John Kerrigan

‘The Professor was not always right,’ declared H.D. after analysis in Vienna. Her judgment seems rather generous. Reading her Tribute to Freud, one can’t ignore the emotional and interpretative coercion that went on at 19 Berggasse under the name of science. To an alarming degree, theory preempted argument. H.D. had been abandoned by her husband, Richard Aldington, for another woman, during a difficult pregnancy in which mother and child seemed doomed; her love affair with the feminist Bryher was fraught; writing set up its own strains: but Freud already knew, amid this welter of anxieties, what really worried the patient. Had he not just shown, in the lecture on ‘Femininity’ (1933), that women are driven by a penis-envy which may be sublimated into some vague desire for intellectual achievement but which can only be allayed by bearing a child, preferably male, as phallus? If H.D. dreamt of a princess stepping down towards water, to find and protect a baby, while she stood by as witness, did this not demonstrate the patient’s longing to possess the penis? Never mind the trauma of childbirth. Did it not recall the finding among bullrushes of that founder who had fascinated Freud since his 1914 essay on Michelangelo’s Moses? Well of course this hadn’t occurred to H.D. Freud, after all, had thought harder than she had about totemic leaders with rebellious followers – like Adler and Jung – and he, not the patient, was gestating Moses and Monotheism. In short, it’s hard to know where to look when H.D. regrets the death of Freud’s disciple, Van der Leeuw, and the master replies: ‘You have come to take his place.’ Someone had to; the succession needed securing; naturally, ‘the Professor insisted I myself wanted to be Moses … a boy … a hero.’’

Professor Vendler’s soul is in peril. Reviewing Black American broadsides in 1974, she found it ‘sinful that anthologies and Collected Works should betray the poems they print by jamming them together and running them into one another.’ Yet here is her Faber Book, a self-confessed anthology which, attempting to present 35 poets ‘whole’, aspires to be a collection of Collecteds. Probably we should leave the editor alone with her conscience and just be grateful to have the poems. But a hostile finger must be pointed at the publishers, who have produced a tome so stoutly handsome that it’s hard to tear the pages out to read the texts as broadsides. An unsewn paperback would ease this problem.

August is the cruellest month, breeding tailbacks on the Dover Road and logjams in every departure lounge. Travel reverts to travail, stirring dull roots in trepalium – that classical ‘instrument or engine of torture’ now known as the ‘chartered jet’ or ‘transcontinental sleeper’. Driven by some collective urge, we flock abroad and return two weeks later exhausted and ready for a holiday. Why post-industrial man should display such ritualised migratory behaviour already seems mysterious. And future archaeologists will find our tourist networks as baffling as the Songlines which stretch across aboriginal Australia. At which point, they should turn to the poets. For just as the Songlines are, to use Bruce Chatwin’s image, ‘a spaghetti of Iliads and Odysseys, writhing this way and that, in which every “episode” [is] readable’, so the quick and shallow tracks of tourism retrace our oldest myths, revisiting ancient holy sites, seeking out a palm-fringed paradise, ploughing in hydrofoils across the wine-dark Aegean.’

In Irish poetry, from Ó Rathaille to the rebel songs, a paradigmatic encounter recurs. Up on a hill, or down by the glenside, the poet meets a woman who celebrates Ireland’s pastand speaks of national redemption. This emblematic figure, often glimpsed in a vision or ‘aisling’, can be a glamorous maiden awaiting her Stuart prince, but she also appears as the ‘poor old woman’ of the patriotic ballads. Whether praising the sacrifices of ‘the bold Fenian men’ or complaining (after 1921) of the bondage which shackles one of her ‘four green fields’, this plangent yet bloodthirsty crone is as worn a cultural token as those related feminine stereotypes, Dark Rosaleen and Cathleen Ní Houlihan. In the rapidly modernising Ireland of satellite TV and legalised divorce, she might seem an exhausted figment. Remarkably, however, the Shan Van Vocht keeps cropping up in verse, as though poets hoped that renewed encounters could release the energies still locked in archaic nationalism, and clarify relations between patriotic sentiment and sexual politics.

Since the publication of Roy Fisher’s sequence City, in 1961, his work has been praised by fellow poets, but his refusal to strike marketable postures, during a period in which reaching an audience has increasingly depended on a poet’s willingness to do so, has kept him relatively unknown. This neglect is the more understandable given Fisher’s publication history. Many of his early pieces were circulated in fugitive pamphlets. Like the Collected Poems of 1968, the superbly crafted Matrix (1971) was published by Fulcrum Press – a by-word, in those Movement-dominated times, for what was taken to be wayward experimentalism. Only with The Thing about Joe Sullivan (1978), published by Carcanet, and two OUP editions of his collected poems (1980 and 1988), did Fisher turn to houses equipped to reach ‘mainstream’ readers. Now he has gone the way of all poets and taken his selected works to Bloodaxe. It is to be hoped that The Dow Low Drop will not be lost in the sheer bulk of that outfit’s throughput – though it would somehow be typical of Fisher if his gesture towards a popular readership proved yet another route to self-effacement.’