LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

LITERARY CRITICISM

THE THEMATIC CRITIC

Alan Brownjohn is a complex personality. He writes both poetry and fiction, but he is also an academic, who finds literary criticism as necessary as breathing, to quote T.S. Eliot. His approach to literature is generally thematic, with an open eye to technical abilities, which he never fails to acknowledge. Generous and interested in a large variety of writers, Brownjohn welcomes the celebrities with due respect, but shows his true face when he discovers lesser authors, and praises or rebukes. When he is nasty, he is merely ironical, as he never accuses any writer. Brownjohn hates literary judges, but makes ample use of very subtle and sharp critical judgment.

In 1975, Alan Brownjohn wrote a study on Philip Larkin, whose poetry he greatly appreciates. The judgments reveal an affectionate critic, a sensitive eye, a poet who is looking for himself and explaining Larkin’s and his own poetry at the same time. He begins by quoting Larkin’s ‘down-to-earth contention’ that the years of his childhood, his ‘formative’ years, were ‘monumentally ordinary’, or, in Larkin’s own terms, they were ‘unspent.’ Brownjohn’s own poems seem to deal with ‘unspent’ moments, so veiled in secrecy that it takes deep sensibility and sympathy to reach the core of the experience, the meaning, the emotion.

Brownjohn discovers in Larkin what he himself is most sensitive to. He shares Larkin’s disposition when he describes his existential mood:

‘Life, for Larkin and, implicitly, for all of us, is something lived mundanely, with a gradually accumulating certainty that its golden prizes  are sheer illusion, that second best things will have to suffice.’

Brownjohn the poet introduces Larkin’s mood in this way and wastes no time, he starts at once in search of Larkin’s ‘themes’. Brownjohn does not seem to believe, for his own use, in the technicalities of complicated critical approaches, in the analysis of form above heart, of words above their author. Sympathy – at times its opposite – for the writer is what prompts Brownjohn to be a critic. This is how he introduces Larkin to us:

‘As a poet he has taken as his themes such things as the gap between human hope and cold reality; the illusory nature of choice in life; frustration with one’s lot in a present which is dismal, and in face of a future which brings only age and death.’

At the same time, Brownjohn never fails to appreciate good poetic technique when he finds it. Larkin’s poetry is ‘technically brilliant’. At the same time, besides being ‘appealing’, it is also ‘approachable’: it makes sense, it can be grasped, it is not obscure, which is essential to Brownjohn both as a critic and as a poet. He describes Larkin as ‘this very private man,’ which is very true for Brownjohn himself. He may write reviews about writers that he never feels a kinship with, but chose Larkin for a longer study, because Larkin is his alter-ego, almost. As Eliot so many times repeated, we write best about writers who influenced our work. Besides being essentially a thematic critic, Brownjohn is also, in Larkin’s case, a very affectionate appraiser.

The study follows Larkin’s work chronologically, evincing the ‘Larkin tones’ and modalities. Titles are self-effacing and ‘non-committal’, and Brownjohn the practitioner of poetry muses that this is ‘never a good tactic for leaving a clear impression on the reader’s mind.’  The young Larkin and the later Larkin are compared and found similar in the ‘dullness of ordinary, solitary existence and the prevailing sense of death.’ The critic notices Larkin’s sensibility to the ‘sad faces of the urban crowd,’ a possible echo of T.S. Eliot, who influenced both poets equally. This becomes particularly true when Brownjohn detects in the volume he analyses ‘the protagonist’s sense of his own inability to love.’ Reflexive soul agony is what strikes Brownjohn all along. His analysis is personality oriented, he finds ‘elements of continuity’, and recomposes a universe out of familiar features.

Well acquainted with the poetic landscape of the twentieth century, the critic senses Larkin’s debt to Yeats and Auden. The ‘later themes’ can be guessed, but only faintly, in the first volumes, and ‘the typical Larkin protagonist – humorous, self-deprecatory, observant – seems shyly reluctant to show himself’ for the time being. On the other hand, Brownjohn notices a ‘growing technical command’. As Larkin advances in age and craft, he displays a ‘disconcerting humour’, a ‘new ability to convince and to move the reader.’

The reader’s response is vital to Alan Brownjohn. Focussing on the ability of the poet to make himself understood, Brownjohn examines devices and appraises accessibility. He looks for the ‘message’, his criticism is not only very clear and accessible in itself, but also centred on basic commonsensical requirements. We are informed about recurrent ideas, the use of irony, about ‘Larkin’s vigorous colloquial mode’. All through this study, Brownjohn has a sympathetic approach, he analyzes with his poetic sensibility and feels with Larkin, rather than dissecting him.          

The critic Brownjohn delves for recurrent ‘ideas’, and is sensitive to irony, as when he notices, for instance, the ‘ironically sinister titles.’ He squeezes Larkin until his texts make sense. He concludes that Larkin writes a poetry of ‘a man speaking to men,’ with ‘large themes’, just like Brownjohn’s own. Besides irony and accessibility, in Eliot’s tradition, the critic finds ‘progress’ even where Larkin himself ‘has eschewed the idea of ‘development’ as a necessity for a poet.’  He reads and rereads carefully, painstakingly, eager to find shades and unuttered, implied intentions. He thus finds the ‘social observer’ in Larkin. On that occasion he also appreciates Larkin’s detachment:

‘Larkin’s own position is that of a different kind of observer, one standing a little distance away from the happiness of others, unable to feel affinity with them, yet cautiously assuming such joy as they may be able to find.’

Detachment, in Brownjohn’s view, implies both ‘amusement’ and ‘despair’, well balanced but undeniable. He sees Larkin between ‘the position of the slightly ironical witness’ and ‘that of the thoroughly involved thinker.’ He talks at a certain point about the bleak air of a volume, about ‘resigned nostalgia,’ ‘dispiriting’ realities. His turn of phrase is remarkable when he writes, ‘human hope is drained away by time.’ He finds the paradox of Larkin’s mood by pointing out hope hidden in ‘the humane precision with which hopeless things are observed.’ A very apt definition follows: Larkin is characterized by ‘compassionate despair at the human condition.’ The critic underlines his aptest words himself, leading the reader to the central idea, in a didactic, welcome clarity of discourse.

Besides the disabused Larkin, Brownjohn also manages to show his more sentimental side. He finds Larkin aware of ‘the deep and terrible necessity – of love in life.’ He may have his own discreet, blank poems in mind when he writes about the ‘meager and elusive’ ‘possibility of happiness in Larkin’s poems about love.’ He talks about a single existence, about doubt, fear, even sheer panic in Larkin. How could he have failed to notice his own mood in Larkin’s lines? He calls them ‘refined pessimism’ and ‘creative solitude.’ He compassionately mentions the ‘genuine dread of loneliness.’ Paying more than usual attention to the presence of a sense of humour – in good Desperado tradition, Brownjohn finds themes again, this time ‘the themes of how to live, of loneliness, age and death.’ Since the sense of humour is absent for the time being, Brownjohn finds such poems alarming.

Brownjohn the exceedingly private poet shows us he is not alien to spying on Larkin when he states, ‘Larkin is nearest to showing his own existence,’ and he seems to be doing that with ‘entrancing authenticity.’ The critic cannot fail to notice, again with a feeling of kinship, the ‘vulnerability’ in Larkin. Although it seems a rule for Desperadoes to shove narrative into their volumes of poetry and make each volume a short autobiographical (or secretly so) novel, we get to know precious little about Brownjohn in his poetry, but the little we victoriously extract is in fact the perfect suspense (if we can speak of that where lyricism is concerned) of his volumes. Each poem is clear and independent, but once we close a whole book, a sensation of secret narrative exposed by our spying curiosity gratifies our desire to meet the poet in flesh and blood. The private person stretches a shy hand and we shake it, as a corollary of reading. Larkin does that too, just like Alan Brownjohn, like Peter Porter and not many others.

Brownjohn enjoys decoding symbols, too. He talks about Larkin’s lighthouse ‘symbolizing both creativity and intense loneliness.’ Whatever the symbol deciphered, Brownjohn keeps his eyes open to all possible meanings and all kinds of ways of reaching them no matter what critical approach they may belong to. He is not a systematic, or a fervent critic, but a widely informed and eclectic one, for whom themes are always the red thread to follow. He feels it his duty to be aware of all directions, though, and finds the intellectual reactions of his subjects palpitating, as when he writes about Larkin, ‘awareness of the situation is a kind of mysterious advantage,’ or when he notices in one poem by Larkin the ‘hopeless unawareness of the very old.’ The noticing critic will not commit to a fanatic deconstruction or reconstruction of a text, but will probe it from all angles and in all lights, with the clear eye of reason and in the very accessible words of commonsensical sentences. Above everything else, Brownjohn the critic, unlike Brownjohn the poet, means to hug the reader and make him feel comfortable.

What Brownjohn never does is to let show his fears, so he naturally notices this propensity in Larkin with fresh interest. He sees horrifyingly ‘truthful’ lines, ‘scarcely compassionate because that cannot be the point.’ He is scared by ‘the whole state of human living seen as a hospital,’ and awed by Larkin’s description of the ‘true sense of death.’ When a poet, Brownjohn is very careful with the last lines of a poem. Similarly, in analyzing Larkin, he chooses and quotes the lines that appeal to him, delving into the poems with all the tools of careful reading. His quotations are initiating, subjective, conductive to a personalized appraisal. Brownjohn means to find the poet in the poem, and, at the same time, we can say we find Brownjohn the critic in his criticism, a more personal presence than we could boast of grabbing in his poetry.

Stubbornly, Brownjohn reveals the narrative of the poems, he is helped along by the use of an explanatory narration of the examined images. He ends by discovering the vital irony of the poet, but only after he has left behind ‘a wonderful accumulation of concrete detail,’ ‘Larkin’s lack of hope or expectations,’ ‘the mindless destruction of rural England deplored,’ ‘conservatism.’ He tries to select affinities, but is also very good at pointing out tendencies that he avoids as a poet. Thus, he repeatedly mentions Larkin’s ‘pessimistic view of human existence,’ ‘traps and disappointments,’ the loss of youth. He delights in pointing out that Larkin ‘rejects pretentious, literary thoughts.’ Although far from bookish, Larkin’s language, the critic states, is ‘immensely varied and flexible.’ It is a language that suits awareness, lucidity. It is the language of the ‘Movement’ poets, who wrote in the ‘mid-1950s’ (‘Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, Donald Davie, D.J. Enright, Thom Gunn, John Holloway, Elizabeth Jennings, John Wain’). Alan Brownjohn agrees to be placed in ‘Post-Movement’, confessing to a deep bond with Larkin. But he confesses to that only after long conversations, during which he is unwilling to attempt viewing his work as classifiable. His Desperado mood knows better than to accept being pinpointed to any stable, immovable spot. He wants the freedom to contradict himself whenever he pleases, a freedom that Eliot talked about shortly before his death, and which Desperadoes use with delight.

Alan Brownjohn does not seem to write easily, and he has been very careful with publication of his lines. He has concentrated his lyricism in a limited number of poems, as if each poem were a definition of one mood. He sympathizes with Larkin in this respect:

‘Larkin has never written easily. He composes slowly, and feels lucky if he writes more than one or two poems in a year.’

These poems evince ‘immense metrical skill,’ ‘meditations upon the detail’ and ‘a coldly final climax.’ The metrical skill of Desperadoes is different from the obvious musicality of their predecessors, even of T.S. Eliot. It is a concealed musicality, which seems to fear hurting the poem, and lingers behind the meaning, at the end of a line that may make a syllable rhyme with a pronoun. Desperado rhymes are resourceful. They resort to half-words, even letters, conjunctions, prepositions, surprising sonorities. Their rhythm is very special, too. At times, a particular cadence is enough to suggest lyricism, replacing all other devices. It may look prosaic at first, devoid of romantic sonority, but it is as addictive as any poetic manner used so far. The Desperado poet depends upon poetic trance as much as any other poet, only he reaches it via prose.

The last part of the study on Larkin focusses on some of his prose writings: the two novels (Jill and A Girl in Winter) and the book on jazz. There are also uncollected (at the time, but collected later, in posthumous Larkin books) poetry reviews, which, Brownjohn remarks, cast ‘interesting light on Larkin’s preferences in poetry, especially the poetry of his own time.’ So do Brownjohn’s reviews, as a matter of fact. In discussing the first novel, published in 1946, Brownjohn starts with theme, plot, technique. We are told that Larkin ‘has pace and surprise,’ as well as ‘ear for dialogue.’  In Brownjohn’s assessment of A Girl in Winter we might try to find suggestions for his own future novel, The Long Shadows. Between 1947 (the year Larkin published his novel) and 1995 is a long time, yet the remarks Brownjohn makes are relevant. The central character is ‘in a position of acute psychological isolation,’ and her name is Katherine. She is a foreign girl who finds herself employed by a provincial British library. ‘Her life is a desperately lonely one.’ She also writes a significant letter, like Carolina. There is ‘fantasy and idealization’ in the book, but Brownjohn also stresses the ‘background details’ and the realism, which, he says, cannot be denied. Yet he concludes by stating that ‘A Girl in Winter leaves a sense of things happening out of time, of actions performed by characters imagined rather than people seen and known.’ The Long Shadows steps farther into the core of the Desperado novel, tackling dystopia, which Larkin may have intimated, but only in mood.

Brownjohn finds Larkin’s jazz journalism ‘occasionally rather stiff and didactic,’ quite often ‘relaxed, readable and informative.’ He notices the lyrical impulse of writing this book out of ‘nostalgia for the departed jazz world of his own youth which, he sadly acknowledges, has gradually yielded to the challenge of  a new jazz which he cannot enjoy.’ The critic looks everywhere for Larkin the poet, in his novels, his journalism, even his life. Preoccupied with a name for the literary label, Brownjohn examines ‘Modernism’, which, he claims, Larkin denunciates as ‘ ‘irresponsibility peculiar to this century’ ‘. A sense of disagreement with Larkin’s ‘attack on the modern’ can be felt in the particularly violent quotation the critic chooses:

 ‘...irresponsible exploitations of technique in contradiction of human life as we know it... [modernism] helps us neither to enjoy nor endure. It will divert us as long as we are prepared to be mystified or outraged, but maintains its hold only by being  more mystifying or more outrageous: it has no lasting power.’

Brownjohn contemplates Larkin denouncing Picasso, Pound, Henry Moore and Joyce, and his sympathy withdraws for a moment there, poised between denial and eager agreement. Any Desperado feels the Modernism that preceded him nearly killed art. It is a Desperado belief that Larkin expressed as such, and which is present in Brownjohn’s desperate attempt at being crystal clear, at grabbing the reader and sharing the work with him. He manages to identify at last with Larkin in this:

One of the cardinal sins of modernism for Larkin is its ostensible separation of artist from audience, and in an earlier piece, a sort of extended preface to one of his rare reviews of new poetry, Larkin declares the need for poetry to try to move towards the reader:

‘ at bottom poetry, like all art, is inextricably bound up with giving pleasure, and if a poet loses his pleasure-seeking audience he has lost the only audience worth having.’

Brownjohn connects this avowed love of clarity to an ‘apparent accessibility,’ and he concludes, tongue in his cheek:

‘In something of the manner in which a dedicately experimentalist artist may be closer to the tradition than he imagines, an artist who avows traditionalism may be making it newer than he believes.’

Whether for or against tradition, the Desperado poet is preeminently greedy to have a public. Larkin reaches his taking a different path from Brownjohn, but basically they are very similar: the mind may play its games within reasonable technical limits, but the line must be drawn where the reader’s understanding wavers. Is the reader the master of the work? More than he was with Joyce or Eliot, but still at the mercy of the author. Analyzing Larkin’s tyranny and servitude, Brownjohn unwillingly reveals his own credo.

*

The selection of reviews we are going to examine were published between 1976 and 1986, in New Statesman, Encounter, Times Literary Supplement. They have not been collected in a volume of criticism, although they evince a unity of appreciation and a personal way of stating a remarkably firm point of view. Put together, they make up a theory that Brownjohn the poet has so far been too unassuming to dictate to his readers. These reviews offer a sly view of the workshop inside the poet and afford great pleasure, mainly because of their constant limpidity of discourse and clear cut thought.

Carnal Knowledge (September 24, 1976, New Statesman) examines Thom Gunn, with his volume Jack Straw’s Castle. Brownjohn notices loneliness, apprehensions and nightmares. He discovers a ‘new’ Gunn, ‘at times almost inarticulate with self-doubt’. He is not pleased:

‘But the poem only partially works: read as a whole, it feels wilfully bizarre, and ragged in structure.’

Recollection and nostalgia seem to Brownjohn to be ‘uncertain territory’ for Gunn. He discovers technical ‘trouble’, analyses the ‘latter-day American free verse’ Gunn uses, and is not pleased. The volume is uneven, and the major contention seems to be that poetry must have a pace, a rhythm, a technical effort. Poetic thought or mood without poetic sweat is doomed to die prose.

Untidy Moments (Encounter, June 1979) introduces Douglas Dunn, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Terence Tiller, P. J. Kavanagh, U. A. Fanthorpe, Geoffrey Holloway, Gavin Ewart under the heading New Poetry. The state of poetry is described thus:

‘Poetry seems to be approaching the end of the 1970s in a moderately confident condition. It’s been a less noisy and extrovert decade than its predecessor (...) but it looks more possible now that it did nine years ago that the distant poles of the art might actually co-exist in the same world. The tide of technological modernism, which seemed ambitious of sweeping everything else aside in poetry as it had apparently done in some of the other arts, has receded a bit. (...) Things could be worse; and most of the verse in new volumes by either celebrated poets or new ones seems to be written without too fearful a glance towards the public or the critics lest the poet should not be doing the right thing in writing this way, or even writing at all.’

It is the first decade without T.S. Eliot (who died in 1965), and it implies a ‘prolonged battle’ to ‘offer one’s talent to readers.’ Poetry needs redefining, and this time each poet must find his own meaning, build his own theory, like a true Desperado. Brownjohn states this idea clearly:

‘Poets who can write without showing traces of a struggle to define for themselves the essential nature and function of poetry in our time, and how they should respond to it as their work changes and develops, are perhaps the lucky ones. But it is fairly likely (though not infallibly certain) that they are also dull writers.’

This ironical definition of the technically minded Desperado poet is essential to the understanding of Alan Brownjohn’s poetry. He re-defines art in his own terms and strikes out all alone, with his newly found convictions. He is first and foremost an intellectual poet, whose emotions are not absent, just hidden in order to intrigue and cause poetic suspense, if we can use this name for the reader’s breathless immersion in the discreet soul of each poem.

Dunn is perceived as a poet who is never dull. His unfashionable concern for ‘what remains of the strengths of a working class tradition’ is opposed to the ‘classless’ culture, ‘far less taxing’. Whatever the reason, some poems are difficult and Brownjohn notices this particular detail at once, attributing it to the fact that they are ‘less technically sure.’ T.S. Eliot exhausted the mine of difficult poetry for generations to come. To this day, poets like Brownjohn and others, are haunted by the spectre of ambiguity in The Waste Land. When a text trips into tangled meanings, it is condemned, just like novels without story are, after Joyce. The Desperado age has begun.

With Yevtushenko, translated from Russian, just as in The Long Shadows later on (though more than there), the critic fails to read between the lines and misses some of the text, inevitably. He finds in him histrionic gifts, a decency of outlook, exoticism. He commends him for being ‘immensely readable’ (a formula that any Desperado would die for). He is vital and Whitmanesque, but not a word is said about his hidden political dissent, present even in the quotations Brownjohn chooses. It took him a long time to decipher the wicked, tortuous ways of communism. Reviewing the Russian poet without his political halo of revolt takes all the magic away from him.

Brownjohn reproaches Terence Tiller with making understanding difficult, with too much fondness for devices:

‘In certain of the poems the ingenuity seems to disperse in vagueness; and without discernible stories and situations (which the poet eschews, or conceals) the going becomes hard.’

Poetry must share narrative with fiction. A merely lyrical poem, as they used to write before hybridization was invented, is no longer acceptable. Prose is contagious and poetry cannot wait to fall a prey to story and suspense. We talked about the poet Brownjohn peeping from behind fiction and criticism. Maybe we should think of him as mainly the novelist who has taken refuge in verse?

U.A. Fanthorpe is detached, promising (she is at her first volume – in the meantime she has published several books and is a popular, much-loved figure on the poetic scene), observant, has technical maturity and individual freshness. There is no one like Alan Brownjohn for letting poets down gently. He pays homage to great writers, to acknowledged poets or novelists, but will not pat a beginner just for the sake of encouragement. Unless he or she is really good, the young poet will be rebuked, gently yet firmly.

The Long & the Short discusses ‘recent novels’ by Iris Murdoch, David Storey, Kurt Vonnegut and a few more (Encounter, March 1977). Plot comes first. The critic admires the ‘sophistications and intricacies of her (Murdoch’s) narrative’, the ‘bizarre incidents,’ the fact that the novels are ‘absorbingly readable, endlessly inventive, and crammed with plausibly fantastic people and locations.’ The key word is of course readable. In spite of the fact that Iris Murdoch is a Desperado as far as limpidity of meaning is concerned, Brownjohn has a grudge and he states his discontent:

‘On the other hand, another case can be made against them; perhaps needs to be made against them if critics are going to continue making claims for the gravity of Miss Murdoch’s moral statements and the profundity of her insight into authentic moral dilemmas. Simply, the ideas in these novels  are serious, and the debates her characters have with each other (and with themselves) are notably intelligent and compelling – but the credibility of most of these people, situations and adventures doesn’t finally match the apparent seriousness of the themes.’

Accessibility is not enough. This Desperado – Brownjohn – needs credibility as well. Others enjoy fabulation and fantasy. Brownjohn enters upon an argument with the novelist and reproaches her with artificiality. The novel is ‘primarily about love,’ yet there is no one to experience the real feeling. Murdoch adopts an ‘irritating affectation of style,’ is partial to caricatural treatment of heroes. The whole debate around her philosophy is consequently a hoax.

‘So far so good,’ we are told, and the argument goes on. The narration is colloquial: it means that the oddity is perceived with commonsensical irony, which cannot surely be a vice. Any Desperado is rescued by irony whenever he falters. Not Murdoch, in Brownjohn’s eyes. She ‘assembles décor instead of creating a reality.’ The dénouement is ‘much more extraordinary than true.’ The critic frowns at

            ‘those tidy yet implausible Murdoch conclusions – with most things safely restored to what they were   at the beginning. It won’t do. The adroitness of the contrivance distracts the reader’s attention from the unbelievable elements; but in the end it terribly undercuts the moral seriousness Miss Murdoch may have been trying to establish. It throws doubt, in retrospect, on the quality of the moral and religious debates, which are often absorbed comfortably enough into an entertaining plot, but don’t always re-read very well...’

The question of rereading was bound to crop up. Together with irony they qualify Murdoch for belonging to the Desperadoes, but Brownjohn is not done with her yet. He dislikes Murdoch thoroughly, and shows it by praising her. He notices:

            ‘Miss Murdoch’s most genuine gift is for detecting the surprise and fascination latent in an ostensibly drab world.’

It is probably the best label he could formulate. Putting aside the dissatisfactory sides, Iris Murdoch is  a fascinating writer, who can see where others do not. Brownjohn begins by calling her ‘enthralling’, and ends by finding her book (Henry and Cato) ‘overloaded with oddity and symbolic pretentiousness.’ In a very Eliotian ironic last sentence, Brownjohn moans:

            ‘...if only Miss Murdoch relaxed more into the ‘suddenness’ of things, which she handles so brilliantly, and worried less about weighting every book with up-to-the-minute metaphysical wisdoms!’

Writing about fiction, Alan Brownjohn reveals his grudging self. He dislikes easily. Though gently ironical, he bites all the same. Whatever falls short of reality is censured. As a poet and as a novelist, as a critic even, Alan Brownjohn will not abjure his belief in the truth behind the word.

As far  as shamelessness is concerned, Brownjohn is perfectly decent and discreet. In The Long Shadows we never get to know if there actually has been an affair, far less do we see any description of sex on the page. When Brian Moore tries to be more ‘vital’, we are told there are ‘several over-long sequences of raw lovemaking’ in the book. As for Vonnegut’s Slapstick, it is a ‘short book in large print.’ Brownjohn muses on the ideal length of a novel and offers a theory that applies to all Desperadoes, permissive as it is:

            ‘Admittedly the terse, throwaway novel is a favoured form, and brief, intense, sometimes minimalist and experimental, fictions are still with us. But those head-shaking predictions that the novel of the ‘70s would need to be fairly tiny to survive, whether in economic or literary terms, seem to have lost some of their strength. Come to think of it, the paperback top-sellers on the supermarket racks are none of them calculatedly sparing in length: in fact, a ‘popular’ read almost has to be a ‘good’ read. It may be too early to be positive, but the novel may have come through another of its crises. And would it be fair to guess that this is because novelists have been sufficiently stubborn about the length and the form they want to have won a small battle against a creeping failure of nerve?’

Long books will not die, then. As he said in an interview, the book ‘will always be with us.’ Now he adds, long or short, it will have to be good. By good he means a ‘good read’. Which proves that the Desperado is very vulnerable to reading, which Joyce and Eliot could not care less about.

In Heads, Tongues & Spirits (Encounter, November 1978), Brownjohn writes again about ‘new poetry’ at the time. Among the names, Ted Hughes, Vasko Popa, Harold Pinter, D.J. Enright. As in his other such surveys, Brownjohn begins with general features, applicable to all. He formulates this time several traits of the Desperado: the ‘startling inventiveness,’ the ‘derangement of metaphors,’ the fight against ‘pretentiousness.’ He describes one poet as ‘ferociously ingenious.’

When he reaches Pinter’s poetry, Brownjohn is in doubt, but will not say anything against it, except that Pinter’s early verse, like his early plays, are ‘unrepeatable.’ He confesses he reads ‘selectively,’ which qualifies him as a thematic critic, browsing the work for his favourite obsessions. His eye is caught by ‘playful’ treatment, and does not recoil from pointing out, when the time comes, that a result is ‘monumentally ridiculous.’ He spots somewhere an ‘uncomfortable mixture,’ he finds ‘recurrent’ motifs such as ‘ ‘distance’, ‘silence’ and ‘shadow’.’ At one time he talks about ‘honesty’ found in a ‘poetry utterly without gesticulation.’ Although Brownjohn’s own poems focus on incident, he feels that ‘too much happens’ in many of David Holbrook’s new poems; we are told that ‘tranquillity is not his style,’ in a book that ‘reads like a journal, of a full and combative life.’ In short, it is a ‘provoking book,’ and we are left with the feeling that a Desperado poem should in fact be narrative with economy. Lyricism cannot be superseded by fact and bustle.

A Change of Landscape (Encounter, August 1979) brings a welcome characterisation of the Movement by a poet who claims to be Post-Movement himself. The Movement emerged with the ‘1950s new wave of English poets’, among whom Kingsley Amis. Some major features that some critics read wrongly into this Movement are:

1. ‘tightness of form and tightness of lip’

2. ‘mistrust of extravagance’

3. ‘modesty of ambition’

4. ‘predilection for defensive ironies’

5. ‘faithful reflection of an entire social landscape’

6. ‘nothing ever went gravely wrong, nothing exciting ever happened’

7. ‘drab living produced drab writing.’

The mere fact that they were mentioned is reason for meditation, though. Here is Alan Brownjohn’s own view in the matter:

            ‘...the tone of the new English poetry of the 1950s came largely out of an unusually marked tension between the world of action and the world of the imagination.  ‘How can I dare  to feel?’, Donald Davie’s often-quoted response to Donne’s ‘Alas, alas, who’s injur’d by my love?’, should not have been foisted on the Movement by its critics as a damaging slogan. Donne’s ‘Love sometimes would contemplate, sometimes do’ would have been a much more apposite choice.’

Brownjohn formulates his own theory of several major features:

‘the new poetry came largely out of academe’

'distantly fascinated by the world outside’

‘Some literary academics found a rigour they could enjoy in the strenuous critical procedures of a Richards or Leavis; so the poetry they wrote had to be invulnerable to practical criticism as well as to accusations of wetness.’

‘ ‘Movement’ fiction offered a violence of emotion, and sometimes of action, which was altogether absent from Movement poetry.’

‘it was essentially conservative in character,’ ‘the literary conservatism was easy to notice’

‘the characteristic Movement way of worrying about  the discrepancy between dreams and reality’

‘Its mistrust of sensitivity, mistrust of experiment, mistrust of artifice – mistrust of art – linked the Movement with the philistinism of good old conservative Middle England.’

Mistrust of sensitivity and experiment is what makes Brownjohn’s own poems look blank at times. It is an expressive blankness, which he fervently defends and explains here. He says that for Kingsley Amis ‘ ‘literary’ attitudes are suspect,’ but so are they for Brownjohn himself. He finds in Amis a ‘colloquial ease and straightforwardness’ and also a ‘note of genuine vulnerability,’ explained by the fact that ‘death, not God, is breathing down Amis’ neck.’ All these remarks fit Brownjohn to a dot. He concludes his review of Amis by stating that the Movement attitudes have their roots ‘deep in the English abhorrence of any seriousness that has to do with art.’ Irony, the dazzling Desperado trait, was there as far back as the 1950s. Brownjohn confesses to it, in his own words and in his own poems.

Ted Hughes is not the critic’s favourite. He notices that In Remains of Elmet, Hughes made no attempt at ‘a ‘narrative’ sequence,’ and he continues, ‘I think an opportunity was missed here to give the sequence a unity and tension it tends to lack.’ The ‘I’ is characteristic of Brownjohn’s criticism, always unafraid of being personal and proclaiming it. As a concession to Ted Hughes, the critic calls the volume under discussion ‘his most approachable volume,’ since Crow, which shows how much importance Brownjohn attributes to clarity.

In New Statesman (February 8, 1980), Alan Brownjohn writes about public poetry readings (Latter-Day Troupers). He talks about ‘instant contact with strange audiences,’ and ‘getting a sense of the culture’ in which the poet is writing. The poets, he says, have managed to turn ‘themselves into extroverts, equipped with voice production, timing and a shrewd sense of audience mood.’ When he describes the poet giving a reading as a ‘good mediator between the audience and the words on the pages of his slim volumes’, we have some difficulty in picturing the poet himself reading and acting his lines, when a basic shyness (both of art and of prying eyes) prevented his lines from being extrovert in the first place. A reading from such a quiet, soft-spoken poet and person would be indispensable to a study about his work, but unfortunately it cannot be included here.

When he writes on American poetry, in Contour Lines (Encounter, April 1980), Brownjohn notices Stanley Kunitz, John Ashbery, John Hollander, Robert Pinsky, among others. He considers that ‘the map of present-day American poetry is difficult to draw: he finds there ‘ ‘ academic’ ‘, but also ‘ ‘Europeanized’ ‘ poets, and he feels ‘something very new and unfamiliar is going on.’ The Desperado in him identifies with the diverse landscape and decides:

‘It’s a poetry which puzzles, and disturbs, and calls out defences. So the chances are it might be good.’

The critic is in desperate search for clarity, whose absence equals death of the text to him. The search is helped along by the crutches of themes. Ashbery is ‘arresting,’ and it feels as if what his verse has to say ‘shouldn’t be missed,’ but if Brownjohn states it so plainly, there must be something wrong, and here it is, subtly stated:

‘Ashbery leads the reader to seek meaning , with an imagery and a syntactical structure which simultaneously grip the imagination and suggest that the quest might be valid.’

Since the meaning is elusive, Brownjohn mentions in passing obscurity, but waves it aside, putting his thoughts differently: ‘Ashbery continually offers a possibility of meaning.’ Ashbery himself is quoted as an explanation of his poetic manner:

‘There are no themes or subjects in the usual sense, except the very broad one of an individual consciousness confronting or confronted by a world of external phenomena. The work is very complex but, I hope, clear and concrete transcript of the impressions left by these phenomena on that consciousness.... Characteristic devices are ellipses, frequent changes of tone, voice (that is, the narrator’s voice), point of view, to give an impression of flux....’

The critic’s struggle for clarity has certainly come to a halt, and he is trying to find an alternate source of appreciation. Brownjohn is a quiet poet with volcanic secrets. Ashbery is a volcanic lyrical manner with a quiet interior. The two could not be more different, but Brownjohn is accommodating. He even explains the American bushy text theoretically:

‘It is a plain statement which also helps to make clear what his poetry is not. It is not, for one thing, a stream of consciousness: there is a controlling narrator, changing the tone of voice, altering the point of view, selecting (and not indulging) detail. Nor is it surrealism: Ashbery deals in the bright untidiness of the everyday, not the logic of nightmare. And it is not a random, unsorted heap of images parcelled up into poems and arbitrarily titled: this is a highly disciplined process, an act of balance which keeps the work upright and performing elegantly over the abyss of meaninglessness into which the flux of the modern world constantly threatens to plunge us. Or, to change the metaphor: Ashbery hangs on to the bewildering flux of sensation with the fingertips of imagery and the ropes of syntax. These absorbing, finely-cadenced poems are about a courageous attempt simultaneously to accept the imperfect world and to pin down some human significance in it. Ashbery’s clues are themselves hard to pin down, not because he is evasive but because he wants to be truthful, and the truth may appear to change.’

Brownjohn has to make do with what there is. Understanding Ashbery, ‘pinning him down’ is an arduous task. The critic finds himself enjoying something that defies his understanding and he is in the process of explaining the inexplicable. As Ashbery himself writes in a poem, it may simply be ‘just a new kind of emptiness.’ Will Brownjohn accept this kind of text? Blankness and emptiness are related manners, after all. For those who ‘want poetry to raise more questions rather than repeat old answers,’ Ashbery could not have ‘extended the frontiers of art more fascinatingly.’ If we take this as a justification, we are appeased. As far as Brownjohn’s own poetic sensibility is concerned, we should not be looking for it in this essay, because it must be miles away.

Obscure poetry is definitely not Brownjohn’s cup of tea. When the poet is less gifted, we are told he ‘occasionally strikes gold,’ ‘not enough is explained’, poetry uses ‘crudely raw materials’, diction is ‘mildly sub-romantic’, the poet lingers ‘on the brink of sentimentality.’ In the analysis of the lesser American poets, Brownjohn makes it clear that, if he can tolerate meaningful obscurity, he definitely cannot stand directness of confession, obscenity, and the emptiness of over-clarity, all three exactly in that order.

Articles about novel writing are less numerous, but they reveal Brownjohn’s fine analysis of fiction. In Breaking the Rules (Encounter, May 1981), he writes about E.L. Doctorow, Martin Amis, Penelope Lively, Kingsley Amis, Richard Adams. General considerations on ‘new fiction’ show Brownjohn’s respect for ‘people, places, plot,’ and his allergy to bad novels and bad novelists:

‘The rules about what constitutes the indispensable essence of a novel are cruelly simple, and have not been altered by any of the strange and elaborate guises the form has been given. Write a novel backwards, slice it and shuffle it, have a heavy authorial presence breathe down its neck, print it as lists of it own semi-colons and indefinite articles, call it ‘a fiction’ – it still has to have people, places and plot. And the first of these is plot; because anything happening entails the necessity (such is our antropomorphising habit) that it is happening to something that resembles people, in something that is very like a place. In other words, you cannot abandon plot and proceed just with either (or even both) of the other two, and still hope to write a novel; but you might just achieve something with plot on its own. Paradoxically, it may be a sign of high skill if you do write a very good novel with a minimum of plot.... But if you write a bad one on that basis it can be a most damaging sign of inexperience, or naivety, or charlatanism, and a lot of academic theorists will like it, provided you have done it in the right way. Now, more than ever, an ability to effect an ingenious concealment of vacuity seems to be the essential prerequisite of the bad novelist with high pretensions.’

The critic discusses ‘the ethos of the modern novel’ and the similarity to a ‘puzzle’ of a novel or another, which, worst of all defects, leaves ‘the reader incredulous.’ He disapproves of mere ‘acrobatic accomplishment or artificial stylishness.’ He looks for solid themes, for characters and the plot that gives them life. He even probes the novelist’s sensibility, and finds out that Martin Amis is ‘more sorry than cynical.’ His perception of Penelope Lively is very favourable. She records with ‘flawless accuracy’, leads her characters to ‘frustration and tragedy’, ‘makes moving sense without thrusting conclusions on the reader.’ When all is said and done, Brownjohn looks for ‘narrative inevitability’. If poetry is entitled to more than its share of ambiguity, obscurity, freedom, the novel has to move within strict boundaries, and Brownjohn the critic is adamant about fiction musts.

In Auden & the Facts of Life (Encounter, September 1981), Alan Brownjohn tackles a new field, that of biographies. He writes about Humphrey Carpenter’s biography of W.H. Auden, whom he calls ‘political and English poet in the 1930s, religious and American poet in the ‘40s.’ The biography quotes from unpublished letters and manuscripts, uses anecdotes, relies on everything but does not manage to elucidate Auden’s ‘ultimately mysterious story.’ The poet is a ‘lonely and anguished man’ whose life is well written, though it was sadly lived.

To Brownjohn’s discontent, though, the biography in question oversteps its boundaries. Biographical explanation of creation, mainly of poetry, is wrong. Alan Brownjohn reveals himself as a very private poet, too, when he accuses biographical spying on the work:

‘Poetry is something shaped and refined with the precise intention of transcending the particular circumstances of its origin. It is quite possible that those circumstances, if revealed, may seem discreditable, or banal; the poem is the action which the poet wishes to be seen committing, and since it may suffer enough at the hands of the critics, it can do without any biographical annotation which is not essential to our understanding of the words on the page.’

A Desperado poet usually writes a volume as a diary, using his own life as a narrative thread, but Brownjohn is in fact essentially a Desperado by the very fact that even here he dissents from the others. Desperado means dissimilarity and dissent. Do like nobody else, though it may not be consciously done, this is the slogan a Desperado should exhibit. Brownjohn carefully conceals his own experiences, the poem is independent from the poet’s life, even when, as in Auden’s case, it is a ‘creative life that was immensely poignant, and still puzzling.’

A Way Out of the Mind (Times Literary Supplement, February 12, 1982) comments on Sylvia Plath’s collected poems, edited by Ted Hughes. The ‘privacy’ of poetry is again emphatically stated. The critic appreciates the fact that ‘everything is vibrant, observant, questioning.’ He talks at large about Plath’s ‘sustained imaginative power’, opposing it to the interest, blamed again, in ‘the circumstances of her life and death.’ Yet he himself finds in poems the ‘theme of suicide’, he psychoanalyses in spite of his theory when he writes, ‘Always Sylvia Plath’s imagery has an edge of danger and nightmare.’ The critic finds the themes and moods, combining life and art as he goes along, proving that he is more than a critic of the text. He notices the ‘darkness of the late poems,’ but he also pays attention to technique, at least as much as he considers the life of the poet as a way of understanding the text. An ‘exactness of comparison’ is pointed out, the style is seen as becoming ‘both more profoundly frightening and more fluent, the cadences beginning to shorten towards the brief, violent lines.’ The voice is angry, and the imagery is ‘harsh, clear and almost unbearably poignant.’ Obviously, there is no more talk about obscurity; in good poetry, Brownjohn takes clarity for granted. If Ashbery needed a reason to be read, Plath is her own reason. He just follows the thread of her life and unconsciously does what Auden’s biographer did a lot more indecently, in Brownjohn’s opinion. Brownjohn treats Plath’s life respectfully, drawing from it only what her poetry makes public. He never feels free to disclose details she never confessed to. He finds her voice ‘angry, insistent, eloquent’, and chooses the very title of his essay from a poem by Plath (Apprehensions): ‘Is there no way out of the mind?’ His choice is significantly pointing to Plath’s mental instability, which he never mentions, but definitely hints at, in his discreet way, mainly when he mentions that what Plath calls the ‘sourness’ of this world ‘comes in a profusion of uneasy images’.

Thematic criticism is joined, besides biographical criticism, by sympathetic criticism, a criticism of identification. Brownjohn states that Plath had a ‘sensitivity to the peculiar cruelties of our world,’ situating himself on the side of the dead poet, whom he obviously and greatly approves of. Yet, the ironical poet who hates to be found out as a mere man in his own poems comes back at the very last, labelling Plath as, first and foremost, a ‘questing imagination.’

A ‘slow writer,’ as Brownjohn describes himself in Living on Poetry, he is also a very shy one, exceedingly respectful of real art (even television is scolded for compromising with commercials), and highly interested in foreign poetry. In Complaining (Stand, autumn 1986), the writer muses:

‘It helps the British writer to have done some homework on his own culture before leaving home: I have been gently corrected about the birth-date of one of the youngest English poets, in a country where direct contact with western writers is fairly rare!’

He is afraid of xenophobia as a variety of ‘self-censorship,’ but he also shows an open mind and a desire to look at the world. Continuing what T.S. Eliot aimed at doing in the Criterion, Brownjohn talks about a ‘proper circulation of the best work irrespective of its political significance,’ deploring the news that pick up political scandals from the ‘Eastern bloc’, when translation before the scandal would be much more efficient. Also,

‘It helps writers in danger or distress in any country if the British literary community speaks out on their behalf. It would help them more if their work had been vouchsafed some critical attention before their danger became headline news.’

He praises the ‘extraordinary energy and  variety of modern Romanian poetry’, and at last recommends, in the same, best Eliotian tradition, to circulate ‘the best of foreign literature in translation.’

As a critic, on the whole, Alan Brownjohn appears as first and foremost a generous mind. His interest goes into many directions, and he can digest any text, requiring clarity to help his reading, but finding his path where the criterion of aesthetic pleasure may be different. He builds critical theories on the spot, whenever required, yet never comes with a preconceived set of opinions to any text. His thematic search is the most commonsensical approach possible, and he makes a point of being commonsensical in criticism, as he is accessible – even though not simple at all – in his poetry and fiction. In everything he writes, Alan Brownjohn is the tolerant, welcoming mind, the inviting Desperado.