POETS Day! “Against Romanticism” by Kingsley Amis

My son started school today, August 8. That’s absurdly early. Back in 2012 Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan tried to start a conversation about extending the school year by shortening summer vacation. There were arguments about students forgetting lessons between grades and valuable time wasted getting them back up to speed.

The conversation never went anywhere, but it wasn’t meant to. The Department of Education being a bureaucracy, the lack of pushback against an idea most didn’t take seriously meant no impediment to its inertia. So here we are.

I’m dying to say something snarky like “The more time kids are kept away from our public school system the better,” but I’m afraid, especially if I point to political speeches from both sides of the aisle over the course of decades lamenting the sorry state of education in America or mention unacceptable test scores impervious to decades of hand wringing to bolster my point, my friends with a wife/husband/son/daughter who’s a teacher might think I’m blaming a political party or theory of education or even a bloated nameless bureaucracy when really I’m saying that the entire decrepit mess is the fault of their wife/husband/son/daughter whose been trying to score Brownie points with that “I have to buy or sell (or whatever* it is she’s doing) art supplies with my own money,” sob story since We had a President who knew how to throw out an opening pitch.

There’s a real risk that when you say a system is failed they might get defensive because they think you’re attacking everybody in the system and not allowing that there are good people doing good work against all odds when you’re really saying that their wife/husband/son/daughter is the degenerate child-hating know-nothing out-of-tune piper leading yet another generation to unwarranted self-esteem Hamlin. They never take general observations personally and it’s maddening.

Sorry kids. Summer break ain’t what it used to be. That doesn’t mean you can’t escape and reclaim some of what the politicians in Washington took from you. Call it a POETS Day and Piss Off Early, Tomorrow’s Saturday and you don’t have to be Mickey Rooney to fake a convincing dry heave.

When you get free of my friend’s husband’s/wife’s/son’s/daughter’s dirty looks, may I suggest a little verse? I know that sounds counterintuitive and learningish, but it doesn’t have to be a serious poem. It can even have “Nantucket” in it. You’ll thank me if ever you take up writing on bathroom walls.

* “or whatever. Try to avoid this in speech. Never write it.” from The King’s English: A Guide to Modern Usage by Kingsley Amis

***

In a letter to his former roommate Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin writes with admiring jealousy. “I mean, you’ve become what I dreamed of becoming, and I don’t suppose you ever dreamed of being a librarian. If I’m so good why don’t they pay me enough money to go to some southern beach and lie on my belly (or someone else’s)? Eh?”

He was referring to the notorious incident on an Italian beach where Amis’s soon to be ex-wife, having just found out about yet another affair, wrote in lipstick on his sleeping back “1 Fat Englishman. I F*** Anything.” Her suntan epigram gave us the title of his subsequent novel, One Fat Englishman.

The two friends were opposites in some ways – Larkin’s balding, awkward, and dumpy to Amis’s dashing, fair haired, and suave – but both were alike in that they were cads, and puerilely so, though Larkin had to work harder at it, as he writes in “A Letter to a Friend About Girls”:

My mortification at your pushovers,
Your mystification at my fecklessness—

and

Described on Sundays only, where to want
Is straightway to be wanted, seek to find,
And no one gets upset or seems to mind
At what you say to them, or what you don’t:
A world where all the nonsense is annulled,

And beauty is accepted slang for yes.

He apparently made seduction, made everything, look easy though he was very disciplined in his writing. He worked at his craft. It may not seem like much but he insisted on five hundred words output every day. In his life he published over forty books, mostly novels, but including six volumes of poetry, collections of essays (New Maps of Hell is not to be missed by science fiction fans), usage manuals, and collections of shorter fiction. I’ve read a handful and found them all to be deceptive in their simplicity but consistent in that the voice he uses in mystery is known to the reader of his fiction which is known to the reader of his poetry. The smirk is ever-present.

I’ve tried to square his caddishness with what else I know of him. The Penguin Modern Classics edition of his Collected Poems is helpful in many regards. First, from it I learned that there is a whole branch of divination based on allum. It surprised me, though it shouldn’t have. Cromyomancy. Divination by means of onions.

Green Heart

Cromyomancy carves out a preview
And a foretaste of you:
Brittle as gold-leaf the outer skin,
Firmness within;
Peach or strawberry;
The heart will grow.

From the beginning, tears flow,
But of no rage or grief:
Wise cromyomancers know
Weeping augers belief.

Second, the introduction by Clive James frames the collection as a “richly various expression of a moral personality coming to terms with the world.” The poems, as selected and laid out by Amis, are chronological. Development, poetically, from Auden worship through emergence of his own distinct voice, and conscientiously is apparent.

He doesn’t, strictly from a reading of his poems, repudiate his choices, of which I’m glad. I like my rogues unrepentant. He accepts his temptations as a fixture in life and assumes that we all suffer from the same discreditable wants. The trick in life is not in banishing your demons, but in making them a plaything of the mind; keeping them at bay and going on about life in an upright way.

“Look, if they knew me, well and good, / There might be cause to run;” he writes in “Sight Unseen.” But he tells us what runs through his mind. In “A Dream of Fair Women”:

Speech fails them, amorous, but each one’s look
Endorsed in other ways, begs me to sign
Her body’s autograph book;
‘Me first, Kingsley; I’m cleverest’ each declares,
But no gourmet races downstairs to dine,
Nor will I race upstairs.

He’s not confessional so much as matter of fact.

Coming of Age

Twenty years ago he slipped into town,
A spiritual secret agent; took
Rooms right in the cathedral close; wrote down
Verbatim all their direst idioms;
Made phonetic transcripts in his black book;
Mimicked their dress, their gestures as they sat
Chaffering and chaffing in the Grand Hotel;
Infiltrated their glass and plastic homes,
Watched from the inside; then – his deadliest blow –
Went and married one of them (what about that?);
At the first christening played his part so well
That he started living it from then on,
His trick of camouflage no longer a trick.
Isn’t it the spy’s rarest triumph to grow
Indistinguishable from the spied upon,
The stick insect’s to become a stick?

In addition to Larkin, he seemed to form deep friendships. Robert Conquest was a longtime friend and collaborator. The poet Cecil Day-Lewis convalesced and passed at the house Amis shared with Elizabeth Jane Howard. He pops up in other writers’ lives in situations you’d assume reserved for intimate acquaintances.

C.S. Lewis hosted and recorded a symposium of three in his rooms at either Oxford or Cambridge on the subject of science fiction, or “scientifiction” as Lewis called it. Amis was one of the two invitees to a convivial conversation; banter that indicates familiarity. He’s an interesting figure consistently among interesting company.

He writes with wit. You’ll see what I mean in the poem below, one of my favorites of his, “Against Romanticism.”

In the 1950s he, along with a handful of poets including Larkin, Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings, and Thom Gunn, formed a movement in to counter what they saw as the excessive experimentation of the early twentieth century by the likes of Ezra Pound. It was Dylan Thomas, though, that they held out as their bete noire. According to David Lodge, in Working with Structuralism: Essays and Reviews on Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature, “Dylan Thomas was made to stand for everything they detested: verbal obscurity, metaphysical pretentiousness, and romantic rhapsodizing.” In keeping with their opposition to ostentation, they called their movement The Movement and “Against Romanticism” was their declaration of intent.

It’s a call for celebrating things as they are; a frustration with what they saw as poetic inflation that devalued reality with over-the-top metaphor. His call for a straightforward poetics is straightforward enough that it needs little commentary other than to note that he uses iambic pentameter in blank verse; a no frills meter. But he presents it with all the even lines indented – which may be lost in formatting on these electronic pages but I trust to your imagination – calling to mind heroic couplets; teasing with form the content he’s arguing against.

Against Romanticism
Kingsley Amis (1922-1995)

A traveller who walks a temperate zone
–Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot–
Finds that its decent surface grows too thin:
Something unperceived fumbles at his nerves.
To please an ingrown taste for anarchy
Torrid images circle in the wood,
And sweat for recognition up the road,
Cramming close the air with their bookish cries.
All sense then are glad to gasp: the eye
Smeared with garish paints, tickled up with ghosts
That brandish warnings or an abstract noun;
Melodies from shards, memories from coal,
Or saws from powdered tombstone thump the ear;
Bodies rich with heat wriggle to the touch,
And verbal scents made real spellbind the nose;
Incense, frankincense; legendary the taste
Of drinks or fruits or tongues laid on the tongue.
Over all, a grand meaning fills the scene,
And sets the brain raging with prophecy.
Raging to discard real time and place,
Raging to build a better time and place
Than the ones which give prophecy its field
To work, the calm material for its rage,
And the context which makes its prophecy.

Better, of course, if images were plain,
Warnings clearly said, shapes put down quite still
Within the fingers’ reach, or else nowhere;
But complexities crowd the simplest thing,
And flaw the surface they cannot break.
Let us make at least visions that we need:
Let mine be pallid, so that it cannot
Force a single glance, form a single word;
An afternoon long-drawn and silent, with
Buildings free from all the grime of history,
The people total strangers, the grass cut,
Not long, voluble swooning wilderness,
And green, not parched or soured by frantic suns
Doubling the commands of a rout of gods,
Nor trampled by the drivelling unicorn;
Let the sky be clean of officious birds
Punctiliously flying on the left;
Let there be a path leading out of sight,
And at its other end a temperate zone:
Woods devoid of beasts, roads that please the foot.

Over the last year plus, I’ve come to enjoy his work – across genres – more and more, and not just because I sense a fellow semi-colon enthusiant. He’s an urbane scoundrel. I’ve been impressed with every book of his I’ve read thus far and there are at least thirty-three more to go. Lucky me.

Pleasant Housekeeping Side Note:

When writing about Muriel Rukeyser’s poetic treatment of the Hawks Nest Incident in last week’s POETS Day I was unsure whether she was partnered with, employing, or working for the photographer she travelled with while gathering information. I wrote:

The story made the rounds of the smart set New York circles in 1935 and the next spring, shortly after the congressional hearings, twenty-three year old published poet Muriel Rukeyser and photographer Nancy Naumberg – I’m not sure who, if either, was in tow – drove from The Big Apple to West Virginia where they collected stories, made interviews, and visited sites.

I unexpectedly received a very kind email from the poet’s son, Bill Rukeyser, who has given us permission to share it with our readership.

I can clarify. My mother and Nancy were co-equal in the effort. The project was originally conceived as a poem/photo book and would have been impressive. I’m not sure exactly why it wasn’t published that way. My guess is Depression era financial realities prevented it.
Sadly, most of the photos were lost or destroyed after Nancy’s death. My mother’s collection included one, possibly two. Two more were in the collection of Walker Evans (now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC). That’s how we were able to include a few in the WVU Press edition.
Thanks for your blog writing.

Bill

It’s a shame the book never materialized as envisioned. I’m guessing it would have been something to behold.

A great thank you to Mr. Rukeyser for the clarification.