Finders Keepers Page 5

  What I heard made sense. In the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’, for example, the footfall of the word ‘time’ echoes and repeats in a way that is hypnotic when read aloud, yet can be perplexing when sight-read for its meaning only. Similarly, the interweaving and repetition of the words ‘present’, ‘past’ and ‘future’ goes round and round, like a linked dance through the ear. Words going forward meet each other coming back. Even the word ‘echo’ meets itself on the rebound. The effect is one of a turning and a stillness. Neither from nor towards. At the still point of the turning world:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.

  What might have been is an abstraction

  Remaining a perpetual possibility

  Only in a world of speculation.

  What might have been and what has been

  Point to one end, which is always present.

  Footfalls echo in the memory

  Down the passage which we did not take

  Towards the door we never opened

  Into the rose-garden. My words echo

  Thus, in your mind.

  But to what purpose

  Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

  I do not know.

  Other echoes

  Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?

  Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,

  Round the corner. Through the first gate,

  Into our first world, shall we follow

  The deception of the thrush?

  By its orchestration of theme and phrase, paraphrase and reprise, its premonitions of the end recoiling into the beginning, this passage is typical of the procedures of Four Quartets as a whole. The poetry comes through in a silent reading, of course, since (to quote again from Eliot’s own definition of ‘auditory imagination’), it operates below the level of sense; but it operates much more potently when the words are spoken aloud. Gradually therefore, I began in the early sixties to take pleasure in the basement life of Eliot’s ear and to teach myself ‘to sit still’ and let its underworkings work.

  These were also years when I was trying to make a start as a poet, and searching for the charge that sets writing energy flowing in a hitherto unwriting system. Yet much as I was learning from Eliot about the right way to listen, he could not be the stimulator of poetry for me. He was more a kind of literary superego than a generator of the poetic libido, and in order for the libidinous lyric voice to get on with its business, it had to escape from his overseeing presence. So I turned towards more familiar, more engageable writers like Patrick Kavanagh, R. S. Thomas, Ted Hughes, John Montague, Norman MacCaig. All of a sudden I was making up for not having read contemporary British and Irish poetry; and that way, I got excited and got started.

  Then I came upon C. K. Stead’s book, The New Poetic, with its revelation of Eliot as a poet who trusted the ‘dark embryo’ of unconscious energy. Stead revealed Eliot as a much more intuitive kind of writer than the commentaries had allowed one to believe. It is not that this lessened one’s awareness of the strictness of his mind or the scrupulousness of his withholdings. Eliot was still a rara avis, one whose note was uniquely beyond the common scale, a thin pure signal that might not wash genially across the earthy reaches of one’s nature but had the capacity to probe in the universe of spirit as far as Pluto. Yet one could grant this inimitable status to his achievement and still recognize the process that produced it as the usual uncertain, hopeful, needy, half self-surrendering, half self-priming process which the rest of us also experienced.

  What one learns ultimately from Eliot is that the activity of poetry is solitary and if one is to rejoice in it, one has to construct something upon which to rejoice. One learns that at the desk every poet faces the same kind of task, that there is no secret that can be imparted, only resources of one’s own that are to be mustered, or not, as the case may be. Many of the things Eliot says about poetic composition are fortifying because they are so authoritatively unconsoling:

  And what there is to conquer

  By strength and submission, has already been discovered

  Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope

  To emulate – but there is no competition –

  There is only the fight to recover what had been lost

  And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions

  That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.

  For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

  So, to conclude. If Eliot did not help me to write, he did help me to learn what it means to read. The experience of his poetry is an unusually pure one. You begin and end with the words alone – which is admittedly always the case, but often in the work of other poets the reader can find respites and alibis. With Frost or Yeats or Hardy, for example, there is a corroborative relation between a landscape and a sensibility. The words on the page can function in a way that is supplementary to their primary artistic function: they can have a window effect and open the blinds of language on to subjects and places before or behind the words. But this kind of mutual help does not exist – and is not intended to exist – between the words of Eliot’s poetry and the world that gave rise to them. When I visited Burnt Norton, for example, I did indeed find a rose garden and a dry concrete pool; but I also found this very documentary congruence between poem and place oddly disappointing. I realized that I did not really want a landscape to materialize since I had long since internalized a soundscape.

  Perhaps the final thing to be learned is this: in the realm of poetry, as in the realm of consciousness, there is no end to the possible learnings that can take place. Nothing is final, the most gratifying discovery is fleeting, the path of positive achievement leads to the via negativa. Eliot forfeited his expressionist intensity when he renounced the lyric for philosophic song. It may even be truer to say that the lyric renounced Eliot. But in accepting the consequences of renunciation with such self-knowledge and in proceeding with such strictness of intent, he proved a truth that we want to believe not perhaps about all poets, but about those who are the necessary ones. He showed how poetic vocation entails the disciplining of a habit of expression until it becomes fundamental to the whole conduct of a life.

  T. S. Eliot Centenary Lecture, Harvard University, 1988

  Belfast

  The Group

  ‘If a coathanger knocked in a wardrobe / That was a great event’ – Derek Mahon’s evocation of the unfulfilled expectancy of an old man living in Belfast could be extended to the young men around Queen’s in the late fifties and early sixties. A lot of people of a generally literary bent were islanded about the place but they in no way constituted an archipelago. There was Denis Tuohy, Don Carleton, David Farrell, Stewart Parker, Ian Hill, Seamus Deane, John Hamilton, myself and many another, all dabbling. I don’t think many of us had a sense of contemporary poetry – Dylan Thomas’s records were as near as we seemed to get to the living thing. Laurence Lerner was in the English Department and produced a collection called Domestic Interior but it was somehow remote, none of our business. And as for Philip Larkin, who had just left, I graduated without hearing his name, from student or lecturer. Michael McLaverty was teaching in town, but we never saw him; Roy McFadden had drawn the blinds on Rann, John Hewitt was in Coventry. That older generation were perhaps names to us but not voices. Gorgon and Q, the university literary magazines, were hand-to-mouth affairs, with no real excitement, audience or clique attaching to them. Mary O’Malley, John Boyd, Sam Hanna Bell, Joseph Tomelty and others were at work but again, they were beyond us. We stood or hung or sleepwalked between notions of writing that we had gleaned from English courses and the living reality of writers from our own place whom we did not know, in person or in print.

  Those of us who sta
yed around saw that state of affairs changed by the mid-sixties and one of the strongest agents of change was Philip Hobsbaum. When Hobsbaum arrived in Belfast, he moved disparate elements into a single action. He emanated energy, generosity, belief in the community, trust in the parochial, the inept, the unprinted. He was impatient, dogmatic, relentlessly literary: yet he was patient with those he trusted, unpredictably susceptible to a wide variety of poems and personalities and urgent that the social and political exacerbations of our place should disrupt the decorums of literature. If he drove some people mad with his absolutes and hurt others with his overbearing, he confirmed as many with his enthusiasms. He and his wife Hannah kept open house for poetry and I remember his hospitality and encouragement with the special gratitude we reserve for those who have led us towards confidence in ourselves.

  I remember especially the first meeting of the group. Stewart Parker read his poems and was the first – and last – writer to stand up as he did so. That ritual of rising up to enounce, that initial formal ratification of the voice, seems emblematic in retrospect. What happened Monday night after Monday night in the Hobsbaums’ flat in Fitzwilliam Street somehow ratified the activity of writing for all of us who shared it. Perhaps not everybody needed it ratified – Michael Longley and James Simmons, for example, had been in the swim before they landed – but all of us were part of it in the end. What Hobsbaum achieved, whether people liked it or not, was to give a generation a sense of themselves, in two ways: it allowed us to get to grips with one another within the group, to move from critical comment to creative friendship at our own pace, and it allowed a small public to think of us as The Group, a single, even singular phenomenon. There was his introduction of a number of us to ‘The Arts in Ulster’, a BBC programme produced by John Boyd. There was an article in the Telegraph. There was Mary Holland scooping it all for the Observer when she arrived to cover the Festival in 1965. It’s easy to be blasé about all that now, for now, of course, we’re genuine parochials. Then we were craven provincials. Hobsbaum contributed much to that crucial transformation.

  When the Hobsbaums left, we missed the regular coffee and biscuits, the irregular booze, the boisterous literary legislation. One act of the drama had closed down. When the second act opened in my own house, after interludes in the back room of the English Department and the upper room of a pub, some of the old characters had departed, to London, Portrush, Hollywood, wherever, and a crowd of gifted boy actors were in the wings to claim the stage. But by then the curtain was about to rise on the larger drama of our politics and the writers were to find themselves in a play within the play.

  Christmas, 1971

  People keep asking what it’s like to be living in Belfast and I’ve found myself saying that things aren’t too bad in our part of the town: a throwaway consolation meaning that we don’t expect to be caught in crossfire if we step into the street. It’s a shorthand that evades unravelling the weary twisted emotions that are rolled like a ball of hooks and sinkers in the heart. I am fatigued by a continuous adjudication between agony and injustice, swung at one moment by the long tail of race and resentment, at another by the more acceptable feelings of pity and terror. We live in the sickly light of TV screens, with a pane of selfishness between ourselves and the suffering. We survive explosions and funerals and live on among the families of the victims, those blown apart and those in cells apart.

  And we have to live with the Army. This morning I was stopped on the Falls Road and marched to the nearest police barracks, with my three-year-old son, because my car tax was out of date. My protests grew limp when the officer in charge said: ‘Look, either you go to the police up the road or we take you now to Hollywood’ – their own ground. It hasn’t been named martial law but that’s what it feels like. Everywhere soldiers with cocked guns are watching you – that’s what they’re here for – on the streets, at the corners of streets, from doorways, over the puddles on demolished sites. At night, jeeps and armoured cars groan past without lights; or road-blocks are thrown up, and once again it’s delays measured in hours, searches and signings among the guns and torches. As you drive away, you bump over ramps that are specially designed to wreck you at speed and maybe get a glimpse of a couple of youths with hands on their heads being frisked on the far side of the road. Just routine. Meanwhile up in the troubled estates street-lights are gone, accommodating all the better the night-sights of sniper and marksman.

  If it is not army blocks, it is vigilantes. They are very efficiently organized, with barricades of new wood and watchmen’s huts and tea rotas, protecting the territories. If I go round the corner at ten o’clock to the cigarette machine or the chip shop, there are the gentlemen with flashlights, of mature years and determined mien, who will want to know my business. How far they are in agreement with the sentiments blazoned on the wall at the far end of the street I have not yet enquired. But ‘Keep Ulster Protestant’ and ‘Keep Blacks and Fenians out of Ulster’ are there to remind me that there are attitudes around here other than defensive ones. All those sentry boxes where tea and consultation are taken through the small hours add up to yet another slogan: ‘Six into Twenty-Six won’t go.’ I walk back – ‘Goodnight now, sir’ – past a bank that was blown up a couple of months ago and a car showroom that went three weeks ago. Nobody was killed. Most of the windows between the sites are boarded up still. Things aren’t too bad in our part.

  There are few enough people on the roads at night. Fear has begun to tingle through the place. Who’s to know the next target on the Provisional list? Who’s to know the reprisals won’t strike where you are? The bars are quieter. If you’re carrying a parcel you make sure it’s close to you in case it’s suspected of being about to detonate. In the Queen’s University staff common room, recently, a bomb-disposal squad had defused a bundle of books before the owner had quite finished his drink in the room next door. Yet when you think of the corpses in the rubble of McGurk’s Bar such caution is far from risible.

  Then there are the perils of the department stores. Last Saturday a bomb scare just pipped me before I had my socks and pyjamas paid for in Marks and Spencer, although there were four people on the Shankill Road who got no warning. A security man cornered my wife in Robinson and Cleaver – not surprisingly, when she thought of it afterwards. She had a timing device, even though it was just an old clock from an auction, lying in the bottom of her shopping bag. A few days previously someone else’s timing device had given her a scare when an office block in University Road exploded just as she got out of range.

  There are hardly any fairy lights, or Christmas trees, and in many cases there will be no Christmas cards. This latter is the result of a request by the organizers of the civil disobedience campaign, in order that revenue to the Post Office may be cut as much as possible over the joyous season. If people must send cards, then they are asked to get the anti-internment cards which are being produced by the People’s Democracy and the Ardoyne Relief Committee to support, among others, the dependants of the internees in Long Kesh camp. Which must, incidentally, be literally the brightest spot in Ulster. When you pass it on the motorway after dark, it is squared off in neon, bright as an airport. An inflammation on the black countryside. Another of our military decorations.

  The seasonal appeals will be made again to all men of goodwill, but goodwill for its proper exercise depends upon an achieved self-respect. For some people in this community, the exercise of goodwill towards the dominant caste has been hampered by the psychological hoops they have been made to jump and by the actual circumstances of their lives within the state, British and all as it may have been. A little goodwill in the Establishment here towards the notion of being Irish would take some of the twists out of the minority. Even at this time it is difficult to extend full sympathy to the predicament of that million among us who would ask the other half-million to exalt themselves by being humbled. You see, I have heard a completely unbigoted and humane friend searching for words to cope with his abhorre
nce of the Provisionals and hitting on the mot juste quite unconsciously: ‘These … these … Irish.’

  Instead of the Christmas tree, which will be deliberately absent from many homes, people will put the traditional candle in the window. I am reminded of Louis MacNeice, ‘born to the Anglican order, banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor’; and of W. R. Rodgers, whose Collected Poems have appeared in time for Christmas; and of John Hewitt, that Ulsterman of Planter stock whose poetry over the years has been an exploration of the Ulster Protestant consciousness. All three men were born to a sense of ‘two nations’ and part of their imaginative effort was a solving of their feelings towards Ireland, a new answer to the question that Macmorris asked Fluellen in the Globe Theatre almost four hundred years ago: ‘What is my nation?’ As Northern Protestants, they each in different ways explored their relationship to the old sow that eats her farrow. They did not hold apart and claim kin with a different litter. Although, in fact, I have never seen farrow eaten by a sow in my life: what usually happens is that the young pigs eat one another’s ears.

  Last Sunday, at an interdenominational carol service in the university, I had to read from Martin Luther King’s famous ‘I have a dream’ speech. ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the full meaning of its creed’ – and on that day all men would be able to realize fully the implications of the old spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, Great God Almighty, we are free at last.’ But, as against the natural hopeful rhythms of that vision, I remembered a dream that I’d had last year in California. I was shaving at the mirror of the bathroom when I glimpsed in the mirror a wounded man falling towards me with his bloodied hands lifted to tear at me or to implore.