Like a fish, sleeping in the water: The Red-headed Pupil, Jeffrey Wainwright (Carcanet, 1994; 59pp; £6.99)
Andrew Duncan
The two adequate poets in the reviled Penguin Contemporary Poetry of 1982 were Wainwright and Penelope Shuttle; Wainwright dried up and Shuttle has since published several books so terrible as to be an embarrassment. One could represent this as Motion's bad luck rather than malign intent. This new release fills one with excitement, if also with trepidation: Wainwright's first and only book, Heart's Desire (reprised as Selected Poems) dates from 1978, and it hardly seemed possible for such a silence to be broken. His early work presented scenes from a Socialist view of history - uprisings, communes, massacres, drowned mill-girls - as large canvases, in a muted technique close to the religious side of pre-modern revolutionaries.
Something one cannot avoid mentioning is the name of Geoffrey Hill. Wainwright uses a plain discourse, reflecting, no doubt, the cultural and even speech-melodic patterns of the Midlands (he comes from Staffordshire). The drabness of language is Wainwright's most distinctive touch:
Praise be then to every pipe-layer in his ditch,
to the stolid inspector with his wooden wand,
the Sanitary idea and all the Chamberlains
and Averys who took the Water Works -
life and death, not source for profit - for their Birmingham.
(2.VIII); not for him, Hill's indulgence in the high-calory collegiate languages of chivalry and the Catholic Church, nor Hill's expert balancing and negation of that temptation, to conclude, when the phantasmagoria has passed, with iron indecision. Wainwright translated a pseudo-mediaeval play by Charles Peguy, although not the same one that Hill translated; Peguy's Socialism (within the SFIO, the French section of the 2nd Workers' International) is not in doubt; but when one adds to it his extreme nationalism and extreme Catholicism, the ensemble looks like emotional greed, a kind of hormonal imbalance. Peguy, killed in the opening weeks of the Great War, had effectively praised and glorified the said war even before it happened; only in absent moments can Hill and Wainwright, neither of them inclined to flavour the rabbit stew with a pint of brandy and a quart of cream, envy Peguy's reality-free fervour.
The work is two sets, 'The Anatomy Lesson' and 'Free Rein', each of 24 poems, each in three stanzas of 3, 4 and 5 lines, mostly of ten syllables. Drab, functional metrics. Knowledge of the world is being imparted to the named pupil, also to us. The course is largely of ancient, unifying themes of the Left: materialism, represented by the dissection in a painting entitled 'The Anatomy Lesson'; human potential, equally rooted in our nature, but defying a class system based on inherited wealth; while 'Free Rein' presents history in terms of hunger and thirst, and means of staying them; the conquest of disease; mortality, and the status of the human species as survivor; to end up with a discussion of freedom, a free rein, what was thrown into question by the materialism of the beginning. All might come from lectures to a Rationalist Association branch of about 1840. But what precisely is in the balance here? and what is being argued? It is hard to say; Wainwright's means favour the merely visual, and the dazzling, pre-rational, almost somatic, moment of knowledge: but not statement or the contest of ideas. Examination of Heart's Desire shows, behind the remorseless and terrible canvases of elaborately devised and contrived death, a quite different set of meanings; being in water as a secret leitmotiv, a dislocation of the body ego which pushes the psyche into an altered state. The whole book recurs to the ritual act of the Anabaptists, whose Utopian commune of Munster he so vividly describes; wash me in the water as a moment of new birth. Encouragingly, the Anatomy Lesson starts with a shot in continuity with Heart's Desire, as an unnamed corpse fetches up against a piling of a river bridge, and is elaborately retrieved by "a hoist and a cradle-drop from the second span". One of the more suggestive images in the sequence concerns liquid as the source of uprightness: the foot
floats the weight
of the whole body between the heel
and the toes
(...)
And wherever two bones meet, the cartilage tip
takes up the jarr on a surface smooth as cellophane,
filmed by an oil, a tiny pressing of cells
At the intuitive level, Wainwright has an obstinate integrity and grace. Sea-dwelling molluscs play a key role at two points of this book: their lack of senses other than direct, yielding response to the currents and substance gradients of the waters speaks to Wainwright. (The third occurrence, in 2.XXII, of the fossil freshwater small shelly fauna of the Burgess Shale, is spoilt by taxonomic uncertainty whether those weird body plans, Wiwaxia, Hallucigenia, etc., really are molluscs. Simon Conway Morris has contradicted Stephen Jay Gould about all this.) Certain moments of Red-haired Pupil suggest that the immersion motif really refers to the soul's immersion in the body, where it swims but cannot climb out; the obsessional death by water now appears as a release, every watercourse as a Styx which the soul crosses, adrift, knowing only the pressure on its skin.
Wainwright's acceptability to Carcanet, and Agenda, is founded on a syntactic articulation which was rejected by other Left-wing poets of his generation: Raworth, MacSweeney, Freer, etc. But the decisive levels of his poetry are precisely those which contradict the rational, critical, syntactic exposition. A strand of the Left is against the Hobbesian rational individual, and pro the group currents, called by Horkheimer mimesis, where the whole scaffolding of individual identity is disassembled into subjectless action, a simpler energy graph of libido and discharge. The climactic apprehension of freedom (2.XXIV), at the end of the poem, is unassertive: the more constraints are removed, it suggests, the less aggressive we become, the more satisfied, and the more fluid and unstructured our movements become. 2.II runs:
Ecce the thumps and transactions of Empire:
the trowel-taps of Marduk's bricklayers,
the panel-beaters of Abilene,
the mollusc searched for its purple,
the Druze to market for his Yorkshire worsted,
the Roman miles of water carried as gently
as in a cup so the warm fig will swell,
confectionery saved for Tamburlaine in snow,
the cumulus of all things nice that made
Zenobia Queen of Arabia for a while,
wordperfect Macaulay, the lady of Battles
with her lionhearts - Ishtar Regina.
This wins no prizes for verse movement, but does takes economics back to physical comfort and solace; the feelgood factor.
One poem is based on one by Emyr Humphreys, perhaps the most eminent of the Welsh Nationalist poets who were born in the 1920s and reached their peak in the Sixties and Seventies; a committed man who has created a political myth and poetry to go with it. The Taliesin Tradition, a historical-mythical legendarium of Welshness, is a terrible pack of lies, but built in stone. The poetry has more authority and rectitude, but it's as bleak as Monday morning:
Tom Williams, Guto, Dick Williams, Wil bach, Dafydd Dew and me,
We are the people
Isn't there a film which has many extras chanting We are the Mods? Humphreys' thesis is to deny the right to existence, and so the existence, of Socialist Wales; the erasure of astoundingly brilliant poets like Glyn Jones and John James. This we are the people lingo is too simple to be anything but a con game. Masses, I beg your permission to lie.
The venture into long form, like David Harsent's, is a response to the inadequacy of the conventional well-made poem within the conventional length. A certain poem is acceptable to the bien-pensant and large-circulation literary magazines, but put sixty of such poems together for a book and the result stinks from a long way off. We are seeing, perhaps, a historical shift, as an ancien regime collapses into dust, without combat since no-one believes in it. The resulting vacuum invites squatters; although a succession by the modernist Left of the Sixties and Seventies, in the form of achieving a readership in four figures, can more or less be excluded. Giving up on purist libertarian Socialism and electoral defeat, does one join the Parti Socialiste in the unlikely hope that a Francois Mitterrand will eventually win the Presidency? I'm afraid my vote still goes to the ultra-Left, to autogestion, spontaneisme, fetes, and derive.