Where Have You Been? (20 page)

The fascination and the interest are almost completely separate in Graham; the one is stylistic, the other biographical-circumstantial; the one is in the poetry, the other in the letters—which are by no means to be described as the lesser book. Both should be read—though not necessarily together. Each is an absolutely characteristic product of the man and his life, the one a sound or texture, the other maybe a taste.

The poetry—to begin with that—seems to me to exist on the edge of many things: abstraction, mannerism, Scottishness, a whimsical, almost childish falsetto, a homemade philosophy of reading and communication. The poems were written by the sea's edge, in Cornwall, mostly at night, and on a typewriter, and I fancy that these things show too: a slightly spooked sense of one's own eccentric noise heading out into great expanses of space and time. “TAPTAP. Are you reading that taptap / I send out to you along / My element?” “The great abeyance,” to use Plath's term for the sea—though it would serve as well for night, or a phantom readership—that was what Graham wrote into. Graham is a specialist, almost a technician of voice. His speech is never natural, and never quiet, but begins unexpectedly, and continues unpredictably. In letters he starts, “Yes, it is myself,” or “It is indeed myself, Graham.” He proposed once to begin a radio broadcast of his poetry with “Can you hear me?” He makes other writers appear as though they did without grammar, and without surprise. As he puts it, he is the “flying translator, translating / English into English.” He writes as though he had invented the essential miracle of poetry, those marks that speak to us from the page, and continue to do so even after the poet's death. The mixture of detachment and address, of generosity and caginess, the loss of the “fourth wall” of conventional illusionist poetry, the harping on the strange, depleted nature of what is transacted between writer and reader—all these characterize Graham's mature work. By way of one preliminary instance of his sound and his method, here is one part of “Approaches to How They Behave,” from 1970:

The words are mine. The thoughts are all

Yours as they occur behind

The bat of your vast unseen eyes.

These words are as you see them put

Down on the dead-still page. They have

No ability above their station.

Their station on silence is exact.

What you do with them is nobody's business.

I hold no special brief for the early poems of the '40s and '50s—they strike me as having been, for almost everyone then writing, two rank bad decades for poetry. Rather like John Berryman, his close contemporary in America, Graham started off writing a larded idiolect of poemese, derived from Yeats, Hopkins, and Dylan Thomas. The letters show him at pains to try and simplify the calamitous diction of his peers (David Wright, Edwin Morgan), but the poems don't show too many signs that he was receptive to his own teaching. A short poem like “Gigha”—it's the name of a tiny Hebridean island—shows all the problems of a kind of second-generation Imagism:

That firewood pale with salt and burning green

Outfloats its men who waved with a sound of drowning

Their saltcut hands over mazes of this rough bay.

Quietly this morning beside the subsided herds

Of water I walk. The children wade the shallows.

The sun with long legs wades into the sea.

I suppose our time tends to punish literary gestures as much as the 1940s rewarded them, but as far as I'm concerned, the attempted addition of drama to the Imagist recipe produces only distracting clutter. Is the poem action or contemplation? Is it waving or drowning? It seems not to know. “Outfloats” and “saltcut” have a deadly callous literariness, it almost defies belief that they are the words of a man who lived among fishermen most of his life and often went out on trawlers, “beside the subsided herds” is ghastly euphuism, “mazes” is pointless, and the repetition of “wade” only serves to weaken the only tolerable line—though of course I like “green”—the last. Oh for the Coan ghost of T. E. Hulme, or, geographically closer, Eliot's lovely and cogent “Rannoch, near Glencoe.”

Similar strictures might be applied to most of the first third of the
Collected
, though, like most poets, Graham continued to have an ill-advised soft spot for his early production. Even the celebrated long poem “The Nightfishing” of 1955 (and hence a direct contemporary of Berryman's “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet”), though some sort of tour de force, doesn't have much to do with the poet that W. S. Graham became. It leaves me not exactly cold, but lukewarm, though I like Graham's ambition for it: “if it made somebody seasick (a good unliterary measurement) I would be pleased.” The new emphasis on “unliterary,” however, and the suggested conversion rate of poetry (the supreme fiction, remember) and reality are both salutary, and indicative of the future turn of Graham's writing. “The sea sails in. The quay opens wide its arms / And waves us loose.” The sea, also, “as metaphor of the sea. The boat / Rides in its fires.” Graham is at moments somewhere close to Stevens's terrain, “Imaginary Trees with Real Birds in Them.”

Along with night, with language and typewriter noise, with Scottish words and Cornish place-names, with painter friends and spectral readers, with his early memories of Greenock, a sugar port west of Glasgow, the sea takes up residence in Graham's world. These things offer bearings, quiddity, scale. They accommodate the highly self-conscious movements of Graham's poems, which may be memory based (like “The Greenock Dialogues”) or fictional (like the sequences “Malcolm Mooney's Land” or “Ten Shots of Mister Simpson” or “Clusters Travelling Out,” about Arctic exploration, a photographer, and on communication among prisoners, respectively), or again consist almost entirely of his highly characteristic ontological maneuverings and jockeyings. But the temptation to be abstract is denied by the properties and settings of the poems. Even the writing about words and the writing and reading of them has something pragmatic and physical about it. Sometimes, it's the beautiful Scots vocabulary—surely unarguably a tender and more palpable speech, and in any case the language of his childhood, and always produced by Graham with exquisite tact and timing and naturalness. (As an “exile” in England, and, though as Scottish as anyone, a nonparticipant in the sort of Scots supremacist renaissance of the midcentury, Graham was in a difficult position with the likes of Hugh MacDiarmid, who—much as Marx saw communism as something on the way to the ultimate nirvana of socialism—proposed Scots as a way station toward the ultimate grail of writing in Gaelic. Graham for his part disdained what he called the “plastic Scots” of some of his peers—a thing, incidentally, that shows signs of returning in contemporary Scottish writing. I admire his language politics; a poet should be able to help himself to what he needs, rather than take politically inspired direction from himself or, worse, from others.)

There is something rickety and moving about these poems of the 1960s and '70s, even the most stodgy and naturalistic of them, that for me “The Nightfishing” didn't have. A Graham poem is as unconventionally homespun as a Cornell box or a Calder mobile. He writes English like someone working with coat hangers, sometimes three nouns in unpredictable concatenation, sometimes three verbs, sometimes even—certainly, it feels like it—three prepositions. The very short two- or three-stress lines that are his most characteristic form contribute to this impression of language being
bent
:

In fact last Tuesday afternoon

I locked myself in my coat and closed

The door and threw myself on the mercy

Of rainy December, a new month.

One step two steps three step more.

Four step five step I went falling

Into the outofdoors world

To give myself a shake to shake

The words I live on up a bit.

I see an old tin can in a hedge.

It is not speaking. Here I am

On Tuesday the of December

At five o'clock walking the road

Between the whining, beaded hedges […]

Now as the blinders whistle for dusk

And my simple sophisticated boots

Clip on the road as my metrenome

You should look out for me coming up

Soon to be seen from your side.

Every (absent) comma has been thought about. More naïvely trustworthy than Cummings, less learned and more dignified than Berryman, this shows what can yet be done with simple English. The poem is made of next to nothing and takes place in real time. It reminds me of what Graham says somewhere in the letters, that he most likes writing when there is nothing particular requiring to be said. There is a terrific economy of effect here, without any of the reaching in “Gigha” or even “The Nightfishing.” And yet the poem offers the Joycean coinage of “metrenome,” the echo of Horace in “simple sophisticated,” the childish counting chant, the doubling of “shake,” the quiet surprises of “locked” and “falling,” the beautifully supplementary (past and present, active and passive) participial adjectives “whining” and “beaded” (the sort of thing one might hope to find in Heaney), and the humble and still somehow grandiose last line. The whole thing is its own envoi, exquisitely self-making and self-born. It is characteristically self-involved, and yet its ultimate gesture is toward the reader.

Even in this “outofdoors” poem, with its oddly rackety title “Nature Is Never Journalistic,” there is something fetchingly minute and what I would call interstitial. It is where Graham habitually exists in his poems. It is what allows him to say—he has been all round it—“It is not speaking” of the old tin can in the hedge, and to speak of it, and perhaps for it. (It is his version of Whitman's “Look for me under your boot-soles.”) Graham likes to cast himself nestling between and behind the words, “Why did you choose this place / For us to meet? Sit / With me between this word / And this, my furry queen. / Yet not mistake this / For the real thing.” In “Private Poem to Norman MacLeod,” he writes: “My dear Norman, / I don't think we will ever / See each other again / Except through the spaces / We make occur between / The words to each other.” At the end of the extraordinarily beautiful London poem, “The Night City,” he writes: “Between the big buildings / I sat like a flea crouched / In the stopped works of a watch.” A recurring word in his work is the Cornish term for a wood louse: “grammarsow”:

Landlice, always my good bedfellows,

Ride with me in my sweaty seams,

Come bonny friendly beasts, brother

To the grammarsow and the word-louse,

Bite me your presence, keep me awake

In the cold with work to do, to remember

To put down something to take back.

It is the least likely of appeals—effortlessly outperforming the echo of Burns's mouse—the punning coinage, “the word-louse,” stoutly underwriting the “grammarsow,” which satisfyingly links his own name and—via grammar—the language. (The “sweaty seams” of course are also those of language.) These and other small deft creatures are the agency by which Graham obsessively imagines the benign burrowing movement of address in and out of language, through to the other side, the reader's. “To put down something to take back.” “Soon to be seen from your side.” Coming to a theater near you.

The miniaturism in such passagework—and I mean the Benjaminesque pun—is really why I love Graham. My word “falsetto” was a not quite adequate attempt to suggest the smallness, the tenderness, the maneuverability, and the unconventional resourcefulness of his writing. Here is a late poem from 1980, “The Fifth of May”:

This morning shaving my brain to face the world

I thought of Love and Life and Death and wee

Meg Macintosh who sat in front of me

In school in Greenock blushing at her desk.

I find under the left nostril difficult,

Those partisans of stiff hairs holding out

In their tender glens beneath the rampart of

The nose and my father's long upperlip.

The subject couldn't be more banal; people exist who would put poems on shaving on the Index. It's pretty much straight
multum in parvo
, which I suppose is an increasingly important part of what I think poetry is for. Time and space—the history of the Clearances, maybe, the landscapes of “glens” and “rampart”—are, as it were, compressed or dissolved into this tiny piece. It reminds me of a poem of Zbigniew Herbert's, “Mr. Cogito's Face in the Mirror,” which does much the same thing. Again, it takes place in a slightly accelerated real time, moving through past (“I thought”) to present (“I find”) to a sort of sostenuto or slow motion (“my father's long upperlip”), which is held at the end. It exhibits the most striking and lovely balance, between the two four-line sentences, between past and present, between large and small, between shaving and blushing. It is probably more obvious in its charm than other poems of Graham's, but I still find it impossible to take against. Repeatedly, incrementally, it defies expectation. There is a surprise (but not a calculation) in almost every line—“my brain,” “wee,” “I find,” “partisans,” “tender glens,” “my father's long upperlip”—that seems to carry it effortlessly beyond itself, which again, I suppose, is poetry.

There is another class of Graham poem, which is—well, as they say in England, different class. He was anxious not to privilege them himself, but they escape his egalitarian tutelage. “Some of the poems,” he wrote, “for me have more emotion in them than others. The Bryan Winter poem shatters me still although it is mine and I just made it up out of my head. Also the Hilton poem and my father's poem. That maybe is to be expected. But that is the kind of poems they are. They are not better for loosening a tear from the eye.” Actually, I think they probably are, as I imagine Graham very well knew. “They” being “To Alexander Graham,” “Lines on Roger Hilton's Watch,” and “Dear Bryan Winter”: