LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

PETER ACKROYD (b. 1949) is a more than prolific novelist and author of monographs and books of literary criticism (which is more literature than criticism but carries all the weight of erudition and intelligent interpretation of texts). His poems are a tiny part of his creation, but they reveal his peculiar lyricism, which fills his fiction to the brim.

If he does not have a sense of humour – which would have been very ill at ease by the side of his intense lyricism – , Peter Ackroyd has an immense hunger for other texts, which he rewrites in his own. The poem among school children ought to remind us of Yeats’ poem with the same title, but the technique – and the mockery at convention – is a totally different one. Ackroyd’s text is a dialogue of the teacher with imaginary schoolchildren, who first read a poem:

my terrific love-cries

are probably for sale (...)

if I smile will she smile

no one smiles, your eyes

are like broken glass are

you unemployed?

The next stanza is a set of questions for these children:

What do these words mean? (a) love-cries

(b) quantum (c) unemployed.

Have you ever met anyone with eyes

like broken glass? If you have, write about it.

If not, would you like to? Why?

Read the poem again, and think about

the last lines. Why was nobody smiling?

Try to explain in your own words how

the writer felt when he saw the girl

with eyes like broken glass.

The questions are at the same time very serious and ironic (they makes the reader see their ridiculous stubbornness in treating literature as mere information that can be studied). The whole poem expresses Ackroyd’s dilemma: Is literary criticism to be trusted? He must have decided for the negative answer, since his own books avoid it carefully, preferring to recreate moods rather than dissect meanings.

Ackroyd’s novels are all dreamy texts, just like the explanation in the poem on the third... The poet sees his dreams meeting him ‘half-way’. They are ‘stunned and incomplete’, just like his fiction. None of his novels is without lyricism or poetry. These poems are just a proof of the poetic nature of Ackroyd’s writings. Except that the poem is such a slow progress, compared to the turmoil of fiction, which Ackroyd definitely prefers, it seems:

the poem is made of sleep

speech slowed down to the nth degree

the storm in my head

will not reach its point

It is true. The mind of the writer stirs innumerable meanings as the novel progresses, and lyricism is only a trick to slow the speed down, to allow the reader to breathe. These poems are a similar interlude.

Ackroyd’s novels are a collection of doors opening into one another, and the poem opening... is another description of this confusing world:

a hundred miles up

a world

is constructed

and then burns

you wear my coat

and I'll take yours

we'll face the brightness

together

opening the gate

for one another

Reader and author ‘face the brightness’ and the experience (of reading Ackroyd) is a unique instance of togetherness. No other Desperado can melt his sensibility into the reader’s so well, so insidiously. When Ackroyd writes it seems the reader writes, so reading is more creation of meaning than reception of it. Ackroyd has this incredible gift of making any reader feel it is he who has created the world.

These poems  meander between spirituality and physicality. Ackroyd’s fiction ignores physicality, unless the body is uncommon, devious, and hampers the soul, thus stirring it, making it more intense (crooked people, affected by disease, falling an untimely prey to death). Love between man and woman is not an issue. It is there all right, only what really matters is love between soul and soul. Ackroyd has such a keen sensibility that a mere breath of air could make it crumble down, grow and fall again. Foolish Tears makes love into a proposal for a poem. The poet does not give us a poem about love, but his own presentation of a poem we never get to see. He begins by stating the theme: ‘People today are always having problems and difficulties within their own personal families. Foolish Tears is somewhat about family problems...’ It seems to be a narrative poem about a man falling in love with another man’s wife, and so on. The story is actually a joke:

When David's friend found out David liked his wife he didn't seem to mind; he even tried to get David and his wife together. David was embarrassed for a while but not for long.

Foolish Tears is a confusing poem and it was hard to keep the people straight. Who was married to whom and so forth. Even though it was confusing I still enjoyed writing it, and I think I am a good writer.

                                                                                                194 words including title.

Ackroyd may not show a sense of humour when he writes fiction – he is so busy weaving meanings and other texts, myths into his own – but he certainly uses it here. The poem ends with a word count, which tells a lot about computers and their effect on the mind of writers (so many authors fear computers might simplify their thoughts...).

The poems have no poetic technique except the abrupt advent of lines, which could easily be arranged as prose. The rhythm is the only one that reminds us this is poetry, we must slow down to ponder on the words and not rush in pursuit of incidents. These poems are a warning:

there are so many emotions to get through

that I dream continually of slipping backwards

while the day spins ahead of me like a kite

although its string leads precisely nowhere (there are so...)

Fiction is a slope and the author feels he might slip backwards and reach ‘nowhere’. An immaterial passion or rather a passion for immateriality haunts Ackroyd. He dreams of ‘some great plot/ which will encircle all of our feelings’, which he calls ‘a definition of madness.’ There is in him a madness of intensity, of which these poems are an only and ‘complete statement’.