Subjects

Letters

Vol. 5 No. 21 · 17 November 1983

From John Lucas

SIR: Craig Raine is right (LRB, Vol. 5, No 18). Subject-matter cannot be considered apart from style. What you write about is utterly dependent for its success on how you write about it. If this weren’t so then every halting piece of doggerel in the obituary columns of local newspapers could claim kinship with, say, Ben Jonson’s great poem on the death of his first son. Donald Davie says some-where that a poet may try to disarm criticism by his obvious sincerity, and he cites as an example of this Stephen Spender’s ‘I think continually of those who are truly great.’ Can you bear to be critical of a poem that starts with such a line? Well, yes, you can. In fact I can report that its sheer inanity makes me double up with laughter as soon as I think of it. (Which is not continually: I ration myself to once or twice a year, or whenever the going gets rough.)

On the other hand, I think Mr Raine is wrong when he implies that those who admire Tony Harrison’s work do so uncritically. His subject-matter appeals to the upwardly mobile, Raine says, but shouldn’t they take notice of Harrison’s flaws: shouldn’t they, for example, ‘reject that padding “all”, even while they reluctantly accept the decorum of the cliché: “Your life’s all shattered into smithereens”? Not to mention the awkward rhyme, “between ’s”, which boldly attempts vernacular, though the actual phrase remains maladroitly formal: “what’s still between”.’ I don’t see why acceptance of the decorum of that cliché has to be ‘reluctant’. More importantly, though, I disagree that ‘all’ is padding. The word is frequently used in demotic speech as a means of adding emphasis. Two examples from my local pub, both of them overheard yesterday: ‘I was all covered in mud.’ ‘You could see she was all upset.’ In Harrison’s poem the word is so deployed as to imply the speaker’s desire to get back to a language that father and son can share, because it is the indicator of a shared emotional life. But of course books have come between them, hence the maladroit formality of the phrase ‘What’s still between’, which perfectly well suggests how difficult the speaker finds it to come to terms with his father. (Cliché intended.) The clumsinesses and hesitations of style are what the poem is about, and Craig Raine’s criticisms seem to me no more than an accurate description of certain of its effects. You can surely only object to Harrison’s tactics if you accept Yvor Winter’s view that to imitate speech rhythms and idiomatic phrases must always be wrong; and I cannot believe that Mr Raine would wish to identify with so ridiculous a notion.

Of course, the danger with my approach is that it can be a way of defending the indefensible, or of sheltering behind the absurdity of Susan Sontag’s ‘integrity of badness’. I don’t at all want to do that and I will agree that Harrison is sometimes clumsy in stylistically indefensible ways – as is Peter Porter. Yet I’m bothered by what seems to be an underlying assumption in Craig Raine’s extremely clever review: that questions of style can be referred to some kind of English equivalent of the French Academy because the nation as a whole will accept an inflexible propriety in such matters. No doubt there are those who would like us to believe that this is the case. The history of the editing of John Clare is a particularly damning example of what happens when that belief is put to the test.

John Lucas
Beeston, Notts

Craig Raine writes: I am grateful to John Lucas for his thoughtful letter. Initially, I was so convinced by its citation of local dialect (‘I was all covered in mud’ and ‘you could see she was all upset’) that I was prepared to stand corrected. Those two phrases are obviously authentic. There can be no argument about them. But is the same true of the phrase I quoted from Harrison’s poem: ‘Your life’s all shattered into smithereens’? I think not. The phrase is ‘smashed to smithereens’, isn’t it? And the line could have read: ‘Your life’s all smashed to smithereens’ or ‘Your life is smashed to smithereens.’ Either would have been authentic. Both would have been two syllables short for an iambic pentameter, though. What Harrison has written doesn’t ring true at all: ‘shattered into smithereens’ is a very decorous version of the cliché, half demotic, half literary. At the very best, it is an awkward conflation of two phrases, commonly used, though never simultaneously: ‘he was completely shattered by what happened’ and ‘it was smashed to smithereens.’ Obviously, you could attempt to justify Harrison’s procedure by saying that the upwardly mobile poet no longer has a precise grasp of dialect idiom – that he is deliberately demonstrating how rarefied he has become. But you have to be very rarefied indeed not to know a phrase which, after all, is only restricted to the entire British Isles. It is a mistake a foreigner might make. Surely Harrison has tampered with the standard phrase to fill out his iambic pentameter. Given that, the authenticity of ‘all’ as a dialect intensive is beside the point. In this context, it merely adds to one’s doubts. I feel the same way about Harrison’s ‘what’s still between’. My original description was ‘maladroitly formal’. In fact, the phrase is scarcely English at all. One might say: ‘what’s still between us is’. Harrison prefers ‘what’s still between is’ – again for metrical reasons. This time he has one syllable too many, so ‘us’ is eliminated and ‘is’ elided. And he ends with ‘what’s still between’, an absurdly stilted phrase that is required by the exigencies of his formal conceit about the book ends, but not by any requirement of the English language. Neither he, nor his father, nor anyone, would ever use it. Except in a poem.