Friday 30 December 2011

Remembering WG Sebald


Forget pantomimes, Christmas parties, carols etc.  The best thing this year was an evening at Wilton’s Music Hall in East London, on the tenth anniversary of WG Sebald’s untimely death.  Friends and colleagues including Iain Sinclair, Rachel Lichtenstein, Marina Warner and AS Byatt talked about their connection with him, and read from his work.  

Sebald's evening: photo from fivedials.com
People remarked that Sebald, with his interest in unusual buildings and their history, would have approved of the venue - London’s last music hall, a refuge in 1936 for East Enders protesting against Mosley’s Blackshirts in the Battle of Cable Street, saved from demolition by Betjeman and co. in the sixties, venue for Fiona Shaw reading The Waste Land.  Still half in ruins today, which gives it a special, fragile charm, but a worrying one.  This time the balcony was in use, the (relatively) recently opened Mahogany Bar was heaving, and I didn’t notice any electrical wires spraying out of sockets.  But should the DLR, over a block away on its viaduct, have made the building shake?  Wilton’s needs help - see here. 

This was three weeks ago.  There was a real sense of loss, and the occasion was saved from any sentimentality by Sebald’s work.  I half-remember a couple of metaphors people used about his writing: an interlining between the imagination and reality, and a robe with deep hidden pockets.  Someone in my party had been a student of Sebald’s, and remembered him as erudite, sometimes grumpy and obscure, proud of his German literary heritage and generous to students who appreciated it.  One highlight was Anthea Bell, reading from her wonderful translation of Austerlitz (a book I’ve written about before).  She chose the passage where the young Austerlitz remembers Evan the cobbler’s tales of the dead. 

Evan told tales of the dead who had been struck down by fate untimely, who knew they had been cheated of what was due to them and tried to return to life. If you had an eye for them they were to be seen quite often, said Evan.  At first glance they seemed to be normal people, but when you looked more closely their faces would blur or flicker slightly at the edges.  And they were usually a little shorter than they had been in life, for the experience of death, said Evan, diminishes us, just as a piece of linen shrinks when you first wash it.  The dead almost always walked alone, but they did sometimes go around in small troops; they had been seen wearing brightly coloured uniforms or wrapped in grey cloaks, marching up the hill above the town to the soft beat of a drum, and only a little taller than the walls round the fields through which they went. … Hanging from a hook on the wall above Evan’s low work-bench, said Austerlitz, was the black veil that his grandfather had taken from the bier when the small figures muffled in their cloaks carried it past him, and it was certainly Evan, said Austerlitz, who once told me that nothing but a piece of silk like that separates us from the next world. 

Another highlight was the poet Stephen Watts, who lives in the East End (and whose poetry I’ve written about).  He read, beautifully, a poem of his about walking through the East End with Sebald.  He said he’d taken Sebald to see the Jewish cemetery in Mile End.. at which point the distinction between Sebald, Austerlitz and Watts became blurred. 

from jewisheastend.com
He had discovered the cemetery, from which, as he now suspected, the moths used to fly into his house, said Austerlitz, only a few days before he left London, when the gate in the wall stood open for the first time in all the years he had lived in Alderney Street.  Inside, a very small, almost dwarf-like women of perhaps seventy years old - the cemetery caretaker, as it turned out - was walking along the paths between the graves in her slippers.  Beside her, almost as tall as she was, walked a Belgian sheepdog now grey with age who answered to the name of Billie and was very timid.  In the bright spring light shining through the newly opened leaves of the lime trees you might have thought, Austerlitz told me, that you had entered a fairy tale which, like life itself, had grown older with the passing of time.  I for my part could not get the story of the cemetery in Alderney Street with which Austerlitz had taken his leave of me out of my head…

A selection of Sebald’s poetry, Across the Land and the Water, translated by Iain Galbraith, was launched.  On scant evidence - a few poems read that evening, and the one printed in the programme - I’m not sure they’ll be as remarkable as his prose.  The one in the programme, ‘Day Return’, almost feels like notes for a prose passage; without the cadences, the shifts in argument and the exceptional syntax.  Here’s an extract:

Who scrawled the warning
Hands off Caroline
across the fire-wall
in Ipswich who knows the names
of our brothers the ducks
under the willow on the island
in Chelmsford Park pond

A third highlight was Ian Bostridge singing part of Schubert’s Winterreise, which became an elegy as his plangent tenor filled the space, and my head for days afterwards.  (I've just found him on YouTube, singing it totally in character as a distracted, velvet-coated German romantic, in a large bluewashed room with Central European windows and as derelict as Wilton’s.  I've been playing it while writing this.)  He started with the first song, which begins, so appropriately for Sebald, ‘I came as a stranger and I leave as a stranger’:

Fremd bin ich eingezogen,
Fremd zieh ich wieder aus.
    
He ended with Der Lindenbaum (the lime tree), which ends ‘There you’d find peace’:

Du fändest Ruhe dort!

Jewish cemetery in Mile End, from jewisheastend.com

Thursday 22 December 2011

The Age of Geoffrey Hill

He’d have got a job at the Oracle in Delphi, turning the priestess’ ravings into cryptic verse, and would have had gleeful fun with all the earnest misinterpretations.  He looks the part, too.. OK, hardly a Delphic priest, but a part: dressed in black to offset his white beard, whose roundness goes with the roundness of his balding head, voice and vowels.  All he needs is a ruff, and he’d fit into one of those 17th-century Dutch group portraits.  I was just thinking that, when he referred to Grotius. 

This was at the South Bank, down from Parnassian heights around ten days ago.  Hill gave us a mini-manifesto: he’s not concerned with poetry as self-expression, but as imposing shape and harmony where there was chaos, emotion, passion.  Otherwise, irony and humour were to the fore: “This is not stand-up comedy”, he said.  We all laughed; and again when he added that he didn’t get stand-up comedy fees either.  His timing’s good.  He slagged the event off nicely, describing poetry readings as “the most abysmal functions on the face of the earth”.
    
I went because Geoffrey Hill is there, like a single-standing mountain without foothills.  I greatly admire what I’ve read of his earlier work whose language and use of form I find beautiful, often mysterious.  I’m not sure about the recent stuff.  Hill told us that he used to think himself lucky if he wrote 7 poems a year, now it’s more like 7 a week.  As long, he said, as he can write in strict form, he feels he’s still in control, no matter how gaga he might be otherwise; this was the attraction of the complex (and no doubt very difficult) form of Clavics, which he read from.  Was he challenging us to discriminate between learned, deliberate obscurity and the ramblings of a once-great poet?  He was, of course, the opposite of gaga. 

Clavics is like a pageant with lots of themes and fragments all mixed up, drawn from literature, history, religion, music, legend.  There are a few contemporary touches: the Lotto, Ronnie Scott, ‘dead in Afghanistan’.  Even the George Herbert-derived shape of the poems is processional, thin strung-out bits mixed with fat crowded-together lines, all held together by strict form and somewhat trenchant rhymes.  The second ‘wings’ sections are also hour-glass shaped and there’s an hour-glass in poem 20.  The two sections feel like thesis and antithesis, or statement and gloss, though often it’s hard to work out the connection.  And then one wonders if the connection one finds was meant or not, as in the last poem, which starts:

There is a noise in my head: the breaking
of sequence.

The second section includes this:

I shall not reveal how
  Much warmth was spent
     In ice
     Device. 

This combination brought to mind the effects of global warming in the Arctic and Antarctic.. quite possibly unmeant. 

Clavics reminds me of the way some of my male contemporaries used to sit around and top each other’s obscure references.  It’s as if this collaborative/competitive process has been turned into a poetic monologue.  I don’t know whether the Emperor with New Clothes is part of the pageant.  I’ve quite enjoyed reading the book, but don’t find it compelling and am not sure how rewarding it would be to give it hard work.  It lacks his earlier beauty, and without this the tone is more problematic: it’s erudite (of course) and humorous but also mannered, seen-it-all, conservative, irritable, seeking refuge in elaboration. 

Hill’s own description of Clavics was interesting: like iron spikes sticking out of a blasted landscape, an Anselm Kiefer one, and Kiefer was interested in Paul Celan…  But this made me contrast the way Celan’s poetry draws me in, with the way Clavics doesn’t. 

I was able to inspect a cross-section of GH fans, as I stood outside the venue to hawk a friend’s unused ticket.  A high proportion of men on their own; ditto of Hill-friendly black clothes; mostly more-than-averagely intense.  They were nice about me trying to sell them the ticket, unlike the security guards.  The life of the mind was definitely there in the Purcell Room.  I was surprised by the length of the queue afterwards for book signing; surely an activity Hill would despise.  I’ve just looked on eBay where there’s a signed copy of Clavics available for £59.99. 

Here’s Clavics no. 19, which feels less fragmentary than most.  (Where the words are spread out, the letters should be, to make the pattern work; but I don’t know how to do that.)

Into life we fell by brute eviction:
What prize brutish joy; what price compunction?
             To feel by trust
             Most things ill-won,
             Ill-held; even
             Your perfection
        Gross in its mistiming.
             In the dead mist
The fleet sweeps past, Invincible, others,
Derfflinger, Grosser Kurfürst; it is a dream
             Of undreaming,
             Chaste, all weathers.
             The journal ends
             Here in its fronds;
        Oblivious    the     calm
             Jolt of a wave.
That is an odd world from which to derive.
You may call ecrased a deep-whelmed acclaim.
             Forgo blaming
On the loss of Empire the spent compère. 

                *******

You look at the thing; you think, Not today.
   Inopportunist    Mechanics
      Adjust   it   otherwise
        Write as on slate.
           Yet   I’d
           Concede
        Sensing the bite
      From the deep-laden rise
   Of the word my thrill; as sonics
Are to spheres where surely strange gods deploy.

‘Ecrased’ isn’t in the SOED; in French, écrasé means overcome, overwhelmed.  The Battle of Jutland links the ships (that bit was easy).  I haven’t even tried to probe the rest.  There’s plenty on the internet about Hill and Clavics; I enjoyed Rob Mackenzie’s two pieces, on obscurity and on tackling Clavics no.1 with a bottle of Shiraz.  Clavics is published by Enitharmon