LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

POETRY

DESPERADO E-MAILING VERSE

E-mail of the mind (quick interview of sorts)

LIDIA VIANU: Have you written, do you write love poetry?

ALAN  BROWNJOHN: The emotions are under the surface, and expressed rather indirectly in the early poems. There is fear of physical love, an anti-love poem written out of frustration, a cerebral love poem, poems which do contain passionate emotion rather quietly expressed. One poem even contains the name of the girl  in a coded way. I’ve also done this much later in life. Later on, the love poems became more forthright, much more direct in their approach. Critics did not like two poems of that kind, but I kept them in my collected poems  because I did not want my older self to correct my younger self too much, and I hoped there might still be some kind of crazy life in them. These are Lines on a Birthday and Ballad for a Birthday. One poem is very candid and harsh, and it made the subject of the poem very angry at the time. The next was written as a gentle apology for it. The poem The Packet is obviously a poem of love  and loss and waiting, and there is a very obvious connection between salt and tears in this poem of frustration and sorrow. I have also written melancholy humorous poems. The later poems are a matter of memory and nostalgia, also of reflections on love and sex and time, which do not have reference to particular persons. There are later poems which could be regarded as love poems invoking the muse.

My love poetry is almost always indirect, but new changes, and irony and ruefulness and satire on the emotion are a strong presence.

LV. Do the words moral and immoral mean much to you, or do you think that anything poetic is its own standard? Have you ever written about things that could not be confessed and that is why you wanted them concealed? Are you hiding secrets or just being shy?

AB. I believe I am a strongly moral writer. One of the critical remarks I have been most delighted with was made by my friend the poet Peter Porter, who said that my poetry was very often about ‘failures of nerve’ in human behaviour, in large matters and in small. I think I am a moral poet in the sense that Matthew Arnold and F.R. Leavis were moral critics. That is to say, writers with a strong moral view of what is good and bad in art, politics, mass media, social behaviour. It is not for nothing that I have spent twenty years in schools and colleges, because I am a terrible old teacher at heart, full of moral indignation about small things.

I think my poetry is an attempt at moral criticism, that it is a criticism of society, and this kind of critical attitude has become more and more difficult to sustain. And now comes the whole question of Postmodernism, where you find the intellectuals into structuralism and poststructuralism have ceased to make the differentiation between high art and inferior art. My poetry is about observation, reflection and moral prejudice.

LV. Are you always so much in earnest?

AB. I also have a playful side and a humorous side. I like to think that people will start reading my poems as if they were lemonade and then suddenly realize they have been drinking vodka.

LV. How much or how little do you recognize yourself under the label of Desperado?

AB. I dislike crudity or violence in all art. But I enjoy playing games of the imagination, I have always been to some extent a frustrated novelist. The fictions I wanted to write went into my poems. Again, I’ve never tried to be deliberately shocking. I have no sympathy for the aesthetic of violence at all.

May 1999

THE POEM WITHOUT E-MAIL

The volume The Cat without E-Mail  (Enitharmon Press, London, 2001) was in print. In a conversation with Alan Brownjohn (November 25, 2000), the poet described it as having been written over a three- or four-year period, finished in July 1999, and showing no intended unity. It is a deliberately technical book, born of hard work. There is in it more than subtlety of technique, though. There is hidden emotion. The volume, as Alan Brownjohn put it, is ‘detached and yet observant, with the influence of writing fiction showing in the poems, because I enjoy detail.’

This volume is sober, skilled in the art of versifying everything, terrifying in the darkness of the mood, and finally liberated by the poet’s irony, which blows seriousness into tiny pieces, small mementos that make your blood freeze, while your heart is still warm and beating. The poet begins (The Cities) with an autobiography of sorts. He says he was born in a country called London, in ‘one of London’s various cities,’ and he has not had time to explore thoroughly the other London cities which he has travelled through, gazing at the streets ‘from an upper deck front seat.’ Familiar and unfamiliar, Brownjohn’s universe is both a real and dystopian London of the ‘thirties’, the time of his childhood. As he grew up, he learnt to decipher the physical geography with maps, but ‘forgot to understand’ the secret message of the city, to decode ‘that outdated place/ I thought I had left behind,’ an idea suggesting growing up and rejecting one’s origins (the poem Ruse is an exercise in view of this mood). A gap in understanding, a momentary dizziness and the poet is back, feeling inside something ‘waiting, hidden,’ as if life had stayed where it was. The ‘faces I grew up among/ And lost the strength to know’ are all in his mind, and he experiences a ‘fear to think.’ The fear that some day he will have the revelation of the real London, the real city of birth actually – since the meaning is greatly enlarged, that his life might have a replay is insidious and ends by overwhelming us. A vast past comes back and it overwhelms a dreadful present. The dead past threatens to return and the poet does not want it back. Right now, ages after childhood, ‘cinema organs rise through motorways’, meaning that memory of old organs and perception of confusing present-day motorways clash, coexist within the same terrified sensibility. As Brownjohn himself confessed to me, ‘There was something bizarre and delightful about the organist rising on his organ, playing as he rose, in front of the cinema screen.’ The whole poem is afraid of memory and does not welcome nostalgia. In this volume, Brownjohn seems determined to live in the present, for the present, to experience and enjoy his present age. The Cat without E-Mail is  preeminently a volume of the present.

This apparently loveless volume is populated with women who ‘have never been girls at all’ (Poem about Men), women who are a lifetime away from the  girls that were once ‘everywhere’, the girls who had the courage of being ‘unusual.’ A regular, monotonous, clockwork universe ticks with the speed of adolescence, afternoons after school. Again, the poet does not wish to go back. He merely notices time is dead, and he is left with himself, to peer at a colourless infinity.

After two prosaic poems, A Defence of Reading hits us in the face with musicality too obvious to be taken seriously. The Desperado irony uses rhyme to teach the reader how to smile with a bitter soul. The poem is a statement of lovelessness after love. What used to be, the physicality of ‘legs’ which in the spring ‘were out’, ‘smooth and trim’, changed into the sun tanned summer look meant to catch the eyes, then the ‘autumn’ was spent ‘brooding on/ The truth the legs had taught.’ The poem only once mentions the word love, but never names woman;  we are merely made to contemplate legs, whose behaviour changes according to the season in life. The conclusion to the six stanzas is a bitter meditation in the margin of a lifetime spent à l’ombre des livres instead of ‘jeunes filles en fleur’. Actually, the whole volume smells of ‘à la recherche du temps perdu’, being, ‘remembrance of things past.’ In Brownjohn’s own words: ‘I am greatly in favour of reading as an activity which makes love seem more exciting and valuable – i.e., romantic love (with or without sex) is much better than purely sexual love, represented by the tactics of the women’s legs and the conquest of them by the men whose eyes gaze at them and desire them.’

People who ‘starve in attics’ ( a word which inevitably reminds one of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, which did mean a lot to the poet Alan Brownjohn) are slaves of ‘the inexorable/ Laws of mathematics’ (Against Mathematics). The only trouble, as far as the poet is concerned, when it comes to mathematics is that it has no ‘sense of humour’, it functions by ‘The ruthless clock of reason.’ It could be inferred that this whole new age relying on computer math, e-mail math included, is deprived of the sense of humour, and the poet feels called upon to restore irony to the universe, which makes him a true Desperado.

A Teashop ’92 closes at the end of the day, reminding us of Eliot again, with ‘HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME’, only the mood is mildly nostalgic, which denies Eliot’s bitterness: ‘...the girl/ Is second by second feeling wingless.’ The poet himself might be seated at a table, last late customer, delaying the girl from youth, from enchantment, making her cogitate, just like Eliot’s young man in Portrait of a Lady:

Or should I serve him? Over the sea, the sun

Goes through the bottom-line horizon, far away,

Below three colour-choices of January cloud.

Sensitive to the point where sensibility becomes an illness, Brownjohn feels the girl’s life ebbing away, and empathizes, feels guilty, forgets his own. The man in the café is Death, and the newspaper pictures are of war, disaster, famine – they are also death.

            A Witness is the ‘blank’ memento uttered for anyone who dreams of becoming a successful Icarus. The three stanzas, rhymeless and soothingly unpretentious, have an overwhelming unassumingness. ‘Did something drop down and move out over the shore,/ Just now?’ The end brings an unsteady, thoughtful, poignant, questioning answer: ‘An Icarus landing on sand, getting up and running?’ Hope and hopelessness. Icarus alive after the failure to fly. Is that possible, to try and fail and still live? Like the entire volume, this remarkable poem is marked by both resignation to loss and fierce will to enjoy, to go on being, to treasure life, no matter how painful, dissatisfying, uneventful it has become. Life is life, and the ‘witness’ is the poet himself:

A Witness

      Did something drop down and move out over the shore,

Just now? In front of, then lost to sight in, the mist?

The colours in the perspective tell me nothing.

Did something occur that the light would not yield up?

      — That was the final question of the day,

The seascape as usual resigned to dull entropy,

No spaced-out clouds forming up into glowing processions,

No cinematic gloriousness and hope.

      — It might for a moment have been something falling there.

The day had begun, and was ending, blank. But at four-

Fifteen was there an unobserved low-tide success?

An Icarus landing on sand, getting up and running?

The images are discreet, apparently weak, actually hiding incredibly strong emotion. Alan Brownjohn has never been a theatrical poet, but this last volume is even more withdrawn than before. He does not hide, he is so reticent that the reader is forced to guess the ‘cinematic gloriousness and hope’. The poem is the prize of this guessing ability, very Desperado if we come to think of it.

Throwback is the dim memory of the early age when one dreams of a couple, of ‘love interest’ and ‘catastrophes’ as Virginia Woolf would have called them in her abuse of traditional novels. A bride and a groom are waltzing in the derelict ballroom of a Grand Hotel that was sold and ‘left to the weather to shut it down.’ The poem begins with Brownjohn’s characteristic word, ‘ridiculous’: ‘Ridiculous no one told them they could stop.’ He is with one of many possible friends – a ‘might have been’ (Eliot’s Quartets are so very present in the tone and age of this nostalgic, devitalized yet fiercely painful poem) – and he wonders what the imaginary music lingering in a room in ruins could be: ‘It could be the wind?’ As Eliot once put it, ‘The wind under the door.’ The Waste Land is present even in these apparently non-theatrical, blank, subdued lines, written at an age when Eliot had already given up writing poetry. Alan Brownjohn remembers his ‘early adolescence’ and seeing the bride and groom suddenly seems wrong, especially when they inexplicably call him by his ‘real’ name. The end reminds the reader of Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus, where the ideal feminine presence turned fairy calls the hero by his name and runs. Yeats’s hero is determined to find her when ‘time and times are done’. Brownjohn, the wise Desperado, does not wish and does not hope: Eliot’s worst nightmare has come true, love is so old-fashioned in Brownjohn’s poetry. Its apparently blank, nonchalant memory is far more intense and becoming.

Mosquito is another poem about lovelessness and sexlessness and ridicule. The author is ‘marooned like one/ In his seventh decade, with only the past/ To look forward to...’ The rhyme is subtle but ingenious: a-e, b-d, c-f. The sound is surreptitious, almost overlooked, although they are full, clear rhymes. The pattern and the naturalness of spoken lines hides the sonority. Like Eliot’s Gerontion, though far less exhibitionistic, the hero of the poem (Brownjohn has no poem without a hero) has only ‘small spites’ left. He sees a mosquito and sees himself in its place, boasting about the juicy bites of the summer. Can John Donne with his flea be far behind? Love, which seems so far away, is present not only in the hero’s remembered passion, but in his literary reminiscences, which flood the poem when it is read closely. Brownjohn is at the same time so clear and so literary that it is hard to define this poetry: direct simplicity versus Desperado complication might do the trick.

The whole volume has a sense of summer going, going, gone. In Summer Time Ends, twilight catches the poet unawares, it feels, while he barely has any strength left to ‘draw/ The curtains while you have the energy.’ Eliot is close by, with his sense of winter covering us ‘in forgetful snow’:

Now, everything falls, go down with it and give

Yourself to the gravity, putting up a show

Of warming wistfulness with the last leaves.

Fall hard, and stay there, waiting for the snow.

Snow walks will soon be ‘like/ Illicit love with no one betrayed’. Again, Eliot’s La Figlia Che Piange comes to mind, where a wished for betrayal turns into the despair of having been betrayed. The difference is that Eliot saw the ‘gesture’ and the ‘pose’, while Brownjohn could not be farther away from parading the pain. He actually recommends: ‘Live for the thought/ Of the bracing dark...’ He lives in this latest volume ‘As if there were no tomorrow’, and, just like Juliet, he muses to himself, ‘parting is such sweet sorrow...’ Saying goodbye is his forte. Goodbye to theatrical emotion, goodbye to exhibitionism, goodbye to loud shrieks (all Eliot’s attributes), but never goodbye to poetry. There is always more poetry when a poetic device dies: dozens spring up to take its place, and Brownjohn has chosen, consistently, the poetry of blankness.

‘She’ is a very discreet presence in Brownjohn’s poetry. What She Required is a trip down the ‘romantic pledge you knew/ Might never be fulfilled.’ A pledge requiring ‘huge luck’ and costing the protagonist ‘tiresome agonies.’ Fifty years later, the day ‘you waited for’ is at last ‘today.’ It is summer again. ‘She’ comes back, ‘she reappears’, only for the protagonist, in the intimacy of imagination, in the quiet of the unreal, the unwished for, the regretted failure. The keynote of this volume and this particular poem is the ‘side-door’, the silence, the odour of the end:

And you, waiting statue, see her move back again

Into your field of vision, walk towards this place

   From a direction only you were free

To imagine, on a path only you two share,

   Her dress and purpose your own choice, her face

Whatever shape you hoped it might retain

  — Yet entering not by a ceremonial stair,

But by a side-door and quite silently.

Love was not noisy in earlier poems. It is always shy and reticent with Brownjohn, but its intensity, just as in these later poems, is unquestionable. An intensity of pain rather than joy, of solitude rather than shared bliss. Alan Brownjohn is not a believer in joy. His lines, even the lightest (apparently – they never are so, in fact), are concerned, heavy with apprehension. Regret is always there, whether merely anticipated (see Ruse) or actually experienced.

From a stopped train, between ‘six thirty-nine and about six fifty-eight’, the protagonist of these poems (who is neither a stranger to the poet nor the poet himself, or not totally) watches ‘two fifty-year olds’ chasing a ball, running, fighting for it (it is almost like a ‘duel’), in the ‘dusk of the day’. Dusk and summer once again. A dead rose is absent for the picture to be perfectly eloquent. Ruse anticipated this, Overview from an Embankment is already there: the poet is past his fifties himself, but so much the wiser. The two middle-aged men he watches are still the children in Ruse:

...two old mates

Regarding life at fifty as much the same

Set of futile chances as their boyhood game.

But luck (time and tide) waits for no man: there is no second chance. Actually, if we take Alan Brownjohn’s view, there is no first chance to begin with.

Sonnet at Sixty-Four is as Larkinesque as Sunny Prestatyn, only less bitter and more decent in terms of four-letter words. Brownjohn only mentions ‘some suitable organ’ where Larkin dashed all the organs on the page in black and white. He speaks in the first person, and enumerates a few things he has never done. Regret is there all right. After ‘going to Greenland, or riding a horse/ — Which is unlikely now’, he thinks of a tattoo, but Larkin’s use of the sexual organs is far more daring. Brownjohn is more a mind than a body in everything he writes. This time, he reads the sign in the tattoo shop-window: ‘At last, the AIDS-free needle – here – for you!’ The effect is just the same as Larkin’s ‘Fight cancer’, which replaces an advertisement for a sunny beach and a beautiful girl defaced by sex-obsessed (age-obsessed?) passers by. The body goes, and – both cancer and AIDS suggest it – maybe there is something we can do about it? It is an instance of how morality (fight illness of the body by health of the mind) alleviates the pain of growing old. Irretrievably old.

Elegiacs on a Pier is an Eliotian immersion in the sea. The ‘fragments I have shored against my ruins’ (end of The Waste Land) are translated into a café on a pier, a ‘red-bloused manageress’, a chance customer and the poet himself, in the first person again, taking in the atmosphere: the radio thundering a ‘cruder love song’ (Eliot’s? Prufrock’s?), ‘the wind that controls our lives’ taking away the days, clearing everything, as the poem puts it (is it a coincidence that Brownjohn’s first novel was entitled To Clear The River, I wonder?). The poem claims resignation is not true, it does not apply to this poet: love is a maybe for Brownjohn, but life is not. We live as on that pier, where ‘the sea below goes on presenting propositions/ Which the beach accepts with patience.’ One line even ventures to state, ‘we are all sentenced, whatever our plans.’ But every new day is unexpected and we want to experience one more endlessly; because nothing is ‘regular’, when the time comes we must not ‘go quietly’ (the poet cannot have failed to think here of Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’). Life is a constant surprise,

—And it’s this perpetual trick that phenomena seem to achieve

Of being unexpected that makes it hard to bear

The sentence we are under.

Alan Brownjohn may not be a sentimental or shocking poet, but he is one of resentment and righteousness. He talks here about resenting (his own word)

The fact that it has to go, that the end-of-September blinds

Must finally clatter down and darken the sea’s great stage

— And worse, exclude you from it.

He wants his ‘corner seat’ which will be in the sunshine again (presumably when he is no longer there, or here, or anywhere at all), he wants the ‘page after page that you write’, he wants the moment of the ‘luminous sense after all’, he wants to go on living and writing. When it comes to regrets, then the real regret here is that writing has to stop with life. There are still so many things to live for, so much writing to do, so much literature left unwritten. In the contest with non-existence, Brownjohn the poet wins. He gets the right to voice the unwilling loss. Not to change or defeat it, though, and that is why elegy is the best name for the mood of this apparently subdued volume, which rages with intensity, in fact.

In a key-cutting shop (Stream), the poet feels the danger of yet unopened doors ‘onto... Where?’ A second, then a third, a whole row of doors open simultaneously and reality slips into non-reality, life into after-life. The lines are indirectly about the impact of the West on Eastern Europe. The same row of alternate realities was anticipated in The Packet, except that here there is an intense cry: ‘Take the key from the machine, leave it uncut/ Leave the door, wherever it might be, silent, shut.’ This poem uses rhyme and there is a sense of game in it which relieves the intensity. Unaware, possibly, of the effect, the poet has found a way out of the intensity of pain: he plays with the words and does it well, the rhymes are both intriguing and entertaining.

The same row of similar realities appears in A Song of Surrogate Street. A customer and a waitress (the more or less same couple was there in Elegiacs on a Pier, too) think and furtively glance at each other in the mirror. The poet, in the first person again, can hear their thoughts, can see loveless love happening even before it is actually there. They are lonely and choose to meet in a mirror, ‘through/ Their images only’, out of ‘distress’. This superficial, rendingly sad encounter is repeated ‘Through the other mirrors’, all around the place. From image to image, the pain grows. It grows in The Packet, it scares the poet in Stream, and now it also scares us: the future is nothing to look forward to, nor should we desire multiplication of  the same experience. No more ‘lived happily ever after’, which is a very Desperado attitude in fiction, as well as in poetry.

Repetition is an obsession. The Invitation describes a path, ‘my path’, taken many times before, an apparently harmless walk with ‘attractions’ the poet recognises, attractions already ‘proved’. The path stares him in the face and defies his existence: ‘I am clean of your original footprints/ Which I closed over like water as you walked on.’ The poet is both confused and disabused. When he hears the path whisper, ‘I have changed in that time. So might you. Start over again?’, the invitation does not sound reassuring. The beginning of the poem was just saying he preferred short distances for his walks, turning back rather than going ahead all the time. Eliot’s Prufrock with ‘Should I dare?’ cannot be far behind, except that Brownjohn dares all right. His fear is he might not like what he finds once the daring is over and he has what he once wished for. ‘Start over again?’ is not an easy question. Not for Brownjohn in this latest volume. The general atmosphere of these lines almost makes us suspect he would politely decline the offer. Life all over again? Maybe no, thanks.

Facial brings in a term that Brownjohn has never uttered but which he is definitely fond of: ‘composed’. He is trimming his beard and feels rather ‘exposed’, takes great pains to look balanced, decent, reassuring. The key mood is there, however, and it is not in the least reassuring; quite the reverse. On My 66^th Birthday is positively a death alert:

...One day it will be there before the word

Has formed in the head, and long before the key

Has been clicked in the lock.

Both Joyce (‘before the word’) and Eliot (‘the key/ Has been clicked in the lock’) in a stanza that goes farther than the stream of consciousness: Brownjohn is far more aware than anyone, whether modernist or postmodernist, of the end, and his present obsession is the bitter burden of helplessness.

Leaving the World of Pleasure shows the poet retiring from the ‘Mall of All Desires’, heading for ‘the attraction of sorrow.’ In Desperado vein, happiness is long gone, and what is left to us is ‘the unattainable other side of it.’ A false peace reigns in this volume, that claims to have left boisterous youth behind. It is the false peace in Ishiguro, Barnes, Swift, Lodge, Lessing, and so many other Desperado novelists. It is the need for still life. Byron was an agitation addict, Dickens fed on what happened next, and these Desperadoes suddenly bring in the need to sleep movement off. Are they as peaceful as they want to seem? Brownjohn is not. Pain is well hidden and sensibility claims to watch life helplessly. But forbidden movement can be so very much more poignant and alert than Eliot’s bustle of bodies and recurrent images and irregular music of words. Brownjohn and the other Desperado poets may look, just  as a contemporary critic of Eliot’s accused Eliot to be, ‘musclebound’. The truth is this is not lack of vitality or lack of art to put life into words. It is a new idiom, a way of writing that may look blank at first sight, to an untrained eye. The blankness becomes fireworks if we reread, if we take the time to read between the lines. The West is learning only now what Communism imposed upon writers for fifty years, till the 1990s. It is vital for a Desperado poet or novelist to be reread, with an eye open to what blankness hides between the lines, to what is not said, and this, again, comes from the lesson of Eliot’s poetry, which was first and foremost one of understatement.

Why a Cat without E-Mail? Because the poet Brownjohn loves cats (just like Eliot)? Because everyone decently young has e-mail these days, while he sticks to the typewriter and still subjects poetry to morality and commonsense? As a protest against Desperado madness of words, masks, denials, pretence, and exhausting remoteness from the reader? As a warning, yes, that literature can only take so much. As a signpost which says, I am an unwilling Desperado. I will always stick to my cat and refuse e-mail. So will the cat. So will poetry in the long run. The question is, will it?