Fellfoot Ginstone Bazzilica: Barry MacSweeney, The Book of Demons (Bloodaxe, 1997; 109pp., 7.95)
The cover tells the whole story of the book:
MacSweeney... has been an alcoholic since he was 16. Two years ago his solitary hard drinking almost killed him, and after a series of life-threatening fits and convulsions which ended with him on a life-support machine, he underwent rehabilitation through detoxification in several hospitals and in an addiction clinic. He has now recovered. The Book of Demons records his fierce fight against addiction, the demonic visions which arose(...)
MacSweeney's poetry sweeps the floor with any other poetry around it. It is amazingly colloquial, coherent, plenary, compelling, colourful, funny, dramatic, purged of irrelevancies, high-flown, natural in tone, shifting and self-renewing. It pours unstoppable as a river. It is mesmerizing; everything else around it falls silent to catch what it has to say. It creates a private set of myths without being introverted:
My great hero Kazimir Malevich, how the moon the other night
was just like your Suprematist plate in 1917, when
you quietly stormed the waiting world
with your railway sidings. I wear a cap in honour of you.
Now I have my CAFE CUBANO- Tueste Oscuro, and
today, with the rosemary flowers so azure
beneath the borage heavens, I,
like you, and Sergei and Vladimir, hate
all of my replicant oppressors, double-breasted
faces, Otis lift tunes all of the way to the boardroom if you fancy.
And, Kazimir, I think of your wonderful plate, wonderful
is not too great a word to use. Indeed, it is undervalued
these very salination days, these days of liver expansion.
And Sergei, and Vladimir, I think of your guns,
and what they can eventually do. I used myself to shoot one,
but never at myself, though I have always had reason.
Yes, bless, blessure, bliss and blood, worst and wine
are my saintly, thorny words. I am crowned by them!
Not wearing fur-fringed gloves upon her flinty fingers
which sometimes taxed my shifting planets, she
felt my collar, for I am a drunken criminal of overspent
love, and she threw me in the jail of my terrible life.
Always in the locker of my single-minded lit-stricken cuffs
reaching for the emerald glass cylinder
cork within apertures, and the demons rampant
in their crest cockiness hands down my throat.
Hysterical psychotic drain cleansers.
It is highly polished; themes replace each other with the effortless generosity of perfect art. The narrator is visited by demons in a fit of alcohol poisoning; he goes in Legless Lonnen, down Do-Lalley Drive, Kerbcrawl Boulevard, Cirrhosis Street and Wrecked Head Road. Later, he is in various detox units and addiction clinics, drying out, relapsing; feverishly narrating either his delusions or his philosophy of life:
All moons waned and keeled, peeled
of sanity and treasure of esteem,
lollbonce on black plastic rim,
bottle of Hennessy and a Football Pink,
's' all I need, unbuckled pants ankle-dropped,
now that the greenwood
is stacked for fire, and me the inebriate sodden slave, tree
destroyed by a legion of governments
and the studied stupidity
of the lapsed intelligence of the people of England.
His poetic career started with a flourish as The Boy from the Green Cabaret Writes to his Mother, published in 1968 when he was 20, was a hit, selling several thousand copies. He was a star, dropped immediately by his publishers for writing complex poetry which couldn't be marketed under the working class-pop culture rubric. He worked on the small press scene for twenty years, and was very badly affected by the collapse of its political hopes (and of most of its audience) during the seventies. He dropped out of the scene around 1985. In 1993, his work was collected and canonized in one of the huge Paladin volumes, and pulped by Rupert Murdoch nine days (or, according to other versions, three months) later. He went through an astonishing range of styles in those twenty years. Inability to write, and the literal pulping of his life's work, must have contributed to the crisis of his illness, and subsequent hospitalization. Hellhound Memos (1993), a return to poetry, was followed in 1995 by his masterpiece, Pearl (1995), reprinted in this volume.
In 1995, Barry was unemployed, and when sober could barely sleep at all; he lived only to write poetry. He also spent many hours on the phone to friends, and I heard most of the poems here for the first time over the telephone; so I do know what they're about, although I'm also probably too close to them. Composition was more or less continuous from 1994 to mid 1997. A lot of the poems I heard over the phone were rubbish, but all those have been cut out. I should add that I have a strong moral dislike of alcoholics; they hurt everyone who loves them, commit this gross treachery through greed, and this makes it hard to sympathize with them.
Autobiographical reference, delusional allegory, and personal mythology form a dense web, which can be difficult, although the underlying emotional states are both clear and extreme. I must admit I can't understand most of his work of the seventies, although the 100 page essay in Clive Bush's recent Out of Dissent sheds much light on this avant-garde phase. MacSweeney is sustained by the love of his girlfriend, and the poems on pp. 43 and 61 are uttered through her voice. The intact self he hopes to recover to is filled out by a projective identification with Casimir Malevich, the Suprematist painter, partly also with Sergey Esenin and Vladimir Mayakovsky, seen here as innocent poets of an innocent communist Revolution. Malevich comes in through an exhibition of his work in Amsterdam, which Barry visited with Jeremy Prynne, his chief inspiration as a poet. Robert is Robert Johnson, who asked to be buried down by the highway side, so that his old evil spirit could take a bus and ride. Also on board is the spirit of Anne Sexton, another drunk-poet whose confessional style is an important source for the Demons. The Pookah comes from a James Stewart film called Harvey, a kind of demon there moving in the form of a six-foot rabbit. He says so damned Warwickshire clearly (p.75) because his girlfriend came from Leamington. The scattered 14th century spellings, starre, etc., are there as relics of Chatterton's fake mediaevalism; Barry wrote a poem about Chatterton in the seventies. "you're a photo once in the Sundays borsik in the madman's paradise": borsik is Russian for handbag, but I can't explain this line. Wobbly eggs are barbiturate tranquillizers.
The cover refers to "his heroic fight against alcoholism", but his struggle to get and remain drunk must have been much more expensive and time-consuming. In fact, the struggle to clean up is not much discussed; there is no statement that you can control your own destiny, that you can't have everything you want, no confession of past sins, no visible struggle to stay sober. As a book about alcoholism, it fails for these reasons. There are a variety of authority and hate figures, who conveniently take the blame for the bad things which happen, and of whom the Demons are the supreme examples: not demons, I would suggest, bought the bottles, but Barry MacSweeney. Paranoia includes the splitting off of parts of the personality as external and hostile forces, a failure to grasp the nature of agency which is also a classic failure to accept responsibility. I have to table the possibility that Barry's whole view of politics and history, of the omnipotent evil of the ruling class, etc., is just another symptom of this paranoid projection. Throughout the book, we see hate figures who restrain heroes from their liberty; we do not hear any admission that self-restraint is a good thing. This fits too well into a pattern of thought claiming that, in the 1960s, politicians gave up on telling people to be good, and defined consumption as the only collective good; a generation of artists became famous because they were utterly susceptible to the mood of the times, they extolled pure consumption and fell victim, en masse, to alcohol and drug abuse. I hope this pattern is wrong: but there is a suspicion with Barry (more in Hellhound Memos than here) that the artist's limitless interest in himself is not only the source of the appeal of his work, if we fall for it, but also the characterological basis for his substance abuse. Although The Book of Demons is not a success in its treatment of alcoholism, it is a success as a self-dramatization and the triumphant playing out of a personal myth. His poetry is emotionally credible even when it is not emotionally credible.
We have to ask who Barry's replicant oppressors are. Since the visions of demons was a product of alcohol poisoning, we have to ask whether he has given over control of the poems to a biochemical pollution process; and in what sense we could possibly believe what he shows us. Are the demons his own evil desires; or personifications of his physical pains; or social agents who withhold from him the means of happiness; or the staff of various storehouses of care who withheld alcohol from him and gave him advice which he was fiercely unwilling to take? How can he refer to the medical staff who looked after him as the Stasi (p.52), or denigrate the Stasi while extolling the revolution of October 1917 which created the blueprint for them, and which they upheld in being?
There are various attempts (pp. 37, 60, 76, 103 ) to link his plight to that of the Jews in the Third Reich; he quotes the line "all poets are Jews" (vse poety zhidy) from a poem by Mandelshtam which became known by being quoted at the head of a poem by Paul Celan. On reflection, I think that the Jewish themes are an attempt to say to the (Jewish) children of his girlfriend that he is a good and understanding stepfather. So the motive has nothing to do with art, but is practical and immediate; and admirable, since he is right to think that becoming a stepfather at forty-eight is not a sinecure or an automatic success. But no-one ever persecuted Barry; this is just paranoia again. Being an alcoholic is voluntary, being murdered by Hitler was not. The persecution of poets was a real thing in Rumania and the Soviet Union, but is non-existent in Britain and North America.
The most controversial poems are the ones about his father, which are intended (I think) to make a claim that Barry's excess drinking was due to not being loved by his father as a child, and to his consequent hatred of his father (lived out in a terrifying, if monotonous, fantasy of going to Ireland and killing his father). Gary Oldman's flawlessly great film Nil By Mouth (a phrase which appears here, the handling of someone on a drip feed) also shows an alcoholic character who talks, in a revealing scene, about his father's alcoholism and lack of love. Personally, I don't believe a word of it; I think Barry was bored and indoors somewhere where the course leaders wouldn't declare you "clear" unless you found some bad-family explanation for why you behaved compulsively. Compulsive over-indulgence is compulsory in capitalist consumer society. You don't become an alcoholic because some incident when you were seven years old (p.44) petrifies part of your brain, which reproduces a static pattern; you become an alcoholic because you drink too much.
The strength of any poetry can be tested by what we see when we pull the camera back to show what is around it but not shown in it. What we see is two women, his mother and his girlfriend, being violently hurt on a daily basis by his abusive drinking and multiple relapses. Consider this: woman, seventy, makes a hot dinner every day for her son, aged forty-eight, an alcoholic. How does she feel about that? How do we feel about that? Perhaps it is Barry oppressing other people, neglecting responsibilities through machismo and greed, which we are watching, through the screen of a distorted account, and not Barry being oppressed by anybody else. The pivotal moments of the book are, therefore, those where Barry owns up to hurting other people through his fault; directed by feminism and evangelical Protestantism. The critic Greil Marcus argued in his book Mystery Train that the intensity of the blues came from the Calvinist religion which informed the popular culture around it; the greatest blues records are not light-hearted drinking songs, but full of eschatological angst, debauchery shot through with a real fear of losing your eternal soul: I'm a poor drunken-hearted man, and sin was the cause of it all. DARK was the night and COLD the ground, at p. 60, was the name of a wordless East Texas Baptist chant, recorded by Blind Willie Johnson, a preacher. At its best, MacSweeney's poetry touches this religious sense of damnation, but he fails to make the realisation of Johnson's other famous number, 'Nobody's Fault But Mine'; recorded in 1976 by Led Zeppelin, in possibly their finest moment, a howling desolation where they seem to walk the line between life and death. Protestantism's attempts to appeal to the uneducated are, murkily, at the root of Western popular culture, notably of advertising. Barry has a wonderful ability to find poetry in tabloid language:
Ten years in the same team Going Nowhere Albion sponsored
not just match days Cellar 5, Victoria Wine, Threshers, Red
Wine Rovers, Plonk Park Disunited, The Old Dysfunctionals,
Soused Spartans, Inter Chianti's chanting demons' unflagging
fandom
My research indicates that the collapse around 1973-4 of revolutionary hopes saw a switch of attention from the large, disobedient space of national politics to the small, perhaps controllable space of the body: jogging as an alternative to revolution. Barry's retreat into alcoholism is a variant on this, which represents a permanent crisis for idealist politics and for the poetic movement which was so thirled to that politics. The Soviet Union dissolves, and you drink Cuban coffee. Alcoholism provides a non-stop series of crises, where madness and death are at stake the whole time, within this minimal zone that is the body. We have so many people who write wholly personal poetry although their personalities are very boring. Of course, the Book of Demons is very close to the confessional poetry which Al Alvarez pleaded for in a famous anthology of 1960, and which never really took off in this country.
There are numerous references, signalled by the phrase greenwood tree, to a crude anti-Tory politics:
We did not burn enough magistrates' houses. We executed
one king but did not drag out enough Tories, and hang them
from the greenwood tree.
These forever here in the snow-laden urinal are my hysterical
historical regrets. Swan Lud, get my poster, did you?
As a competitive man, I am attracted by the idea of turning politics into a single spectrum of performance, where the more Left someone is, the more moral they are; as a subject who is ruled, I would prefer not to be governed by someone this reckless and simple-minded. In competition, both Gordon Brown and Kenneth Clarke solved real-world problems which this Leninism probably couldn't. Politics is mainly verbal, and to do with assent; but adapting politics so as to milk it for the most simplistic and self-dramatizing speeches possible may be narcissistic and unintelligent. There are analogies between this politics without ambiguities and excessive drinking; both block out criticism, nuance, or doubt and create a temporary sense of mutual love and emotional solidarity. The success of political poems often depends on how complex, and therefore how credible, their portrayal of the Right is. Strange how the Left always wins the argument in poems and always loses it at the polling-booth. The phrase with the tree comes from 15th century Robin Hood ballads. The Book of Demons is essentially a family drama, retracting even further to become the history of a soul; the references to a larger political system are inadequately thought out. There were alcoholics in 1795 and 1895 as well as in 1995; wanton greed and the slapdash belief that the rules don't apply to you are retarded, but ahistorical. The argument for the complete overthrow of capitalism deserves to be made, but cannot be won by default when only 2% of the population agree with it; and the staging of the argument here is blustery. His girlfriend (during the Book) is a communist, and her parents were communists; I think the political bluster may be an attempt to assert solidarity with her and hold the family together: Our passion, darling, is pure 1917. Not only Barry wants to write about class and writes instead about the family. Barry was a union activist (met her at an NUJ weekend conference, I think), used to cover Newcastle City Hall for his paper, and is not stupid about politics. Moreover, he did write a great political poem—Black Torch; he has pulled almost everything off at some point in his career.
He incorporates, not merely figures such as Malevich and Sexton, but also the whole Soviet Union, the whole history of England, etc.; seizing and distorting are two key acts. History is here fetishized as part of a relationship: because he and Jackie are in love (or: when his love for himself revives), the world falls into line with their shared fantasy, as all the people on a street in a Hollywood musical sing the song which the lovers (and stars) sing. A poet must have the ability to do this; poetry which transforms nothing, is completely sober, does not move us. But this transformation of the real world is tense and fragile: the world has not actually changed. The belief in Soviet communism (more exactly, the ability to suppress the evidence that the capitalist ruling elite are not sheer evil) is part of being in love, which gives pleasure by bringing a distorted, intoxicating and unsustainable, sense of the perfection of the self. The poet sweeps up more and more elements of the world into the vision, which makes it more robust but more fragile too; the bubble touches more sharp objects as it swells out. MacSweeney's poetry includes his whole life, it has a vast, immersing depth, it is as complex as reality; but the penalty for building a world-game which is not little, uninvolving, and artificial, is that it can be compared with reality and lose. When it bursts, what he loses is everything, he becomes cold and empty. The demands which Barry puts on the bubble must be related to the need to drink too much in order to block out the flaws in the pattern; he has no faith in reality, which is for him a kind of psychic annihilation. This intolerance for asymmetries in the pattern equips him, however, for making huge and incredibly perfect verbal machines.
The analysis which draws on inherent pattern preferences in the present, inability to compromise, a dialectic of "high" fantasy states and psychological collapses, and excessive ability to block out dissonance, which in fact depicts character as a set of aesthetic choices, is more convincing than the explanation through traumatic events of thirty or even forty years ago. Meanwhile, Black Torch and The Book of Demons exist in the outside world, and retain their substance even if Barry's moods swing to and fro; surely these stable exteriorised objects should give him enough gravity to become stable.