LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

ALAN BROWNJOHN (b. 1931) is the exemplary Desperado poet. His sensibility is intensely shy. His words are accordingly used with an economy of beauty which Eliot himself did not foresee. He writes apparently flat lines, using only one word denoting emotion in a whole poem, but around that word he builds a scenario of slow revelation. ‘In this city...’ is a perfect illustration. ‘In this city, perhaps’, the poem starts: perhaps a street, a house, a room, a woman in the darkness, a woman crying. Why?

For someone who has just gone through the door

And who has just switched off the light

Forgetting she was there.

Between ‘perhaps’ and the –ing’s (sitting – repeated three times, crying, forgetting), the poem is elliptical. It does not say anything has actually happened. The key to the mood is the very last –ing: ‘Forgetting she was there.’ Silent solitude is Brownjohn’s forte. His poems are all solitary races in which the flat word wins and manages to shoot at the reader’s soul.

Peter Daines at a Party is the opposite kind of poem. It rhymes obviously and places an apparently silly stress upon the rhyming words, a stress which faintly reminds of Eliot’s lashing irony in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (‘In the room the women come and go/ Talking of Michelangelo’), as if the rhyming were everything that mattered, the meaning were not even there. Alan Brownjohn loves this kind of fool’s rhyming. One stanza rhymes names with nouns (Justinian’s-The Virginians, Stevens-evens, Amanda-thunder). Another stanza uses half-rhymes: both-Ruth, Dad-said, familiar-Pamela. The third and last stanza, at last, has perfect rhymes: knowledge-college, gaps-chaps, population-conversation. This last stanza comes very close to Eliot’s destructive refrain (go-Michelangelo):

Still, here were these women with items of knowledge

Picked up in one and another college

 – And here am I with not quite all their gaps

In my knowledge of all these high-powered chaps,

Doing well with the female population

And their limited but charming conversation.

The poem proves that Alan Brownjohn is a master of rhymes, and while we could hardly say that rhyme is not significant, we have to admit that the significance he gives it is totally different from that in Romantic, Victorian or even Modernist poetry. Brownjohn mocks at the predictability of rhyme and uses it unpredictably, tearing down its pedestal of gravity, dragging it into the gutter of commonsense.

Ballad for a Birthday is a poem made of common gestures and common words, of a dazzling linguistical clarity – which is a Desperado feature in itself. For each stanza, the poet uses three perfectly rhyming lines (telephone-grown-own, hooks-books-looks, page-stage-age, bell-tell-well, meet-street-complete, door-more-sure) and the same unrhyming refrain: ‘I feel the same but I wouldn’t want to call it love.’ Besides this lesson in the uselessness of music in poetry – the meaning never goes hand in hand with the perfect rhyme: there is more meaning where there is no music of words – , Brownjohn also uses grammar to convey his message indirectly. He relies on modal verbs (v. Yeats’ Byzantium), and conditionals (v. Eliot’s La Figlia Che Piange). The stanza with the modals is the following;

I wanted coffee, so I marked the page;

It should have been over when it got to this stage;

Can I be the same girl at a different age?

            I feel the same, but I wouldn’t want to call it love. (the emphases are mine)

Each verb expresses more than a whole sentence. We learn the girl’s feelings from them: what would have been better if it had happened (‘It should have been over’), the change she must get used to (‘Can I be the same girl at a different age?’), the conclusion that love has not died and this is the source of the intense pain this poem expresses so flatly apparently (‘I feel the same but I wouldn’t want to call it love’). The conditionals are symmetrically present in the last three stanzas, on the pattern ‘if he phoned/wrote/drove round’, followed by ‘should I answer it?’, ‘would I answer?’, ‘could I tell him?’ Even more than a past tense replacing the present conditional and the main clause with a present conditional or a modal verb in the past tense (with a conditional meaning), the poet adds a direct object clause with a past tense, which shows unreality more clearly:

If he drove round here and knocked on the door,

Would I answer his questions, let him ask me more,

Or could I tell him I was absolutely sure...?

The aim of this enumeration is to prove that Alan Brownjohn puts his grammar to the best use. He means to say a girl has been left and wants to forget but cannot, while the man is (characteristically for Brownjohn) absent. The attitude echoes clearly Eliot’s The Waste Land with the hyacinth garden, where the man is inert. The difference is that with Eliot the intensity was mutual, both man and woman feel the pain, even though they failed to communicate. With Brownjohn – with all Desperadoes – intensity is a lonely experience. The girl is supremely alone, the man is silently accused. The poem manages to make us feel exactly that without making one definite statement to that effect, while being crystal clear, posing no obstacles to understanding.

Repetition – a major element of clarity – is Brownjohn’s favourite tool. The Packet is a static versus active poem, is versus does, -ing versus the present tense. The first part of the poem repeats obsessively ‘is’, as if the poet were explaining a painting which is in fact a painting within a painting within a painting... in a long line. Until the line ends, everything ‘is’ (meaning nothing much moves):

In the room,

In the woman’s hand as she turns

Is the packet of salt.

On the packet is a picture of a

Woman turning,

With a packet in her hand.

When the woman in the room com-

Pletes her turning, she

Puts the packet down and leaves.

On the packet in the picture

Is: a picture of a woman

Turning, with a packet in her hand.

On this packet is a picture: of a woman,

Turning, with  a packet in her hand.

On this packet is no picture.

— It is a tiny blank. (the emphases are mine)

In the middle of this static part, the woman ‘com-/Pletes her turning’ and leaves. Significantly, the important act here, the decision of the woman to go away for good, is separated into syllables by the end of the line, which is only done to underline the meaning of the word. Significant words in a poem by Brownjohn are not rhymed, but defaced. The more unusual the end of a line, the surer we can be that it leads to a meaning.

            The second part of the poem focusses on the man, who slowly understands the woman has left him. He draws her leaving, closing the line of pictures within pictures (an image of the future, maybe), locks the door (end) and goes to sleep. Part two is full of verbs:

And now the man waits,

And waits: two-thirty, seven-thirty,

Twelve.

At twelve he lays the packet on its side

And draws, in the last packet in the last

Picture, a tiny woman turning.

And then he locks the door,

And switches off the bedside lamp,

And among the grains of salt, he goes to sleep. (the emphases are mine)

The simple sentences the poet builds make the poem easy to read. Separating a word into syllables and placing it in two lines at once is a way of drawing our attention, in this context of clarity. If the first part repeats the static ‘on’  four times, the second part repeats ‘and’ four times, as a connection between actions. The simplicity of Brownjohn’s technique in this poem, as in most, is a proof of shyness, of the author’s delicacy versus the reader’s understanding. He seems to say, Your guess is as good as mine; whatever the poems means to you, it means to me too. He only points to his version of the story; the reader is encouraged to find his own.

Palindrome reminds us of Yeats’ Two Years Later:

Has no one said those daring

Kind eyes should be more learn=d?

Or warned you how despairing

The moths are when they are burned?

I could have warned you; but you are young

So we speak a different tongue.

O you will take whatever=s offered

And dream that all the world=s a friend,

Suffer as your mother suffered,

Be as broken in the end.

But I am old and you are young,

And I speak a barbarous tongue.

The difference lies in the use of language. While Yeats needed melody – at that stage of his poetic career –, Brownjohn writes as he speaks. Naturalness is a must with Desperadoes. They seem to think rhyme prevents thinking. Monotonous musicality is not Brownjohn’s favourite. He makes the lines as rugged as he can:

We used to be some self-absorbed people living

In a compromised age about twenty years ago. We hated it, it

Was a terrible age, and underneath we liked it in a way, it

            Was because it gave us the chance to feel like that.

Palindrome is a poem about young and old, just like Yeats’ poem, but much more relativistic. Every new generation knows intensity and loss, and ‘all the time the ages are getting worse and worse.’ It seems that Brownjohn is less passionate – from the language of the poem, not half so flamboyant and tragic – but the truth is he is very intense in his quiet, ‘blank’ way. He devises a Desperado intensity, which delights in tricks borrowed from everyday speech, from conversationalism.

Ruse is an unrhymed poem, whose main tool is rhythm. Alan Brownjohn’s rhythm  is the main device for intellectual suspense in the poem. Each thought/line is interrupted at the exact moment it menaces to spell itself out, to be resolved in a complete statement. Sometimes he separates the subject from its predicate (‘The other children instantly/ Scattered among the scrubland grass), at other times the attribute from the noun (‘the orange/ Street-lamps), the auxiliary from the verb to be conjugated (‘I was/ Expected home from this game), the attributive clause from its noun (‘There were so many ruses more/ I wanted to devise), the conjunction from its clause (‘Before/ They counted out my time), the verb from its direct object (‘Turning today/ A tower-block corner’), the verb from its adverbial of place (‘I saw them/ In the gathering dark’), the adverb from its verb (still/ Searching’). This strategy of interruptions clashes with the predictability of each line beginning with a capital letter, which somehow reassures the reader that this is a poem, he need not worry, these are real lines, the convention of the poem is there. Actually the poetic convention is contradicted, slowly but surely. Broken sentences, broken meanings, broken poetic idiom. Brownjohn breaks poetry into pieces of feeling and mainly of ideas. He manages to conjure up intensity from an inferred little story behind the poem. He does not confess – he probably hates confessional lines because he always keeps his own life as private as possible – and replaces personal revelation by intellectual puns so to say. He plays upon an idea, he builds a fable, some situation half absurd, half very real and sad usually. He is not an optimistic poet. His poems are deeply moral and, even though they never frown, they brood. Ruse describes a child playing hide and seek, leaving his mates while they are looking for him and coming back to them forty years later. They are middle-aged, dressed in tattered children’s clothes, all confused. They missed on his whole life but he has not missed on theirs, because they have not changed. He, on the other hand, is totally different. His life left the track his friends followed. He is – we infer – the poet, and he has created, while his friends have not. Creation has made all the difference to the poet’s existence. The ruse was to turn the childhood game into a game of creation, which his childhood friends never did. And this is how a poem about hide-and-seek turns into a statement of plenitude. It seems nostalgic, but the message is not ‘I miss my childhood, I am back to remember,’ but one of difference. The trick implied in the title is the discovery of poetry writing, which gives a certain sense of balance to the author and reveals the emptiness of other lives in its absence. Apparently a nostalgic poem about a lost age, about growing old, Ruse turns out to be an enthusiastic praise of poetry writing, which can defeat age and aimlessness. Poetry gives a meaning to life.

A Witness is an enigmatic poem based upon the form of a question. It begins with the past tense (did...) and ends in a question mark. Something definitely happened, but it was ‘No cinematic gloriousness and hope.’ The ‘falling’ on a ‘blank’ day ends in a last tentative meaning: ‘An Icarus landing on sand, getting up and running.’ Possibly, because the line ends with the question mark. The poem is one of failure, of repeated failure, actually, because it is about only one out of who knows how many Icaruses. The interesting part is that Brownjohn avoids the tragic, theatrical tinge by making it an uncertainty. Maybe Icarus failed, but maybe he did not. This may be a repetition, but we cannot be sure we have seen it indeed. Uncertainty is a fertile device with Brownjohn. He is such a shy poet that he would hate to pass judgement or present his ideas as final. He will accept the reader’s ideas, all his readers’ interpretations are welcome. He will not impose a meaning but will not write a poem which is empty, either. Between the poet’s and the reader’s meanings, falls uncertainty. It is the uncertainty of all of Brownjohn’s poems, desperately shy, yet unbelievably firm in their need to signify, to make a point.

He is a Desperado in the sense that his clarity hides a forest of ideas, all to be unveiled by the reader’s understanding as he walks in a maze of indecision: Can the idea be so clear? Is it the only thing the poet meant me to see? Well, as with all other Desperadoes, it usually is not.