Mazagrans

Les castors bâtirent. Les "mazagrans" fumèrent dans les estaminets.
     Dans la grande maison de vitres encore ruisselante les enfants en deuil regardèrent les merveilleuses images.


(Arthur Rimbaud, from "Après le Déluge", in Illuminations)

Full text of Après le Déluge:
http://abardel.free.fr/petite_anthologie/deluge.htm

John Ashbery's translation:

The beavers built. Tumblers of coffee steamed in the public houses.

In the vast, still-streaming house of windows, children in mourning looked at marvelous pictures.

Unattributed translation on PoemHunter:

                                   Beavers built.

'Mazagrans' smoked in the little bars.
In the big glass house, still dripping,
children in mourning looked
at the marvelous pictures.

Ashbery is right about a mazagran being a coffee drink, but his translation doesn't reveal that a mazagran is a cold, iced drink. (It originated in Algeria.) So if it steams or smokes, that's a paradox, but a natural one, like the vapour rising from a stream on a chilly evening.

[Image source: http://www.lavaisselleaukilo.be/catalogue/mazagran/ .]

acorn

Grocery shop in the Edgeware Road

[Image source: https://londonist.com/2015/08/the-culinary-tube-map-edgware-road. Photo by Adrian Scottow.]



Here's the beginning and end of Laurie Duggan's "Autumn Journal".



gulls caught in early light over rooftops


yellow sky


*


one red fox, several deer


the length of the King's Wood


*


mud and twigs


cracked acorns on a wet road


*

- - - -




smoke turns to fog


moonrise south of Gravesend


*


rough winds


wrong equinox



The characteristic generous, indifferent, allusion in the title:  LD's poem does have some quiet conversation with MacNeice's eve-of-war meditations. But the differences are marked. For example,  this autumn journal consists of 14 lines, instead of 24 cantos. Macneice's poem covered about 4 months in 1938. There's a hint of a smile in just how brief LD's Autumn Journal is. What's happening in our news media, then? The silence hums with that unvoiced commentary. Yet isn't this poem, too, in some accord with what Macneice says in his introductory note, "Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets -- a final verdict or a balanced judgment".


The poetic is one in which the integrity of the real world is specifically not "captured" in the words, it is not immanent in the words. Yet it feels very present For, example, the poem uses no verbs of  movement, yet looking past the text we're aware of  movement.  The gulls, for example, are flying and wheeling and gliding. How do I know? The poem doesn't say that. But I see them.




You can read the poem in a few seconds. The asterisks, however, are there to tell us that its seven annotations are spaced far apart, in place and probably in time.  Its horizons are large, it's a big page.


The length of the King's Wood is also quite a long way: it's one of the largest woodlands in E. Kent. Placed next to the deer, it suggests a chase, vistas opening, canopy thinning.


The second allusion is to Shakespeare's Sonnet 18: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May .  The springtime of that poem explains why now is the "wrong" equinox.  But then isn't the autumnal equinox always the wrong equinox. Yet the trans-seasonal "rough winds" are, in a way, reassuring of larger cycles.


It was in a park in Bexhill-on-Sea, last Saturday morning, that I encountered the cracked acorns. (Moving between the ash-dominant scarplands of the upper and lower Jurassic, well, I don't seem to spend a lot of time with oak trees and am always struck by them when I visit other parts of the country.)


Only some of the acorns were cracked. This was more about cycling and trampling than the pulverization of trucks.


Pedunculate Oak. Some of the acorns were really big. I picked up the fattest and juiciest and bunged it into the pocket of my hoodie. Then I forgot about it until, very late last night, after luminous dinner at a Lebanese restaurant on the Edgeware Road, and several hours of train and coach into provincial darkness,  I was settling down in the van, and I heard the sound of something rolling along the foot-well then plunking onto the step.


The Indo-European root for "acorn" is very ancient; it meant fruit of various sorts. Words from the same root turn up in Celtic languages, referring to sloes and plums. Preparing acorns for human food is not straightforward, but it's possible. The tannins must be leached off, boiling with five changes of water. But potentially it's worth it in survival terms, because this is an abundant source of starch and fat, things that most easily-foraged foods tend to be lacking in.




http://britishlocalfood.com/acorns/
https://honest-food.net/how-to-eat-acorns/


*


"moonrise south of Gravesend".




This could, I suppose, mean a moonrise witnessed while standing somewhere to the south of Gravesend;  and if so, that's not particularly interesting, except for confirming that the poem reports from a number of different locations. 


 The alternative and I think more natural interpretation is that, from where the observer is standing, the moon appears to rise to the southward of Gravesend. 


Let's think a bit about this.

Moonrise, we all know, takes place in the east -- approximately. In the UK moonrises vary between nearly NE (e.g. a full moon in midwinter) and nearly SE (e.g. a full moon in midsummer).


The observer would need to be seeing the lights of Gravesend on or near the eastern horizon. Not necessarily due east, but definitely easterly. It wouldn't make much sense to say the moonrise was "south" of Gravesend if Gravesend itself lay far to the north (or the south, for that matter).


Positioned thus, the observer might witness the moon come up to the south of  an eastward-lying Gravesend. The moonrise isn't, I suppose, very far to the south, or why would you mention Gravesend at all?


The observer would need to be quite a long way off, so that the lights of Gravesend appeared as a localized cluster (or smudge), something you could refer to in relation to the moon.


On the other hand, if you were a very long way to the west then Gravesend wouldn't be distinguishable from the lights of other nearby conurbations.


My imagination takes me to a viewpoint somewhere on the high ground south of Swanscombe. A motorist on the A2 eastbound -- yes, that might do it.


People usually notice moonrises when the moon is (more or less) a full moon, rising in the early evening. A full moon at the autumnal equinox would rise due east. If you were standing, let's say, on Castle Hill, then it would appear to come up just to the south of Gravesend. Though (to quote Ashbery) this is just one example.




The magical power of four words!


*


Since Ashbery' s "These Lacustrine Cities" has swept into view, I can't neglect the opportunity to recommend Norman Finkelstein's interesting reading of that poem (The Utopian Moment in Contemporary American Poetry (2nd edn 1993), p. 62ff.).

a pleasant smell of frying sausages

In the Garment District, New York

[Image source: http://theclassytraveler.com/where-to-stay-in-new-york-best-hotels-in-midtown/garment-district-new-york/]






That pesky John Ashbery has effortlessly hijacked this post, displacing such potential future topics as Mirabelle Plums and Bigarreau Cherries, Sibelius' Kullervo, Perennial Sow-thistle, nations as organizing frames, Measure for Measure, Osyris alba, Le Canal du Midi, vikings in Normandy, Emily Critchley, Emily Bronte, The Lay of the Last Minstrel,  and I don't know what else.


MIXED FEELINGS


A pleasant smell of frying sausages
Attacks the sense, along with an old, mostly invisible
Photograph of what seems to be girls lounging around
An old fighter bomber, circa 1942 vintage.
How to explain to these girls, if indeed that’s what they are,
These Ruths, Lindas, Pats and Sheilas,
About the vast change that’s taken place
In the fabric of our society, altering the texture
Of all things in it? And yet
They somehow look as if they knew, except
That it’s so hard to see them, it’s hard to figure out
Exactly what kinds of expressions they’re wearing.
What are your hobbies, girls? Aw nerts,
One of them might say, this guy’s too much for me.
Let’s go on and out, somewhere
Through the canyons of the garment center
To a small cafe and have a cup of coffee.
I am not offended that these creatures (that’s the word)
Of my imagination seem to hold me in such light esteem,
Pay so little heed to me. It’s part of a complicated
Flirtation routine, anyhow, no doubt. But this talk of
the garment center ....






(The whole poem is here:


http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1975/04/03/mixed-feelings/   )




Ashbery's poem is guilelessly sexist, the way things could be in 1975, but for that reason illuminating, and in fact you might prefer to describe it as "about" sexism. The gaggle of imaginary girls that the poet describes as having "tiny intelligences" are very evocative of the way we solitary strangers experience socializing groups of girls (and lads, it's true). There's no getting any sense out of them, we say comfortably (to hide, more often than not, our real discomfort).


One of Ashbery's perennial themes is the experience of a high-population world. This poem is about that, too. Though the girls are, as the poet sincerely says, only his imaginary creatures, yet in fact this poem is about his and our habitual experience of those large crowds of real people that we don't know. In the high-population world we always translate them into imagination to a certain extent. The unvarnished communication of real with real tends to be jarring.


And we arrange them, as my TEFL course advises, into groups. ("Advice on teaching large classes".). A class of 50 students should be divided into five groups of ten who are asked to sit and work together. Each group should contain at least one strong-ability student who can guide the others.


The "garment center", aka the Garment District, is a high-fashion area of Manhattan. But the poet goes on to reflect that the bleaching sunlight in his imaginary photograph can only be Californian. So it seems that the imaginary girls are prone to flights of imagination themselves. In their case, naturally, the imagination is completely in the thrall of magazine culture.


The poet's view of the girls is generally dismissive (these Lindas and Sheilas; "I have already forgotten them") and sometimes appreciative: "astonishingly young and fresh" ... but then youth and freshness is what young girls always bring to the party, of course -- I mean, once the observer has reached middle years. The phrase is a way of acknowledging, after all, how very unastonished one is...


So is this a failure of the poet's imagination, since he is after all imagining the girls? Yes: but that is a due recognition that even our own creatures soon develop inscrutability: and how much more the real people!  Can the real people even be distinguished, so large is the element of projected imagination in men's thoughts about women?


(A less sheerly dismissive "appraisal", if no less stereotypic, might have noted the girls' superiority in respect of expressive quickness, unerring backchat, fluency in social and body language, judgment of relevance, clarity of vision, and so on. Freshness is also an intellectual quality.)


So the poem is completely accurate in its account of the inability of different parties on the same street to make any real connection. ("This guy's too much for me"...) . The mutual low esteem with which gang and individual regard each other.


Yet this is hardly a counsel of hopelessness. We know that snatched out of our habitual spheres of operatio, and from no matter what sociolinguistic groupings, we mere persons can still meet each other meaningfully on many large grounds.


But nor is it only  a matter of social comedy ("Mixed Feelings").


When we meet possibly in the lounge of a modern airport,
They looking as astonishingly young and fresh as when this picture was made
But full of contradictory ideas, stupid ones as well as
Worthwhile ones, but all flooding the surface of our minds
As we babble about the sky and the weather and the forests of change.


This continuous experience of existence, as a daily fact, of "contradictory ideas" and "forests of change" defines a state of affairs in which communication with others as different from us as can be is plainly a matter of urgency. Though the poet enjoys the feebleness of communication as romantic evidence of the ungraspable largeness of the world, it's really a blight.

John Ashbery in 1975 (photo by Peter Hujar)


[Image source: http://pictify.saatchigallery.com/433570/john-ashbery-1975-hujar . The picture is in the National Portrait Gallery in the Smithsonian Institution.]


*


But what about the pleasant smell of frying sausages?


It places the thinking in a quotidian context, but not unmixed with desire. And that seems just right for this projectedly-flirtatious meditation. The coffee drifts in to the poem later, and maybe even the orange juice; the poem ending in a post-prandial feeling of alert tranquillity.

America is a fun country...

[This post has now been published in Intercapillary Space:
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/america-is-fun-country.html]

Franz Kline, Mahoning (1956)

[Image source: http://whitney.org/Exhibitions/AmericaIsHardToSee?&artwork_id=13464&filter_id=24. The painting is in the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York]

America is a fun country. Still, there are aspects of it which I would prefer not to think about. I am sure, for instance, that the large "chain" stores with their big friendly ads and so-called "discount" prices actually charge higher prices so as to force smaller competitors out of business. This sort of thing has been going on for at least 200 years and is one of the cornerstones on which our mercantile American society is constructed, like it or not. What with all our pious expostulations and public declarations of concern for the poor and the elderly, this is a lot of bunk and our own president plays it right into the lap of big business and uses every opportunity he can to fuck the consumer and the little guy. We might as well face up to the fact that this is and always has been a part of our so-called American way of life.  ... 

(From John Ashbery, The Vermont Notebook , 1975)



The president in 1975 was the unelected Gerald Ford, who took over after Nixon's resignation in 1974.

Still, Ashbery's poem seems an eminently fitting welcome to the new era of Donald Trump and Rex Tillerson.

Reading this today, it seems clear enough that the "higher prices" (where we might have expected "lower prices") are the price paid for indifferent environmental destruction. America is one of the most polluting countries on earth. In gross volume of pollutants, it is second only to China. But in per capita pollution, it's way ahead of China, and right up there with Australia and Saudi Arabia, the dirtiest nations on earth. (2011 figures from the Union of Concerned Scientists.)

Somewhat paradoxically, all three nations - USA, Australia and Saudi Arabia - have surprisingly high poverty rates; compared, for example, to European nations. Paradoxical, because it costs money to be a polluter. The main polluters are rich nations. But maybe there's also something about massive social inequalities that links with the unfettered burning of fossil fuels.


Child Poverty Rates in the USA:
http://www.globalpolicy.tv/shamefully-high-child-poverty-rates-in-the-united-states/?gclid=CjwKEAiAm8nCBRD7xLj-2aWFyz8SJAAQNalaZTjWr6OCAGwVLZdJKM2weFP_47VoVGU2SVj8xbgIZBoCmtLw_wcB


*

Ashbery's diatribe is not, of course, quite what it seems to be. Ashbery is having a lot of parodic fun with slipshod phrases like "so-called" and "cornerstones". Something is being performed here: it's an almost typical rant, contemptuous of "pious expostulations" and sentimental for "the little guy".

In The Vermont Notebook as a whole, Ashbery's country-bus rides lead to a direct critique of lazy distinctions between the rural/natural and the urban/artificial, along lines we might now associate with queer theory.

Christopher Schmidt writes of Ashbery's career preoccupation "to misrepresent the line between the natural and the artificial, and to recuperate what is normally deemed waste..."

(Christopher Schmidt, "The Queer Nature of Waste in John Ashbery's The Vermont Notebook", Arizona Quarterly, Vol 68 No. 3 (Autumn 2012), pp. 71 - 102.)

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/486613/pdf )

And the theme of waste in The Vermont Notebook is picked up again here:

Brian Glavey: The Wallflower Avant-Garde: Modernism, Sexuality and Queer Ekphrasis (Oxford University Press, 2016)

https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=CnyECgAAQBAJ&pg=PT144&lpg=PT144&dq=%22America+is+a+fun+country%22+ashbery&source=bl&ots=EjGpKcTeSv&sig=s9r6hYv_pD2ebVq33UcN4svB6NY&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjD7MOfvvbQAhWqKsAKHa76BX8Q6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=%22America%20is%20a%20fun%20country%22%20ashbery&f=false


*

Reading Ashbery as an environmentally-concerned poet might seem rather ridiculous. But I expect we'll get used to it. As it becomes clearer that hard capitalism wants a trial of strength about the environment, we'll perhaps start to read a lot of things differently. We'll see that Ashbery's work, for instance, is linked in manifold ways, some rather obvious and some less so, with the things that are being wrested from all of us.

Douglas Crase and John Ashbery at Niagara
 in 1975

[Image source: http://www.douglascrase.com/newsletter.htm]

The museum

[Image source (above and below): http://www.rugbooks.com/advSearchResults.php?action=search&orderBy=relevance&category_id=0&keywordsField=afghanistan]



These fragments I have shored against my ruins  

Somehow, modernism was in favour of museums. It was also anguished by them, by catastrophic history and a distasteful present, so the characteristic mode was irony.

By the time of the New York school, history seemed more catastrophic still. The poets begin to see the museum's contents in a different way. The details of the history you are supposed to be interested in became ridiculous. Irony died. A strong feeling of healthy irresponsibility blew through the room. It became apparent that the museum and its spaces and the items on display are crucially about now and here.

                                     whether it's the form of
Some creator who has momentarily turned away,
Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces
Are seen as part of a spectrum, independent
Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival;
Whether on the other hand all of it is to be
Seen as no luck.

(from John Ashbery's "Clepsydra", in Rivers and Mountains 1966. The first couple of pages of "Clepsydra", which include the above extract, are online here)

The third poet in Penguin Modern Poets 19, Tom Raworth, perceives the modernity too:

looking at the etruscan statues in the louvre there is a green
       patina on my hands my expression has taken its final
       shape
everything becomes modern inside these cases there is
       nothing without touching

children crawl under the glass      things are reflected several
       times

(from "Six Days", in The Relation Ship (1966))

Ashbery's idea of the "spectrum" becomes a "prism" in Lee Harwood's "The 'Utopia'" (Landscapes, 1967).

The table is very old and made of fine mahogany
polished by generations of servants.
And through the windows the summer blue skies
and white clouds spelling a puffy word.
And on the table the books and examples
of embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen
and many large and small objects - all of which
could not help but rouse a curiosity.

-----

At times it is hard to believe
what is before one's eyes -
there is no answer to this except the room itself,
and maybe the white clouds seen though the window.

------

*

ISIS destroys triumphal arches in Palmyra

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/world/middleeast/isis-syria-arch-triumph-palmyra.html?_r=0

As has often been pointed out, Daesh is philosophically just as western as it is eastern; indeed, the example of Daesh reveals such distinctions as inadequate to account for moves within a globalized world (though, of course, much remains in the stereotypes to be deftly exploited).

Daesh's intention to make a bonfire of both the nation-state and accumulated cultural riches is something that many of us will uncomfortably recognize as our own deep aspirations put into hideous practice.


*

"embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen".

Khamak and other Afghan embroideries are of course the art and labour of women. But owned and displayed by men, at least until they end up, - as a result of what transaction? - on this so-polished table...



*

Interview with Lee Harwood by Andy Brown in The Argotist Online - no date is given, but I should think it was around 2008.

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Harwood%20interview.htm

Recent short (but helpful) take on Ashbery's "Clepsydra", by John Koethe.

http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/short-takes-on-long-poems-volume-2/

John Ashbery's eyes

.... are indeed blue, but a greyish type of blue.

Lee Harwood's "As Your Eyes Are Blue. . ." and  "For John in the Mountains" are closely related poems, both recalling the same flowery and meadowy trip to the mountains. (I would assume, in France or Switzerland.)

In the latter poem, he writes:

                        a dark snow
darker than your eyes'
dark snow

Ashbery's eye-colour compared to the blueish-grey colour of snow in shadow. To spell it out.

John Ashbery and Lee Harwood, Paris 1965 (Photo by Pierre Martory)

[Image source: http://jacketmagazine.com/16/ah-harw.html, where it was reproduced courtesy of Lee Harwood (I've blown up the small JPG, which is why it looks blurred)]


*

Kenneth Koch's much-quoted 1965 conversation with John Ashbery.
http://thisrecording.com/today/2011/1/20/in-which-john-ashbery-and-kenneth-koch-start-making-sense.html


Essay by Andrew Field about the early Ashbery and pragmatism:
https://andrewfield81.wordpress.com/2013/10/03/the-imminence-of-a-revelation-not-yet-produced-ashbery-and-the-pragmatist-sublime/   (with particular reference to the opening line of Some Trees, "We see us as we truly behave:")


Essay by Bob Archambeau about Ashbery's art world at the end of 1940s:
http://samizdatblog.blogspot.co.uk/2015/02/john-ashbery-and-poetics-of-art-world.html

Robert Browning (1812-1889)

Portrait of Robert Browning by Dante Gabriel Rosetti (1855)

[Image source: The Fitzwilliam Museum]


This post compiles all the pieces that I've written about Browning. The two most substantial pieces appeared in Intercapillary Space, so I've just given links to them.

*

Pauline: A Fragment of a Confession (1833)

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2007/04/robert-brownings-pauline.html

The name in the title should perhaps be pronounced in the French manner, as Pauline apparently hails from the Alps and her sole intervention (a footnote) is in French. But I don't think I'll be trying this in public.


*

Strafford (1837)

http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.co.uk/2009/11/robert-brownings-strafford.html

*

"Bishop Blougram’s Apology" (published in Men and Women, 1855)

Of course you are remarking all this time

How narrowly and grossly I view life,

Respect the creature-comforts, care to rule

The masses, and regard complacently

‘The cabin’, in our old phrase. Well, I do.

The bishop is fascinated (in what is finally a generous way) by his effect on the young man. Whom he doesn’t wholly understand, but he knows that “life” is a revered word. He enjoys the words “narrowly” and “grossly”; intended as criticisms of him, he smacks his lips over them. This is talk not lecturing, so his sentence leaves its moorings - he obviously does not mean, what he logically implies, “how narrowly and grossly I regard complacently...”

“in our old phrase” politely includes Gigadibs (he would feel, “implicates”).

“Care to rule” is an odd phrase, perhaps a false note, but it passes the crozier/crook under our nose.

***

Everyone who has done the canon knows a few things about Browning. They know that he is copiously good. Also, that he isn’t good like Shakespeare’s sonnets or Keats’ odes. (You can read Men and Women with exuberant pleasure, but you don’t bother to learn any of his lines by heart.) Finally, that apart from the copiously good there is also a more-than-copious not-so-good, mainly in the last twenty years of his career, and there’s no conceivable requirement to dip into it.

So finding yourself in company with a volume of late Browning is a very liberating experience, though it is death to stay there.

* 

Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884), published when the author was 72, is in no way outstanding. The man who had produced a great collection (Men and Women) was as interested as ever in the shape of a collection, and this one is typically complex, the poems about the Persian philosopher (a pleasant image of the ageing author) interspersed with slight love-lyrics that play with the same themes. In the “Prologue” Browning supplies us with the image of spitted ortolans separated from each other by bread and sage-leaves.

Browning’s “poems” are, as Wilde acutely noted, a new kind of form that is close to prose. Much of it is barely more exciting than prose:

Wholly distrust thy knowledge, then, and trust

As wholly love allied to ignorance!

There lies thy truth and safety. Love is praise,

And praise is love! Refine the same, contrive

An intellectual tribute – ignorance

Appreciating ere approbative

Of knowledge that is infinite? With us

The small, who use the knowledge of our kind

Greater than we, more wisely ignorance

Restricts its apprehension, sees and knows

No more than brain accepts in faith of sight,

Takes first what comes first, only sure so far. 

It is, no doubt, rather frustrating that this is not “even” very limpid prose. The last sentence in this passage draws a parallel between the infinite knowledge of God and the merely “greater” knowledge of our more skilled peers, but the parallel is hardly laid out to the eye, and the curious expression “our kind greater than we” is a positive hindrance to understanding. Yet this casualness of exposition is important. It took me several readings of Shah Abbas to grasp exactly what the point of difference was between the two speakers – this is because the speakers are not lecturing, and some things are just implied in the tone. Towards the end of A Bean-stripe, a moving conciseness is achieved by the speakers’ digressiveness; the proposed discussion is in effect cancelled by the influx of solider things. From there I quote some examples of the poetry that lies lurking in the seams of the argument:

- Those Seven Thrones, Zurah’s beauty, weird Parwin!

Then let the stars thank me who apprehend

That such an one is white, such other blue!

But for my apprehension both were blank.

Cannot I close my eyes and bid my brain

Make whites and blues, conceive without stars’ help,

New qualities of colour? Were my sight

Lost or misleading, would yon red – I judge

A ruby’s benefaction – stand for aught

But green from vulgar glass? Myself appraise

Lustre and lustre; should I overlook

Fomalhaut and declare some fen-fire king,

Who shall correct me, lend me eyes he trusts

No more than I trust mine?

Yet I think the most memorable lines are after all quieter and close to prose.

Shelter, of some sort, no experienced chill

Warrants that I despair to find.

And there seems no reason why a valid art could not contain this high proportion of prose-interest to poetry-interest. Obviously, though, the arguments need to be grasped, so here are my brief summaries:

The Eagle: You should work for the world, and be a “helpful strength”.

The Melon-Seller: Do not bewail a fall from grace, but give thinks for your undeserved past happiness.

Shah Abbas: To be right-hearted, to be on the side of God and virtue, is more important than strict belief.

The Family: To pray is human. To submit to God’s will too easily may be less than human.

The Sun: In praising, we attribute a human aspect to the divine.

Mihrab Shah: The existence of pain is necessary for us to give thanks to God and love to each other.

A Camel-Driver: God does not punish like man may need to.

Two Camels: Enjoy the good things in life – it makes you more fit for work, and more aware of what joy is.

Cherries: Give praise for the smallest things, don’t despise them for the greater things you hardly understand.

Plot-Culture: God does not need to spy on the details of sensual love.

A Pillar at Sebzevar: Love is sure, knowledge is uncertain.

A Bean-Stripe; also, Apple-Eating: This is the most substantial poem in the collection; a discussion that begins with whether life is good or bad; it sinks all in man’s impotence and God’s omnipotence, and in the humbly optimistic faith of one who does not try to know too much.

Browning’s later career of course attracts the charge of facile optimism, as well as that damning facility for verse.  To do him justice, he is prepared to defend the optimism. I don’t know why we should be so unforgiving to this aspect of the late Victorian sages, when there is a clear line of descent to the scientific writers of today, whose universal optimism is a matter of no note.

[nb this sentence was written with a memory of Gregg Easterbrook’s remarkable A Moment on the Earth (1995) and Adam Philips’s Darwin’s Worms (1999), where the blurb’s statement that the author “unexpectedly finds much to celebrate” unwittingly emphasises just how expected, in another sense, it all is.]

Browning was a happy poet. Of Browning’s optimism we can say in reproof that he ignored – well, the Victorian slums, for instance. Yet he saved Elizabeth Barrett; through egocentrism and ignorance, it may be, but I don’t know that. I have to listen to his sanity, cheerfully selfish though it may have been. It is the selfish and rich who are intelligent.  Charity exacts a cost. If you love your neighbour, as Browning perhaps did not do (I mean in a practical way), do not suppose that you will write better, or even think better, as a result. On the contrary, to fight evil is to court the probable infection of evil. You must do it, if you’re going to do it, only because it’s right.

Did Browning, we may wonder, take drugs, or was it a natural high? Was it just his temperament? In the Prologue to the Parleyings with Certain People (1887), he puts it down to wine – this poem, which considers his own cheerfulness, pursues many of the same themes as A Bean-Stripe.

* 

Parleyings with Certain People of Importance in their Day (1887)

By the time of Men and Women (1855) Browning had developed the form of the dramatic monologue (DM) to a stage where it seems to us simply a natural form that we accept unquestioningly – and this was a monumental achievement.

The problem arose when he tried to think about what he was doing in an analytical way. He observed that the material of a DM was highly partial, usually chosen by the speaker to defend his own way of life. In The Ring and the Book (1868-69) he had the idea of composing a multiplicity of DMs that all addressed the same material. This would make clearer the partiality of each speaker; it would also supply a peculiarly rich presentation of the material itself, presented from many different viewpoints. But when we try to read the Ring and the Book we see that the experiment fails. Because each speaker is made to go over the same ground, s/he is inevitably compelled to rehearse long stretches of material that shed no interesting light on her/his character. Nor does the story itself gain greatly from this repetition; where slight contradictions appear, we are left not with a deeper insight but merely with doubt. 

The Parleyings, too, have the air of being composed in response to an over-schematic idea. The speaker is Browning, and the “people” (they are all men, by the way) are brought in to inspire his meditations on a number of interlinked themes. These, we might suppose, are the sort of thought-processes that precede the composition of DMs. But in the Parleyings, instead of progressing to writing the DMs, Browning versifies the notes. In principle, and occasionally in practice, this allows him to introduce frankly contemporary material – instead of composing a historical fiction, he can openly ponder the relevance of the past to his present. But this constitutes a loss of belief in poetry – what we value in the younger Browning is not his ideas, but his fiction.

(My prose – your poetry I dare not give,

purpling too much my mere grey argument)

he writes, as an aside, in Christopher Smart – and these are among the more memorable lines, because one tends to concede the rightness of Browning’s choice of colours. Yet the Parleyings deserve some attention.

Apollo and the Fates: A Prologue.  (The meter is similar to the Epilogue; galloping stanzas rhyming ababb where a is normally disyllabic.)  Apollo visits the Fates to plead for the life of Admetus. They scornfully point out that the life of man is mere misery; happiness only an illusion. Apollo persuades them to drink wine, man’s consolation, and they become temporarily merry, and applaud man’s potential and stubborn survival – “no defeat but a triumph”.  But then a mysterious “explosion at the earth’s centre” sobers them. Man is fated, they re-assert. But they grant Apollo’s plea for Admetus if anyone, for love’s sake, will offer to die for him. Apollo agrees, and sees his relatives contending for the honour. And sees Admetus refuse them – he’d rather die. The Fates laugh, interpreting this as a confirmation of their argument and a thwarting of Apollo’s plan. Our own response is more ambiguous, of course.

Bernard de Mandeville.  The central part of the poem is (I find) extremely obscurely expressed, but the basic argument is clear. A “parlous friend” asks for one plain demonstration that God is on the side of good. Browning argues by analogy; it’s impossible to comprehend the sun doing good, but thanks to Prometheus we have the little gift of fire and with it can do good ourselves. Not intellectual knowledge which fails before immensities, but our mere senses and our practical application, are enough to supply the faith that is wanted. [The poem’s drift became somewhat clearer once I looked up Mandeville, and learned that his idea was that in society individual evil such as pride and avarice led to the common good – for instance, by boosting the economy. It was an argument whose sources can be guessed at, for instance, in the medieval poem Wynnere and Wastoure – but after Mandeville it became dominant in economic thinking. Browning considers only the moral aspect, and seems to approve of it.]

Daniel Bartoli.  Largely devoted to the story of a woman who gives up a great Duke’s love so that he can retain his political power. Browning finds “saintship” in this worldly chronicle (not in a legendary) – he means the woman’s, though her life is not religious. He even finds something to please him in the duke, who tamely goes along with this (i.e. gives her up) – at least he too was once devoted to love, and though now a mere ghost of his past idealism, might rise again to that splendour.  

Christopher Smart.  Browning wonders why Smart produced only one inspired work (i.e. the Song to David). Browning seems to approve Smart’s humility in retiring to commonplace once the visionary experience had passed away, and contrasts him with those who seek “the end ere the beginning”. But the last section is confusing.

George Bubb Dodington. Concerned with statesmanship, and the politician’s habit of feathering his own nest. Browning decides (for the sake of argument) to accept this selfish motive as valid, but criticizes GBD for advising the statesman to adopt a sham zeal which will deceive no-one. Suggests that the statesman should go further and create in us a sense of awe by revealing his blatant lack of human conscience; behaviour which might persuade us, perhaps, that he is mystifyingly superhuman and thus merits our subservience. In George Bubb Dodington it’s quite clear that Browning doesn’t mean what he’s saying – this is an example of what (I think) is meant by Browning’s “casuistry”.

Francis Furini. FF was a painter-priest who painted nudes as well as religious subjects and who, according to legend, requested on his death-bed that his works be destroyed. But Browning refuses to credit this legend – assumes that Francis was a defender of the noble profession of art. Imagines him addressing the sceptical evolutionists and other speculators – putting forward the nobility of the body and man’s own desire for righteousness as signs of the innate goodness of the world. This “starting from what we know” links up with Christopher Smart and with Ferishtah’s optimism; it’s a fairly plain statement of what Browning himself had, it seems, come to think of as his “philosophy”.

Gerard de Lairesse. A fanciful and mythological writer, because he became blind? But Browning tries to achieve an insight into the world that is based only on sober sense and not on fancy. The centrepiece of the poem is a lengthy description of a day, from dawn to dusk, peopled by Lairesse-style imaginings – but Browning calls it “fooling”. Browning criticizes the “Greek” (perhaps Platonic) despair of the world – everything merely a shade. His joy in the actual.

Charles Avison. An organist of Newcastle, who composed a simple march. Browning considers music, an art whose expression of the soul exceeds any other, but which is necessarily transient, displaced by what follows it, so that the music of Avison’s time has no inspiring power for us moderns (e.g. of Browning’s time) who have Wagner and Brahms. And yet the fading is not inglorious. “Soon shall fade and fall / Myth after myth – the husk-like lies I call / New truth’s corolla-safeguard: Autumn comes, / So much the better!”

Fust and his Friends: An Epilogue  The friends, a conventional and benighted crew, come to Fust’s study – he is discovered, a “lost wretch” apparently sunk in despair. They conclude that he has made a pact with the devil. But Fust proudly demonstrates his astonishing invention – a printing press. Fust praises its power for spreading the truth, the faultless multiplication of a psalm. But asked why then he was found in such a woebegone attitude, he confesses his fear of how the press could be used to multiply falsehood. The friends agree – what if another Huss should make use of it? “I foresee such a man”, Fust agrees (i.e. Luther).  The basic connection with the Prologue is the concern (ultimately optimistic) with man’s potential for both good and evil. [Fust was also of interest to Jonathan Oldbuck – see The Antiquary, Ch XI. Scott has the astrologer Galeotti deliver a similar effusion on the ambiguous powers of the printing-press in Quentin Durward, Ch XIII.]

In writing up these notes (which I think ought to be useful, since few will trouble to read such a book) I have injured my vanity, both by admitting that some passages defeat me and also by revealing to a better reader – who I hope may enlighten me – where I’ve unwittingly missed the drift. It can be infuriatingly difficult to follow the argument. Often I am in doubt who is speaking, and whether they are expressing their own beliefs, or putting a case, or surmising or burlesquing someone else’s argument. Often the point at issue is bafflingly buried in the mass of common ground.

It’s easy to see why modernist poets who followed in Browning’s paths decided to drop the interconnecting links between “presentations” (such as a description of the dawn (Gerard de Lairesse) or a visit to a great house (Christopher Smart) or a bird picking at a thread (Charles Avison) and allowed the reader to do the work of inferring a connection between the materials. One can perhaps interpret the unresolvable pseudo-argument of Ashbery’s poetry as a reaction against these disjunct and imagistic “presentations”, in a certain way readmitting the “process” that we meet with in the Parleyings*.  Browning’s subjects are of such a kind that argument is in any case necessarily hazy and/or mercurial. It comes quite close itself to being pseudo-argument, except that there is a repetitious chiming of certain abstract words (such as will and beauty) which had a positive meaning for Browning because of his religion and his culture.

*Note. This has been noticed before, e.g. by Peter Porter.

[2001, 2002, 2007, 2009]