Dynamo: Bad Machine

After something almost every day and night for weeks on end my dynamo is a little low. No chance of recovery however. The 07:49 to Newcastle tomorrow, back at 21:22. Then Cheltenham next morning. Then London next day. Then home, then London again. I am tired and short tempered (though the short temper will go). Here is a poem in draft, in passing. Hot off the press. Read it last night at the Faber gig having only finished it in the morning after some seven or eight drafts started a few days back. Maybe it's still a draft.



Canzone: The Bad Machine
for my father at ninety-two

And so they handed me the bad machine
that seemed a miracle to me when new.
This, they said to me, was the machine
I’d have to play with now, this grave machine
whose workings were beyond me. It was mine
for ever, as long as any grave machine
could be, since it was only a machine,
albeit miraculous. And oh, the many parts
there were to it! I could move whole parts
and not even know that somehow the machine
was on. They’ll care for it, I thought. If care
was what it needed they could give it care.

And yes I did, in my own way, quite care.
It was, after all, my very own machine,
and others at first also lavished care
on it. They bathed it, tucked it up, took care
it should be sound, kept it as good as new,
insisting, in turn, that I too should take care
with all they cared for, such parental care
being only natural. They called it mine
but it felt almost like theirs. I cried out: Mine!
It’s mine alone, let go! They didn’t care
what I thought then. They played their given parts
as I played mine. These were our private parts.

It is the younger party that departs
and so it was with me. I took some care
to make the parting easy. So one parts.
Parting is all we know of heaven. My parts
were working. I was the fit machine,
each chamber of my being full of parts
that wheezed and slid along with other parts.
The bad machine was good, as good as new.
I strode out and the world itself was new,
delightful, with discreet and lovely parts.
The way was open and the way was mine
to choose, or try at least to make choice mine.

Then everything was mine or beyond mine.
And parts were lovely. I had seen those parts
before in books and cinemas, that mine
of images whose images were mine
to start with. There was such tender care
in them, with death enough to undermine
all tenderness. I loved that machine of mine.
I loved what it did as befitting a machine.
I had no thought then of the bad machine,
for how could it be bad if it was mine?
It was the machine that was for ever new,
or maybe I could change it, old for new.

And yet it was all new, or almost new
each time. My darlings and desires were mine
to cultivate as I saw fit, as if the new
were all machine and good machines stayed new.
I understood the wearing out of parts
as on another plane, as something new
and still in the future tense. And it was new
to me, the bad machine that tender care
would not maintain, that did not care
for me, bad even then when it was new,
because that is the nature of machine.
There’s no machine that’s not a bad machine.

My darling look. See, here is a machine,
the bad machine that is our mutual care.
I want you now for all those faulty parts
that over years have learned to move with mine.
Be bad with me, let bad be good as new.



'Be bad with me' sounds like a good line, but it's not the best possible state of affairs.

Faber New Poets at Dragon Hall

Lateish back because of this. Fiona Benson, Jack Underwood, Heather Phillipson and Toby Martinez de las Rivas. These are some extraordinarily talents. I am not about to review them or their readings now because that would be invidious, but they cover a considerable range among them from the mystical to the funny to the lyrical to the keening, from light to dark along a variety of routes. I read a little with them and we talk with two or three questions from the big audience. Then they're on the road for the next eight days in as many cities. Faber and the Arts Council. I wish them all very well.

In the meantime my second major wholly unofficial mentor from thirty years back, Peter Porter, with whom I was supposed to have read at Cheltenham on Thursday, is out of hospital again, and - so says AT - in high spirits. I remember sitting in pubs in Bayswater with Peter, about 1973, having sent him poems in the post, waiting for his verdict. Kindness, patience, intelligence, truth with a friendly face. It's what a young writer needs. It was what I needed and got. It is what I, in turn, want to provide.

Another launch - the UEA anthology - tomorrow evening.

Dawkins on Darwin

I have been catching this programme, in so far as I catch any programme, for I hardly ever know what is on, but I have read Dawkins and Dennett too. And that is fine. Darwin's the man.

Just the following points:

1.) It might be worth looking more sympathetically at human emotion;

2.) It might be worth considering the nature of language a little more closely and particularly in its poetic aspect, a substantial poem being, by definition, neither a fudge nor a prettiness cast over language to divert people from the truth. When, say, Christina Rossetti exclaims: My heart is like a singing bird, we don't necessarily ask in how many precise respects it is so. Does it have feathers? Does it have a beak? How does it survive inside your physical body? Does it in fact sing? No? In other words it is not very like a singing bird at all. Case dismissed. Is only that which is demonstrably logical of value? Isn't this Gradgrindism? Is there no value in exclaiming, as the writer of Job does: Canst thou pluck out Leviathan with an hook? Is there no value in the feeling George Herbert addresses in 'I struck the board and cried no more?" In other words can we take some questions on the literalism of the questions as well as on the literalism of the answer? Our hearts are sometimes very like singing birds for no literal reason. (This is as much point 1 as point 2, of course.)

3.) It might also be worth considering why Dawkins, in railing at fundamentalism and multi-culturalism, only addresses Christians. He accuses some science teachers of running scared. But is he not running scared of other religions, which are never to be mentioned?

I do not doubt the science. It is the language and the humanity I quibble about. And the tin ear.

Sunday night is... Elocution (The last glottal stop on the line)

Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Wilfrid Hyde White (dansant), (Julie Andrews chantant), in which the Irish Socialist George Bernard Shaw stands up for upper class English vowels. Pygmalion, alias here, My Fair Lady.

I wish this clip had the lovely Hepburn doing her Dick-van-Dyke Cockerney. Here in Norfolk where, notionally at least, we speak like this, I was given a ride by a cabbie last week whose voice had a touch of Devon or Somerset in it, or so I thought, but he was pure Norfolk. He could understand the confusion, he said, the difference being that Devon people spoke slowly and Norfolk people spoke fast. Well, fast is as fast does, and the Norfolk vowel is more country route than direct line to my ear, but he'd probably know better. Compared to Norfolk, Glasgow Scots has no vowels at all.

The same week though, everywhere I went in Norwich, I kept hearing London overspill, the full Estuary, especially among the young and I wondered whether this was genuine overspill or an affectation picked up from telly. The last glottal stop on the Liverpool Street line, I thought. True Eastenders. It's the new elocution: Norfolk to Walworth. And - not so rare after all - Higgins and Pickering and Julie Andrews learning from Eliza. Sheer street cred. For a while only, of course, before reverting.

Márai on death and the rich

This is the maid, Judit Áldozó still talking to her musician lover, long after her marriage to her ex-employer has failed. It is after the war, in the early communist period. We only ever hear her, never the musician.

Shall I tell you more about the rich? There is no way of telling anyone everything about them. I mean I lived among them for years: it was like walking in my sleep, in a deep sleep. In dread. I always worried about saying the wrong thing when I talked to them. I worried in case I listened wrong or touched things in the wrong way… They never shouted or cursed at me, certainly not! They trained and educated me instead, sensitively, patiently, the way the Italian organ-grinder out in the street there trains his monkey, showing him how to perch on his shoulder and preen himself. But they also taught me the way one might teach a cripple, someone incapable of walking, of doing anything the way it ought to be done… Because that is what I was when I first went to them: a cripple. I couldn’t do anything properly. I couldn’t walk, not as they understood walking, couldn’t say hello, couldn’t speak, and as for eating?!... I had not the foggiest notion of how one should eat! Even listening was beyond me, listening properly that is, listening with purpose, in other words, with evil intent. I listened and gawped. I was a fish out of water. But little by little I learned everything they had to teach me… I worked at it and got on. It surprised them how much and how quickly I learned… It was I who left them gawping in the end. I’m not boasting but I do believe they were quite astonished when they saw how I learned.

I knew about the family vault for example. The mausoleum. Oh lord, that mausoleum!.. You know how it was back then, when I was still a maid in their house. I saw how everyone was robbing them. The cook made a bit on the side, the servant took backhanders from the salesmen who inflated the prices for brandy, wine and the best cigars, the chauffeur stole and sold the gas in their cars. All this was to be expected. My employers were perfectly aware of it, it was part of the household budget. I didn’t steal anything myself since I only cleaned the bathroom where there was nothing to steal… But later, once I had become ‘her ladyship’, I couldn’t help thinking of everything I had seen in the cellar and the kitchen, and the mausoleum was too much of a temptation. I couldn’t resist it.

You see there came a day when my husband …. a proper gentleman husband… suddenly felt his life was incomplete without a family vault in the Buda graveyard. His parents, the old gentleman and the old lady, were old fashioned in their death, turning to dust under simple marble tombstones without a proper mausoleum. My husband grew quite morose when this omission occurred to him. But he soon recovered and set to work to remedy the fault. He asked me to negotiate with the designer and the clerk-of-works to create the perfect mausoleum. By that time we had more than one car, had a summer house in Zebegény and a permanent winter residence on exclusive Rózsadomb, not to forget the mansion in Transdanubia, near Lake Balaton, on an estate that my husband found himself lumbered with as the result of some deal. We certainly couldn’t complain we had nowhere to live.

But a mausoleum we did not have. We hastened to correct this oversight. Naturally we couldn’t trust any ordinary builder with the job. My husband took great pains to discover the leading funerary expert in the city… We had plans brought over from England and Italy, whole books, their pages printed on heavy burnished paper… you have no idea the amount people have written on the subject of funerary monuments… I mean, after all, just to go and die, that’s nothing special… people scrape out a bit of earth and shove you in, end of story. But gentlefolk lead different lives and, naturally, their deaths are different too. So we employed an expert to help us choose a model, and had a beautiful, spacious, dry mausoleum built, complete with cupola. I wept when I first saw the mausoleum from within, the sheer glory of it, because, for a moment, it made me think of the sandy ditch we lived in out on the wetlands. I mean the vault was bigger than the ditch. With careful foresight they had left enough space at the centre for six graves, I have no idea for whom. Maybe they were expecting guests, the visiting dead, just in case someone dropped in and needed somewhere to stretch out. I looked at the three spare places and told my husband I would sooner be buried by dogs than lie in this crypt of theirs!... You should have seen him laugh when I said it!

And so we were prepared for all eventualities. Naturally the mausoleum was equipped with electric light, lights in two colors, blue and white. When everything was ready we called the priest to consecrate this house of dead pleasure. Everything you could possibly think of was provided, darling… gilt letters above the entrance, and, on the elevation, modestly small, the aristocratic family crest, the crest they wore on their underpants… Then there was a forecourt where they planted flowers, and columns at the entrance, leading to a sort of marbled waiting room for visitors should they fancy taking a breather before they died. You then passed from the zinc hall through the wrought iron gates into the parlor where the elders were arranged. It was a proper mausoleum, set up for eternity, as if the dead interred there were not to be thrown out after thirty-to-fifty years later, yes, even the most illustrious among them; yes, for eternity, when the last trump would call them forth in their distinguished pyjamas and privileged dressing-gowns. I earned eight-thousand pengö commission doing the mausoleum, the builder wouldn’t give me more. I had an account in a bank and, stupidly, I deposited this little extra cash there, and my husband came across the statement one day by chance, the statement revealing how my little here and little there was amounting to a reasonable sum… He didn’t say anything – of course he didn’t say anything, what a crazy idea – but I could see it upset him. He thought a member of the family shouldn’t be making a profit on his parents’ family vault… Can you credit that? I couldn’t understand it myself, not to this day. I only told you the story to show how strange the rich are.

This is self-confessed bourgeois, Sándor Márai writing. He doesn't seem to be pulling too many punches regarding his own class. It is one of the fascinating things about him, the dramatist part that prefers long monologues to dialogue if only because he wants to hear everything that could be said by the characters he is interested in.

Nobel Peace Prize

Give him the prize quick before we can think of a reason not to. Winning the election was great and he is doing fine as I am concerned. Just surprised he is doing this fine.

One (done)-Two-Three (and Four)

Three readings in three days, all different.

1.
I have written about Poems on the Underground where among other things I learned that Wendy Cope's favourite poet is A.E.Housman (she read the poem I talked about a while ago, 'Into my heart an air that kills') and that Jo Shapcott's poem was banned for use of the word 'bollocks'. (She actually subjected the audience to the trauma of reading the poem with the 'b' word in it).

2.
Yesterday at The Curve, which is part of the events section of the Forum in Norwich as part of Norfolk Poetry Week, a mixed bill of poetry read straight, poetry with music, and two splendid animations based on poems, one on a Nicholas Breton poem to a Berceuse by Chopin which was quite wonderful, and a very attractive short piece featuring Carol Ann Duffy's poem, 'Valentine'.

I kicked off as the family 'elder'. How odd it still sounds to be an 'elder' (and odder still that Norwich should be full of writers I have taught or worked with, so that I feel a bit like father to hundreds of rebellious shining illegitimate children of the Muse - and be wary, reader, it is not just Norwich). We all did ten minutes.

Following me was, mostly, youth: Sarah Roby who won the recent MsLexia competition, who seems a fine assured poet with a very good ear and a strikingly clear poetic intelligence, then Tom Warner (son, illegitimate etc) who is quite outstanding and will be on the Faber scheme next year; then the Breton film.

After the break it was music from Andrew McDonnell and his band, My Dark Aunt (Andrew, another of the brood, now three times over as I am part-supervising his PhD), then my colleague Andrea Holland, who is such a fine poet it seems to me a monstrous injustice that she is not better known, and lastly, illegitimate daughter-of-the-Muse, but entirely her own woman, Helen Ivory, who, someone says to me, writes haunted dolls' houses. Well, I think she does a great deal more, but that's a reasonable starting definition. The Carol Ann cartoon followed.

To which I should add that I heard CAD's new poem (listen for a few more days before link dies) on the Today programme yesterday morning and thought it a really good Laureate poem, the number of which, over the centuries, you can count on the fingers of one hand.

Suzie Hannah organised the Curve event. She is in charge of animation at the art school and has a deservedly international reputation. Good audience. I like mixed events. In fact, considering what I said about the Poems on the Underground event, I prefer them in some ways because they unite strands and unite people. They're not keeping it in the club or in the family. I would love to do more mixed events.


3.
And yesterday the dialogue with Martin Figura (yet another illegitimate etc and shortly to be international poetry performance star) at the Norwich Arts Centre.

I was apprehensive about this event for two reasons. First, the usual reason that no one would turn up or that the turn-out would be so embarrassingly small that I would wish I had never done it (prophet-in-his-own-country syndrome); but secondly for a more fundamental reason.

The relationship between maker and thing made is complex. My general feeling is that - to use academic terms - text is text and that the author (as Roland Barthes said long ago) may as well be dead; that we don't read poetry (poetry above all!) to find out about the author or even about the intentions of the author, but to find out about: 1) the world, 2) language, 3) ourselves. I ten to think that, if the author has a message, he or she should just tell me what it is and I'll text back. If, on the other hand, the author has a personal complaint they should see a specialist, though if they would like to confide in me, I, as a human being, am ever sympathetic. It's just that I don't need it in verse. You fall upon the thorns of life and bleed (PB Shelley)? Are you asking for Elastoplast, PBS? No, I don't think you are. If I care that you fall upon the thorns of life and bleed, it is because you perceive such thorns and such blood to be an aspect of the human condition. We fall on thorns and bleed, and when the pain is intense, it feels like this. Saying so is not Elastoplast, it is simply giving that experience meaning and shape, which, in the long run (in the long run only) seems just as valuable as the Elastoplast. In the short run, Elastoplast is best.

In other words the personal condition of the poet is not the point of the poem. It cannot help but be somewhere in the poem, forming it in some way, but it doesn't precede or validate the poem. So, having an autobiographical first half of an evening, along with old old family photos, goes a little (in fact rather a lot) against the grain. You may be able to glean biographical material in my poems, but the poems aren't about me. I have no very clear idea of the 'me' they might be about. I rather fear that such a 'me', if it did insist on parading round the square, would be some false imitation that would eventually lead to psychosis and I'd start saying things like 'George Szirtes doesn't do things like that...' George Szirtes is no more interesting than any other collection of atoms in the universe. Nor am I.

And yet this much is true. In certain circumstances one may talk about life and the things one has seen. We do this all the time. What did you think of the film last night? How was the holiday? My back is killing me! etc. This is a natural part of human life and even as a poet I am not apart from human life. Nothing of what I say in this context is an inducement to read my poems ("I have always wanted to read the poems of a writer with two heads / with fifty cats / with a guilty secret"). I do not wear my heart on my sleeve or on anything I might wipe my nose with in an emergency. But we are people. We can talk. It is, after all, a person who has made these poems, fixed the plumbing, arranged the flowers etc. I hate mystification when one could be clear. About certain things it is impossible to be clear because we are too much involved or because language is simply inadequate to talk straight about them. Granted. But for the rest, let's try to say what happens as people to people across a table as well as in the more demanding, more concentrated, better shaped, vital house of art.

So, it was fun and well attended and enthusiastically received and I am not cringing with embarrassment at that photo of me as a two year old in a suit in the bare Budapest square where I was born. But look, he's so cute, you simply have to buy the book!


(4)
And tonight on The Verb, Radio 3, at 21.15, or so I am told, there is to be talk of the sixty-year old man's new book, The Burning of the Books. Go then, little book...

Oh, and this nice thing.