Post-postscript from Marai

All day I have been working on Márai and am only ten pages from the end. In the meantime I sneeze and sneeze and sneeze again, possibly because I've got a cold (it feels a bit like a cold) or, more probably, because of an allergy. I suspect an allergy because a number of times I have started what I think is a cold, running, sneezing, red-eyed, but within a day it goes. In the meantime it isn't constant. It comes and goes. So now I have taken antihistemine and have some hope that all manner of things shall be well.

In this end part we are left with the drummer who had become the last lover of Judit Áldozó, the maid who married the young master, became a society woman, then, eventually, rejected society. When we last saw her she was delivering her story in the hotel room in Rome to her young, vain, and rather stupid lover. Her story is as extraordinary as her mind.

But then her story finishes and we are left with this coda. The young drummer is now in New York, some time in the seventies, I would guess, serving in a smart off-Broadway bar and that is where he begins his monologue to a customer, a fellow Hungarian newly arrived in the USA. He talks in Hungarian street slang some of which is genuine and some invented. My impossible task is to translate this not into British but American English. I am working on the assumption that the editor - or a friendly nearby American - will correct my feeble efforts. As it happens, this part is relatively straight.

The drummer is in New York because he skipped across the Hungarian border a few years ago, straight after being asked to file reports for the AVO, the much dreaded security police. He tells this story and that of his escape, his feelings presumably close to Márai's own, albeit more crudely expressed. After recounting his escape he starts reminiscing about Judit. We mustn't expect too much of him, of course.

The photo? It was the one in the passport, I’ve just had it enlarged. Where could she go without a passport? To join the angels, friend. You don’t need passports or photographs there. No jewelry either…. Take a good look at her. That’s what she was like. But not just like that. By the time I met her she was like a flower at the end of the season.

I don’t like talking about her. She’s been gone ten years. Soon after that I too said 'ciao Roma' and crossed the big pond. They say what’s gone is gone, why fret about it?.. Yes, but heaven knows it’s not always like that. Some things don’t disappear quite so easy… because this picture isn’t the only reminder I have of her. I remember more… her voice for a start. And some of what she told me. She wasn’t like the usual kind of woman I met. The rest have vanished without a trace. But I remember this one.

Because, as you probably know, with artists like me, chicks more or less just pass each other the house key. There were all kinds, I needn’t list them all. There were cute little thin girls. There were big ones. There were showgirls with boobs out to here, but also women with class, women with a position in life… women with taste who sensed their time was almost over, who'd grown wild and started firing on all cylinders… but, let me be clear, all of them wanted just one thing, which was that I should love and adore them, and only them, for ever.

This one was different. She wasn’t a bag of nerves. She told me straight from the start, no beating about the bush, that the only thing she wanted of me was that I should let her adore me. She wasn’t insisting on full blown romance with hearts and flowers… Cigarettes were all she needed, that is apart from adoring me and making a fuss of me.

At first I thought she had fallen for the artist in me. I’m not one to boast, I’m simply recognizing the fact that there’s something irresistible about me… especially now that I’ve had the bottom set of my teeth fixed. What you laughing at?...

As I said we don't expect much of him, but the book finishes with his words. And there's just a shade of Iris Robinson there, further news of whom seems to bubbling through the Austrian papers, according to Gwilym.

Postscript to the tragedy or otherwise...

We have been beating about the central bush in the comments to the last post, wondering whether the affaire Robinson can be described in terms of classical tragedy.

My essential conjecture was that the affaire may be perceived as a tragedy if we look not to the specifics of the people (she being hostile to gays, etc, and, as Lucy hints, who knows what we might discover about him) but at the specifics of the situation. That is the way drama works. We don't know everything about the characters involved in it, only what is necessary for us to apprehend the events as a drama.

The related conjecture was that certain things happen in what we call 'real life' that, in the way they unfold and in the choices they present, approximates to art; that if art is a mirror to life, the moment of the passage through from one side of the mirror to another is the tragic moment.

Once the characters are through the mirror they are no longer simply themselves. They are symbolic figures in the imagination. Something like this happened, I think, in the relationship between the life and poetry of Sylvia Plath. It seems, in some way, she chose to take the passage through. The figure we remember is the one at the point of crossing. That, at least, is the position she holds in the imagination. As for the reality? Reality is elsewhere, where it no longer matters.I have immortal longings in me, says Cleopatra in Shakespeare's play. Then she steps forward and becomes the symbol the play had been preparing her for from the start. That sense of stepping forward is what interests us. Not whether she wore green underwear, picked her nose, or was a bigot in the scenes we don't see. Or whether in real life she was everything art cracked her up to be.

But surely we cannot detach the persons from the symbols they become? No, we can't, but we strip them of everything but the choices they faced within the drama prepared for them.

*

This was going to be a short post but I can see it can't be as short as I intended. Let me start elsewhere, beat about another bush if you like, and try to find my way back if I can.

In the comments to the post below we were speculating whether Iris Robinson was in the grip of passion or was merely feeling - as Mark put it - an itch that she was arrogant enough to think she could satisfy without consequence. We tend to think passions are in some way grand and noble, whereas itches are there to be controlled. Ascribing passion to this woman, some might feel, would be to excuse her.

On the relatively ignorant but important instinctive level I felt this was a case of passion, not so much because she was having an affair (lots of people have affairs) but because she took the risk of providing money she was not entitled to so that the object of her passion could set up his life. If it was an itch, it was an itch gone mad. The risk she took seemed to me the act of a person out of control. Who, in any case, knows when an itch becomes a passion? I suspect it does so pretty regularly.

It takes two to have an affair. There is the object (in this case the young man, presumed handsome, vigorous and, above all, young) and the subject (powerful but aging, driven by furies - even bigoted furies are furies - that are frustrated). At fifty-nine the subject may be grasping at the last straws of youth. What began as itch could easily pass over into passion and madness. The ego is frail, the body is desperate for reassurance. All things pass. One would give anything to stop it passing. And people do.

We do not find Iris Robinson an attractive figure in life, but this is an existential predicament in which an existential choice presents itself in a form we all secretly understand. We understand it in so far as we understand the pull of desire and vigour and the fear of weakness, incapacity and death. We understand it but we cannot act on it, nor can we fully admit it. Life closes in and we don't want to be closed in but we have responsibilities, affections, security - love even. And still we feel closed in. That, we suspect, is our greatest given existential predicament. Our truths pull us two ways at the same time. The tension is intolerable, so we act as though there were no such tension.

How do you become brave? someone asked. You do it by acting bravely, came the reply. You act. You act as if. You assume the form of your aspiration. You don't even want to know you are assuming it. You want to become, and may become, the thing itself, But the truth of the tension remains. It rolls in waves under dreams and produces shadows and myths.

In tragedy the choices we reject becomes choices that are accepted. That is what the figures in tragedy are there to do. They are there to accept what we reject. This isn't just a matter of criminality. A criminal's arena of choice is a mean little place we wouldn't want to enter most of the time. The arena of passion is different. There the choices are not so clear cut, if only because they are passions, not social ethics. There the ghosts under the waves are larger, the shadows bigger, the figures through the mirror more haunting and imposing. Desire, terror, and power are the big figures in the big arena, and maybe desire - for a while at least - is the biggest. Out of those figures and the spaces through which they move - their arena - we make art. The arena is the poem, the story, the drama.

We know transgressions carry danger. Here, in shadow world, the dangers can perform their ritual revenge.

*

So maybe we can detach Iris Robinson from the woman whose politics we don't like, whose statements we abhor. Those are part of her catalogue of faults but when it comes to the moment of choosing to take a lover and go for broke, her other qualities diminish. The catalogue is much reduced. By the time she reaches that point she has become the shadow figure who chooses what generally we cannot, in an arena we don't inhabit, an arena within which she already occupies a dramatic role of some kind. Power - and she is associated with the seat of power - is a dramatic force.

It is, by no means, a case of saying: What a tragedy that such a good / heroic / admirable person should come to harm. We don't because we don't believe her to be good, heroic or admirable. It is the very fact that she is flawed, and that one flaw leads to another, eventually to disgrace or madness or death, and that the waves travel out from this into every part of that arena that makes her subject for tragedy.

*

I have left Peter Robinson out of this because he is - for now - easier to defend, and, for that very reason, is less interesting. For now. His fate remains to be seen. It is the very fact that Iris Robinson is not to be defended that enables her to cross the threshold of the mirror. Power, passion, discovery, devastation, madness, suicide and general collapse are rarely brought together around a single figure.

And in any case, she may, as some suggest, be taking refuge in 'madness; and 'suicide attempts', or may emerge a sadder and wiser woman, or just a ridiculous and somewhat repulsive old bat. If so, that is not tragedy. It may be farce, or it may simply be a drama, even a storm in a teacup. So Gwilym may be perfectly right in the end. But the tragic form is there, the stage is set.

I have always thought that the last days of János Kádár in Hungary, and of Mrs Thatcher as prime minister in the UK, were the stuff of opera. Maybe someone will commission me to write the libretto. Nixon in China, anybody?

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.