LIDIA VIANU

Alan Brownjohn and the Desperado Age

POETRY

THE MILLENNIUM POEM: Two Thousand and One

‘Early in July 2000 I set out to produce, using a portable manual typewriter, a poem of 2001 lines in rhyming couplets for the ‘real’ millennium on 1^st January 2001 – as an attempt to break a ‘writer’s block’ that had prevented any verse composition.’ This is how Alan Brownjohn opens his one-page preface to the poem photocopied in sixteen copies, deliberately rejecting the idea of revision, a poem begun on July 4^th and finished on September 23^rd  2000.

It is a delightfully natural, easy-going, personal yet decently distant poem. The rhymes are charming (all in heroic couplets) and incredibly resourceful, while using everyday words, words that do not always have a poetic ring about them. No shocking words, though. Decency and morality are Brownjohn’s forte. His respect for the reader is obvious here, and also in the clarity of his statements. He handles language with utmost care and we have to hand it to him that he keeps company with a very relaxed and therefore grateful reader.

The importance of ingenuity in rhyming cannot be stressed enough in this poem. An inventory would show unusual dexterity. Brownjohn is a shy virtuoso, though. He pretends he rhymes effortlessly, and that is why he chooses deliberately simple words to end each line. This is a natural reaction to modernism, to Eliot’s boisterous and theatrical rhymes, which either mocked at the idea they expressed (‘In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo’) or wailed in assonances (‘who chose and oppose’ comes to mind).

The couplets are supposed to be ‘impromptu’. They sound that way, of course, but hide an art which has been practised for decades. Behind the art we find Brownjohn’s obsessions, only much more direct and diary-like here. The text is and is not a diary. Inevitably it follows the pattern of days, because its substance starts from the everyday experience, one day at a time. It starts as a joke and slowly grows into something very serious, because Brownjohn’s mind never takes anything lightly, however jokingly it may put ideas into words. Irony does not exclude gravity; quite the reverse.

One of the haunting dissatisfactions that the previous poems only hinted at, but which are overtly stated here, is the media:

     ... trivia trotted out

To smokescreen what our world is all about,

The daily junk life of the telescreens

Or what’s flashed at us in the magazines

—All light (or darkness) years away from where

The bombs drop and the blood dries in the hair.

Telescreen definitely reminds of Orwell’s threats. What follows is an update of 1984, and it comes up more than once, because world politics is a favourite topic of the poet, and he is very much concerned with the hardships of the third world, the inhumane treatment progress applies to it. A so-called progress, because Brownjohn vehemently opposes it, whether it is a TV, a computer, a mobile phone or just junk mail:

Have we gone mad? I think so. Mobile phones

Turning their users into muttering clones

Of each other, young dons in baseball caps

Swigging bottled mineral water, on their laps

The laptops with our future on their screens

— No doubt someone can tell me what this means

For  me in my remaining, ageing years;

Much better than a time of nagging fears

And apprehensions, failing services,

Rising stupidity, and consciences

Increasingly worn down and eroded by

A tide of media vacuity?

The poem brags about ‘spontaneity’. Here it is, all right. When Eliot wrote The Rock, he was full of righteousness and preached; his choruses were more like sermons than poetry. Brownjohn frowns with grace, with humour. He feels age creeping behind him and scolds himself more than those around, in a way. He is dissatisfied with his own feeling of ageing, but never even once insinuates that his discomfort is anybody’s fault. His spontaneity guards him from it. He needed this spontaneity stated out loud, in order to fight his already very deliberate sadness, which is there even when he pretends to be laughing or enjoying himself.

The poet’s image of the whole universe creeps in at some point. Nothing we or others do is without consequences:

We live dependently, we only share

With roots and clouds and grasses, we don’t own.

Nothing we do is ever done alone.

Even though it feels that we are ‘Looking out/ Of the usual window at the usual trees,’ every little gesture changes the universe for ever. Using a computer is against nature (the poet is typing this as the poem goes on, on a portable, very old and reputable – in its own time – Corona; can he have forgotten that the typewriter itself was shockingly new once, even though it took its own sweet time to grow old and inefficient?) He thinks of books and cries inside for the declining fate of the written page in an unfair combat with the whimsical screen. A library is a citadel of paper and hard, palpable learning, but even there civilization, ‘progress’ as he calls it, is gaining good (too good) ground:

... the British Library, where I went

Quite recently, to try to understand

Their ordering technology. At hand

Were patient, calm assistants used to dealing

With techno-sceptics. Do I have the feeling

That there must be many of us? That we are

A common phenomenon? It is bizarre

To have lived into an age when the resplendent

Riches of human knowledge are dependent

On techno-mediation, when  each carrier

(Each book) of learning waits behind a barrier

Of screens and buttons, incomprehensible            

Instructions, cursors, arrows; sensible,

Helpful procedures have gone by the board.

I pity scholars coming from abroad

With language problems and no techno-skill.

We're beaten down by techno-overkill,

It seems to me, compelled to call it Progress

— That goddess who so often turns to ogress

(A rhyme used some while back, I would assume ,

In mentioning some earlier modern gloom

About our changing world.) The crude command

To all of us to get to understand

Technology or die is pretty frightening,

As if some god will strike us down with lightning

If our very mothers' breasts are not online,

Shaped to the dollar's world-wide web-design.

Techno-sceptic is what Brownjohn really is. This diary in rhyming couplets is a red alert, an equivalent of the science-fiction nightmare that civilization has come to a point of crisis, where real values might be lost. It is the same fear Eliot had when he wrote The Rock, only Brownjohn is so much more reticent. He does not make a religion of his aversion to new technology. He merely states that he feels books and typewriters a more familiar environment and is not willing to remake his childhood sense of safety. His youth built a space of security and promise, a horizon of expectation which had nothing to do with technology intruding upon literature. Radio was an acceptable tool. The computer today is not. He is not the only one to reject or merely neglect the vast span of time and space which the internet has brought to our desks, our very page while we write it. Most poets confess they prefer the sheet of paper and the reassuring pen to typing in a computer, on a screen that may lose all words in a second. Fleur Adcock has a whole poem about it, and it goes like this:

It's Done This!

(for Mia, Kristen and Marilyn)

Help! It's hidden my document,

and when I try to get it back,

tells me it's already in use.

It keeps changing the names of my files.

Why won't the Edit Menu appear?

It takes no notice of me. Help!

'You have made changes which alter

the global template, Normal. Do you

want to save them?' Oh, please, no –

what have I altered? The ozone layer?

Help! But Help refuses to help;

the message goes on glaring at me.

There are some things you can't cancel –

or, if you have, you wish you hadn't.

'This may damage your computer.'

What may? 'Windows is closing down.'

But Windows isn't. Who can I ring

to rescue me, at nearly midnight?

Somehow, between us, we survive,

even though I've lost page 4

and all the margins have gone crazy.

What if I've bought the wrong scanner?

What if my printer's rather slow?

I'm getting rather slow myself.

It's nearly midnight once again,

and Windows isn't closing down —

nor do I want it to, just yet.

We're in it together. So be it.

I’ll sit here, at the end of an age,

and wait for the great roll-over.

The whole poem is haunted by the ageing of the body, the diminished eagerness to adapt. Brownjohn writes about ‘our internal clock’, about ‘the value of each moment of our living,’ but never takes refuge. He faces age just like Yeats (viewed by Eliot as ‘preeminently the poet of middle age’), and refuses religion: ‘Isn’t religion simply false and scary?’ Brownjohn, very much a Desperado in this respect, is not a believer: he mistrusts everything, even his own thoughts. ‘I’m no trembling rabbit’, he claims. The poet is all alone in an increasingly alien universe, with only his poetry to go by.

A couplet mentions ‘the semi-happiness/ Of approximate sleep’, while another remembers ‘one of those dark, abysmal sleeps.’ Brownjohn is never tired of the word ‘blank’, which is a kind of stillness, of dream or inertia, a need to stand still and feel, think, verbalize, while reducing physical motion to the border with non-being. Ever since childhood, we learn in this poem, Brownjohn has been obsessed by keeping every experience in mind, a huge computer that was to use the soul in order to build words on top of those, a mechanism that would change the stillness of exacerbated sensibility into the life and bustle of successful fiction. It may seem a paradox to compare Brownjohn’s process of creation to the piece of machinery he despises, but the minuteness of his sensibility which means to make a note of every little sensation in order to use it sometime, his desire to keep track of absolutely everything he ever experiences can only suggest that comparison. Here is the dream of all writers, I suppose:

Everything matters, it’s a gigantic store

Started by a quiet nine-year old who swore

He’d grow up to write stories – yes, fiction

Was going to be his real adult addiction,

Reading it, writing it, having his name

On the backs of books. His serious game

Was to stash away all experience

For using sometime...

Brownjohn refuses ‘in-your-face poetry’ and the ‘brutal emphasis’ precisely because he is so very full of feelings that he does not need to attract attention by language alone. He certainly takes very good care of his words, in the absence of which there would be no literature, but they are tamed words, very far from being offensive. The poet focusses on the what more than on the how, although the how is a huge concern, all the more so as it is not aggressively obvious. He sleeps inside his poem until the reader wakes him up, and then he looks his reader in the eye speechlessly, waiting to be guessed at, found out. His words are always civil and quiet, and if I have called him ‘blank’ again and again, it is because of this poetry he writes, utterly devoid of brutality, apparently sleepy and shy, in reality so very alert and ‘in-your-face’, but at a much deeper level than that of verbal aggressivity.

One of the vivid concerns of the poet is Englishness. He is much more aware of it than the usual Desperado, who complains of being displaced, or enjoys his homeless condition. Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Ruth Fainlight, Fleur Adcock, Peter Porter, though not many others, take Englishness for granted, although they reach it after displacement. Brownjohn is not displaced, either in reality or in his themes, but never clamours his Englishness, or anyway not before this long poem, which does it with a subtle sense of humour:

Summer wears on. Today's the 23^rd,

A month after midsummer. Is it absurd

To say the nights are drawing in? We erred

If we thought the two or three cloud-free days

We had last week meant summer. — That very phrase

Marks me down as English! We stand together

In clinical depression about the weather.

It brings our aches and pains and misery,

It persecutes us with its inventory

Of small and large – and undeserved – inflictions.

Weather is one of our lifelong addictions:

From birth to death it gives us each an axe

To grind, as meteo-hypochondriacs.

On two occasions Brownjohn mentions his reader with the same sense of humour, anticipating:

What fun

He’ll have, collecting all this stuff together

And hoping it makes sense, and wonder whether

It will convince him when he re-reads it all.

Actually the poem is both fun and persuasion. The poet claims he has a writer’s block, but, as a reader, I doubt it. He writes better than ever, with sparkling technique – the fun of his rhymes cannot  be stressed enough – and delightful intimacy, which his readers must have longed for for years. In this millennium poem, we catch Alan Brownjohn unawares, and he shows himself, his political implication, his sense of injustice in this world we live in, his atheism, his friendships with Gavin Ewart or Anthony Thwaite, his neighbours who have a garden party, and more than anything his feigned indifference to age. Rereading, particularly needed for Desperado authors, is welcome and as pleasant as the first time round. If Alan Brownjohn meant to demonstrate when he started writing these lines that he could no longer be a poet, he has failed.