingway could. Possibly because the experience of war carries with it far more suffering than the potential of a war, but it could also be that Waugh was in fact part of the generation that had avoided the war (at least at the time Vile Bodies was published, he did later fight in the Second World War). He was a BYT and Hemingway a veteran, and the audience that they wrote for was completely different. Waugh didn’t want to concern himself with war – in fact in Vile Bodies when war had broken out, it was experienced in the back of a car drinking champagne.

When The Sun Also Rises was published at a time when people where only just becoming ready to talk about the effect it left in the lives of those who had experienced it. Some novels such as Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) did write about the post traumatic stress it invoked, but it wasn’t really until the late twenties when it became ‘acceptable’ (for want of a better word) to talk about what had happened, and how it had changed life as it was once known. Wilfred Owen, whose poetry defines the literary output of the war for so many people, had only a handful of poems published before his death in 1918, and only gained notoriety in the late twenties.

Now the comforting forgetful snow was melting; the mood was changing and at the same time so was the literature. One couldn’t ignore what happened, but it was still difficult to express it. Richard Aldington claimed in 1926 that ‘those who have attempted to convey any real war experience, sincerely, unsentimentally, avoiding any ready-made attitudes (pseudo-heroic or pacifist or quasi-humorous) must have felt the torturing sense of something incommunicable.’[1] Here we stumble upon one of the great strengths of Hemingway and The Sun Also Rises – the subtlety of his writing and the huge impact it has. The 'Iceberg Theory' associated with Hemingway's writing is explained in Death in the Afternoon (1932): 'if a writer of prose knows enough of what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them.'[2]

As I said before, there’s a feeling of constant tension in the book which is always felt, but rarely seen. The tension truly emerges in the scenes between Jake and Lady Brett Ashley, who share a love affair hampered by the wound Jake sustained in the war that has afflicted his sex life. The moments of privacy they share are limited to only a few scenes, and when they speak there’s no huge outburst of feelings, but we quickly understand the torment they experience from not being able to be together, and the damage the war has left. We realise that, like Vile Bodies, the carpe diem philosophy is a way of forgetting – of ignoring the anguish and the damage that the war had inflicted upon the individual. It was now starting to permeate into the consciousness of the world. It couldn’t be forgotten by those who had experienced it and who were still living with the consequences. That’s why Hemingway could present the anxiety far better than Waugh, even if it wasn’t explicitly expressed.

By the time Good Morning, Midnight is published Europe had two decades to come to terms with the destruction of war, and was now holding its breath before plunging into another. There was no longer an abashed attitude to the way the individual suffers, and modernist literature, in particular, was able to communicate suffering in one of the truest ways known to the art world. Good Morning, Midnight deals with the isolation and estrangement of Sasha Jenson in interwar Paris. Almost certainly her experiences capture the emotions of many. Like Jake and the BYTs, Sasha attempts to live a life devoid of tragedy and tries to move on from the pain that she had suffered, but for her it can’t be done. Like Jake she is scarred both physically and emotionally, but unlike Jake we are able to see how entrenched the psychological issues are upon her personality, and the effects it has on her daily life.

What I meant earlier about The Sun Also Rises acting like a blend of Vile Bodies and Good Morning, Midnight can be summed up by comparing one another through something all books have in common, which is a heavy reliance on alcohol. If one was to read The Sun Also Rises alongside Vile Bodies one may be able to attribute the large quantities of Spanish wine being drunk to the urge to have a good time, to enjoy life and indeed being Hemingway-esque. This would be the visible 10% of the iceberg. However, if it was to be read alongside Good Morning, Midnight then the rest of the iceberg would be far more visible, the sadness of Jake Barnes’ life much more prominent. This is what I loved about The Sun Also Rises, how it truly captured the many levels of human emotion, and the fact that it could be read multiple times and each time feeling new. It’s not something you can accumulate by watching Any Human Heart, no matter how brilliant it is.

[1] Richard Aldington, ‘Review of Herbert Read’s In Retreat’ in Criterion 4 (1926).

[2] Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 2002), p. 154.

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Preface

I started a blog about my experiences with literature in 2010, but when writing it I felt even then that my reasons for doing so were based in self-promotion and vanity. This is evident in the way that I talked about books that I had read. I wrote about books from the canon as if they were obscure, and that through my insight they would be given the credit they deserved. I thought it would have the same success as http://anobservist.blogspot.co.uk/ which saw its author, a dear friend of mine, go to the Venice Film Festival through the strength of her blog. Sadly I did not, and I didn't carry on writing it. A brief stint as literature editor of [SMITHS] saw me write a few more articles, and I enjoyed seeing them in print, but I look back at them and realise that they were flip, they were glib, they were journalism.

I begin again, hopefully with a humbler tone and a more honest approach to what I experienced, rather than writing something which simply reinforces the criticism that comes hand in hand with the novel. Though I'm also aware it would be similarly damaging to ignore this. What I write may be banal or insightful, juvenile or academic. It may even be educational to some, at least I hope to impart some wisdom however useful it may or may not be. But really the aim of my blog is to further engage with what I had just read, rather than to gloss over it. Arguably the introspective agenda may be said to hark back to my previous experiment, but I'm a little older and experienced now, and I am more conscious of what I write. I'm relying on this awareness to displace the pompous style which plagued my last blog.

Unfortunately It may be a while until I can do this completely independently; I have just started an MA in literature at the University of Birmingham and so a considerable amount of what I write about will be from the reading list and will quite possibly reek of rehashed criticism from seminars, and not really comment upon anything other than literature from 1880-1940. But hopefully not all… no, not all indeed.

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