LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

LITERARY CRITICISM

THE DESPERADO CRITIC

The critic Alan Brownjohn in the ‘80s and ‘90s

It can amply be demonstrated that Alan Brownjohn is an adept at thematic criticism (if we can ascribe to him any approach at all), because his major concern with a work is its theme, its kernel of meaning, its ability to communicate, in short its connection with the reader. Brownjohn has the interest of the reader very much at heart. There is no literature without a reading eye, and for this silent, unknown but essential witness, the poet-novelist-translator-critic has formidable respect.

The end of the second millennium followed two major paths in literary criticism: on the one hand it went on with scholarly, academic criticism which only academics enjoyed, on the other it attempted a lay form of estimating a text. The latter relied on language as literature, not as a scientific instrument. It described the volume analysed in plain, whenever it was possible agreeable, words, trying to communicate approval or disapproval of it in another literary text. In short, I consider the latter to be really literary criticism, and Alan Brownjohn is a remarkable representative.

Where to Draw the Line (TLS, February 1, 1980) shows Brownjohn reticent to deal with the present in firm words:

            ‘The disputes rage on through magazines and presses large and small; and most of the arguments deployed are tendentious and unhelpful (...). It makes excellent sense to define a tradition, or line of the great figures of the past – as long as you do it very well indeed and as long as you stop before the present.’

He sees the present as a ‘fluid situation’ which must be allowed to take its time. The critic of contemporary works is not called upon to establish greatness but adequacy. A text must be solid before it is acclaimable. Quality comes before glory, and they do not often go hand in hand. Many of the writers Brownjohn found good in the 1980s have failed to make it to the front, but that changes nothing of their value, or of the critic’s evaluation, which Brownjohn is still prepared to stand by, even twenty years later. His basic requirement is that the book be ‘enjoyable’, which brings us back to Brownjohn’s undeterred love for his or other writers’ readers.

The above-mentioned article discusses three studies of more or less contemporary poetry: Neil Powell’s Carpenters of Light: A Critical Study of Contemporary British Poetry, P.R. King’s Nine Contemporary Poets: A Critical Introduction, and Philip Hobsbaum’s Tradition and Experiment in English Poetry. The first is a ‘stimulating if uneven study’. The second comes out as a ‘comparatively modest handbook, grinding no axes and not daring many judgments.’ The first study makes Brownjohn wonder rhetorically, when he comes to the section allotted to Larkin: ‘Is Sunny Prestatyn evidently humorous?’ There may be dissatisfaction with both these books underlying the relatively mild statements the critic puts down on paper, but the third makes him forget civility and his anger breaks loose:

‘And when he comes to the Moderns, the argument serves to repatriate and downgrade Eliot as a member of an American tradition more vigorously

represented by Whitman (on whom Hobsbaum admittedly writes well), to salute Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg as ‘ the chief heroes of English modernism’, to write off Auden and the 1930s, and to advance Francis Berry and Peter Redgrove as the major living figures.  There is nothing wrong with spirited advocacy of poets who might justly feel underpraised ; but there is a lot wrong mostly in the form of a disservice to the writers themselves) with raising them at the expense of other, accepted reputations in the interests of a personal theory of poetry.’

Theories of poetry cannot replace the literary text itself. While the critic is allowed his share of creation when his judgment is tentative and shy, Brownjohn refuses to enslave literature proper to the critic’s eagerness to draw lines and devise a plan for the authors. There he really ‘draws the line’: an author is an author, and he must be allowed to write, unhindered by critical disputes, which disputes are even more to blame when they show error and arrogance. I have the feeling Brownjohn follows in Eliot’s footsteps in this respect, always suspecting the critic of arrogance and making sure the creator of literature is not cornered by theories. At best, criticism is literature of a second degree, literature about literature, and it has no life of its own if it does not serve the reader, which is its only purpose. If you do not write so that the reader may understand you – any reader, actually –, you had better keep away. Let us agree to take this as a warning to academic criticism. The fewer readers, the less right to exist in print.

A Cold Wind Blows (Encounter, August-September 1980) returns to contemporary poetry, examining anthologies of poetry this time. The article begins with:

            ‘No editor of an anthology of modern poetry, least of all a major new Oxford anthology, can ever hope to please most of the people most of the time.’

The article examines The Oxford  Book of Contemporary Verse 1945-1980, edited by D.J. Enright at Oxford University Press. Such an anthology, Brownjohn explains, needs to be ‘authoritative, useful, and fun.’ But he adds: ‘The nearer the period his book covers, the harder his task will be.’ Contemporary writers, then, can hardly be the subject of academic criticism, which assumes greatness and dissects it with a scalpel. They must be handled with care, by a congenial critic, who must be aware – very much so, indeed – that he can burn his fingers while trying to defend a still dim cause. Causes and issues must be set aside when one writes about contemporary authors (contemporary with oneself). Tradition is a good idea at a safe distance. Making up an anthology of contemporary verse is a job that ‘calls for calm and heroic reading, infallible judgment, and luck.’ Enright’s judgment chose to leave out names that had been well established before 1945. Brownjohn feels that such an anthology needs the presence of those very authors who have influenced the present age, and leaving them out is a mistake:

            ‘in order to be authoritatively convincing, an anthology needs to call the important poets who stand at the threshold of a period and govern its practice and taste in poetry.’

Recent poetry is swayed by a very ‘cold wind’ indeed if it severs all its links to those who have shaped it.

One of the recent names Brownjohn mentions in the same article is Derek Mahon, with his Poems 1962-1978, through which ‘speaks a sense of menace and alarm, and a counter-balancing sanity and compassion, which make the book a notable achievement.’ I cannot help noticing here how important to Brownjohn the balance of a book is. A well-balanced book, both poignant and reticent, both outgoing and mysterious (mysterious is an adjective which he very often turns into wonder: lots of books are ‘mysteriously’ appealing, charming, intriguing, enjoyable...) is the ideal text. John Whitworth’s Unhistorical Fragments (his first volume!) is seen as ‘witty, exuberant, full of observant detail’, yet lacking one of two legs: ‘one wants to find something more touching among all the bluffness.’ In the meantime, John Whitworth has grown into an poignantly tender and unspeakably touching poet. The advice may have been put to good use.

Pandora’s Box of Tricks (TLS, October 9, 1982) shows a side of Brownjohn which is less known: he talks about the theatre. Brownjohn likes to talk about the stage, and does it quite a number of times, but only at the request of editors, rarely as his own choice. This time he examines Lulu, adapted from Frank Wedekind by Michael Feingold. The first thing that strikes the poet is the effect of ‘the resources of modern entertainment technology.’ The ‘Brechtian treatment of the Wedekind plays’, which is ‘struggling to get out’, pleases Brownjohn all right, but on the way he is dazzled by the music and frowns:

            ‘... an electronic nowhere of flashing lights, kaleidoscopic screen images and international pop sounds. Without a virtuoso manipulation of its technical contrivances (...), it would be nothing. Even with it, it is, sadly, not very much.’

Much ado about nothing, we might say, unless Brownjohn made it very clear that the text itself was remarkable. The mistake, he decides, is the updating of this play. The dialogue and the verbal imagery are ‘marvellous in the original’, but our attention is distracted by ‘self-indulgent technical gimmickry’. The words are ‘diluted to a thin stew of wisecracks, media clichés and psychobabble.’ Subtlety, which was initially there all right, is lost. ‘Modernization’ is taken too far, and the only desired effect is  the ‘easy, corny laugh-line.’ What would have been needed would have been ‘delicate, intelligent judgment of the verbal limits’. There are very few moments of ‘genuine power’, Brownjohn complains, actually voicing a dissatisfaction that has been valid to this day, that is present in the acted texts all over the world: compromising with the lowest expectations, with an uneducated desire to laugh and ignore the deeper, disturbing meaning. Brownjohn calls his dissatisfaction ‘banal electronic devices.’ He is very angry indeed:

            ‘Perhaps there is going to be more of this sort of ‘total’ theatre; but its proper venue is the amusement arcade.’

            Brownjohn’s anger is firm and always fair. So is his praise. When he both approves and disapproves of Stanley Middleton’s novel Entry into Jerusalem (Ambiguous Gifts, TLS, April 2, 1983), he comes very close to the definition of a Desperado writer:

            ‘Middleton’s is not a fashionable gift, and it makes him increasingly a writer who requires to be read with care and thought rather than speed, but he unquestionably looks harder, and finds more, than most of his contemporaries.’

A Desperado – which theory very likely Alan Brownjohn disagrees with, as it involves immediate contemporaries and attempts a definition of a trend not yet self-organized – must indeed be read with ‘thought rather than speed’. It is one of the major features that a Desperado critic could not stress enough.

Another Desperado sign is the fact that Brownjohn is sensitive to the need for sanity and the sensation of nightmare in Shena Mackay’s Babies in Rhinestones (Punishment in Surrey, TLS, July 10, 1983). In all the short-stories he notices the ‘claustrophobia of uneventful lives’, which is a splendid definition for all Desperado novels. He is also impressed by a ‘lethal accuracy of observation’. While describing her, Brownjohn unknowingly describes later-to-come novels by Ishiguro, Barnes, Swift, Martin Amis, Gray, Lessing, Lodge, Bradbury all at once:

            ‘Not much needs to happen in them for the message to be clear. Where things do happen in Babies in Rhinestones, this self-regarding suburban world seems less plausible.’

He never draws a theoretical conclusion – it would be against his principles – but notices the directions of his age very keenly. The sign that he notices is the fact that he does not find this feature – reprehensible from the point of view of a classical novel – harmful in any way. The plot focusses on insanity and nightmare, not much happens, yet the novelist is a ‘highly original talent’. Brownjohn has adapted to new requirements and he senses the new criteria for fiction. From this intelligent critical standpoint to a theoretical statement, the distance is very short.

Time and again, Alan Brownjohn writes about five or six collections of verse at once, looking for ‘nuggets of clear, unforced feeling’. One poet rhymes ‘unobtrusively’ (Desperado feature, again), even though it ‘sometimes goes a bit too far.’ Another is ‘enjoyable’, a woman is ‘intriguing’, someone’s ‘principal themes’ are ‘place, love (and loss), and memory of the dead’, a sequence of poems is about ‘fatherhood and separation’. It must be obvious by now that Alan Brownjohn the thematic critic and the unwilling Desperado are inseparable, as a matter of fact.

Describing John Hewitt’s Collected Poems (Ghosts and Aliens, The Sunday Times, March 22, 1992), Brownjohn concludes he is best described by ‘craftsmanship, calm and decency’, which all three together represent the ideal of any Desperado poet, I think. The poet Vernon Scannell (The Face of Someone Who Could Die, The Spectator, 11 April 1992) is ‘good company’. Linda France is ‘frustrating’ but good where ‘the content justifies the fireworks.’ Crichton Smith has an ‘ironic imagination’, Carole Satyamurti impresses by her ‘range of sympathy and the understated power of her poems’, while Sue Hubbard is, here and there, ‘over-deliberate.’ All these were stated in Taking up Collections (The Sunday Times, 8 January 1995), which begins with Peter Porter, praised for his ‘ambitiousness of theme’ (in Millennial Fables), for being ‘defiantly not a poet providing easy answers or slogans’, for steeling himself against the ‘likely sleaziness of this millennium’s close.’ All the features Brownjohn picks here will soon become Desperado commonplaces, but were only peculiarities at one time, which shows the good judgment and the fine sense for theory Alan Brownjohn possesses. 

Ready to Be Rediscovered (Times Educational Supplement, 10/3, 1995) muses on the theme of biography, starting from John Stallworthy’s ‘honourable toil’ to elucidate the case of Louis MacNeice. The conclusion is that ‘Louis MacNeice still remains mysterious’:

            ‘...the man, shy, distant and elusive while alive, and now farther off still from anyone who would attempt the task, may be a cipher to whom no one ever quite finds the key.’

In his novel The Long Shadows, the mystery is fervently cultivated by the novelist himself, even while he is alive. In many interviews Alan Brownjohn has clearly stated that knowing the life of the creator is not a prerequisite and should be invoked only ‘if it helps’. He does not approve of the reader’s obscure, unconfessed wish to treat the creator like a movie star and pry into private stories. Whatever is private is off limits, and the creator should not be disturbed. The poetry or fiction can have the emotional load. The day-to-day experiences do not help. They are far better off left alone. This is what Brownjohn, himself reticent and very private, thinks and does.

Bard Company (The Sunday Times, 28 May 1995) brings several more Desperado elements. August Kleinzahler writes verse in which ‘hope is terminally faded’ and ‘any viable dreams’ are dead. His gaze is ‘pitiless’ and is inevitably followed by ‘pleasureless reading’, supported though by ‘narrative vigour’. It sounds just like the Desperado as a wanted poet. If we add to it James Simmons’ ‘confessional’ vein, doubled by the ‘unexpectedly private, delicate side to his talent’, and Mimi Khalvati’s ‘meditation on exile still uncomfortable after long years’, we have most features of Desperado poetry in just one review.

Peter Reading (Virtuoso Who Sings the Grotty, Poetry and Fiction, 15 December 1996) adds to the Desperado profile an ‘unremitting pessimism’ and love of ‘grim details’, which does not prevent him from being a ‘paradoxically, a bizarrely entertaining writer’ (bizarre being a variation on the theme of mystery, the word Brownjohn is so fond of and which expresses him so well). Nothing in Reading is ‘comforting, or boring.’ Thomas Kinsella (The Mark of the Mature, The Sunday Times, 26 January 1997) brings a ‘rhetoric of anger’, alongside with the remark that American confessional poetry of the 1960s (Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) ‘never took root in Britain; or only as a peculiarly British form of reticent sensitivity.’ I have read many young poets who are reticent, indeed, but I have read just as many, all British, who are unashamed of confession, who push it into theatricality, as a matter of fact. Britishness character must have changed in the meantime. Brownjohn’s poems are both far from confession and at the very core of his very private emotions. So, it is only a matter of covering one’s tracks. Some do it better. Some do it, period.

The question of poetic mastery comes up in a review of John Fuller’s Collected Poems (A Poet’s Poet, Sunday Times, 16 March 1997). It is a very important point for Brownjohn, whose own poetry relies on solid knowledge of prosody and a cultivation of educated verbal music. Considering the knowledge that goes into Alan Brownjohn’s verse, we might think he is a poet of the mind more than anything else, but, strangely (mysteriously, as he would say), the soul comes to the limelight. He talks about John Fuller’s ‘erudition’, about his ‘complete mastery of almost any poetic form you can name.’ Yet, he says, Fuller is not a poet’s poet, in spite of all his ‘allusions and learned games.’ Brownjohn is not a poet’s poet, either, but that is somewhat more obvious with the naked eye. With Fuller, Brownjohn finds that ‘one of his main pleasures is in baffling admirers with brilliantly mysterious poems’, in which he opts for ‘a playful reticence, not usually allowing emotion to be more than implicit.’ Baffling is exactly what any Desperado dreams of doing, and Brownjohn does it in his own way, which is not Fuller’s, definitely. Fuller baffles our expectation of words to make sense, Brownjohn baffles more subtly, in very clear verse, or, we could say – if we choose to stick to the mystery of the text – he baffles with secrecy.

Words of Reassurance (The Guardian, August 12, 1998) ends with a sentence that reminds me of the millennium poem (2001):

            ‘although we assume we live in a dehumanised global economy and communicate impersonally with one another across vast spaces through the answering machine and the Internet, much of the most vital and interesting life of human beings obstinately goes on even now in small communities...’

I wish Brownjohn could be more tolerant of e-mail and internet and the new, fast, and – true – impersonal ways of communication. The Cat without E-Mail ought to be a very sad cat. It is not, though. Brownjohn relaxes in his love for the radio over the television – which I utterly share, for reasons that include bad commercials, incessant advertising flooding one’s brain, kitsch on all fronts – and in his use of an old Corona (for his one long poem, 2001) that gives the flavour of lordly pipe tobacco to his wonderful verse. For the sake of his poignantly appealing lines, I would not change his letters for e-mail messages, but at times it would be so much easier and faster... Is time running too fast or is Brownjohn determined to keep his own time in an area of diamond-like quality, unadulterated by the cheap kicks a screen and flashing virtual libraries could provide?

         A review of Carole Satyamurti’s Selected Poems (Letting It All Hang out) announces that being ‘nakedly confessional’ is no longer in fashion, which means that between the 1980s and the late 1990s it managed to get in there:

            ‘Not long ago, the favoured way of being candid and vulnerable in poetry was to be nakedly confessional. Now the mood has changed. Rather unexpectedly it has once more become possible to negotiate profound and disturbing emotions with reticence and dignity. This can result in bad, quiet poems, just as the confessional mode could produce noisy, pretentious verse that was plain embarrassing.’

Quiet poems is what Brownjohn writes, but they are far from being bad. I called them blank, but I realize quiet is a much more apt way of putting it. Reticence has often been and still gets in the way of autobiographical poetry in Britain. In order for a poem to be ‘readable’, as Brownjohn claims Satyamurti’s poems really are, it has to find a bridge to cross the page towards the reader, and very often that bridge is the reader’s eagerness to learn more about the poet’s intimacy. That is where Brownjohn shakes his finger. Most good poets do. Is it really ‘fine to be vulnerable in poetry now’, as the subtitle of this review states?

Talking about Their Generation (The Sunday Times, 8 May 1994) comes up with a question that best describes present verse:

            ‘Has anyone noticed it – that poets don’t start their lines with capital letters very often these days? The line seems to have given way to the sentence, which meanders on over line-endings and from one stanza to the next: until its meaning is completed.’

It is also true that poets revel in breaking these sentences into lines, with a zest for verbal suspense that even leads to breaking words into suffixes, roots, rhyming vowels. The sentence is indeed replacing the old units of prosody for most, and speech threatens to replace the old poetic art. Brownjohn’s 2001 reconciles the two tendencies and shows that speech can be patterned on older techniques. Nothing like the flavour of pipe tobacco invading piercingly present meanings.

In spite of an addiction to traditional radio, typewriter (and word-processor, though), reticence and technique, which lend Brownjohn’s opinions and verse an unspeakable charm, this criticism at the millennium’s close is avidly aware of each new day and there is in each review or essay the joy of living, of opening one’s eyes again and again, of adapting to literature every morning at the crack of dawn. Brownjohn is in criticism, as in poetry, a late riser who lingers in bed just for the pleasure of blinking and saying hello to sunlight again and again. In between sleep and wakefulness, that morning moment when the early riser delights in taking his time, in getting up late and savouring the return to thought and feeling is Brownjohn’s certainty that life and literature can go on, always together, for as long as it takes.