Disaster to tragedy: the Robinsons

No day passes without a disaster somewhere, but relatively few disasters are properly tragedies. The natural recourse here is to The Poetics where Aristotle talks about a hero with a fatal flaw. (Hamartia is the word he uses.)

Tragedies happen to individuals of some prominence, he says, "...since Tragedy is an imitation of persons who are above the common level..."

There is perhaps also an understanding, at least in the tragedies we regard as tragedies, that as well as being prominent, the tragic heroes and heroines have an active public role.

The most potent and sympathetic of tragic flaws is sexual passion. Prominent people who fall through passion are potentially tragic, especially if their fall brings down not only the edifice of their own lives but of others or of other, larger entities (such as Troy for instance.) Passion and consequence are key factors.

The fall of Tiger Woods, to take a random example of a public fall from grace, is not tragic because of the sheer number of his infidelities. His flaws were lust and opportunism, not passion. Certainly, he was admired and presented as a hero - indeed was a hero to many - but despite his acts being in public, the consequences of his acts were not public. He simply won a lot of money playing golf. Being presented as a good family man was an aspect of his supposed private life. That life is viewable, to some degree, by the public, but it has no public consequence. Being presented as 'an icon' is not enough.

Would we consider JFK a tragic hero? He was certainly prominent and his actions were not only in public but directly consequent upon the public. He was, beside, a handsome youthful ruler, part of a dynasty. But his death was not a tragedy in the dramatic sense. He had flaws associated with infidelity, of course, but these were discovered after his death and were not connected with his assassination. His death was not the result of the flaw. A tragic flaw has to have determining consequences.

But there is somethig about the case of the Robinsons, Peter and Iris, that seems to fit the bill. Not because either of the Robinsons was necessarily great or virtuous, though they were certainly prominent and consequent in the public sphere, but because the cause of their fall is passion. A fifty-nine year old intelligent woman who illegally procures £50,000 for a young man forty years her junior is not having a passing fancy. She is a victim of passion.

That passion is associated with a predicament in which we all share: that of aging. Aging is the most natural of life processes, generally inviting an attitude of noble philosophical resignation. Resisting such resignation however involves vanity of a desperate, vulnerable kind. And we all know what it is to be desperate and vulnerable.

So whatever the politics of Iris Robinson - and they seem pretty unattractive to me - she was, nevertheless, and must have felt herself to be, an attractive, intelligent and vigorous woman of consequence. It is hard to give that up.

Her husband's position is potentially just as tragic, or maybe more so, because his predicament was and is impossible. Either he did know of his suicidal wife's misuse of public money or he didn't know. But what could he do if he did? It is easy to say he should have acted in the public good, but it might have been at the cost of driving his wife to suicide. He himself is an aging man at the cusp of his public, if not necessarily private, powers. And if he falls, what else falls with him? There are potentially large consequences.

From the very beginning this story has played itself out according to classic rules, to the extent that I, who cared little about Peter Robinson and even less about Iris Robinson, am now involved and moved, exactly in the way I might be involved in and moved by any tragedy.

That is partly because the faults are complex yet comprehensible and because they all present universal dilemmas: between love and passion, between private and public obligation, between, as the song goes, the devil and the deep blue sea.

And so, ironically, characters that would not have seemed noble or heroic in other circumstances, now assume the noble and heroic roles that tragedy insists on, since if the flaws are of this kind, suffering so intensely on account of them suggests a fall from some height, the intensity of the suffering and the largeness of consequences all suggestive of scale. People are no longer who they are, but roles. It is the roles that are universal, not the people. And maybe it is precisely because the people are emptied out in the process of becoming the roles that we sense the tragedy in ourselves. If we do, that is.

This post may not be as clear as it should be but I am trying to untangle the story in my own mind.

Sunday Night is... The Mills Brothers and a bad review

Let's have the Mills Brothers first, live on the Nat King Cole show in 1957, swinging the song a bit faster than in the recording I have.



And the lovely lyrics, please...

(Original words by Lilla Cayley Robinson, modern words by Johnny Mercer and Music by Paul Lincke)

Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer
Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer
Lead us lest too far we wander
Love's sweet voice is callin' yonder
Shine little glow-worm, glimmer, glimmer
Hey, there don't get dimmer, dimmer
Light the path below, above
And lead us on to love

Glow little glow-worm, fly of fire
Glow like an incandescent wire
Glow for the female of the species
Turn on the AC and the DC
This night could use a little brightnin'
Light up you little ol' bug of lightnin'
When you gotta glow, you gotta glow
Glow little glow-worm, glow

Glow little glow-worm, glow and glimmer
Swim through the sea of night, little swimmer
Thou aeronautical boll weevil
Illuminate yon woods primeval
See how the shadows deep and darken
You and your chick should get to sparkin'
I got a gal that I love so
Glow little glow-worm, glow

Glow little glow-worm, turn the key on
You are equipped with taillight neon
You got a cute vest-pocket *Mazda*
Which you can make both slow and faster
I don't know who you took the shine to
Or who you're out to make a sign to
I got a gal that I love so
Glow little glow-worm, glow
Glow little glow-worm, glow
Glow little glow-worm, glow
Glow little glow-worm, glow

The third verse is genius! And because that is late Mills Brothers, a double dose - this one much earlier, 'Swing Sister' presumably pre-war:





*

The bad, or possibly bad, review is in The Sunday Times by Alan Brownjohn, reviewing the Eliot Prize shortlist:

Two other shortlisted books of comparable ambition similarly fail to show their authors’ talents to advantage. George Szirtes’s The Burning of the Books and Other Poems (Carcanet £8.95) bursts at the seams, grappling comprehensively with modern European ­history and culture, but it requires readers to be familiar with, for example, Elias Canetti’s horrific masterpiece Auto da Fe and the paintings of Howard Hodgkin. There’s nothing wrong with that, but Szirtes on Woolworths touches us more closely: “The infinite melancholy of small pickings /…firelighters, matchboxes, ashtrays. Cheap /  vanishings. Vultures.”

Well, I don't know - I'd sooner be hanged for ambition and bursting at the seams than complacency and living within my seams. Furthermore, if this is a hanging, then I hang with Elias Canetti and the others out in the darks of Europe. I hadn't thought the reader had to have complete familiarity with Canetti's Auto da Fe to get the poems - some people seem to get them without - and as for the rest of European history, I wrote an 'English' book back in 2001, An English Apocalypse, but maybe one can never be English enough for some. I am perfectly reconciled to that. Nor will any poet ever please everyone. Lucky to please a few. In any case, we write about what excites us and find it harder to write about things that don't. As to Howard Hodgkin, I plead guilty. But then I have always written about art, from the very beginning. Hang me high. Hang me high art.

The review doesn't actually say anything about the writing as such. So it's odd. I think it simply doesn't like the way I am, but as Prevert said, Je suis comme je suis / je suis fait comme ça. Damn, I see that is foreign too.

Two Hungarian poems about loss

The first, by László Lator, I translated recently and is currently in The Hungarian Quarterly with a few others by him.

Forest

This unexpected flash of light,
this shower of glass, shadow of fire,
the forest says: all that is broken
will be mended. Things feebly surrendered
that offered themselves up and melded
into earth will suddenly be woken,
emerging and erupting everywhere,
all spinning, all burning, all bright.

Untenanted matter that has lost all form
shall rise from blindness and decay,
and in one momentary display
of enthusiasm imagine itself reborn
with a new body. Nothing is lost,
repeats the forest, time and again:
all will be reassembled from mere dust,
each flavour recalled, each subtlety made plain.
Or maybe the forest simply tells us what

we need to hear to quench the spirit’s thirst?
How else could it struggle with the worst
life offers us and still emerge intact?

No, says the forest, there’s no resurrection
and wild rejoicing: everything within
the body or beyond it faces the same corruption,
our flesh, our very cells are paper thin.
What has been, will be, and yet not the same:
if things come back at all they might pass through
some other medium—that’s the only claim
the body could make, nor is that body you.

The forest says—but forests cannot speak.
They tell us nothing, one way or the other.
They only encourage the foolish and the weak
to indulge in the usual round of mystic blather.
This forest says… it might address us so—
it could say this or that for all I know.

It draws us in: rejects us and expels us.
Both Stay! and Go! it says—that’s all it tells us.

This is what it says in the biog. note. László Lator has been an editor and translator for most of his life. His first book of verse was banned following the Communist takeover so a first volume only appeared in 1969. Since then he has published several volumes of verse and verse translations as well as essays on classical and contemporary poetry. Lator’s translation and creative writing seminar was perhaps the most influential workshop in the eighties and nineties. He is now working on his memoirs. My own note: Lator was born in 1927 and shares my birthday. He is probably the leading older poet in the country and much loved. It is the death of his wife, the poet and translator Judith Pór - with whom I played a game of table tennis in 1989 - that he is writing about, and has often written about in recent years.

And this poem by Szabolcs Várady (1943-), an outstanding but not very productive leading poet, I translated in 2003, for the Rotterdam International Poetry Festival that year. I had forgotten I'd done it but came across it while shuffling through things. I immediately changed a line since it appeared, then two, then three. That's how it goes.

With the Dead

I take good care in my dealings with the dead.
I’m not sure whether they know that they are lost.
You come through the door; it greets me as you pass –
but that is not quite how one greets a ghost.
And yet it’s not just me who feels embarrassed.
Let’s pretend. Let’s play the sickly host
lying in bed, the visitor at his side,
let’s try to help each other as they must,
incredulous, but credibly nonplussed.

How much time do you have? How much do I?
Your mouth is as sincere as it ever was,
that kiss of greeting isn’t merely mime.
I must have been desiring you some time.
We stood in the snow, lost, the pair of us.
No sun appears. Cold runs through the veins.
I love you. That’s what you said once: I love you.
The snow has melted, the earth is piled above you -
that remains.

The ending still bothers me a little. Várady's poetry - usually strictly formal but not always so - is, I think, very much in the precision of tone. I once wrote an article about Hungarian poetry in which I said the essential Hungarian gesture was the shrug. I was thinking as much of Várady as anyone at the time. It is a worn, humorous, deeply experienced, part ironic shrug that is never, but never, just 'cool'. It is related to gallows humour when expressly funny, but gallows humour lies under even a good deal of the fully serious material.

There is an act of mourning here too, but I don't know for whom. Maybe the ending is a little too straight... (love you / above you)... but his rhyming is pretty strict and I am dubious about starting strict and ending slack. Valery said a poem was never finished, only abandoned. If that is true it is ten times as true for translations!

Register! Tone! Intractability! I put the poem here because otherwise I like it very much.

Entertaining late

Not that late but late enough. Into Norwich earlier in the day to the BBC to record three shorter poems ('under one minute each, please') for the Today programme. They'll air one and display all three on the website some time next week ahead of the Eliot prize giving - providing no urgent world news comes to blow it away, as happened last year. In the event the producer at the other end said not to worry too much about the minute providing its only a matter of a few seconds over, so I read one of the Burning poems (the second shortest one, about the book collector and money), the Woolworth poem (a sonnet), and the one about the farmer and the gravedigger. Couple of decent snowy walks to stations, one across the cathedral close, the spire of the cathedral covered faintly in rime, through bare branches of snow-lined trees.

Have also been writing, fast as ever - a set of two sonnets and two prose poems. Probably part of a series associated with the art project in Wysing.

I love the silence of snow - the soul wrapped in cotton wool but not too tight, still a faint chill about the vast hall of the universe.

Snow and Cambridge

Wysing Arts Centre, on another (sunnier) day


No more than about 3" of snow first thing this morning but deep enough, crisp enough and even enough to make a smooth sweet layer. No cars either so a pure muffled silence. No strong wind to freeze and pound the ears and stab into the temple so the walk to the station over partly gritted surfaces was, if you shut your eyes, like walking on an imagined moon. Once at the station - arriving early - the odd gust pinched and bit in sharply but then, when it was still, the temperature immediately seemed to climb.

At Cambridge met artist Phyllida Barlow and we got in a taxi together to see artists Caroline Wright and Helen Rousseau for a project. It was at Caroline's studio at the Wysing Arts Centre, well outside Cambridge, working home to some 30 artists. Big high-ceilinged studios with tall windows.

The project is a kind of conversation starting with the visual art but moving into and out of writing, generating more visual work and writing, and maybe sound work too. It will come with its own blog and website, and will work with libraries and galleries. I was willing but ginger at the outset. Art writing often bores me solid and I fear there is a part of me that is capable of producing some of it, but having talked things through - and listened to something Phyllida wrote - it suddenly sounded substantial and exciting, and maybe there will be the core of a book in it too. Once I have the web address of the blog I'll put it here, and provide a permanent link in the sidebar.

Enough about that for now.

On the way back, the train was as crowded as I expected and the marking I had intended to do (and had done on the way to Cambridge) became impossible. Opposite me, a young bearded man was about to work on his laptop and glanced over at the papers I had brought out to mark. He asked me if they were UEA papers? He said he recognised them. He himself had been a student at UEA, finished last summer. History and Economics. Father a theologian - Hebrew and Old Testament, just taken up a position at Perth, Australia. Young man was at boarding schools in Indonesia and Malaysia. Off to Vancouver to work and see his girlfriend, then an MA and then, possibly, to do field work in some good cause in Africa.

That's pretty well the world covered in one conversation. Never asked each other's names, will probably never meet again. Talked all the way to W, me asking most of the questions until I feared I must sound as though I were quizzing him. But he was happy to talk. Like most Brits he himself does not ask questions. Nobody here does which explains why English conversation can be slow. Manners. Lack of curiosity. Maybe even a certain dullness sometimes. This wasn't dull. Better than cramped marking.

Walking back from the station was colder than walking there. Air enters the mouth like small blocks of ice. The streets almost deserted. A police car with flashing light was blocking the end of our street. Couldn't see why, but something must have happened further down. We shall find out.

More Burning Reviews

This from Anna McKerrow at the Book Trust, ahead of the Eliot Prize awards in about a week and a half's time...

The title-named series of 14 poems in George Szirtes’ The Burning of the Books and other poems links neatly into a sense of place seen through the prism of species or class identification: unlike plants that are wilfully misclassified, here, books and libraries lose their power to organise and inspire and instead are collaged with cities and mobs into one chaotic and beautiful whole, which is then flayed and burned alive. The semi-narrative sequence of these 14 poems, which in themselves seem to employ a patchwork or collage structure, explores the emotive and uncompromising practice of book burning.

'By a course of intensive study in the appropriate libraries,
Those burning places of the intellect, those driers out
Of the eyes where barbarians gather with their torches
And rank upon rank of shelves, tongues and footnotes
Are burning as always, as is their nature, in the streets
Of the city that opens like a book and must itself always be burning.'

(From 'Postscriptum')

The extreme and expansive passion in these poems are what struck me, and what has me now keeping my fingers firmly crossed for Szirtes to win the prize again (he won in 2004 for Reel). Indeed, as the reader, you feel your eyes and fingers burning as you read Szirtes’ seemingly effortless yet gloriously incendiary verse. The burning of books in the title of his book relates to a hateful exercise in ignorance and intolerance carried out at many times during history, but it could also be said to reflect the burning intellect and the fire of creativity. Thus, books are symbols of the human desire for knowledge and communication, for something above the body’s basic needs – books that burn with potential:

'Life is annotation. Hunger and annotation. It is knowledge
We hunger for, letters we drink, desire in our bloodstream
For the fat, visceral, blood-bound flesh of our books.'

(From 'Consuming Passion')

The Burning of the Books and other poems is a large work that deserves an entry to itself.

It's a lovely cheering review on a cold day. I am going in to the local BBC studio on Friday morning to record three short poems (they can't be more than a minute long, which rules out all the title sequence). One of them might be used on the Today programme next week. But then again it might not.

Abel Gance's Napoleon

In the Comments under the previous post an interesting conversation has begun to develop about arthouse - or as Mark prefers it, art house - cinema. In the course of it we started talking about sheer length and the priorities of commercial production. I don't want to say much now about Gance's five and a half hour film, Napoleon (1927) just to put up three clips, the first of them being ten minutes from the actual film. It is the snowball fight scene from Napoleon's childhood.



The second is Kevin Brownlow talking about Gance's film, Brownlow having assembled a longer version and slowed it down so that the silent film moves more naturally. It is, I think, Brownlow's version with Carl Davis's music that was shown on TV, in episodes, some years back. It blew me over. I thought I had rarely seen anything so beautiful in cinema. Brownlow's own enthusiasm is clear.



The third is a personal, critical view, not of Napoleon but of another, earlier, Gance film, one that Brownlow refers to above as an influence on Eisenstein and others La Roue (1922 or 1923) by Kristin Thompson.



She is tough on his melodrama, but who wasn't melodramatic in the Twenties? Melodrama can be extraordinarily purgative as well as grossly sentimental. I also think it is a being a bit sneaky to attack someone for a minor work that seems to be a preparation for a greater one. But let that go... Do watch.