LIDIA VIANU

The Desperado Age

British Literature at the Start of the Third Millennium

RUTH FAINLIGHT (b. 1931) is one of the major figures of Desperado poetry. The meaning of her poems lies in the intensity of each story, not in the fact that this story of a life happened to the poet herself.  She never claims the experiences described as autobiographical because it does not matter whom they belong to as long as they exist as poetry. Her poems create life as much as they record it. Ruth Fainlight is the perfect Desperado poet, who mingles fiction, poetry and drama, who speaks clearly about deep meanings (which are never spelled out in full), who impresses sharply and has the readers’ souls in thrall. We disapprove as we read, and the more we disapprove, the closer to the text we feel, because the text defies sympathizing. Ruth Fainlight is a difficult nature, both tender and harsh, both endearing and tantalizing.

The poet has a taste for debunking (A Fairy Story), which applies both to imagination and reality. There are always two sides to the truth, or, as the poet puts it, happy endings have ‘unexpected consequences.’ The prince who kills the dragon and rescues a princess will not be satisfied with only one maiden, so he will go forth again and again, while

The rescued princesses compared

Sad stories, boasted of their sufferings,

Exaggerating the ordeal.

They dressed each others’ hair, changed

Robes and jewels, waited impatiently

To see the girl who next would join them.

This kind of discourse, half mocking and maybe a little more than half in earnest, does not go well with rhyme. I should say rhyme sometimes does not suit Ruth Fainlight’s need to contradict everything, including our expectations of the right word. Rhyme is too predictable for this poet who has her heart set on frustrating her reader. The end of this poem uses rhyme very much in Eliotian manner, with destructive irony:

A splendid tomb must be constructed:

Memorial to those princesses,

Obedient victims of his destiny.

The monument still stands, although

The castle fell to ruins long ago.

The knight died on a battlefield.

Their legend: fatalistic, gory,

Fit matter for a fairy story.

The poet is Vertical to the bitter end. Her poems betray strictly vertical morals and a totally uncompromising sense of values and relationships. Honesty is carried to its most absurd  limit. Honesty to the word has the same fate:

I am released by language,

I escape through speech;

Which has no dimensions,

Demands no local habitation

Or allegiance, which sets me free

From whomsoever's definition:

Jew. Woman. Poet.

The order of words in the last line is the order in which Ruth Fainlight describes the important elements of her life: race, gender, craft. I tend to say that, knowing her, the importance goes backwards, in fact. Poet comes first and Jew comes last. Womanhood is the middle support which brings a sense of balance and endurance, keeping the bridge of the being functional.

The Other mentions ‘pushing against the grain of my nature.’ Ruth Fainlight is a constant striver. She pushes the word to the limit of its meaning, she burdens the poem with as much mood as it can carry. If anything, she cannot be accused of superficiality in any of her lines. Or of conversationalism. She is clear, but every word has a part to play. Each line has a perfect economy of words and no letter is set down to paper at random.

The Fall is a poem which ends in an enhancing rhyme. It begins with ‘Once you start falling, you fall forever’, which faintly reminds of John Donne’s ‘Love is a growing or full constant light/ And his first minute after noon is night’ (Lecture upon the Shadow). The end uses rhyme in exactly the same way as Donne, to enhance intensity:

Into the plunging vortex of your fall:

Dark path you hope will lead furthest of all.

Other Rooms follows the fall into an afternoon sleep, when the mind relinquishes its grip on life and

I never remember, with my eyes closed,

Which room, or where it is. So many rooms.

So many sleepless nights, tired afternoons.

This feeling of weakness, of bleeding to death...

The confusion of to be with not to be, the feeling of roots stirring to life out of the winter earth (Eliot, ‘stirring/ Dull roots with spring rain’) dispels, though: ‘I know I shall get up’. Ruth Fainlight always gets up and defeats fear. She is one of the most fearless poets today, even though fearlessness is a modernist mood. She has this toughness in common with Sylvia Plath, her friend once. Like most Desperadoes, she prefers the surprise of the very common next word, the word without any strings attached, the free and at the same time the only acceptable word. Because she never settles for the next best word. Her poems look like a chase after the word.

Deadheading the Roses is a plea against old age, against death. When she cuts off the flower, the poet feels she is fighting ‘destiny’, which turns the ‘glory’ into seed, ‘disdaining beauty/ for the sake of the future.’ The simple gesture of cutting a few roses from the garden becomes a parable of existence. Ruth Fainlight often reinvents myths, instead of merely debunking them. Innocent automatic acts suddenly reveal a hidden pattern of the universe. This need to attach philosophical meaning to the incident is not exactly Desperado. Firmer with her message, Fainlight rejects random conversation and constructs her argument rigorously, poem by poem, thought after thought, until we realize we have been reading more than a sequence of poems: her volumes put together are an X-ray of her understanding of life, of man in the universe.

T.S. Eliot called Yeats ‘preeminently the poet of middle age.’ A generation later, Ruth Fainlight inherits the concern and, far less theatrical than Yeats or even Eliot for that matter, she brings death down to the ground so to say. She talks about growing old in an informal way:

Friends, sisters, are you used to your face in the mirror?

Can you accept or even recognize it?

Don't be angry, answer me frankly, excuse

the question's crudity. I can't – no matter

how often I take the little square of glass

from my bag, or furtively glance into shop-windows,

the face reflected back is always a shock.

It Must is a conversation about losing youth and not making a tragedy out of it. There even is a poem which views it with irony: Divination by Hair. The heroine of the poem pulls out her grey hairs in front of the mirror. The poet sees the gesture as ‘paltry and ridiculous’ (‘paltry’ reminds of Yeats again, with his Sailing to Byzantium: ‘An aged man is but a paltry thing,/ A tattered coat upon a stick...’).Trying to keep young looks is a ‘losing battle’, and the poet snickers:

I know it can be nothing but a losing               

battle, paltry and ridiculous.                     

Sooner or later I'll have to choose whether

to be bald or white.

Where Yeats raged and Eliot moaned, Fainlight smiles. Not without sadness, of course, but the core is the thought, not the emotion, and the thought knows the mind will never grow old. From Modernism to Desperado, tragedy has left the poem and fear has become a constant companion:

Because death always seemed a mother —

or a grandmother, someone

familiar – now I come near

the time of greying hair, I fear     

the mask more than the skull beneath.

Again is another game Ruth Fainlight plays with fairy tales. The ‘prince who once had been a toad’ and ended living happily with the princess (ever after is a notion Desperadoes abolish) becomes a toad again. The poem is a question mark: what will the princess do? The answer is not to be found in the fairy’s power to make things right all over again. The reader feels from the inner strength of this poem that the answer lies in the tender smile. As the poet ends, ‘Let it all begin again.’ When age crept near, Yeats did what Dylan Thomas later advised, namely he did not ‘go gently into that good night.’ When the hair turns gray and the body comes closer to the skeleton, Fainlight gathers all her strength in a ball of fire inside her ribs, which is the poet’s soul. At the light of that fire, her hand goes on writing long after life has ebbed away, or at least this is the impression these poems about approaching death leave.

Love may not be the major theme of Ruth Fainlight’s poems – it never is with Desperadoes, actually – but tenderness is indeed. In Ruth Fainlight’s view – as inferred from her images, because she never openly philosophizes in verse – tenderness is a more general love, which includes all beings and all ages. In this way, the poet can fall in love over and over again, with anyone, at any age. She loves her brother, her parents, her husband, her children, her friends, her work, her myths, literature, history, practically everything she can think of. Whatever can be understood must be loved – this is probably her credo.  Animal Tamer brings the image of the husband (Ruth Fainlight is married to the novelist Alan Sillitoe) feeding a stray, wild cat:

You would have made a good animal tamer –                                                                                  I can tell by the way you're taming the wild black cat                                                                       that appeared last week at the bottom of the garden.                                                           

Every morning she comes a little further.                                                                       

You go outside with a half-filled saucer of milk                                                                           

and put it down as if you didn't care,                                                                                           but each day move it an inch nearer the door.

The man and the cat end up by giving in, both conquered by tenderness. Tenderness and loss mix desperately in My Rings:

On my right hand since then

I've always worn the ring

my father and I chose

as my twenty-first birthday present.

On my left, these months

since her death, my mother's ring:

the engagement ring he bought her

half a century ago,

and gave to me,

after the funeral.

If we stop to examine the language of this – or any other – poem, it is supremely clear, not stifled with incidents or the flow of speech. It is an aristocratic language, with its fair share of stories and memories, with strong images, but also with fearless use of the scary, the painful, the irretrievable. Ruth Fainlight makes poetry out of simplicity by infusing it with the intensity of a soul always on the watch. She makes it her business to feel for everyone she can think of. Once part of her poetry, they are part of her tenderness. She feels responsible for the entire universe and she contains it in herself:

I spread my hands on the desk.

Prominent tendons and veins

on the back, like hers;

red worn skin of the palm

that chaps and breaks

so easily, inherited

from my father. Even without

the rings, the flesh of my hands

is their memorial.

No need for anything

more formal. Not gold

nor platinum and precious stones

can serve as well

as these two orphaned hands.

The pain is always there – intensity and pain are equal for Fainlight, who is more a poet of the moon than of the sun – but it is a pain contained, a pain that stabilizes, that lends the reader the strength to go on.

In some ways Ruth Fainlight is an angry poet. She probably sees herself as tough and harsh, when she is in fact supremely tender even in anger. But anger is necessary to her in order to stay vertical and fight. She is a fighter: for life, for poetry, for herself. Usually Dry-Eyed talks about tenderness at first:

'Do you cry easily?' At times. Always

at what is called the cheapest sentiment.

Especially when lovers are reunited,                    

brothers reconciled, son safe and well                 

at home with his mother, husband and wife

smiling together. Those are the basic tales.

Yet the poem ends in ‘dry-eyed’ anger because one must do more than sympathize, one must also fight ‘arrogance and cruelty.’ There is a certain anger in the way she treats words, too. An anger directed at babbling poems, which cannot communicate because they cannot use language properly. Anger against poets who despise the reader’s need for clarity, for accessibility of the written page. Fainlight has a huge respect for her readers. Before the tenderness she feels for them, there comes the anger directed against poets who debase poetry by making it a puzzle. While always open to interpretation, Ruth Fainlight will not despise a reader because he wants to be told in plain words what to think. Her lines are for all tastes: both simple and intricate. Her poems hide and explain simultaneously.

Marriage is a theme Fainlight holds dear. The union of her parents, her own union to her husband (To Break This Silence). The peace comes first. The ‘mutual isolation’ comes next. Husband and wife are ‘the other’s fate and climate’, they share a house, a landscape, a life but are two minds. And the two separate minds make all the difference. Not even tenderness can bring the organ of poetry into communion with another being. Obviously, the organ of poetry for Ruth Fainlight turns out to be the mind after all.

The familiar landscape of Fainlight’s poems is the town. Observations of the Tower Block has us contemplate the multitude of windows of the modern abode of hundreds:

Different patterns of lights. No matter how late I go

to bed or early I wake, there are always lights burning.

Nights of insomnia, when I look out the window, someone

else who lives in that building is also not sleeping.

The world of her childhood is New York. The world of her mature life is London. She lives in London even though she escapes to her country cottage very often. She is not a rural spirit. Her past and present are bound to the city. Author! Author! reveals her ‘project’, which is ‘the story of myself’. Her poetry is written because she wants ‘to understand what happened and why it happened.’ She sees herself wandering amid stores, parks, streets, and being ‘one more character/ in this extravagant scenario,/ the story not yet finished.’ The natural question that comes to mind is, ‘And who’s the author?’ Is it the city? Do buildings change our minds? This kind of philosophy is never explicit in Ruth Fainlight’s poems, but it is always there, to be dug out if a thoughtful interpreter should care to do so.

Handbag is a remarkably built poem, at once incredibly direct and totally indirect. It begins with the mother figure, so compelling in Fainlight’s poetry. It is her handbag, and it is full of trifles that smell like her: mints, lipstick, powder. But mainly there are these letters. And we learn very slowly: letters from her father, during the war, read over and over again, with worn edges:

My mother's old leather handbag,

crowded with letters she carried

all through the war. The smell

of my mother's handbag: mints

and lipstick and Coty powder.

The look of those letters, softened

and worn at the edges, opened

read, and refolded so often.

Letters from my father. Odour

of leather and powder, which ever

since then has meant womanliness,

and love, and anguish, and war.  

This small object smells of three crucial things in the poet’s life: womanhood, love and history. A sense of all three she got from her mother. The poet’s mother is the pattern of life. This is probably the explanation why she sometimes appears distant and implacable: Fainlight feels that she is governed by her gift, which is a power stronger than her own understanding, a power that has been handed down to her by her mother. At some point she stated in an interview I took that she was a feminist. I think this is the meaning of her feminism: the significant core of her life comes from the source of life, and that is the mother. The father is the light of that source, the luminous tenderness that makes it work.

Poetry, just as Yeats used it, is a triumph of life for Ruth Fainlight. In a different way from Yeats, Fainlight asserts existence by means of words:

I shall not meet my dead again

as I remember them

alive, except in dreams or poems.

 The poem is a prolongation of reality. The poet muses,

So much happened,

I could think about it forever.

I run the action through again

and listen to those voices from the past.

There is always something new

to alter. And my dreams get better.

The story is in the poet’s mind, for the reader’s mind. And it is definitely a story more than a mere mood. The poet is supremely aware of her need for an audience and of the imperative to be clear in order to be accepted:

Like music on the page

which has to be played            

and heard, even if              

only by one person,           

this word, this phrase,           

this poem, does not exist    

until you read it.  (Until You Read It)    

This strong communion with her reader is what keeps Ruth Fainlight apart from Desperadoes. She is more than clear: she makes sure that the triumph of life in her poems – the triumph of her story, her life – is conveyed. She does not encode and we do not decode. We must merely take the time to hear her well and feel her every word, because each word has a taste, a mood, a thought in store for us. The English Country Cottage reveals Ruth Fainlight ‘the alien’ (Jewish in an English cottage), My Mother’s Eyes shows the poet a grandmother in her turn, after having been a child once, Those Days brings recollections of lost youth. Stranger is the one label that Ruth Fainlight would never accept but which suits her best:

Meeting strangers

I lack discrimination

become too familiar

as if greeting a lost relation.

I don't know how to keep my distance

or not feel rebuffed and rejected —

exposed, foolish, pathetic — when

by the second or third occasion

it is perfectly apparent

there is nothing else to say.

I often wonder which one,

in a bus or train, if

disaster came, would pass the test

and save me. Another stranger.

In spite of the intense participation her poetry requires on the part of the reader, Ruth Fainlight fears she might find out she has been a stranger all along. It is the reader’s turn to step in, read and reassure her. A possessive poet, a firm iron fist in a velvet glove (as a line puts it), an impatient sensibility, easily hurt, desperately perceptive of every little anxiety, Ruth Fainlight writes with the stuff that dreams are made of.