Martian Arts

Letters

Vol. 9 No. 15 · 3 September 1987

From Donald Davie

SIR: Jonathan Raban (LRB, 23 July), telling us that ‘in 1972 the “Poundian revolution” still looked as if it was carrying the world before it,’ alleges, as evidence of this, that ‘with his Essex Poems, even Donald Davie, the very type of the English conservative poet-critic, appeared to have capitulated to “American” Modernism.’ Though I don’t much like being ‘the very type’ of anything, still ‘English’ and ‘conservative’ and ‘poet-critic’ are so far as I’m concerned honorific descriptions. So I’m gratified. But my 1968 Essex Poems has by reasonably attentive readers been thought a great deal less ‘Modernist’ and less ‘Poundian’ than my Forests of Lithuania of 1959. Am I to infer that an English poet may legitimately be ‘Modernist’ when dealing with matters of Poland and Lithuania, but not when attending to the matter of Britain? And in any case is it ‘capitulation’ when an English and conservative poet shows himself aware of what his American contemporaries have been up to?

It is Raban’s precedent that forces me to put quotation-marks round ‘Modernist’. If I were to follow him further, I’d have to frame in a similar manner ‘revolution’ and ‘Poundian’ and ‘American’. Because of this caginess of his, it is hard to identify that filthy modern tide which by his account he and his fellow Canutes of the Review repelled so valiantly fifteen years ago. Carried inshore on that tide were, it seems, Williams’s Paterson, Bunting’s Briggflatts, Zukofsky’s A, Charles Olson’s Maximus, Ginsberg’s Howl; Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Kenneth Koch, Charles Tomlinson; also, mirabile dictu, Adrian Henri and Roger McGough, not to speak of the hapless Miriam Waddington. I don’t know where that leaves me, who have consistently written in support of Dorn and Tomlinson but have declared that life is too short for A; who have championed Briggflatts and execrated Paterson; who am currently in receipt of hate-mail from the US for refusing, in the New Republic earlier this year, to accept William Carlos Williams at the rate that some Americans demand for him. ‘Modernism’ (or ‘American Modernism’ or ‘Anglo-American Modernism’) is not the package-deal that Raban, like many others, would persuade us can be either accepted or rejected outright. Raban and Ian Hamilton and perhaps Gavin Ewart think Modernism is something they have triumphantly ‘seen off’: they should be cautious – in the history of poetry fifteen years is no time at all.

Donald Davie
Silverton, near Exeter

Jonathan Raban writes: Professor Davie’s points are fairly made, and I am sorry that I gave him cause to detect a gloating note in my review of recent books of British verse. I did not mean to sound ‘triumphant’ at the ‘seeing-off’ of ‘Modernism’. Nor was I trying to play at being King Canute, though I was registering a bystander’s surprise at how far out the tide now seems to be in this country. As a keen observer of tides, I know very well how hard it is to mark the difference between the last of the ebb and the first of the flood.

Vol. 9 No. 16 · 17 September 1987

From Geoffrey Minish

SIR: Jonathan Raban, in his landmark survey of contemporary British verse (LRB, 23 July), refers to the ‘State of Poetry’ symposium that appeared in the final issue of the Review. He is amused at the way some contributors – he quotes Roy Fuller and Julian Symons – fumed over American Modernists and their Liverpudlian acolytes. But Mr Raban neglects to mention that he, too, was a contributor. Like this: ‘American poetry sometimes seems given over to telling (rather than showing) us that it’s tremendously powerful stuff … the Liverpool Scene … like the Wimpyburger, was a dim English emulation of the way they do things in the States, and was largely famous for being famous.’ Or this: ‘It’s surely clear now that the wham-bang, big-time American style of poetry, whether Black Mountain, West Coast, New York School, or whatever, has been a matter of bold election promises, little more.’ Or again: ‘As a community of poetry readers we’ve proved ourselves to be flibberty-gibbets and sad-sacks, bedazzled by dollars and Cadillacs.’

Mr Raban’s prose has come on a little since 1972, but not his taste. Does he think that a weak poem by Miriam Waddington and a feeble parody by Gavin Ewart settle the question? Reading Mr Raban, I again wondered why it is considered a trifle philistine, even in England, to complain about modern art, but civic-minded to deplore modernist poetry. (Because there is no Painter Laureate, perhaps?) Actually, I am wrong: the exemplary Philip Larkin hated Modernism right across the board, gloomily detecting a ‘compulsion on every modernist to wade deeper and deeper into violence and obscenity’. Filthy Mondrian.

Geoffrey Minish
Paris

Vol. 9 No. 20 · 12 November 1987

From C.A. Latimer

SIR: Something should be done to rehabilitate the reputation of King Canute. Perhaps a ‘hands off Canute’ movement. He was a very intelligent, able and successful king, but the only purpose for which he is mentioned now is to illustrate the sort of ignorant obtuseness, joined with vanity, which he was seeking to combat on that famous tidal occasion. Presumably his courtiers got the message, but no one since seems to have done. The episode has been turned on its head so that to be ‘a King Canute’ has come to mean the opposite of the man himself. Jonathan Raban and Donald Davie (Letters, 3 September) are both educated men, so why do they do it?

In spite of Michael Hulse’s protestations (Letters, 15 October) the words ‘Commonwealth writing’ are as exciting to the average general reader in this country as the words ‘tinned prunes’. If the time comes when Kingsley Amis gives way in the bookshops to the latest offering from Canada or wherever, it will not be because the British have become less ‘sniffy’, or because the ‘residual British superiority complex’ has finally expired, but because they are a better read. It is difficult to determine what Mr Hulse wants. He admits that ‘the situation has improved immeasurably in recent years.’ If it has improved so much that it cannot be measured, what further improvement does he look for? He goes on to write: ‘if the books are to be read, let them be read because they are as good as (or better than) books by other writers, not because they happen to be written in Melbourne or Toronto.’ Exactly so.

C.A. Latimer
Woodbridge, Suffolk