There is much in Mrs Blanaid Salkeld’s ‘Hello Eternity’ (1933) that is personal and moving, when not rendered blue in the face by the sonnet form. What is badly needed at the present moment is some small Malherbe of free verse to sit on the sonnet and put it out of action for two hundred years at least. Perhaps Mr Pound…? Other Irish sonneteers are Mr Erik Dodds (‘Thirty-two poems’, 1929) and Mr Francis Macnamara (‘Marionettes’, 1909), but only in the leisure moments of a university professor and a student of social theory respectively. The influence of Rossetti is strong in Mr Macnamara. The Oxford Georgians have left their mark on Mr Dodds.
In ‘Man Poem’ (1919) Mr Percy Usher, best known as translator of Merriman’s ‘Midnight Court’, deals with himself and the vacuum in a manner that abides no question. One would like to see this work, before it is improved out of existence, safely between the boards.
Mr Francis Stuart is of course best known as a novelist, but he writes verse. So does Mr R. N. D. Wilson. So does Mr Leslie Yodaiken when his politics let him. So I am sure do Mr Frank O’Connor and Mr Seán O’laoláin — also best known as novelists of course. And I know that Mr Seá;n O’Casey does, having read a poem of his in Time and Tide.
In ‘Primordia Caeca’ (1927) Mr Lyle Donaghy undertook a regular Saison en Enfer:
Enter again into the womb;
be saturate with night;
let the vain soul be satisfied,
Descend into the dark cell;
look on the unnatured, undistinguished pulp;
peruse the incipient page.
Retrace the way come blindly;
from centre and cause revisited,
draw the pure being up.
It is drawn up, but in the unfinished condition made manifest in his ‘Flute Over the Valley’ (1931), which contains however a fine poem about a steam-roller. Some years ago Mr Donaghy published an admirable ‘objectless’ poem — ‘The Fort’ — in the Criterion. Another volume, ‘Into the Light’, is announced as impending. May it be down into the light.
Mr Geoffrey Taylor, in his ‘Withering of the Fig-leaf and ‘It Was Not Jones’, performed a very diverting ballet away from the pundits. But I do not know that he has done anything since.
Mr Denis Devlin and Mr Brian Coffey are without question the most interesting of the youngest generation of Irish poets, but I do not propose to disoblige them by quoting from the volume of verse which they published jointly in 1930. Since then they have submitted themselves to the influences of those poets least concerned with evading the bankrupt relationship referred to at the opening of this essay — Corbière, Rimbaud, Laforgue, the surréalistes and Mr Eliot, perhaps also to those of Mr Pound — with results that constitute already the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland:
Phrases twisted through other
Reasons reasons disproofs
Phrases lying low
Proving invalid that reason
With which I prove its truth
Identity obscured
Like the reflections of
One mirror in another
Reasons reasons disproofs.
It is no disparagement of Mr Devlin to observe that this is still too much by the grace of Eluard. What matters is that it does not proceed from the Gossoons Wunderborn of that Irish Romantic Arnim-Brentano combination, Sir Samuel Ferguson and Standish O’Grady, and that it admits — stupendous innovation — the existence of the author. Es wandelt niemand ungestraft unter Palmen is peculiarly applicable to these islands, where pigeons meet with such encouragements. But it is preferable to dying of mirage.
Of Mr Niall Sheridan and Mr Donagh MacDonagh I know nothing, except that they have just published Twenty Poems’ between them; of Miss Irene Haugh, nothing, excpet that she has just published The Valley of the Bells’, and that her chief concern, in the words of her Dublin Magazine reviewer, is God; of Mr Niall Montgomery’s poetry, nothing at all.
6. Ex Cathezra
Make It New. By Ezra Pound.
‘A collection of reports (in the biologist’s sense) on specific bodies of writing, undertaken in the hope, and with the aims, of criticism, and in accordance with the ideogrammic method,’ on the Troubadours with special reference to Arnaut Daniel (speech in relation to music), Elizabethan classicists, translators of Greek and the past half-century of French poetry (speech), Henry James and Remy de Gourmont (human consciousness immediately prior to the author’s) and Guido Cavalcanti (synthesis of aforementioned in mediaeval Tuscan virtu lost and gone for ever), representing Mr Pound’s critical activity, via discussion, translation, pastiche, music and new composition, in the two great modes of prognosis and excernment, from 1912 to Anno XII. Only the ignoramus will ignore the continuity of these essays, only the reader already familiar with Mr Pound’s A B C’s of Reading and Economics and — it goes without saying — Ernest Fenollosa’s ‘Chinese Written Character’ will appreciate it thoroughly.
The opening essay has a penetrating account of the deterioration of Provençal poetry after the crusade of 1298. This would have been the very place for a pronunciamento on that most fascinating question, the Minne modification of amour courtois, but it cannot have seemed to Mr Pound at the time. Heinrich von Morungen is invoked in a much later context, his famous Tagelied coming as a great relief after lashings of James. The Razo on the luxurious Arnaut is a pleasing piece of informative criticism by pastiche, the translations that follow give a good idea of his cantabile.
The essay on the Elizabethans is in the main bouquets for Marlow (with the e or without) and Golding (Arthur) as translators, plus objurgations on the beastly bigot Milton. It is notable for an apology to the reader: ‘pardon the professional tone whereof I seem unable to divest myself in discussing these matters’, and two epigrams. ‘Education is an onanism of the soul’, ‘Beauty is a gasp between clichés.’ Translators of Greek is boilable down to a plea for more sense and less syntax. Bérard’s Homer is not mentioned.
The essay on the French poets is full of acumen and persimmon, and the one most likely to interest the current reader. Laforgue, Corbière and Rimbaud are duly affirmed and discriminated, however debatable the opinion that Corbière is the greatest of these and his Rapsodie Foraine (transcribed in full) ‘beyond all comment’. The parallels Rimbaud-Cezanne, Corbière-Goya take longer to meet than most. Rimbaud has more tags than Cézanne, Bateau Ivre pullulates with them, and they matter no more than Thibaud’s slipped notes. Strange that such sen de trobar as Mr Pound’s should not vibrate to Rimbaud’s ironical Hugoisms, also that it should succumb to Gourmont’s Litanies de la Rose (transcribed in full). There is no mention of Apollinaire, whose Chanson du Mal Aimé seems to me worth the whole of the best of Merril, Moréas, Vielé-Griffin, Spire, Régnier, Jammes (all quoted, the last copiously) put together. The best of this essay is in the notes on Romains and Unanimism, stating among other facts not sufficiently received these two of major interest, that Romains is Unanimism, and a poet of importance.
The essay on James is, as its author observes, ‘a dull grind of an affair’. The suggestion that Fielding was deficient in comprehension of the novel as a form, because we have no notes (no?) from his hand on the subject, is very nice. The ‘distinction’ on Gourmont is what Renard would call ‘bien dumaficelé’, the extracts that follow spangled with sparklers. The picture of Gourmont as the uomo singolare can scarcely be deemed complete in the absence of twentieth century Arlotto, Gonnella, Folengo and Monkey Laocoon.
‘Stray Document’ is a synopsis of Imagism, together with instructions to the candidate for the poetry certificate. ‘Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe coldly …’
Cavalcanti (1910–31), with addenda out of Anno XII, is a most terrific organon. From the text, translation and exegesis of Donna me pregba Guido emerges gran maestro, not of amor, as the china-maniac Petrarch would insist, but of the entire mediaeval scibile, which Mr pound may possibly consider to be the same thing. There is an admirable paean on the ‘mediterranean sanity’.
In sum, a galvanic belt of essays, education by provocation, Spartan maieutics. It is no disparagement of Mr Pound to observe that Sidney’s ‘verse no cause to poetry’ has not been ousted, but merely made to move up a little in the bed, by the ‘blocks of verbal manifestation’. Raum für alle. …
7. Papini’s Dante
Dante Vivo. By Giovanni Papini. Translated by Eleanor Hammond Broadus and Anna Benedetti.
To these already familiar with the versatility of Signor Papini’s middle terms, it will not come as a shock to find him (Chapter I) deriving from the circumstances of his having been born Florentine, embraced Catholicism and written verse, a peculiar aptitude to understand Dante. Nevertheless it is shocking, in its implication that these ingredients, racial, religious and artistic, were as agreeably accommodated in the case of Dante as admittedly they now are in the case of Signor Papini. But it is well known, and Signor Papini himself admits, that Dante’s concern with not failing as an artist was so intense as to preclude his devoting himself seriously to succeeding as a citizen, on that maladetta e sventurata fossa, or as a devotional mechanic. It could even be sustained that mediocrity in the civic and religious spheres was an important condition of his eminence in the artistic, and Signor Papini himself seems to lean towards this opinion: ‘He failed as a statesman, as a White Guelph and as a Ghibelline, as a moral reformer and as a Christian. In recompense he was successful as a poet. But he owes this eminence, at least in part, to the last and gravest of his failures.’ This in Chapter XLVIII, after the unqualified assertion in Chapter I that Dante Alighieri, like Signor Papini, was Florentine, Catholic and artist. The copulatives of Signor Papini are as protean as his middles.
The initial confusion distributes itself over the book. Analysis of what a man is not may conduce to an understanding of what he is, but only on condition that the distinction is observed. Signor Papini does not observe it, nor indeed make it, till the book is over. Chapter XLII: ‘The greatest wrong one can do to Dante… is to classify his most important work as literature.’ As what, then? As morale negotium, in whole and in part a moral act, demiurgic anagogics, supplement to the Bible, sequel to the Apocalypse, the work of a prophet partaking of John the Baptist and a haruspex à la Joachim de Flora (‘Daniel without the lions, Tarchon without Tages’), announcing the dispensation of the Holy Spirit, that of the Father and the Son having broken down. Relief from this picture may be obtained in Coppée’s gazetteer and Nietzsche’s hyena.
The same ideology identifies the Veltro (VangElo eTeRnO) with the Paraclete, not to be confused, as the fashion is, with Beatrice’s DXV, who is a temporal prince and harbinger of the Veltro. The argument is driven home as follows: ‘The expectation of the Paraclete is, even in modern times, more alive among Catholic writers than is generally supposed: it is sufficient to instance Léon Bloy.’ More than sufficient.
In the margin of this special pleading the Dante ‘raté’ is well observed and illustrated. It is pleasant to be reminded that lechery, wrath and pride were his meed of the cardinal sins; that he had a mania for tearing out the hair of his enemies and for applying to his friends and himself formulae usually reserved for the members of the Trinity; that he introjected certain forms of suffering like a neurotic, loathed children, hungered all his life long to be called ‘son’, and had Ovidian amours by the dozen. Pleasant, but beside the point, inaccessible within its Messianic cocoon, of Dante the artist. The purpose of these marginalia would be the reduction of Dante to lovable proportions. But who wants to love Dante? We want to READ Dante—for example, his imperishable reference (Paolo-Francesca episode) to the incompatibility of the two operations.
8. The Essential and the Incidental
Windfalls. By Sean O’Casey.
What is arguable of a period — that its bad is the best gloss on its good — is equally so of its representatives taken singly. A proper estimate of Moliére as master of prose dialogue depends largely on a proper estimate of him as a very humdrum practitioner of the alexandrine — teste for example ‘La Princesse d’Elide’, where the passage from the latter to the former vehicle is one of the great reliefs in literature. Similarly to Chaplin’s comic via his mièvre, Eisenstein’s cinematography via his Moscow copybook.
This is the interest of ‘Windfalls’ — that by its juxtaposition of what is distinguished and what is not, the essential O’Casey and the incidental, it facilitates a definition of the former. The volume comprises two sections of verse, a squib on the recruiting campaign in Ireland, four short stories, of which three represent ‘an effort to get rid of some of the bitterness that swept into me when the Abbey Theatre rejected “The Silver Tassie”,’ and two one-act knockabouts. It is in these last that Mr O’Casey comes into his own, and with a distinctness that would be less vivid if he had contrived to get there more quickly.
Mr O’Casey is a master of knockabout in this very serious and honourable sense — that he discerns the principle of disintegration in even the most complacent solidities, and activates it to their explosion. This is the energy of his theatre, the triumph of the principle of knockabout in situation, in all its elements and on all its planes, from the furniture to the higher centres. If ‘Juno and the Paycock’, as seems likely, is his best work so far, it is because it communicates most fully this dramatic dehiscence, mind and world come asunder in irreparable dissociation — ‘chassis’ (the credit of having readapted Aguecheek and Belch in Joxer and the Captain being incidental to the larger credit of having dramatized the slump in the human solid). This impulse of material to escape and be consummate in its own knockabout is admirably expressed in the two ‘sketches’ that conclude this volume, and especially in The End of the Beginning’, where the entire set comes to pieces and the chief character, in a final spasm of dislocation, leaves the scene by the chimney.
Beside this the poems are like the model palace of a dynamiter’s leisure moments. ‘Walk with Eros’, through the seasons complete with accredited poetic phenomena and emotions to match, is the ne plus ultra of inertia, a Walt Disney inspected shot after shot on the celluloid. The influences of nature are great, but they do not enable the disruptive intelligence, exacting the tumult from unity, to invert its function. A man’s mind is not a claw-hammer.
The short stories have more jizz, notably (characteristically) that on the dissolution of Mollser, the consumptive girl who had such a good curtain in ‘The Plough and the Stars’. Mr O’Casey’s admirers will give him the credit of allegorical intention in ‘I Wanna Woman’.
But the main business, when at last it is reached, obliterates these preliminaries. And no reader so gentle but must be exalted to forgiveness, even of the prose poems in ‘Second Fall’, by the passage in ‘The End of the Beginning’, presenting Messrs Darry Berrill and Barry Derril supine on the stage, ‘expediting matters’ in an agony of calisthenics, surrounded by the doomed furniture.
9. Censorship in the Saorstat
An act to make provision for the prohibition of the sale and distribution of unwholesome literature and for that purpose to provide for the establishment of a censorship of books and periodical publications, and to restrict the publication of reports of certain classes of judicial proceedings and for other purposes incidental to the aforesaid. (16th July, 1929)
The Act has four parts.
Part 1 emits the definitions, as the cuttle squirts ooze from its cod. E.g., ‘the word “indecent” shall be construed as including suggestive of, or inciting to sexual immorality or unnatural vice or likely in any other similar way to corrupt or deprave.’ Deputies and Senators can seldom have been so excited as by the problem of how to make the definitive form of this litany orduretight. Tate and Brady would not slip through it now if the Minister for Justice deemed they ought not. A plea for distinction between indecency obiter and ex professo did not detain a caucus that has bigger and better things to split than hairs, the pubic not excepted. ‘It is the author’s expressed purpose, it is the effect which his thought will have as expr
essed in the particular words into which he has flung (eyetalics mine) his thought that the censor has to consider.’ (Minister for Justice)
Part 2 deals with the constitution of and procedure to be adopted by the Censorship of Publications Board, the genesis of prohibition orders, the preparation of a register of prohibited publications and the issuing of search warrants in respect of prohibited publications.
The Board shall consist of five fit and proper persons. This figure was arrived at only after the most animated discussion. Twelve was proposed as likely to form a more representative body. But the representative principle was rejected, notably by Deputy Professor Tierney, who could not bear the thought of any committee with only half a Jew upon it. This is a great pity, as the jury convention would have ensured the sale of at least a dozen copies in this country, assuming, as in reverence bound, that the censors would have gone to bed simultaneously and independently with the text, and not passed a single copy of the work from hand to hand, nor engaged a fit and proper person to read it to them in assembly. Tit and proper’ would seem to denote nothing less than highly qualified in common sense, ‘specialists in common sense’ (Dep. Prof. Alton). Dep. J. J. Byrne burst all his buttons in this connexion: ‘Give me the man broad-minded and fair who can look at the thing from a common sense point of view. If you want to come to a proper conclusion upon what is for the good of the people in a question of this kind, I unhesitatingly plump for the common sense man.’ This is getting dangerously close to the opinion of Miss Robey, that for the artist as for the restaurateur the customer is always right. Imagine if you are able, and being able care to, Dep. J. J. Byrne’s selection coming to the proper conclusion with reference say to the Secret Life of Procopius, a work that has so far evaded the net. His position would be as invidious as that of Jerome reading Cicero, for which he was whipped by the devil in a Lenten dream, were it not that the man broad-minded and fair is at liberty to withdraw his purities from the pollution before they are entirely spent, that is to say almost at once. ‘It is not necessary for any sensible individual to read the whole of a book before coming to the conclusion whether the book is good, bad or indifferent.’ (Dep. J. J. Byrne) There are books which are so blatantly indecent and known to be indecent that it would be unnecessary for the members of the Board to read every line of them. Should the members of the Board, for instance, be compelled to read through every line of Ulysses, a book that has been universally condemned?’ (Minister for Justice). The judicial outlook. Dep. J. J. Byrne’s censor’s Lenten dream will not wake him.