Too Many Alibis

James Wood

Canaan by Geoffrey Hill
Penguin, 76 pp, £7.99, September 1996, ISBN 0 14 058786 1
The Truth of Love: A Poem by Geoffrey Hill
Penguin, 82 pp, £8.99, January 1997, ISBN 0 14 058910 4

Geoffrey Hill the poet is often washing his hands. Sensuous but deeply penitential, his poetry visits waves of scruple upon itself. No contemporary poet has a more contrite ear for the confessions, and the betrayals, of words. Of course, much great poetry has not worn this bent gesture, nor do we always want it to, and it can be irritating when Hill’s more pious admirers speak as if verse’s highest theme should be not the intolerable wrestle with words, but, as it were, a further wrestle with the wrestle. Thomas Mann, like Hill, an artist wary of the claims and capacities of art, lamented that his Doctor Faustus was ‘joylessly earnest, not artistically happy’, and Hill’s two new books certainly tread the gravel of the joyless.

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Vol. 21 No. 13 · 1 July 1999 » James Wood » Too Many Alibis (print version)
Pages 24-26 | 4524 words

Letters

From W.S. Milne

I may be mistaken (I hope not!) for one of 'Hill's more pious admirers', but I think James Wood is more than a little unfair in his estimations of Canaan and The Triumph of Love (LRB, 1 July). There are very beautiful sections in both books. I would single out for special attention the whole of 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis' (in Canaan), especially the end of section IV where Hans-Bernd von Haeften's courage is praised. It is von Haeften's 'persona', not Hill's 'personality', or some other supposed abstracted 'piety', which is at issue here: 'you were upheld/On the strong wings of the Psalms before you died./Evil is not good's absence but gravity's/Everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains/Inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.' The diction is inherited from Paradise Lost, but is replenished, modernised. The 'resistance' abides in the historic claim made by von Haeften's action. 'The irrefutable/grammar of Abdiel's defiance' lies in the German's determination not to be moved by falsity, not to be shaken, terrified, persuaded 'to swerve from the truth, or change his constant mind' in the face of Nazi diktats. The bravery the poet praises is secured wholly in limning von Haeften's deed, and not in any purported 'faith' the poet pretends to.

Taken side by side, the poems may seem 'at once magisterial and imbecile' – Hill's comment on the styles of John Bramhall and the first Earl of Clarendon in 'The Eloquence of Sober Truth', TLS, 11 June. Von Haeften's position can be seen as gravely commendable and exemplary, Hill's own, in comparison, as clownish, absurd, irrelevant, imbecilic: 'a voice considerably changed, strained, by the circumstances of the intervening half-century' since he started writing. If nothing else, Hill's stance shows a 'marked courtesy' to the subjects he chooses to memorialise. It is not that Hill is religious or not religious enough, as Wood contends; it is rather that he is not certain how much we, the readers, know about the religious dimension of our historical experience, and how that impinges on our everyday consciousness. It is easy to forget, after all, how much we owe to Luther, for example, for our stress on individual liberty. It was not so easy for the likes of von Haeften to forget, confronted as he was by the reality of Hitler's tyranny.

The image that comes to mind for Canaan and The Triumph of Love is that of a diptych: in the first book we have a picture, or writing-tablet, of the 'worthies', if you like, of European history; in the second, we have a scene of traduction, defamation and slander, both of the self and of others who are deemed to have fallen short on their promises. In The Triumph of Love the poet attempts 'to suppress and destroy that pride and self-conceit, which might tempt him to undervalue other men, and to plant that modesty and humility in himself, as would preserve him from such presumption' (Clarendon's words quoted approvingly by Hill in 'The Eloquence of Sober Truth'). He does not succeed in his aim in this volume. He opens the wounds which art elsewhere dresses. 'De Jure Belli ac Pacis' more successfully demonstrates the process whereby the 'curse' of being an artist is transmuted into the 'blessing' of having produced a work of art. You cannot have one without the other: you cannot have 'the wrestle with words' without the concomitant, existential wrestle with metaphysics itself.

W.S. Milne
Esher, Surrey