Grids, perspectival space, and rules of deduction: Of Love, Time, and Places; Selected Poems, by Charles Madge (Anvil, 1994; 18.95, 224 pp.)
Charles Madge (1912-96) published two volumes (The Disappearing Castle, The Father Found) with Faber in his twenties; this is his first volume of poetry since 1941. The impact of Auden was decisive on his poetic voice, as was his conversion to communism at about the same time. Rejection of his third volume in 1946 (! this is a rumour rather than something in print anywhere) was, along with the rejection by the same publisher of new material by Lynette Roberts, part of the preparation for a dull and conformist era in the 1950s. An outsider and bearer of the hopes of those who were satiated and disgusted by the main line of stultified English poetry, he was from then virtually invisible, apart from sporadic appearances in Nine. Seymour-Smith's Guide to Modern World Literature, published in 1973, discusses two long unpublished poems by Madge, 'The Storming of the Brain' and 'Poem by Stages': 'The resultant poetry is a major revelation, and should be made available without delay.' The present volume includes 'Poem by Stages' - not the other poem. His technique is extremely advanced, to say the least; incapable of an orthodox link or phrasing. It would be simple to review him with a fanfare, as a grand old man; but this is not that kind of magazine.
The profession of sociology opened a more urgent everyday way of living and thinking, and moreover promised more rigorous solutions to the problems of human nature and politics. Madge's style increasingly, and from the first, placed the demand that the language of poetry should be as precise as the standards of academic discourse, under the penalty of regression and infantilism. One can conjecture that this scepticism made satisfactory formulations out of reach, and wiped out the superficial rewards of posing the self in poetry - whether as a rebel, or as man of the world, or as a sensitive spirit. Still, it did not become implausible itself; probably, most people today would agree with him; poetry, clinging to an old-fashioned definition of what is poetic, has not kept the key to a magic kingdom but excluded itself from the concerns of intelligent people. Madge's poetry shows an evolution from self-righteous sinking of other people's philosophies of compromise, to austere unhooking of the cherished truths; at no point does he scatter around the bonbons which would console a self-indulgent poetry audience for their brush with objectivity:
For a moment I was naked on the wall, hung there
Flat, with a drain pipe to hold on to
And all parcelled out in bricks and mortar
As a grid set up for reference purposes.
I cannot say how long arrested motion
Kept me in shadow under the guttering eaves
Or whether I walked away with all my windows
Blazing to the uplifted light, blinded
With the idea of sight. I was divested
One moment, that was it, of guise and fashion.
I was not, no shape hid me, in mere pain
Of existence I was laid out by length and breadth,
And then, look, I drew on the matted cowl
And was expelled into the three dimensions
Walking and talking, nodding to acquaintances.
And there were drawn upon all identities
At once their dull or gleaming surfaces.
('Poem by Stages', xii). What this reminds me of is Piers Plowman; an eschatological narrative of being thrown into social being; rendered here as the closing and rebirth of pictorial space. In any case, this style has underdeveloped narcissism and highly developed wish for precision. Whereas the poetry audience's secret longing is for just the reverse.
'Poem by Stages', in 48 parts, written in 'January-March 1949', resists interpretation: the arrangement of junctures is quite unforgiving, the consolation of a possible convergence dissolved in a thorough polyvalence and scepticism. Close analysis shows a striking number of religious themes. The putting on of the 'matted cowl' (xii, above) oddly recalls the anapausis tou endumatos of certain Gnostic texts, the mortal body seen as a 'garment' whose disvestment throws the soul into a place of nothing and potentiality. This would incline us to re-interpret the 'disappearing castle' of 1937. Hints at the end of the poem suggest that the whole is addressed to a new-born child - the son found, perhaps; and that the themes are the taking on of flesh, and worry about the future as a repetition of a dark human past.
The Disappearing Castle, his 1937 book, referred to the castle of the feudal noble as the imaginary home in which the poet, lingering over a thousand years or so of patronage and upward identification, attempted to make his language native. The disappearing castle is also the Grail Castle, in Aufhebung and visible only at certain junctures: the goal of the search. Madge did not really describe the university as the poet's emergent new home.
The most frequent theme, it seems to me, in this selection is that of the emergence of binocular vision and of recession; the volume includes two poems by that name, and makes unmistakable references to the theme on pages 38, 65, 84, 95, 99, 128, 166. The point of departure is the assumption of consciousness: 'The strain of man upright in the flat world', but also the prevalence of illusory, surface, scenes: 'The walls of the maelstrom are painted with trees'. It has multiple values, relating to the contention between an illusory pictorial space with recession, and an abstract, objectless, but engulfing and sublime, picture plane, in the painting of that time; and also anticipating poetry's shift of interest, massively since the mid-70s but already with early Raworth or even early Roy Fisher, away from the morality of behaviour being represented to the rules which govern how verbal models are organised. For Madge at that time the theme meant, however, the dialectic, and he was seeing a scene from two sides in that sense: 'After the revolution, all that we have seen/ Flitting as shadows on the flatness of the screen/ Will stand out solid' (p. 128). Because this is also a temporal perspective, the object imagined is the future socialist state: because it is intermittently visible, it is like the Grail Castle:
This window by a curious trick can see
Workaday things and a white rising planet.
It looks both in and out and on each side
Is outside. There's no house for such a window.
(...)
This is the problem of our understanding,
Facing the window with transforming panes;
The plant or sparkle of a star emerging
Inversely with the drawing of our gains.
('Philosophic Poem')
By external astronomy
I bend towards the side of light,
Conjecturing with strain of eyes
The edi fi ce, the future thing,
Vanishing, wandering.
('Binocular Vision')
A line on p. 58 rather explicitly points the castle also at Saint Teresa's Castello Interior; the fourth line of 'Philosophic Poem' is based on Rilke's 'Wo gbe es ein usseres/ fr so ein Inneres?' Confusingly, the layout of the Castle Teresa had in mind is also an exercise in perspective, showing the mind as convergent walled zones receding from a Centre which is the eye of God. This is the first Panopticon.
The value Madge assumes in the pantheon is as a precursor of certain contemporary currents: by his rejection of the demands of orthodox taste and publishing; by his elimination of the personal voice in favour of more intransigent sources of information; by the indeterminacy and internal polyvalence of his mature work; by his cultivation of the long poem; by his critique of language, of self-awareness, and of social structure; by his foregrounding of the rules of art; by the provisional nature of his answers, with scepticism becoming the hero, the space within which events unfold. If one were to look for a local precursor to Prynne and Allen Fisher, it would be Madge on whom one's gaze would rest.
The forties saw a great surge of left-wing opinion in the electorate, but a mysterious gap in poetry. While the government was fighting against fascism, a critical attitude was almost untenable; typical poetic war work included writing folk-songs (perhaps with the Workers' Music Association) and translating Russian poetry. Also published by Lawrence and Wishart is Marxism and Poetry, a 1945 pamphlet by George Thomson. This provides a convenient reference for the possible opinions of Marxist poets in the decades on either side of 1945. Thomson is the archetypal Stalinist. He dismisses all poetry since the Renaissance as a product of the bourgeois era; leaving folk-song, which is classless. Song is inherently better than poetry. All art reflects the economic interests of a class; the categories of the imaginary derive from social organisation. Anticipating a torrent of neo-Stalinist attacks on human awareness, he denies the individual any right to consciousness. To be sure, he gives the mind its validity back as soon as it submits to the Justified Masses, whose rightful voice is the Communist Party; a concession which not all followers of the same path were to tolerate. Your lyric feelings become true so long as you have the government behind you; a kind of majority rule. His proofs are gaudy in their variety; Assyria, Ancient Greece, the West of Ireland, Kazakhstan, Black Australia, etc. It emerges after a while that this is a flashback to the style of Ebenezer Jones: the same figures are present in the same parts of the canvas, but the whole is dressed as a piece of rational prose instead of an opening of the vials and flight through the violet smoke of Apocalypse. It is striking that he quotes no contemporary poetry, no episodes from contemporary Britain, no example of the culture of the masses in Britain; he is only convinced by things he has never experienced, which appear to him as a kind of exotic, veridical dream. He makes much of a Kazakh bard, Djambul, who wrote many panegyrics to Stalin. This 'great poetry' is supposed to be a model for regressive and disobedient English bards; what Thomson does not know is that Lenin, irritated by a Kazakh revolt against Bolshevik brutality, confiscated their flocks as 'state property', depriving them of their food supplies; about a quarter of the Kazakhs died in the subsequent famine, one of Lenin's more notorious acts of genocide. Lenin's career makes Radovan Karadzic look like Mother Teresa. For a Kazakh to praise Bolshevism was a cringing hypocrisy and treachery of no mean order. Thomson knew nothing about the history of the Soviet Union; his invocation of the whole of human culture as pieces of one vast pattern is only made possible by ignorance and fantasy.
Thomson's worship of Western Ireland brings us back to Synge, and so to Masefield, who was at the first reading, in Yeats' drawing-room, of Riders to the Sea, and wrote so much poetry based on English peasant speech. The Georgian poets are the realization of which Thomson writes the theory. Hardly surprising that the diehard Stalinists should mingle with the followers of Cecil Sharp.
A volume of New Lyrical Ballads (Poetry London Editions, 1945) draws bucketfuls of gap from the void; names like Randall Swingler, Jack Lindsay, Honor Arundel, Arnold Rattenbury, Maurice Carpenter, demand instant oblivion. The seizing of a broad, songlike, diction of direct address may possibly remind us of Christopher Logue's songs, or of the frequent quoting of pop songs by John James, Barry MacSweeney, and Denise Riley. Hubert Nicholson tries to combine shop floor Socialist Realism with Apocalypticism ('In this imprisoned congo berserk suns/ rise with the furnace-doors, make random morn,/ set on the molten wave that tideless runs/ and from the heat our birds of ice are born.'), to psychedelic effect. Most interesting debut of the decade was Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, by Hamish Henderson. One could also mention Roy Fuller. The betrayal of the Warsaw Uprising and the start of the Cold War stripped away the credibility of the Soviet Union in the eyes of all but the crazed few. The pistons of our locomotives sing the songs of our workers, and singalong Stalinists weren't going to fall out. Henderson, a folklorist by profession, gave up poetry after one volume and wrote only folk songs, much sung by the Scottish Nationalist movement in the sixties and subsequently; collectors like Ewan MacColl (The Shuttle and the Cage, 1954) and A.L. Lloyd (Come All Ye Bold Miners, 1952) did much of real merit in the folk-song revival. Perhaps, when poetry gets anywhere near music, it loses its intelligence; Thomson has no interest in the Stalinist poets of Britain, the ones who poured such a torrent of hatred onto magazines like Horizon, or onto people like Orwell and Cyril Connolly. No one on their own side seems to have the faintest interest in people like Randall Swingler, Julian Symonds, or Jack Lindsay, despite all the time they spent announcing that their theory was the only scientific one, and that everyone else should just do what they said. Perhaps they weren't talentless, but the Marxist theory they adopted was so fatal that they just succumbed to it. If you have a theory of how poetry should be written which disqualifies every existing poet, has no valid examples, and extols a class of poetry with no members, then you are merely a jailer, a board of punishment. Perhaps the problem with Swingler et al. wasn't even their poetics, but just their surrender of their own right to judge before the literary secret police, their quaking fear before batteries of punitive ideals, the atrophy of their creative powers in their guilt at being middle class. I don't know what the Reds of the thirties were doing in the fifties; their books were not being published, perhaps not being written; I doubt they were revolutionising Western art practice. With all this twinkling panoply of aesthetic and ideological might, it's hardly surprising that the new Left poets from around 1959 should have started from scratch, ignoring local poetic predecessors as if they had never uttered.