Mark Ford

D.J. Enright recently celebrated his 70th birthday. In commemoration, Oxford University Press have prepared a rather lean Selected Poems, and a volume of personal reminiscences and critical essays about Enright’s life and work by a variety of writers. This festschrift’s title, Life by Other Means, derives from an Enright poem called ‘Poetical Justice’ which muses rather more ambiguously on the relations between art and life than the stirring phrase might suggest in isolation.

‘Travelling,’ Jonathan Raban once remarked, ‘is inherently a plotless, disordered, chaotic affair, where writing insists on connection, order, plot, signification.’ Even the best contemporary travel writing is haunted by the self-consciousness that grows out of this contradiction. It’s embarrassing to read about seemingly spontaneous encounters with exotic people in far-flung countries, and then suddenly to remember that the whole thing has been set up just so the author can convert it into so much copy for his or her book.

In the original raree-show, of which this is a pale Imitation, phantoms swore and hurled mountains at each other;

Tiny, endless columns of red-jacketed soldiers Adjusted their busbys before attacking a farmhouse;

And ‘White Light/White Heat’ blared From bank upon bank of shuddering loudspeakers.

Now a vast customer complaints department Imposes everywhere its blinkered theories of...

I sit down here drinking hemlock While terrible things go on upstaris.

Sweat creeps like moss outward to the palms, And time itself now seems a strange, gauze-like medium.

Sleep will leave still newer scars each night, or, Infuriatingly, is a curtain that refuses to close.

On the horizon, bizarre consolations make themselves Known – a full fridge, a silent telephone,

The television...

May the 24th is Bob Dylan’s 50th birthday. To anyone involved with Dylan in the mid-Sixties, say during his medicine-fuelled blaze with the Band through Australia and Europe in 1966, the fact that he is not only alive but still performing twenty-five years later must in itself seem utterly extraordinary. One of the key aspects of the Dylan myth during those roller-coaster years was that he wouldn’t be around much longer. He was popping quantities of pills; he hardly ever slept; he seemed to provoke showdowns with any authority he could find. ‘He was Christ revisited,’ remarked an Australian actress he briefly took up with. On occasion Dylan himself explicitly tried on the martyr’s role: ‘I have a death-thing, I know …’ he told his official biographer Robert Shelton in one of his more revealing interviews, as if confiding to an apostle.