Cultural Cohesion (16 page)

And the not-so-young, too: when he wrote this Roethke was thirty-two years old, which is a bit late to get knocked sideways by another voice. A year later (the editor says “probably”) he enclosed another sub-Auden effort in a letter to Dorothy Gordon.

In 1939 he had written to Louise Bogan: “Oh, why am I not smart like Auden?” Too much of his first volume,
Open House
, revealed his success in getting smart
exactly
like Auden. In being able to add these unpublished poems to the Auden-influenced poems in
Open House
, what we have is not an improved case—the case must be made on the evidence of the published volume alone—but a broadened field of study in which to observe something strange and rather terrible going on: something more intimately bound in with Roethke's neuroses, I suspect, than has yet been realized. Admiration, emulation and, always, aspiration, as the perpetual
doppelgänger
tries to catch up with the
zeitgeist
. A career conceived of as staying level with the leaders.

Evidently the Dylan Thomas influence was in the wind as early as 1947, although it shows to full effect only in the volume
Praise to the End!
which came out in 1951. Writing to John Sargent, his editor at Doubleday, Roethke made a few suggestions about how to flog a batch of poems to
Harper's Bazaar
.

As you say, these people are very name-conscious. If Aswell [of
Harper's Bazaar
. C.J.] got the idea that Auden, Bogan, Burke, Martha Graham, W. C. Williams, Shapiro, etc., think these are fresh and exciting, she would jump at the scheme, I think. Auden, for instance, liked this last one best; read it over four or five times, kept saying “This is extremely good,” etc. The last part,—the euphoric section,—made him think of Traherne, as I remember: no “influence” but the same kind of heightened tone, I think he meant. I mention this because Aswell is currently on a Dylan Thomas jag: sees that Welshman in everything. If she trots out his name, give her the admirable Bogan's dictum. Said that eminent poet and critic: “You do what Thomas thinks he does.”

This letter is crucial in several ways. First of all it shows that Roethke was aware, and wary, that an accusation of Thomas-influence might be made. Second it shows that Roethke was beginning to develop defence mechanisms; in this case the
common ancestor
, the pre-modern poet who perhaps influenced both him and the man he could be accused of copying. A month later he was writing to John Crowe Ransom: “But I am nobody's Dylan: I never went to school to him. If there's an ancestor, it's Traherne (the prose).”

By 1948 the Thomas-Traherne connection is firmly installed as a mental tic, and he writes to Babette Deutsch:

An eminent lady poet said, “You do what Thomas thinks he does.” The remark seems unnecessary: I do what I do; Thomas does what he does. My real ancestors, such as they are, are the bible, Mother Goose, and Traherne.

Unnecessary as it may have been to the field of critical judgement, Bogan's remark was obviously vitally necessary to Roethke's estimation of himself. In the letters at least there is no further sign of the common ancestor until 1959, when a letter from Mr. Mills proposing a book on Roethke incidentally triggers off the whole notion again. Mr. Mills regrettably does not include his own letter but says in a footnote that he had mentioned to Roethke that “certain parts of ‘Meditations of an Old Woman' seemed to contain parodies of Eliot; however, I did not mean to be understood as thinking the individual poems or the group of them constituted mere parodies.” Mr. Mills's footnote reads with the beautiful sincerity of a collector writing to van Meegeren and mentioning that certain sections of the Vermeer seem to be reacting strangely to X-rays, but let that pass. What counts is Roethke's reply.

(I'm oversimplifying: what I want to say is that
early
, when it really matters, I read, and really read, Emerson (prose mostly), Thoreau, Whitman, Blake, and Wordsworth; Vaughan and real slugs of dramatic literature—Jacobeans, Congreve, & W.S., of course.) My point is this: I came to some of Eliot's and Yeats's ancestors long before I came to them; in fact, for a long time, I rejected both of them. . . . So what in the looser line may seem in the first old lady poem to be close to Eliot may actually be out of Whitman, who influenced Eliot
plenty
, technically (See S. Musgrove, T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman, U. of New Zealand Press—again not the whole truth, but a sensible book.)—and Eliot, as far as I know, has never acknowledged this—oh no, he's always chi-chi as hell: only Dante, the French, the Jacobeans, etc. My point: for all his great gifts, particularly of the ear, Eliot is not honest, in final terms, even about purely technical matters. It's here I guess your point about the
parody
element comes in—though I hate to call such beautiful (to my mind) poems mere parodies.

To get this interchange between novice and guru down to ground level, all we have to do is look at “Meditations of an Old Woman” (
Words for the Wind
, 1958). Here are some sample fragments, easily flaked off:

Roethke's subject matter is nominally different from Eliot's, but the forms are the same, with the result that he is using somebody else's poetry to write with. It's in this sense that Roethke is a representative modernist—he can write in all the modern styles that matter, at the price of writing very little that matters. To be a fan of Roethke's it is necessary to have read nothing else. In the same letter to Mr. Mills Roethke goes on to say:

I can take this god damned high style of W.B.Y. or this Whitmanesque meditative thing of T.S.E. and use it for other ends, use it as well or better. Sure, a tough assignment. But while Yeats' historical lyrics seem beyond me at the moment, I'm damned if I haven't outdone him in the more personal or love lyric. Why Snodgrass is a damned earless ass when he sees Yeats in those love-poems. . . . Teckla Bianchini, one of W. H. Auden's closest friends and a woman of unimpeachable verity, told me on the beach at Ischia that Wystan had said that at one point he was worried that I was getting too close to Yeats, but now he no longer did because I had outdone him, surpassed him, gone beyond him. Well, let's say
this
is too much, in its way . . .

Somewhere between the “god damned high style” and “the Whitmanesque meditative thing” most of Roethke's later poetry got lost.

Roethke's difficult life was full of worries about his tenure at each and every one of his many universities, forcing him to seek and circulate testimonials to his teaching abilities: there are enough of these in the book to convince anyone that he must have been a remarkable teacher. Against this must be put his applications (which Mr. Mills unwisely includes) for Guggenheims, Fulbrights, and sojourns under the wing of the Corporation of Yaddo. They make destructive reading. Roethke waited a long time to be accepted as a poet, and when he had been could never accept that it had happened: he was always waiting for the final reassurance—a common trait in people who are uncertain of their work. No amount of Pulitzers, or even Nobels, can satisfy a need like that. In a way the critics who see him as a casualty of the age are right—it's only the context that they've got wrong. He was a casualty of the American age of the Career in the Arts, an age which has even managed to industrialize the traditional rhetoric of the practising artist and so decorate in eternal terms what is really a vulgar struggle for preferment.

Times Literary Supplement
, 1970

POSTSCRIPT

Put together, these two pieces look now like a single dance on a lonely grave. Certainly the vocabulary was too harsh: “condemn,” “contempt,” “loathing” are strong words springing from a weak conception of the critical task, which is not that of a vigilante—the Leavisite
odium theologicum
must have got into me even when I had publicly dedicated myself to keeping it out. But there was still good reason to question Roethke's reputation: it had been brought into existence by his ambition, and criticism soon dies if the artistic will is taken for the deed, whereupon the art dies too. It was care for poetry, I like to think, that made me so careless about a poet's feelings—and just because he was dead was of course no good reason for speaking as if he couldn't hear. If I would be more tactful now, it might be because the passion is gone. There is also the possibility that although I wanted my own poetry to go a different way, it depended on a parodic element, so I didn't want to allow an unconscious use of what I proposed to use consciously. Critics who write poetry themselves, on however diffident a scale, always shape their criticism to personal poetic ends as well as universal critical ones, though they do better with the second thing if they acknowledge the first. There is at least one glaring falsity of tone: “It will need to be done by a first-rate man” can only mean “I would do it myself but I haven't got the time,” so it was not a judicious thing to say. But on the whole I would say all this the same way now. If poetry and the criticism of it had agreed standards there would be less bitchery. As things are and will probably always be, the whole field is as inherently contentious as ice-dancing: the judges can never be popular, especially when they invade the rink.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1992

7

CHARLES JOHNSTON'S
CATACOMB GRAFFITI

Poems and Journeys
by Charles Johnston
Eugene Onegin
by Aleksandr Pushkin,
translated by Charles Johnston

Appearing unannounced in 1977, Charles Johnston's verse rendering of
Eugene Onegin
established itself immediately as the best English translation of Pushkin's great poem there had yet been. It was an impressive performance even to those who could not read the original. To those who could, it was simply astonishing, not least from the technical angle: Johnston had cast his
Onegin
in the
Onegin
stanza, a form almost impossibly difficult in English, and had got away with it. Only an accomplished poet could think of trying such a feat. Yet as a poet Charles Johnston was scarcely known. Indeed, his profile was not all that high even as Sir Charles Johnston, career diplomat and quondam High Commissioner for Australia. All the signs pointed to gentlemanly dilettantism—all, that is, except the plain fact that anyone who can convey even a fraction of Pushkin's inventive vitality must have a profoundly schooled talent on his own account.

Now a small volume of Johnston's own creations, called
Poems and Journeys
, has quietly materialized, in the unheralded manner which is obviously characteristic of its author. It seems that most of the poems it contains previously appeared in one or other of two even smaller volumes,
Towards Mozambique
(1947) and
Estuary in Scotland
(1974), the second of which was printed privately and the first of which, though published by the Cresset Press, certainly created no lasting impression in the literary world. The poems were written at various times between the late 1930s and now. There are not very many of them. Nor does the Bodley Head seem to be acting in any more forthcoming capacity than that of jobbing printer. “Published for Charles Johnston by the Bodley Head” sounds only one degree less bashful than issuing a pamphlet under your own imprint.

But this time Johnston will not find it so easy to be ignored.
Poems and Journeys
is unmistakably an important book. Leafing through it, you are struck by its assured displays of formal discipline, but really, from the translator of
Onegin
, that is not so surprising. Hard on the heels of this first impression, however, comes the further realization that through the austerely demanding formal attributes of Johnston's verse a rich interior life is being expressed. Johnston's literary personality is not just old-­fashioned: it is determinedly old-fashioned. He has set up the standards of the clubbable English gentry as a bulwark against encroaching chaos. Even those of us whose sympathies are all in the other direction will find it hard not to be swayed by his laconic evocation of the secret garden. It doesn't do, we are led to assume, to go on about one's predicament. Yet somehow a stiff upper lip makes eloquence all the more arresting.

Johnston's diplomatic duties took him to Japan before the war. After Pearl Harbor he was interned for eight months. After being released in an exchange of diplomatic agents, he was sent to the Middle East. After the war there were various other appointments before he took up his post in Australia. Clearly the accent has always been on uncomplaining service. Nor do the poems in any way question the idea of dutiful sacrifice: on the contrary, they underline it. Trying to identify that strangely identifiable voice, you finally recognize it as the voice of someone who has not talked before, but who has been so amply described that you think you know him. Johnston is the sort of man who has been written about under so many names that when he writes something himself he sounds like a legend come to life. He is the faithful servant of Empire, who now emerges, unexpected but entirely familiar, as its last poet.

By an act of imagination, without dramatizing himself, Johnston has made poetry out of his own background. The same background has produced poetry before but most of it has been bad, mainly because of an ineluctable cosiness. Johnston, however, is blessed with a distancing wit. He has the intensity of gift which makes facts emblematic without having to change them. It is the classical vision, which he seems to have possessed from the start, as the first two lines of an early poem about Japan clearly show:

The visual element is so striking it is bound to seem preponderant, but there is more at work here than just an unusual capacity to see. To choose a Greek classical measure, alcaics, is an inspired response to the inherent discipline of a Japanese landscape subject: the native poets and painters have already tamed their panorama to the point that their decorum has become part of it, so to match their formality with an equivalent procedure from the poet's own cultural stock is an imaginative coup. Then there is the subtle control of sonic effects, with the word “tense” creating stillness and the word “tumbles” releasing it into motion. He sees something; he finds the appropriate form; and then he exploits technical opportunities to elaborate his perception. The classic artist identifies ­himself.

But everything he was saying was said from under a plumed hat. The Lake Chuzéji of his early poems was the playground of the foreign diplomats. They raced their boats on it, giving way to each other in such elaborate order of precedence that only a
chef de protocole
knew how to steer a perfect race. They committed genteel adultery around its edges. A man of Johnston's mentality, no matter how well he fitted in by breeding, must sometimes have doubted the validity of his role. He was, after all, a double agent, both loyal functionary and universal observer. But he had not yet conceived of his complicated position as his one true subject—hence a tendency, in these early efforts, towards a Georgian crepuscularity, which even affects his otherwise scrupulously alert diction. Locutions like “when day is gone” crop up with their tone unqualified: something which would not happen again once his manner was fully developed.

Internment helped develop it. The work commemorating this experience is called “Towards Mozambique” and is one of the three original long poems in the book. Datelined “Tokyo 1942–London 1946,” it should now be seen, I think, as one of the outstanding poems of the war, even though it is less concerned with fighting than with just sitting around waiting. Exiles traditionally eat bitter bread, but the narrator is more concerned to reflect than to rail against fate. The poem has something of Ovid's sadness in the
Epistulae ex ponto
, except that Johnston is not being sorry just for himself. He is bent on understanding misunderstanding—the tragedy of incomprehension which has brought Japan to war against the West.

The personal element of the tragedy comes not just from the feeling of his own life being wasted (and anyway, much of the poem seems to have been written after the internment was over) but from regret for the years that were wasted before, when diplomacy was being pursued to no effect. He reflects on what led up to this. A lot did, so he chooses a form which leaves room to lay out an argument—the Spenserian stanza whose clinching alexandrine both Byron and Shelley, in their different ways, found so seductive:

Ripping, what? (The ambiguity in the third line, incidentally, is less a grammatical error than a mark of class. Osbert Lancaster and Anthony Powell have both always let their participles dangle with abandon, and Evelyn Waugh, in the same chapter of his autobiography which tells us that only those who have studied Latin can write English, perpetrates at least one sentence whose past participle is so firmly attached to the wrong subject that there is no prising it loose. This habit has something to do, I suspect, with a confusion between the English past participle and the Latin ablative absolute.) But some of the young diplomats were not content to shelter behind Britannia's skirts. Greatly daring, they took what opportunities they could to mingle with the locals—to penetrate, as it were, the membranes of inscrutable reserve:

Everything in the diplomatic colony is ordered, decorous and unreal. The unreality becomes most apparent during periods of leave in Shanghai, where a phoney aristocrat rules society:

But only in the enforced idleness of internment is there time to see all this in perspective. Long months of contemplation yield no grand might-have-beens or if-onlys. Nor, on the other hand, do they bring nihilistic resignation. Britain's imperial role is not repudiated. Neither is its inevitable passing particularly regretted. Instead, there is redemption in the moment:

A stanza MacNeice would have been proud to have written. Even in these few examples you can see how Johnston is beginning to realize the lexical freedom that strict forms offer. Up to the point where restriction cramps style, the more demanding the stanza, the greater the range of tone it can contain. Slang phrases like “professional as hell” and “in the nick” sound all the more colloquial for being pieced into a tight scheme.

The second long poem in the book, “Elegy,” is written in memory of Johnston's brother Duncan, “killed leading a Royal Marine Commando raid on the Burma Coast, on the night of February 22nd 1945.” This, too, ranks high among poems of the war. On its own it would be enough to class Johnston with Henry Reed, Bernard Spencer, F. T. Prince and Norman Cameron. It is a high-quality example of what can by now be seen to be a particular school of Virgilian plangency, the poetry of the broken-hearted fields. But it is probably not one of Johnston's best things.

It loses nothing by its air of doomed gentility. The narrator could be Guy Crouchback talking: there was a seductive glamour about the squires going off to war, and a potent sorrow when they did not come home. But though Johnston can be impersonal about himself, he cannot be that way about his brother. The poem tries to find outlets for grief in several different formal schemes, including blank verse. The stiff upper lip relaxes, leaving eloquence unchastened. There is no gush, but there is too much vague suggestion towards feeling, made all the more unsatisfactory by your sense that the feeling aimed at is real, harsh and unblunted even by time. A first-hand experience has aroused a second-hand artistic response. The air is of an Owenesque regret, of the dark barge passing unto Avalon in agony, of a drawing-down of blinds. The few details given of the lost, shared childhood leave you wanting more, but the author is caught between his forte and an ambition foreign to it: he is a poet of controlled emotion who can give way to anguish only at the cost of sapping his own energy:

“Elegy” is something better than an empty monument, but it is tentative beside its predecessor “Towards Mozambique,” and scarcely begins to suggest the abundant assurance of its successor, the third long poem in the book, “In Praise of Gusto.” This contains some of Johnston's best work and instantly takes its place as one of the most variously impressive long poems since Auden and MacNeice were at their peak. It is not as long as either “Letter to Lord Byron” or
Autumn Journal
but it has much of their verve and genial bravura. It embodies the quality to which it is dedicated.

“In Praise of Gusto” returns to some of the same subject matter dealt with in earlier works, but this time it is all brought fully within the purview of what can now be seen to be his natural tone, a tone which taps its power from the vivacity of experience. His dead brother is again mentioned. This time all the emphasis is on the life they enjoyed together when young. Nevertheless the effect of loss is more striking than it is in “Elegy,” where death is the direct subject. One concludes, aided by hindsight, that Johnston loses nothing, and gains everything, by giving his high spirits free rein. It might have taken him a long time completely to realize the best way of being at ease with his gift, but with consciously formal artists that is often the case. The last thing they learn to do is relax.