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(review which I wrote circa 1996 & which never got published for some reason)

Idolatry is Worse Than Carnage: John A. Scott, Selected Poems (University of Queensland Press, 1995, 281 pp.; $19.95, paperback)


Andrew Duncan



Characterisation is impeded by the rapid motion of the book, each verbal moment made unique by its position on a moving curve, rather than repeating other moments in a static array, visible at a glance. It's not accidental that the moving line of his best poems is also the line which the whole book follows. I would guess that the initial stake was to reach authenticity, in frustration at the limits given both by a social system and by a temperament. Scott may have been deliberately altering his linguistic practices to win a victory over system constraints and decay into repetition; to probe the possibility that the persistence of emotional problems in modern art was a "commodity-identity", the artist repeating gestures, partly to gain and retain market recognition, partly from an artisan technical complacency, How can you know that a character is unreformable unless you try? This Selected Poems of formidable complexity can only be dealt with in phases, and only characterised by means of contradictions: some parts are sensitive and reflective, others are as humanist as Tank Girl; some poems are narrative and stripped-down for speed, others are lush. Analysis of repeating themes shows above all a temperamental mobility, one senses that a theme is exercised to outrance, its realisation in form uses up the available energy to the point of discharge: the line of the book does not loop back on itself.
The phases into which the work is grouped are six: a rather sketchily represented period of 1968-78, with separate poems of rather formal versification, extremely violent in content but static and meditative in treatment; the Narratives, dated 1982-4, an astounding group of poems as existential thrillers, wholly without fine phrases and consisting almost entirely of moving structure; Poems 1982-7, not narratives, not violent but so concerned with sensitivity to feelings as to verge on singer-songwriter territory, and occasionally rhyming; The 'A' Sequence, (1981-90), a 100-page long novel about a certain Carl Brouwer, mainly in prose, permissive in structure, lush and fetishistic in language; and a section of Related Works 1983-90, a sort of "Others" category, resembling A to some extent, and more clearly being poems about the biography of other poets, a rather anecdotal genre.
One of the high points is a fairly early poem:

And so some hundred beasts
of burden were to be chained inside the city bells,
each body's dull sack replacing the tongue. For
it should be understood that victory, never gained
without sacrifice, must echo its cost in celebration.
And so the night of herding and enclosure. At dawn
the first ropes were pulled, and the low bellowing
of those beasts whose sheer strength enabled them to
survive the hours, gave way to a splintering
of bone. Only an infrequent clash of nose-iron rang
out for the Years, unmuted by flesh. And those who
were gathered in the stadium awoke to this frightful
music, and together they threw back their heads,
as if for slaughter, and for song.


('Celebration') This, going like the clappers, is typical in its clarity of presentation and lack of figures; symbolism is presented throughout, not as metaphor, but as carnage. It also shows the themes of impaired communication, of a terrible pessimism about what has to be communicated, and of the inflexibly preordained physical burden of the messages. The length of the beasts' suffering, and the point at which their message gives out, depends on the physical strength they possessed at the outset. The role which neurological or other damage plays in several poems here, in structuring the utterances or visible behaviours of persons, may be a hyperbolic denial, counterattack on, or Aufhebung of, the impaired communication; the structuration is an added value or stepping up of the communication script, serving for example to invalidate any resistance or qualification on the listener's part. Thus social reality becomes asocial. Being crippled is a repeating theme.
Thus Scott shifts the verbal to the physiological. But the encapsulated menace is, isn't it, that this denial of the merits of consciousness and potential for change will torpedo any attempts at writing poetry, which follows the scales of verbal, not physiological, time, and whose information value depends on the whole not being wrapped up in, and predictable from, the first moment. The whole domain of social interchange is wiped out if the protagonist is unable to change; a character which is so inflexible, so self-fulfilling, so strong, as to be inexorable is death to any literary narrative, whose weakness then is just this strength. His characters rarely seem to influence each other - impaired emotional communication, perhaps, their emotions are not aroused by social life but by some sealed and hidden control unit; this is crippling. The authenticity of John A. Scott is the uncertainty, the temporal unsteadiness, which he allows to perforate his narratives.
Long poems in the sixth section paraphrase the Northamptonshire peasant John Clare, mad and with a wavering command of elevated English, and Pound, senile and unable to type, typing letters to dead friends. The parapraxes of the two cases exhibit regression on the level of lexicon and phonetic articulation which parallels a regression of sexual-genital organization, to a point of origin, which is perhaps innocence, or perhaps a primal scene, a memory which is at once repressed, magnetic, and decisive. In Catullus' poem 63, presented as a translation by Brouwer, the protagonist or villain of The 'A' Sequence, a 1st century BC priest of Attis castrates himself, becoming closer to the Mother Goddess, in a negation of the division between male and female.
The triumphs of the book are the Narratives. These are perfect poems, following a high-velocity narrative curve which is integral and yet not closed to possibilities outside itself. The atmosphere is closest to J.G. Ballard's short stories, but any of the hard, existential, erotically charged, mathematically plotted, pessimistic SF of the Sixties would do. The end of one of the asylum poems in St Clair runs:

At five in the morning the ward lights flared.
Attendants dragged Sheehan from his mattress.
For ten minutes they forced him to dance.
Then one kneed him in the groin - made a loose
sack of his body. They pulled him to the end
of the room, where he was rolled tightly in
soaking sheets of canvas. They left him -
cigarette, cocoon - his body heat starting
the long process of evaporation.

This image of cooling - a real psychotherapy - a heat signature leaking out along a long curve, to the limit of endurance, is one we shall return to.
We have to mention a data object, which we may as well call the X-rated, a British film censor's label of a kind of film which competed with television by plunging into Sex and Violence, and subduing all psychology to that end. In order to place Scott inside this data object, we don't need to decide whether it existed first in fiction or in real life, where it originated, or whether it came to poetry from cinema or elsewhere. It was characteristic of the 1960s, when Scott was growing up. You may dislike J.G. Ballard, Ted Hughes, David Cronenberg, or Sam Peckinpah, but you can't deny that they reach a kind of perfection, a reptile transcendence. The encapsulation in "novels" brings up problems of context and hysteresis; what is the interpretative framework of these actions? aren't they meant to be either self-explanatory, like the actions of animals? or existentially meaningless? Such a framework of meaning could only be built up from significant actions; and from relating to others at whom the actions could be signified. It's unclear why he wants larger contexts when everything is to be sliced up into disconnected, affectless, pure actions. He is a sensationalist writer; a form of aesthetic unsuited to presentation in the social atmosphere of academic prose. He tends to present the past as a trauma, reducing seriality to the instantaneous as a form of violence.
The negative space of all of this discourse is the world of attachment: where loving relationships aren't instantly faced with termination if the sex element slackens, where trust and the sensation of being loved provide a security which sensation does not, where people are trying to make other people unhappy rather than stalking, without ever finding satisfaction, some unquestioned, elaborate, imperious, and perverse imprinted scene. It's hard to imagine any of these characters in a marriage, or bringing up children. Sensibility is scarce in much, though not all, of the book. The characters have cravings but not attachments. However, this is the deal, this is Scott's chosen beat.
More worrying is the episodic novel, mainly in prose, The A Sequence:
"'You are still too pure. You are still full of moral prejudice and conformity. Your mind and your desire must become amoral. Focused. Able to accept everything. Before it can control, the life force must be free of every inhibition. Now you must kiss me goodnight.'
Leaning forward into Aosman's hand, I felt his long scarlet fingernails bite into my palm."

This is not so much overripe as pongy. The whole novel is vitiated by a sickly-rich louche lushness:

"Everywhere I felt her trace within this room. The skid-marks of a jewellery across the skin, drizzled in a sex-exhaustion.
Everywhere an evidence of recent disappearances: a cushion pile, still warm; a book marked at the passage about 'falling'; grey nipples of ash. The rings of coffee-cups on table-tops. On the pillow-white, the watermark of gasping mouths: faintness of blood or lip shiraz."

The first few pages are striking, but the rest could be a film by Albert Zugsmith. Owing to the narrow text area, some poems briefly appear to be in prose. A couple of pages appear twice, as verse and then as prose. Notable is a kind of art-snobbery, mixed with the concept of events in Europe being more significant and cultured; something puzzling to a European who doesn't share this assumption either about wine or about poetry. The text is at times starstruck and parasitic on certain artist biographies; the informational death threatened by this is that, because we know the stories of pre-war Montmartre,nothing can be added to these brandy-soaked cloying bonbons and the poem has no flow or possibility of flow; it can only regain some margin for action by a descent in the order of creation, down into the culinary or millinery details of objects and the crepuscule of verbal ornamentation. the claret odour of mating: are you sure about this? do we have any figures on this?
The poem on Pound typing runs, in part:

Plat. And it's away. The hammer on
the rubber tube. A 'd', plat 'e',
plat 'a', plat 'r'. The Kama Sutra's stroke
of ecstasy. A chorus line.
The stocking's leafish silver. Searching it
a letter at a time. It kicks.
And now he's looking up the dress.

Compared to the significant English poets born circa 1948: Denise Riley, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney, Michael Haslam, Ulli Freer, Brian Catling, John Ash, Grace Lake - his work is more conventional, if we can mean by that closer to the discursive world of film and television narrative, more concerned with the depiction of character, and less in experiment with syntax, montage, detournement, the selective dismantling of language to make its structure and rules visible. 1948 was just about the best time for a poet to be born in England. Scott has seized upon popular culture, the kinetic possibilities of narrative. Where he is "high culture", however, is in the disuse of identification: this is made persistently difficult for the reader, the presentation of social-psychological events, and of selves who might experience them, is more oblique, less gratifying, perhaps more searching, than that. Was it in the signature of this dissociation to decay into the fetishism of commodities and body parts? Of the three grand lines of criticism of language, affecting the discourse of lovers, of politics, and of poets, I don't find the second one, so typical of the Seventies, in this work. The problem is that his lushness of language is distinctively late nineteenth century French, he seems to have lacked the microlinguistic curiosity of his contemporaries.
A major figure, subject to a latent critique here, is the foregoing moral-aesthetic formation of social control, close textual reading, moral and metrical restraint, which was groping towards its own mortality in the Fifties. Someone is bound to say that Scott's world is socially impoverished by its lack of personal restraint; so the point has to be made that the critique of ecclesiastical, respectable morality could derive from its failures in practice, not from selfishness. This system could fail especially because it despised personal gratification, prohibited the collection of data by experiment, and by elevating its own data of invested texts, collected (or invented?) in the past, denied the importance of individual variation. From here, the practice of Sixties poets of staring hard at gratification, experiment, and freaks. Another accusation would mention a specifically male narcissistic wish to conquer and narrate conquest, to fetishize detail, and to suppress love; however, the suggestion of male inadequacy clearly leads to closer self-observation, and the binding theme of the book may be the difficulty of making a woman happy, the impossibility of doing this without sex, and the merely indicative value of sexual satisfaction as part of a test - physical, intellectual, and spiritual - which finds every flaw and never stops. Possibly the exclusion of sexuality prescribes an atmosphere of depression, contempt, and mutual indifference. Scott really seems to believe that human effort must fail, because only at the limit, the point of failure, can the information that we most want be collected. The poem I quoted above, 'Celebration', is apparently religious, but has a sexual ring: the French slang term carrillonner (used by the Catholic pre-Fascist Leon Bloy) is grossly sexual; Anita Ward sang Ring my Bell; Lou Reed sang something about his ding dong. The message emitted is a proof of vigour, but is also the departure, consumption, of that vigour. Particularly heartening, then, is the late text The Apology, from which we quote this orgasmic-chiliastic monologue of someone called Julia:
"This presence and this absence. Take it here in gratitude. But do not move to hasten it. I feel the semen separate. Melt into its pools. Within the socket of the eye. The corner of the mouth. The hollow of the collarbone. This confirmation. Love. I crave a language based entirely in the present. An act of reading that erases all that has been written from the page. An act of speaking that erodes the memory." The message erases itself to reveal oneness.