LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

II/7. ALAN BROWNJOHN (28 July 1931)

Poetry

● Paradoxically, Brownjohn can be included among the Desperadoes mainly because he is different from them all, because he is always on his own. Being dissimilar is his major feature, whether desired or not. He is his own trend.

● Alan Brownjohn’s favourite word is ‘blank’, and it applies to his poetry, which is treacherously monotonous, hiding in fact a turmoil of emotion, a discreet despair that can never be tamed, not even by the poem.

● The music of Brownjohn’s poetry is present but discreet. The poet seems to be mocking at poetic musicality, while working hard at it. Experimentalism is replaced by oversimplification. The Desperadoes never bite their sensibility to the quick. They hide it behind a blank, dispassionate text.

● Love is no longer exquisitely painful. It is frustrated, wasted in isolation, deeply doubted. Brownjohn, like all Desperadoes, is a highly cautious poet. The text is steeped in secrecy. The secretive poet teaches his readers to find him out. The poem becomes a challenge, just like fiction.

● Words become insufficient, mistrusted, emptied, which is the opposite of what Eliot was doing when he was loading the word with all ambiguities he could think of. Even rhymes are no longer complete, they become frustrating, imperfect, and also highly ingenious. The poet claims to be talking to us, telegraphically, almost deliberately ignoring our expectations of a show. Brownjohn discovers the stating poem, which operates like a black and white photograph.

● Brownjohn has quite a number of dystopic poems describing a grim future. With him, life is never safe. The poem refuses to please the reader or even to appeal to him. The reader feels repelled by the displeasing Desperado poem.

● Eliot was talking about cutting out all the poetry. This is what Brownjohn and all Desperadoes do. There is a suspense based on silences in Brownjohn’s poems. He avoids finishing sentences, he breaks them and spreads them over many lines, barring coherent understanding. Rhymes often occur between a fraction of one word and another.

● Though direct, the Desperado poet is never explicit. He is unambiguous, yet vague. He avoids committing himself to a credo, because his world is desecrated. What he does hold sacred is the idea of game. Every poem is a game. Writing is a game, and reading invites, compels rereading, reentering and winning (understanding) the game.

● As far as the feeling is concerned, whether love (see love interest in fiction), fear of death, joy or despair, it is no longer a shock in the Desperado poem, it is a burden. It has to be conveyed by everyday words, as if it did not change anything in the lives of writer and reader, when in fact in does change our sensibility. The Desperado poet willfully ignores his own sensibility.

● The hybridization of literary genres is continued and even intensified in Desperado poetry. It becomes a game of recognizing the voice. With Joyce, the novel gulped down all genres, and not many people talked about stream of consciousness in poetry. With Desperadoes the game is present in every written text. Brownjohn’s poetry is flooded by fiction, drama, essay, encyclopaedia, even a kind of psychotherapy. Each poem is a psychological analysis and a point of view at the same time.


● Brownjohn refuses ambiguity in the Eliotian sense. He resorts to an insufficient clarity, which leaves us incredulous: Can it be that simple? Is that all he had to say? Why bother? And we are taken by surprise: we do have to decode, but we did not even realize from at first that there was any complication. The poet has stolen behind our minds and is teaching us the sophistication of simplicity. In short, Clarity is back, beware of clarity.

● Emotion is debunked until the skeleton of naked poetry dangles before our eyes. Eliot dreamt of a poetry with bare bones. Here is Alan Brownjohn kindly obliging both Eliot and post-Eliotian readers. Brownjohnism finds poetry exhibitionistic and leaves it a prude.

● Descriptions of nature are anything but romantic. Sentimentality is dead, and so is its natural landscape. The Desperado is casually antagonistic to lyricism. The question is no longer Eliot’s ‘Do I dare? ‘, but , Am I there? Am I anywhere? Brownjohn feeds on the unimportant. Obvious intensity is avoided. The poet recites his thoughts like a bad actor. He respects the reader’s privacy. Poetry has become the public place of a very private soul. The Desperado is a mistrustful poet who debunks all feelings and desecrates the heart.

● Most poems are long Haiku: they are repeated odes on Grecian urns. Brownjohn includes images within images, in an endless line, until the infinite ‘nearly’ hurts. Eliot’s lesson has been well learnt and is now taken further into Brownjohnism: we stealthily learn from these blankly despairing poems how to be ashamed of our own sensibility. Which is highly uncomfortable and piercingly effective. The Desperado is always on tenterhooks.

● Brownjohn can hardly be included in a group of poets, being usually on his own, whether in poetry, fiction or criticism. His individualism makes him qualify for inclusion in the family of the utterly dissimilar. All these writers have in common is the fervent wish to be different, strangers from one another.

● The (apparently) blank words, mood and meaning he confronts us with are ample proof that he wants to hide his concrete presence, while manipulating the reader with his thoughts. A monstrous mind, in which the writer crams his whole being, the poet is a cyclop staring at the reader with one, desperately anxious eye: Is the reader going to obey?

● Brownjohn’s inertia can be connected to the inertia of all the other rememorating writers, from Ishiguro to Lessing, through Swift and Larkin. There is plenty of action going on in these writers’ texts, whether poetical or lyrical, usually both, in their dramatic perception of the world. The trick is that this action has a layer of carelessness spread on top of it: it is as if the writer were saying, Like it or not, you will have to find your own pleasure, enjoy what you can find. The author will not help, but expects his audience to solve his enigma to the bitter end.

● Behind Brownjohn’s possibly serene or at least dispassionate images, there is despair. The blank despair of his words is the despair of all other Desperado artists that their medium is not enough, and they have to resort to neighbouring fields, actually to whatever trick literature has invented since it has been known to exist. Nothing is off limits, and despair is joined by greed, or maybe the explorer’s instinct. The Desperado rediscovers America, so to say, and is very disappointed when he is pinned down as a one-track intellect, which is mainly technically minded, since the narrative cannot be his invention alone.

● Eliot lectured at large about the music of poetry, and used it, mockingly or very much in earnest. With Brownjohn and Peter Porter, Larkin and Ted Hughes, there is half-music. Music is concealed, the rhymes delight in shrinking to half-rhymes, which we may even overlook, but which the poet painstakingly arranges so as not to hinder the meaning of the words. With Eliot, a rhyme could charm or kill. With Brownjohn, rhymes are so matter of fact that you are not sure whether you are supposed to notice and talk about them. They match the apparent tameness of clear sentences, whose ambiguity lies much deeper than earlier verbal obscurity. Difficulties in understanding are not welcome, Brownjohn harshly rebukes them in his criticism. The reader must understand the words and be left in the dark about the other side of clarity. Because the Desperado poem always has a hidden face, a pole opposite to simplicity. They all want to be uncomplicated and limpid, but inevitably end up in a complexity that was from the very beginning and totally within their scope.

● If irony is the defining Desperado attitude, bitterness cannot be far behind. In Brownjohn’s poems it is not. Every experience is open to after-thoughts that weigh like a burden on the reader’s soul. Whether lost childhood or lost love, solitude or fear of pain, the innuendo is that no experience is free from poignancy, from exquisite denial.

● Shyness protects the puzzle. The Desperadoes are very cautious writers, always in hiding under the veil of a monotone, behind the shadow of a denied sensibility, which we are challenged to reconstruct. Deconstruction is the wrong approach in their case. Reduced to words alone, the texts die, the reader starves. This proves the underground very strong connection author-reader, in which the writer tempts, beckons to us to follow him from afar, not promising revelations, just helping us to find ourselves, the Desperado readers, always in thrall.

● Secrecy brings suspense. The word was everything to Joyce and Eliot, but it has lost its universality. A word used to encompass all history, philosophy, mythology; it used to be an epitome of the mind. A word was an etymological adventure into consciousness. It is a comfortable pillow, in a Desperado text. It has an obvious meaning, which soothes the reading eye, and an agglutinating meaning, that requires good memory and patience for the puzzle. The text used to be word-addicted, but now it is the word that is
text-addicted.

● A Desperado is not an optimist. Quite the reverse, he is disabused. The stream of consciousness writer expected the best and the utmost from his writing. The Desperado tempers down his own, implicitly our, expectations. Actually he expects the worst. The words may or may not make sense, it all depends so much on the reader’s willingness to bricolate. The mood may or may not come through, in direct connection with the reader’s patience to reread and re-interpret over and over again. The characters may or may not come to life, the plot may or may not cohere, and the reading mind bears the burden of making this whole edifice work. The Desperado writer trusts, yet bitterly mistrusts his Desperado reader.

● The reader’s expectations of a show are baffled. The Desperado work, in its Brownjohnian variant, is a black and white photograph, which needs to be filtered by a reader’s eyes, and then it turns the colours of the rainbow. Apparently, Brownjohn talks about nothing going on. In fact, the whole world revolves on the axis of his poetry. He is just trying hard to hush up the betraying noise. Brownjohn’s poetry is the quiet before the big bang.

● Alan Brownjohn does not try to please. He wants to make a point, to be exact, to use words, not be used by them. Consequently, he divests his lines of Eliot’s fireworks, imposing a grey austerity. If the reader finds the joy, he has the clue. If he does not, he should not be disappointed, because the poet did not mean him to feel elated. He just wanted his reader to comply with the text. Whether emotionally or otherwise, that remains to be decided at some later point.

● Brownjohn, a true Desperado poet, does what Eliot wanted to do but did not manage: he ‘cuts off’ all the poetry. He disconnects from traditional lyricism, he pulls the plug of imagery, he is verbose, thus shunning the lullaby. And, on top of that, when he speaks he wants to be heeded with lucidity, not in a trance. Poetry is like mathematics: calculate your strategy and work for results, which the reader must reach after solving the text as a problem.

● For Brownjohn, love is not the joy, but the daily burden. Love interest is despicable. Virginia Woolf claimed the novel was not supposed to provide it, yet could not do without loves and lovelessness in her novels. Coming later, like all Desperadoes, Brownjohn feels poetry should not rely on the inner carnival of emotions. The intellect comes first, like a censorship of the soul.

● As far as hybridization is concerned, we find in Brownjohn’s poetry fiction, drama, essay, encyclopaedias, letters and, above all, a reassuring psychotherapy. He sets things right by viewing them with the iron fist of reflexiveness in the velvet hand of imagery. Whenever an image menaces to get romantic, the poet forbids rhyme to enhance it. On the other hand, in the middle of a prosaic verbosity that might seem irrelevant, a cluster of emotional illuminations sparkle. The reader’s sensibility is slowly, yet safely cured of the taste for tragedy, for the show. Joyce’s epiphany has dwindled into an icon of commonsense.

● As a consequence of purging intensity, the poem Brownjohn writes is, at first sight, dry. The naked bones of poetry, which Eliot wanted to see but did not manage to X-ray, are sketched by Desperadoes out of the force of habit. The flesh on the bones is added by the reader. A Desperado reader feels part of the birth of the poem. He has to lend it his soul.

● Violating the language, which was a must for the stream of consciousness, is forbidden. Clarity is back, beware of clarity. Can it be that simple?, we should wonder. That easy to understand? It usually is not. Although Brownjohn is extra careful with punctuation and correct word usage, ambiguity sneaks in and we learn to do more than just decode it: we also have to detect it, almost (half?) invent it ourselves. Having the reader manufacture his own ordeal is a feat of resourcefulness only a Desperado could have thought of.

● As a Desperado, Brownjohn is terrified of any invasion of the reader’s privacy. He hates to dictate what the reaction of his audience should be. He gives no clues, he recoils from making his presence felt. The poems are promontories of meaning. He stretches out a hand, an idea, and the emotion waits patiently to be dug out, far behind. The reader is not overwhelmed, as he was by all previous writers. For the first time in the history of literature, the author is genuinely discreet and quiet. It is up to the reading eyes to peer till they catch a glimpse of him, and decide whether they enjoy the sight or not.

● The conversational tone of Brownjohn’s poetry is essentially Desperado, too. He works hard on his technique, but surrounds it with words that suggest he is not declaiming, but merely talking at ease, whispering actually. Eliot used to shout, Joyce was no less agitated. Brownjohn looks like a man handcuffed to the page. No great gestures, no final words, no decorousness. The incident is the core of the poem, and the meaning concentrates in it. The images help along, but are not essential. Lyricism trips into fiction again and again.

Fiction

● The addiction to dystopia, both in poetry (where he builds dystopic incidents, short negative plots that generate fear because they defamiliarize) and fiction, makes Brownjohn a Desperado, too. Two of his novels, The Way You Tell Them and The Long Shadows, envisage a world which is not the author’s, and which he dreads. The Way You Tell Them was published in 1990, but describes the 1990s, ahead of time. It ends in the death of a writer. The Long Shadows tackles communism before and after its fall, as a space that Brownjohn feels very insecure in, and would like to keep as far away as possible. Travelling into the communist land is all right, but leaving it is best. In the meantime, he gets to know and understand it, but, again, the book turns around the death of an English novelist that dared cross the border. Brownjohn’s dystopia is deeply and subtly connected with his well concealed, muffled fear of the future, which might be said to be the fear of the century.

● The Desperado characters are usually non-characters. They live in an apocalypse – whether future or present, it does not matter – which tears them apart, so coherence and logic would be false for them. They scatter their memories and emotions at random, leaving the narrative as enigmatic as they entered. The exit of the novels is a dark pit where unborn personalities sleep till a reader fishes them out and makes an emotional map. We can only vaguely guess what a Desperado hero looks like (we usually have absolutely no idea), but we know exactly what his soul is made of. The inheritance of the stream of consciousness is strong and also contradicted. We are inside an imaginary soul all right, but we look outside, we never try to dissect. We swim to the surface, using it to rearrange the puzzle of the plot. Incident comes before thought, the novel returns to the outer world.

● The Desperado’s forte is the bitterly disappointed hero. Brownjohn’s characters never end happily. Happy endings are strongly discouraged by Desperadoes, as unlikely to happen in an apocalyptic world. The major achievement of all heroes is the fact that the reader figures them out. After this communion with the readers, they can, and usually die. When a hero is left by the reader at the end of a narrative, he is twice doomed: first by the plot ( he dies or is too old to enjoy life), second by the revolving force of the reader’s mind leaving him, upon which he disintegrates. A hero is not an idyllic refuge from life, but the burden of reality weighing heavily on a deeply disappointed reader, whom the writer persuades to fall in love with his own disappointment.

● Delicately ironic in his poetry, Brownjohn resorts to bitter irony in fiction. His heroes are half serious, half destroyed by the author’s mocking suggestions. We are not meant to laugh, we are not meant to commiserate, either. The Desperado merely warns us to keep our distance. Which we can hardly do, since we are also meant to identify with the character as we reconstruct him. In the end, we find ourselves in the paradoxical situation of both approval and disapproval. Do we love the hero? We do not. Do we hate him? We cannot. Desperado irony results in fact in a huge sense of helplessness.

● Displacement, another Desperado major concern, is present in Brownjohn’s poetry and fiction, too. Whether lyrical or narrative, Brownjohn’s beings do not feel at home in their bodies and souls. Their minds keep fluttering, like the broken wheels of an old watch out of use, making our heads spin with the fury of finding the map of a plot. These minds reveal stories that bruise the souls of all heroes involved and leave no serenity. Every story is the story of an exile.

● Interpreting a Desperado writer, Brownjohn included, is a very lonely task. Besides the fact that loneliness is the very essence of all characters, the reader feels utterly on his own when he tries to formulate a conclusion which the author refuses to state in as many words. The poem or novel is meant to gape open for ever, like a sentence without a full stop. The predicate makes the meaning quite clear, only we are denied any sense of closure. The Desperado wants his haunting text to live on and on, beyond the experience of the written page. He writes directly in the reader’s soul.

● The Iron Curtain has slowly been replaced by trips into communism, so the western Desperado is characterized by a curiosity that makes him partake of communism. Some write dystopias imagining communism in their own countries (Burgess, Lessing), others merely go on a brief, terrifying pilgrimage and come back a better man (Bradbury, Brownjohn). Crossing the border into dictatorship used to be a rich mine of plots before communism fell. It is now slipping into science fiction nightmare. If communism is no longer the fear, despair has to find another spring. If not politics, then economy. If not economy, human nature. And we come back full circle to Jonathan Swift.

● The communist dissident was, similarly, a major figure in the novel before the fall of communism. It appeared in Burgess, Orwell, Huxley, Lodge, Brownjohn. The new political situation has made him obsolete. The same writers, or others, create local dissent to replace the former, foreign revolt. Going against the crowd, against the wrong tunnel of time has become a pattern of the Desperado hero.

● The Desperado makes a point of creating unlikable heroes. The character must be loaded with meaning, not agreeable. Consequently, the reader is angry, he leaves the narrative in a frenzy of un-attachment.

● Desperado books, whether poetry or fiction, are defeated books. They do not plan to conquer, to succeed, they merely give in. Brownjohn’s novels end helplessly and depressingly, Ishiguro’s novels weigh us down with the burden of bruised souls that find no comfort. Desperadoes are uncomforted and highly uncomfortable writers.

● Physicality is a bone of contention with Desperadoes. Many are unspeakably bold. Some are both bold and shy. Brownjohn is desperately decent. Alasdair Gray confesses he shocked himself in 1982 Janine. Whatever the outcome, physicality is not so bad with literary Desperadoes as it is with other kinds of Desperado creators or mere Desperado audiences.