Wilkie Collins (1824-1889)

Photo of Wilkie Collins, probably from 1866, the year of Armadale's publication

[Image source: https://art.famsf.org/elliott-fry-studio/william-wilkie-collins-1824-1889-199613516 . Information about the probable date comes from Paul Lewis' excellent site, which includes a chronological list of Collins' many portraits: http://www.web40571.clarahost.co.uk/wilkie/wilkieimages/wcimages.htm]

Armadale (1864-1866)

The first thing it came into my head to say about Armadale, I suddenly realized, would utterly deflate the book for someone who hadn’t read it; and this is certainly a book that ought to be read once – which can’t be said of all Collins’ books (see below). And it ought to be read without knowing too much in advance, because (as John Sutherland says in his introduction) manipulation of the reader’s tensions is a principal factor in what the book means.

 [I’m inclined to invite those who have read Armadale to guess what my first thought was.]

In fact I’d now venture it the most interesting of Collins’ books, placing it in front of The Woman in White and The Moonstone. By “now” I’m alluding to the continuously changing way in which nineteenth-century fiction refracts upon us. But one day I might delete these sentences.

This is getting intertextual, but then Armadale is a very intertextual book. Its most central character, Lydia Gwilt, is presented with extraordinary indirectness. She makes no (recognized) appearance at all until the third book, and then we come into contact with her at first through letters. Collins is most reluctant to show her to us in his third person narrative, which is nevertheless increasingly about her. Her very first appearance in the third person (which somewhat paradoxically appears to the reader as the “unmarked case” of presentation), is the climax of Book III Chapter IX:

As he (Allan) came within sight of her face, he stopped in ungovernable astonishment. The sudden revelation of her beauty, as she smiled and looked at him inquiringly, suspended the movement in his limbs and the words on his lips. A vague doubt beset him whether it was the governess, after all.

He roused himself; and, advancing a few paces, mentioned his name. ‘May I ask,’ he added, ‘if I have the pleasure–‘

The lady met him easily and gracefully half way.

‘Major Milroy’s governess,’ she said. ‘Miss Gwilt.’

This is some 260 pages into the novel. Thereafter Lydia Gwilt is “on stage” (i.e. there in the imagined present of the third person narrative) for only 19 pages or so until the final movement of the book at the sanatorium (615-67 in John Sutherland’s edition).  But a great deal of the interim is taken up with her letters and most importantly her diary, a document that Collins admits she has no plain motive for writing.

This highly-worked approach is critically important to the novel itself. In the first half of the book, which is tense with impending doom, evil (at least in the present) is off-stage and ever threatening to appear. In the later part of the book Lydia begins to assume centre-stage, but we see her mainly through her own record. The gigantic fatalism that obsesses Midwinter is replaced by (or transformed into) the self-communing of a complex woman whose own wickedness is something she greatly fears.

Even more elaborately, the story of Lydia’s past is eventually narrated by an obnoxious but condemnatory private detective, representative of official morality, to his weak-minded father (Bashwood), who interrupts with tout pardonner almost without bothering about tout comprendre. Contrary to Collins’ hints earlier in the book, Bashwood’s discoveries do not lead to Lydia’s downfall: they are all about how we react. Bashwood in fact keeps his secret, as Midwinter keeps his, and Lydia goes to her grave with a sort of relieved forgiveness that is also a forgetting, so far as the other characters are concerned. No-one in the book knows half as much about her as we do.

Midwinter, finally emerging as a writer, is troubling in his own right. Collins never lets us know why Midwinter (if there is a simple why) loses affection for his bride soon after his marriage. The hiatus is a potent one. It allows us to reflect that Midwinter’s behaviour matches Lydia’s past experience: she can command adulation effortlessly, but she is mistreated by her husbands and in some sense perhaps is never loved – not, for instance, in the way she loves Midwinter. It also allows us to reflect on our huge respect for Midwinter’s insights, distorted as they are: perhaps his unamiable behaviour makes the final comment on a tawdry and self-centred existence that doesn’t, he discovers, deserve to be loved. Maintaining an unstable equilibrium between those views is one of Armadale’s triumphs.  

(2006)

Armadale, first edition (clothbound)

[Image source: http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_armadale.htm]

The Chatto & Windus yellowback edition of 1886

[Image source: http://www.wilkie-collins.info/books_isayno.htm]

I Say ‘No’ (1884)

A wretched book. I’d kept it lying around on my shelves  (it was a worm-eaten copy of the 1886 yellowback edition shown above) because I was curious to see why, even though I knew that I'd read it, I couldn’t remember a single thing about it.

Curious how the stock of “The Victorian Novel” has fallen in my own mind - the minor novelists seem barely worth exhuming. At one time I quite saw the Novel’s history as a rise into luscious nineteenth-century greatness, culminating in the crisis (itself great) of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake - with all later novelists just ill-mannered guests, persisting in a genre whose significant achievements all lay in the past. This view seems ridiculous now.

[This was a note from 2001. I now understand that I Say ‘No’ was written late in Collins’ life, when chronic ill-health had long since reduced the author’s ambitions to maintaining an output. (It's been suggested that Collins' determination to keep on writing was therapeutic; it gave him a reason not to slip into terminal decline.)

Knowing this doesn’t make the book any better, but it does make voicing the condemnation seem rather pointless; it never set out to be much more than what it is. One of the hardest issues for a completely relativist view of artistic value is how to comprehend the belated efforts of a sick and exhausted professional. MP 2006] 

Alfred Duggan: Family Favourites (1960)

I found this book, with several others by the same author, on a friend's bookshelves. Intrigued by the unlikely choice of title (from a popular radio show) for a historical novel set during the later Roman Empire, and more so by the drily brilliant opening, I couldn't resist asking to borrow it.

The story is related by an old soldier in retirement (he had been first a legionary and then a Praetorian), called Duratius. He eventually becomes a friend and member of the inner circle of the young and flighty Emperor Elagabalus (c. 203-222 - Emperor from 218-222). When the court implodes he is unceremoniously knocked on the head and given an honourable exit. The beautiful Emperor is killed offstage.





Duggan's conception of the historical novel is close to docufaction. Nearly all his characters, except for the narrator, are historical. He introduces only a minimum of additional fictional events, and these additions are characteristically un-sensational. The principal interest, for both author and reader, is in persuasively realizing a time and culture that, in its details, is a mixture of the familiar and the bizarrely different.

Duratius's judgments, for example, tend to be unexpected. On the one hand they are the judgments of a soldier and administrator of the landowning class, evincing recognizably similar attitudes to those of an equivalent gentleman of Duggan's own time. A noticeably broad-minded version of those attitudes; Duratius is remarkably un-judgmental, for example, about the sexual behaviour of Elagabalus and his minions. On the other hand, he places much importance on matters that are alien to us, such as the importance of duty to ancestors, or the delight of worshipping the tutelary gods of a city.

When Duratius attends a gladiatorial show we are, predictably, appalled at what Romans considered sport. Duratius describes it vividly, doesn't notice what we might find objectionable, but finds it a bit dull, though he admits his seat was near the back and he couldn't see the look on the faces of men about to die. On the other hand, when he first sees chariot-racing (a sport followed in the eastern empire, but unknown in the west) he finds it incredibly exciting.

Here, early in the book, is Duratius' interview with the senior centurion of his legion.

'Duratius,' he said, as I stood at attention before him (every soldier is a good deal more respectful to a primus pilus than to a legate), 'within less than a year you can take your pension and go. I won't stop you. But they tell me you are thinking of signing on again, and that I won't allow. When you apply to re-enlist, someone will ask for a confidential report, and I shall advise against you. I'll tell you why, since the regulations don't permit you to ask me questions. I have no complaint against you so far. You are smart on parade, sober, willing when there is digging to be done, and never the first to run from a tight place. You have never been first in the charge either, but that only proves you are a well-trained soldier. In  fact you would be a model legionary, but for one serious fault. We have followed the same Eagle for twelve years and more, and I am still not certain that you are on our side. There's no zeal in you, either for the cause of Eternal Rome or for our glorious Emperor Caracalla. The next time we charge the Germans I don't want you behind me. So now you know the worst. In a few months you leave the army -- for ever.'
    'Very good, sir,' I said, standing stiffer than ever. If he felt like that about me he could have me flogged to death as a malcontent; when he offered to get rid of me peacefully he was being very lenient.
    'That was the right answer,' he said in a more friendly tone. 'I don't like legionaries who argue. I wish I knew what lies at the back of your mind. You are an educated man and a citizen; in the roll they have you down as doubtfully an honestioris. Yet you carry a sword as if you were a labourer digging a ditch at so much a foot. Everyday you earn your daily pay, and never try to do more. . . . And yet you want to stay in the army. I shall offer one more chance. I have been told to pick a draft for the Praetorians. I have put down your name, though of course you may refuse the honour. Take it or leave it. In either case I shall be rid of you. Either you start for Syria within three days, or at the end of the year you are mustered out of the army, with your discharge marked "no readmission". Which shall it be?'
    'The Praetorians, of course, sir. And thank you for the opportunity.'
    'Very well. Tomorrow you will report to the paymaster, for your papers to be brought up to date. Then take a day's leave, to put your kit and baggage in order. On the third day you will parade in full marching order, with your baggage packed and your paybook signed and balanced. You are not entitled to a government baggage-mule, but if you have a mule of your own the government muleteers will look after it. The legate will inspect the parade, so take pains with your turnout. But you always look well on parade, so that will not bother you. I wish I knew why you are content to be a parade-ground soldier. You have never done that little bit extra that would have earned commissioned rank for a man of your stamp. That's all. Dismiss, and never let me see your face again.'

The historical novel is always an anachronism, and the bigger the time-gap between the date in which it's set and the date it was written, the more problematic this becomes, as we Sir Walter Scott fans are well aware. The most pervasive area of anachronism, though not perhaps the most obvious, is the thought-worlds revealed by how the characters speak. I doubt if a centurion would have or could have framed his puzzlement over Duratius' psychology in quite the way that this passage implies.

But if Duggan wanted to limit the effect of anachronism, then the Roman Empire was quite a good era to work with. At least there was a regular army, which he could assume (when he didn't know) was not too unlike Duggan's own army experience during WWII. Army life tends to be practical, psychological conceptions of minimal importance.

Duratius, or rather Duggan, is obviously proud of the numerous "inside knowledge" remarks that pepper his text (such as the one here beginning "every soldier..."). It was a Kipling technique and I suspect late stories like "The Church that was at Antioch" had quite a big influence on Duggan.

The later and longer part of the book, once Duratius has met Elagabalus and become a court official, doesn't quite match up to the quality of the opening. Flamboyant and outrageous as Elagabalus is, his antics lack dramatic development.  And broad-minded as they are, Duratius and Duggan seem to lack real sympathy with either the young Emperor or his opponents. There's a distinctive but slightly unnerving sense of something missing. Perhaps that something is best described as warmth.

*

But this chilliness may be strategic rather than temperamental. In 1954 Duggan reviewed The Fellowship of the Ring for the TLS, and here he points out the weakness in Tolkien's book of a positive conception of the Good; Duggan specifically mentions romantic love. (It's a positive review, though Duggan had evidently no taste for dragons or trolls. In it he describes the landscape of Middle-Earth in political and economic terms that more recall his own books than Tolkien's: reminiscent, for instance, of the breakdown of Roman civilisation in The Little Emperors.

*

Alfredo Duggan was an Etonian of Irish/Argentinian background. His family were extremely wealthy. At Oxford in the 1920s he was considered a rake of the first order, spending much of his time drunk, riding to hounds, or driving his Rolls Royce to and from a highly colourful Soho night-life. (His brother was the main model for Anthony Powell's Charles Stringham.)

[Duggan, Powell and Evelyn Waugh were all members of the Hypocrites Club during the era when it was transformed by them, along with Harold Acton and others, from a student club devoted to gentle philosophical musing into something a good deal headier.]

As Waugh later remarked, no-one of that generation of silver-spooners seemed less likely to produce a book than Duggan. But after war service and conversion to conservative Catholicism, and a respectable and happy marriage, he began, at the age of 47, to write his remarkable sequence of historical novels.

Northrop Frye described the novel as an intrinsically middle-class form. That is quite right. Nevertheless, its relations with the upper classes are scarcely peripheral: think of Tolstoy. (Not to mention Laclos, Proust, Trollope, James...)

Nevertheless, the category of aristocratic Conservative novelists, in the 20th century, has always been problematic. Not, of course, that it laid an especially heavy burden on the incumbent's shoulders.  A conservative press and public would, it might be hoped, be reasonably well-disposed. And a ruling-class author would possess, no doubt, enviable contacts outside the literary community. Many doors are open to those who know how to behave. I don't so much mean contacts from the toadying point of view, though that's true too; I'm talking about access to areas of life that can enrich your work and that need to be written about.

The problematic aspect is about connecting with the literary community itself. The vast majority of literary people, as is often pointed out, tended to be vaguely or distinctly left-leaning. Left fellow-writers might read copnservative work sometimes, but they wouldn't discuss it seriously. Instead, it would be talked up by newspaper editors, and that's a very different thing. The literary community can be a horrible snake-pit, but isolation from it has serious consequences. You sense this isolation in the later years of Kipling, Waugh and Amis.

Like many clever well-off young people of his time, Duggan himself had a very brief flirtation with Communism. But class told. Powell had taken the Proustian route, Waugh the satirical one. Since conservative authors were apt to be anti-modernist, unimpressed by fashionable ideas, and -  in literary terms at least - non-elitist, another possibility was popular fiction.

It was in the distant past that Duggan found a literary image within which he could celebrate the military and traditionalist values that he was born to.


*

Since Anthony Powell got mentioned here, I'd like to to take the opportunity to recommend this lively collection of school-work (by the students of  Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts) on A Dance to the Music of Time .  

http://www.anthonypowell.org/andoverdance/home.html

It's delightful to see the students responding with such evident enthusiasm and sensitivity to Powell's epic chronicle of the upper echelons; a world such as they will soon be entering for themselves, as many of these elite students recognize. Isn't that the best sort of reading, when you're aware of a book's serious relevance to your own life?  Yet from another point of view it's also a little sad. Is this the future of The Dance: to act as an intelligent deb's manual?

There's a notable paucity of references to e.g. feminism, but in one respect this substantial collection of responses does make a profound if inadvertent critique. Almost all the students read the early books in the sequence with a sort of wide-eyed expectation that Kenneth Widmerpool will at some point turn out to have some good in him, something to redeem his self-centredness, awkwardness and pomposity. It amounts to critical comment because what it suggests is that Powell's own loathing for the Widmerpool type had something unexamined about it, something that he couldn't quite communicate.  The students' instinct is sounder than the author's; they see that it's no great surprise that someone so ostracised has become unattractive and selfish, but that it needn't imply that his inner psyche is corrupted and that he is incapable of loving or being loved.

This collection is hosted on the pages of the Anthony Powell Society. The authors I've mentioned in this post tend to have Societies; Kipling does, so does Waugh. In other words, memory of their work is kept alive by people outside the universities.  That has its good aspects; for instance, dedication and detail. The downside is that it's fans talking to fans; the beloved work tends to be discussed uncritically, without awareness of current research into the wider context of its period, and without feeding into the wider conversations of our own.  So in a way the theme of cultural isolation still continues today.


*


PS (2018)


Perry Anderson's long and enormously readable article on Proust and Powell:


https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n14/perry-anderson/different-speeds-same-furies


For all the brilliant insights of Perry's exposition, I remain stuck at the frontier, infinitely entertained but never fully persuaded.  It seems to be so easy to make Powell knock spots off  Proust: but isn't there just a delightful hint of, say, comparing P. G. Wodehouse favourably with Hegel? (What Oxford debater couldn't do that, and yet how little the demonstration matters...)  And it seems strangely pat that the essay, though quite brusque about Powell's early and late novels, finds essentially nothing to criticize in the whole twelve volumes of A Dance. What does such unearthly perfection tell us, both about the kind of work it is and the way it's received? Perry has such fun exhuming and rehearsing passages of A Dance that we hardly notice how his essay elegantly avoids the context of Powell's own times and his own novelist contemporaries. Somehow a question about cultural significance is being sidestepped here. To put Powell (or Wodehouse) in context we really need to be talking about, let's say, .. Lolita... L'Étranger... Awkward, upsetting, difficult, cussed books, but the debates about them, then and now, go on mattering.

Surrealism and the English Channel

Paul Nash, painting of Dymchurch sea-wall

[Image source: from Cathy Lomax's pretty wonderful blog: http://cathylomax.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/paul-nash-and-dymchurch.html]

Lee’s poems had about them a remarkable tone. They were ‘quiet’ compared to the work of the Americans I was reading, but they were also surreal. It was a surrealism of everyday things. I often felt that surrealism arrived in Britain as flotsam; objects that floated across the Channel and sat displaced on a beach in southern England. It’s something you can see in the paintings of Paul Nash.

(From Laurie Duggan's post about the late Lee Harwood:

http://graveneymarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/remembering-lee-harwood.html)


I wonder if Tim Allen (who grew up on the Isle of Portland) would recognize that particular psychogeographical configuration?

Thinking back to my Hastings days, maybe even (in early childhood)  my Eastbourne days, I'd say that I always had a vague sense of it.

A sense confirmed when, much later, I discovered Montale's poem "Eastbourne" (not that Montale was a Surrealist, but...) , and by the Channel-Islander Jeremy Reed's translations of Montale in The Coastguard's House, generously and rightly praised by Michael Hoffman in the LRB;  still surely one of Reed's most stunning achievements.

Maybe it's something about any town that sharply abuts the sea. The sudden, enormous sea-blankness always intrudes a kind of questioning commentary, a kind of provisionality, into the life of the land.

But maybe, too,  it's particularly something unique about the English Channel. Already when I was quite young, the experience here was not just of enormous sea-blankness but of a pressing awareness that, not very far beyond the blankness, though invisible to us, lay a populous, clamorous and totally different world; different languages, different history, different art, different thinking.

Plus it was a fact that continental visitors, like Montale, were a lot more likely to show up in South Coast towns than in, say, Derbyshire.

It always seemed to me quite natural that my own grandmother, an Eastbourne resident long estranged from her husband, should have nourished her imaginative and emotional life with visits to Paris and Austria. She even made me call her by a German name (Mutti). I never really thought of her as English.

Though I couldn't see across the English Channel myself, it was obvious that Mutti could.

[I've been here before.

In an essay I wrote in 2010 about Elizabeth Bletsoe's collection Landscape from a Dream (named after a Paul Nash painting), I felt concerned that taking an interest in Nash's South Coast localities might mean "an unsurrealization of Surrealism". I'm still not sure if it's true or not.]

Notes on Andrea Brady's "Export Zone"

"Export Zone" is a poem by Andrea Brady in Presenting, the second collection within Cut from the Rushes (Reality Street 2013)

http://www.realitystreet.co.uk/resources/Cut%20from%20Rushes%20pp82-83.pdf

An earlier version of the poem appeared here:

Invisibly Tight Institutional Outer Flanks Dub (verb) Glorious National Hi-Violence Response Dream (lifegangdocuments, March 2008) (hereafter Invisibly Tight)

http://www.plantarchy.us/invisibly-tight.pdf

The earlier version capitalizes Burundi, UN HCR, Venus, ABCDE, London Lite, Salt, Basra, and Eastern. (Some of those are helpful clues.)

There are some more substantial differences, too.




 Line 6: "imports unsold trickling over" (Invisibly Tight), "imports unsold sweating" (Cut from the Rushes)
Line 17: "sole citizen" (Invisibly Tight) "sole beneficiary" (Cut from the Rushes)
Line 26 "hold my breath" (Invisibly Tight) "hold breaths" (Cut from the Rushes)
Line 29 "convince me, and the easter" (Invisibly Tight) "convince the easter" (Cut from the Rushes)
Line 31 "the doctors" (Invisibly Tight), "Doctors" (Cut from the Rushes)

The paragraphing is different in the later part of the poem. The paragraph starts are: Invisibly Tight: "purchase on one life" (28), "their sex" (33). Cut from the Rushes: "to the end of sacrifice" (26) and probably "Doctors refuse" (31); I can't say for sure about this one, because line 31 begins a new page, but it seems relevant that in Cut from the Rushes (but not in Invisibly Tight) line 30 ends with a full stop.

There's no reason to suppose a single motive lies behind all these revisions. Those in 26 and 29 seem prepared to blur what had formerly been more direct.


*

Title ("Export Zone"). The term is not simply denotative in itself. It recalls the Agri Export Zones or Export Processing Zones set up in developing nations to enable making money through exports; the latter are free trade zones which are tax-exempt and often deregulated (allowing sweatshop labour). A refugee camp could be compared (ironically) with the penning yards of e.g. Kenya's "livestock export zones".

Line 2-3. ("burundi" "un" "hcr"). Burundi has been a long-standing source of refugees, the latest wave in 2015. The UNHCR (the UN refugee agency) is active in Burundi and in neighbouring countries.

The refugee camp, a location implied here and perhaps too in line 14, is too important a feature of our world to pass unremarked. The average stay of a child in a refugee camp is said to be 17 years. Life does not, of course, stand still. The PLO took form in the late 1960s in the refugee camps of Jordan and Lebanon.

Line 3. ("is that enough milk") One of several intrusions from the typical exchange in a chain coffee-shop. Burundi is poor in natural resources and coffee accounts for 93% of its exports (Wikipedia).

Lines 5-7 ("exotic imports" "bushmeat" "extinction"). In 2003 it was reported that 100 of Burundi's 300 hippos had been killed to sell as bushmeat (considered a delicacy in the cities), a trade driven by poverty.

Line 14 ("abcde"). Possibly the protocol for assessment of clinical emergencies such as patients with multiple traumatic injuries or acute illness (Airway, Breathing, Circulation, Disability, Exposure).

Line 28 ("matching gifts programme") An arrangement, common in large corporates, whereby the employer matches the employee's donation to an approved charity (thus doubling its value).


Gareth Prior has blogged about the poem. 

Showing the slit across the thigh, she anchors
the erotic by which burundi girls buy un
hcr relief. Is that enough milk
foaming venus blood shot through narrow arteries
sewn up with grass and thorn. Exotic
                 imports unsold sweating
bushmeat, a race for extinction won at the starting
gun. Every tactic is neurotic, down to the wire



"Export Zone" appeared in the Forward Book of Poetry 2015. It was Highly Commended for the 2014 prize, perhaps (as Ken Edwards mused) by Jeremy Paxman, or possibly Vahni Capildeo. [Intercapillary readers might like to know that also Highly Commended were poems by S.J. Fowler, Lee Harwood, Colin Herd, and Marianne Morris. Denise Riley went one better and was Shortlisted. In the past the Forward anthologies have been regarded as typifying the most mainstream of the mainstream but evidently it is not as straightforward as that now.]

Nevertheless I feel like there's a wry appropriateness in its being this Brady poem, in particular, that flickered before the eyes of poetry's larger readership. Maybe that's because Costa Coffee sponsor a major literary prize of their own. Maybe it's because the ingredients of the poem, salted and whipped, the plight of Burundi refugees, violence against women, free trade deregulation and smug enjoyment of exported coffee, inadequacy of charitable donations, dubious value of writing poetry, seem at first to compose an argument that's rather too easily digestible; already pre-digested in fact.  In a miserable, grisly kind of way, We know all this. So far as the opening of the poem is concerned, you can say that it shadows forth a sort of Political Poetry Lite.

But that's where the poem begins, not where it ends.

"Before the noon bulletin / I’ve sucked off two enemies and crossed / my arms over my mouth" (9-11)

It's reasonable to suppose that "I" is the Burundi girl refugee of line 2.  Reasonable, yes. But then that provokes a further question, what kind of voice is this? It's neither mimetic of a personal spoken narrative of horrible experience, nor is it gravely impersonal in the way that an emblem may be given a speech-bubble in which to announce its significance. It's emotionally neutral, but not in a traumatized way, but rather in a totally inappropriate mundanely-chatty way. (The present perfect tense has a lot to do with conveying this impression.) As if somehow the cafe had merged with the refugee camp and the lines were only saying "Boy, I've had a really busy morning and gotten a whole lot done."

Pronouns here are unstably connected to dramatis personae. Even in the opening sentence:

Showing the slit across the thigh, she anchors
the erotic by which burundi girls buy un
hcr relief.

Is "she" in fact a Burundi girl herself? Maybe, and maybe not.

What about this?

I sat in front of the terminal bowed by
happy news. He's coming, down the basra
              highway the eastern mainline toppling regime

Another mini-narrative is shadowed forth, but it seems to have a new cast-list. And once more, we're aware of a vague inappropriateness in connecting anything happy with Iraq's highway to hell.

To generalize, the poem seems reluctant to maintain the firm separation between the coffeed-up westerner and the abused refugee upon which the irony inherent in the hypothetical Lite poem seems to depend.

This might be the right moment to survey the text before us rather as if it were a Prynne-style poem from which the reader-tactic of construing syntax is excluded. Among other things we might notice: (1) In the first stanza, the chiming of "erotic", "exotic", "tactic", "neurotic". (2) Duplication of certain words in different contexts: "relief", "sucked", "bowed", "salt", "whipped", "pink"; or pairings of related words such as "buy"/"purchase". (3) Violent imagery of sexual wounding and repression. (4) But notably, a marked absence of such negative words such as "violence" or "horror". Instead (inappropriately?), a marked presence of positive words such as "happy", "relief", "coming", "intimacy", "pleasure", "celebrate".  (5) The progression "sacrifice", "easter season", "celebrate time".  (6) A rhetorical pattern in which the closed question "is that enough milk" comes to be replaced, in the second half of the poem, by four open questions based on the word "how".

Not Why or What, but How. It's the least radical, the most pragmatic, of question-words, because it doesn't question the objective (at least not openly) but only the means by which that objective is to be attained. Increasingly, the questioner becomes more identifiably the poet herself, and the poem ends:

Doctors refuse to look at a local sample, even these
lines sucked tight as zippers betray
their sex with pink flapping. How to feel
pleasure when writing is a work of repressive
sympathy, how do you celebrate time?

(Interesting then that the pronoun becomes "you". Can indeed be fully accounted for as the normal sociolinguistic reluctance of educated people to say "I" when "I" is really what they mean.  Desire to reassure that the question is of wider relevance. Could also place the question as part of a conversation with other writers.)

What the question does not say: 1. It doesn't repeat Adorno or Celan. It's in dialogue with them, maybe, but that's true of most modern poems.  2. It doesn't ask what good is writing, or what use is writing, but what pleasure is writing.

That risks being thought distasteful or shallow or solipsistic, in the context. Brady takes that risk.

I'd argue that emotion, the "pink flapping" of line 33 (specifically its place in a political life and in relation to suffering) is the topic at the heart of the poem.

The composite question could shortly be answered, decidedly in the negative, by proposing an apocalyptic/activist poetic. Feeling pleasure, we could answer shortly, is irrelevant. Celebrating time is by no means an essential requirement for poetry;  only indeed in the  post-Romantic nineteenth century did it begin to seem so, when the bourgeoisie began to live longer. Time in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century poetry was likely to be regarded as an enemy, nothing to be celebrated.

That thought brings into consideration the chain of Christian references in the poem. I would say that the poem takes seriously the Christian framework for thinking about suffering (e.g the theology of sacrifice and the conception of Christ suffering with us as well as for us) but does not accede to it. If line 4 of the poem distantly recalls "See see where Christ's blood streams in the firmament!",  then Christ has been pointedly replaced by Venus.

The poem is not there to supply answers, but it seems apparent that the line of thought stubbornly insists on assigning greater importance to personal emotion than is permitted by the apocalyptic/activist one, or mediated by the Christian one.


STRAY NOTE

Re "1 Will Be Back At Nine", Arethede, literally ere-thede = past people. Appears only in the Middle English phrase "in arethede" (among people of old, in times of yore). (MED)