Francis Spufford’s The Child that Books Built is out from Faber. He is working on a book about technology in Britain since the 1970s.
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print this articleFrom Stanley Smith
I read a pastiche from an Arctic land
That conjured Uncle Wiz from the dim distance
When poets swapped Lawn Tennyson for abandoned
mineshafts, pen and ink for flange and pistons.
I liked the lines; and certainly our Wystan’s
Verbal contraptions have worse flattery suffered
From francs-tireurs less frank than Francis Spufford.
But (echoing Robert Post upon Post-Modernism?)
He sends his letter to a man of letters
Reposted in the night mail of post-Audenism
From male in ’36, with all his tetters,
To next year’s unsexed text. Onlie begetters
End up – dear W.H.! – frustrate and vexed,
No body but a corpus’s pre-text.
The truth is, after Spain, his summer holiday
Went west, young man, in 1937,
Preferring to explore the safe Lunn Poly way
The crooks and nannies of eccentric Devon
With Uncle Dick, Tom Driberg and Nye Bevan,
In which, according to the Auden Annual,
His constant consort was a cocker spaniel.
Post-Modernists of course will argue time
Can move in ways the bourgeois find unnerving,
But Baudrillard himself might balk at rhyme
Dictating such anachronistic swerving
From fact to fiction as at least deserving
A magisterial sniff from Christopher Ricks:
‘Auden in Iceland: 1936’.
No patronymic mine to conjure with,
I sign myself,
Yours truly, Stanley Smith
P.S. Your correspondent rhymed ‘rely on’ with ‘Byron’. Actually, it rhymes with ‘Bion’.
Stanley Smith
Dundee University