Through the Window: Seventeen Essays and a Short Story Read online

  Such divergences transfer into their poetry. Arnold comes out of Keatsian Romanticism, Clough out of Byronism – specifically, the sceptical, worldly, witty tone-mixing of Don Juan. Nowadays, if you were to set Arnold and Clough anonymously side by side, you might guess there to be a generation or more separating them. Arnold is a sonorous, high-minded poet, one who defends culture against both anarchy and Philistia; but essentially one who refers us backwards, to the canon, to the great tradition of Western civilisation which began in Greece and Rome. Clough was equally aware of that heritage: and when Arnold offered him a prose tribute in his lecture ‘On Translating Homer’, it was to a poet ‘with some admirable Homeric qualities’ and a man marked by ‘the Homeric simplicity of his literary life’. Yet Arnold is here affiliating, assimilating – and taming – Clough. As he detected a neuroticism in Clough’s make-up, a ‘loose screw in his whole organisation’, so he thought there was also too much instability, too little hard-chiselled beauty, in Clough’s poetry. Arnold judged himself simply more poetic and more artistic than Clough, just as Keats had judged himself superior to Byron, whose Don Juan he found ‘flash’. (‘You speak of Lord Byron and me,’ he wrote to George Keats. ‘There is this great difference between us. He describes what he sees – I describe what I imagine. Mine is the hardest task. You see the immense difference.’) Yet what Arnold perceived to be the weaknesses of Clough’s poetry are precisely what over time have come to seem its strengths – a prosy colloquiality which at times verges on awkwardness, a preference for honesty and sarcasm over suavity and tact, a direct criticism of modern life, a naming of things as themselves. If Arnold had died before Clough, and Clough had written an elegy for him, the dead friend would more probably have been called ‘Matt’ than christened after some Virgilian shepherd.

  The poem of Arnold’s which speaks to us most directly today is ‘Dover Beach’ (though it was not one he especially rated himself). His analysis of our metaphysical plight in a godless world begins with nature description, proceeds by reference to Sophocles, then declares its central tidal metaphor before coming to its bleak conclusion with a Thucydidean allusion; while the diction by which it leads us there includes phrases such as ‘the moon-blanch’d land’, ‘the folds of a bright girdle furl’d’ and (famously) ‘a darkling plain’. It is stately, mournful and magnificent. At the same time, compare ‘darkling’ with ‘rubbishy’. Also, compare ‘The Latest Decalogue’, Clough’s own poem about religious belief and what has happened to it. This is cast as a sardonic parody of the Ten Commandments, and its freethinking (or blasphemy) precedes Life of Brian by over a century:

  Thou shalt have one God only; who

  Would be at the expense of two?

  No graven images may be

  Worshipped, except the currency …

  It is a poem which undermines both Church and State, and suspects the motives of every churchgoing Christian:

  Thou shalt not kill; but need’st not strive

  Officiously to keep alive:

  Do not adultery commit;

  Advantage rarely comes of it.

  Mrs Thatcher famously urged us to rediscover ‘Victorian values’; Clough had already anatomised those values at the time:

  Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,

  When it’s so lucrative to cheat …

  Thou shalt not covet; but tradition

  Approves all forms of competition.

  Victorian money-culture and money-worship, so successfully reintroduced into this country over the last thirty years, received further treatment from Clough in Dipsychus, the last of his three great long poems. Today’s City traders, driving up motorways in flame-red Ferraris, and driving up their bills in Gordon Ramsay restaurants with four-figure wines, have their precise Victorian counterparts:

  I drive through the street, and I care not a d–mn;

  The people they stare, and they ask who I am;

  And if I should chance to run over a cad,

  I can pay for the damage if ever so bad.

  So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

  So pleasant it is to have money …

  The best of the tables and best of the fare –

  And as for the others, the devil may care;

  It isn’t our fault if they dare not afford

  To sup like a prince and be drunk as a lord.

  So pleasant it is to have money, heigh ho!

  So pleasant it is to have money.

  Amours de Voyage is preceded by four epigraphs. The first three invoke the poem’s main themes – self-love, love, doubt, travel – while the fourth, from Horace, announces its manner: ‘Flevit amores / Non elaboratum ad pedem’ – ‘He lamented his loves / In unpolished metre’ (though Horace actually wrote ‘amorem’). Clough’s metre is ‘unpolished’ compared to Arnold’s; and in Amours de Voyage – as in his first long poem, The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich – he uses the rare hexameter. This has more of a thumping stress than the polished and popular pentameter; but it also helps provide the spontaneous, conversational, unposh tone. Clough’s rhythms are travelling, chuntering, stopping-and-starting; he needs to be able to switch direction and tone, move from cultural history to love-gossip in a line, from high analysis to a quick joke. When Clough was planning his first book of poems, Arnold had complained about ‘a deficiency of the beautiful’, and wrote to Clough: ‘I doubt your being an artist.’ When he published The Bothie, Arnold found it too flippant: ‘If I were to say the real truth as to your poems in general, as they impress me – it would be this – that they are not natural.’ (This from Matthew Arnold …) He asked Clough to consider ‘whether you attain the beautiful’ and reminds him on ‘how deeply unpoetical the age and all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not ungrand, not unmoving: but unpoetical.’ Arnold’s solution was to transcend or transmute – or avoid – the unpoeticality, Clough’s to represent it: he is the ‘unpoetical’ poet.

  So Amours de Voyage is full of un-Arnoldian personnel – Mazzini, Garibaldi, General Oudinot – and paraphernalia: a copy of Murray’s guide and a cry to the waiter for a caffè-latte. It is absolutely contemporary, written at and about a moment when Italy was in the process of being painfully constructed; it includes gunfire and war and one of the finest literary representations of the confusion of murder – the mid-piazza ambush of a priest caught trying to flee the city and join the besieging army:

  You didn’t see the dead man? No; — I began to be doubtful;

  I was in black myself, and didn’t know what mightn’t happen; —

  But a National Guard close by me, outside of the hubbub,

  Broke his sword with slashing a broad hat covered in dust, — and

  Passing away from the place with Murray under my arm, and

  Stooping, I saw through the legs of the people the legs of a body.

  It is also a highly contemplative and argumentative poem, about history, civilisation and the individual’s duty to act. And it is, as the title tells us, a love story – or, this being Clough, a sort of modern, near-miss, almost-but-not-quite love story, with mismatching, misunderstanding, tortuous self-searching, and a mad, hopeful, hopeless pursuit leading us to a kind of ending.

  Whether any part of Claude’s emotional trajectory also happened to Clough – in Rome and places north in that spring and summer of 1849 – is now, happily, unknowable. In any case, Clough sets up his narrator in ways which signal the differences between the two of them. First, Claude is made, in the opening canto, extremely dislikeable: snobbish, superior, world-weary, and deeply patronising to the bourgeois English family (including three unmarried daughters) whom he falls in with. For Claude, the middle classes are ‘neither man’s aristocracy … nor God’s’; his snooty nostrils sniff ‘the taint of the shop’, and he openly admits ‘the horrible pleasure of pleasing inferior people’. He is created this way, we assume, so that he may – like Austen’s arrogant males – be subsequently tamed and humanised by love of the supposedly inferior. Secondly,
Claude is un-Cloughlike both in matters of religion – Claude is suspected of Romanism, while Clough leaned towards unbelief – and of politics. Claude has hitherto avoided public matters and scorned What People Think, preferring a detached, critical, aesthetic attitude to life – in which he is closer to the Bhagavad Gita-reading Arnold than to the liberal, event-chasing Clough who now, from Rome, signs another letter to Palgrave ‘Le Citoyen malgré lui’.

  The poem’s narrative is activated when Claude’s complacent presumptions and foppish idlenesses are suddenly overthrown. The Romans’ defence of their new republic against the French Army, who are besieging the city ‘to reinstate Pope and Tourist’, jolts Claude into the modern world of politics and war; similarly, his exposure to the Trevellyn family, who display all the enthusiasm he lacks (‘Rome is a wonderful place’, gushes Georgina) jolts him into a state of love, or – he being a self-conscious intellectual – near-love, or possible-love, or a state of mind in which whatever it is that love might be is subjected to furious internal debate. In one reply to his friend Eustace (whose own letters are not given, leaving only Claude’s reactions to them – a tactic which jump-cuts the narrative), he corrects a false inference: ‘I am in love, you say: I do not think so, exactly.’

  At the poem’s centre is a debate about ‘exact thinking’, and how such thinking translates into action, and whether emotion as opposed to reason is ever a justifiable ground for action, and whether action is ever worth it in the first place – though of course if it were to be so, then it must first be based on absolutely exact thinking – and, as any sensible reader will swiftly deduce, this is exactly the sort of overanalytical ‘pother’ (Claude’s word) which is most discouraging to a woman who might be inclined to think that you might be inclined to be in love with her. If Clough’s view of Rome is post-Romantic, Claude as a lover relates less to any Byronic predecessors than to those indecisive, self-conscious, paralysed creatures who inhabit nineteenth-century Russian fiction. Claude is ‘too shilly-shally’, observes Georgina, while he himself comes to regret (in another un-Arnoldian phrase) his ‘fiddle-faddling’. Claude epitomises how disastrous it is for a lover to see the other side of the question, and to remind himself of the advantages of not being in love: ‘Yet, at the worst of the worst, books and a chamber remain’ – a line which is an eerie pre-echo of Larkin’s renunciatory ‘Poetry of Departures’: ‘Books; china; a life / Reprehensibly perfect.’

  So Amours de Voyage – this great long poem which is also a great short novella – is in the end about failure, about not seizing the day, about misreading and overanalysing, about cowardice. But cowardice is generally more interesting to the writer than courage, as failure is more exciting than success; and perhaps – as Claude observes in one of his more chilling rationalisations – perhaps the need for kindness precludes the getting of it.

  As for success: Amours de Voyage was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1858; and writers today, as they fret about royalties and advances and reading fees and PLR and copyright and agents and status, might reflect that this was the only occasion in his entire life when Clough received the slightest payment for any poem that he wrote.

  GEORGE ORWELL AND THE FUCKING ELEPHANT

  YOU HAVE TO feel a little sorry for Mr and Mrs Vaughan Wilkes, or ‘Sambo’ and ‘Flip’ as they were known to their charges. During the first decades of the twentieth century, they ran a preparatory school on the south coast of England. It was no worse than many other such establishments: the food was bad, the building underheated, physical punishment the norm. Pupils learned ‘as fast as fear could teach us’, as one alumnus later wrote. The day began with a frigid and fetid plunge bath; boys denounced one another to the authorities for homosexual practices; and daily morale was dependent on whether a boy was in or out of favour with Flip. In some ways the school was better than many: it had a good academic record; Sambo nurtured contacts at the most important public schools, especially Eton; and clever boys from decent families were accepted on half fees. This was a calculated act of generosity: in return, the boys were meant to reward the school by gaining academic distinction.

  Often, this worked, and the Wilkeses might have had reason to congratulate themselves, in the early years of the First World War, for having admitted on reduced terms the sons of Major Matthew Connolly, a retired army officer, and Richard Blair, a former civil servant in the Opium Department of the government of India. The two boys, Cyril and Eric, each won the Harrow Prize (a nationwide history competition), and then took scholarships to Eton in successive years. The Wilkeses must have thought their investments had paid off, the accounts balanced and closed.

  But Englishmen of a certain class – especially those sent away to boarding schools – tend towards obsessive memory, looking back on those immured years either as an expulsion from the familial Eden, and a traumatic introduction to the concept of alien power, or else the opposite, a golden and protected time before life’s realities intrude. And so, just as the Second World War was about to begin, the Wilkeses, much to their distaste, became a matter of public discussion and argument. Major Connolly’s boy, young Cyril – renamed ‘Tim’ at St Cyprian’s, and given the school character of an Irish rebel (if a tame one) – published Enemies of Promise. While describing in some detail the harshness and cruelty of the lightly disguised ‘St Wulfric’s’, Connolly also admitted that, as preparatory schools went, it had been ‘a well-run and vigorous example which did me good’. Flip was ‘able, ambitious, temperamental and energetic’. Connolly, who leaned towards Edenic moralising (especially about Eton), recalled the vivid pleasures of reading, natural history and homoerotic friendship. He devoted several wistful pages to the latter subject. Enemies of Promise, published in 1938, must have felt to the Wilkeses as damaging as the fire which burnt St Cyprian’s to the ground the following year. Flip wrote Connolly a ‘Dear Tim’ letter about the harm he had done to ‘two people who did a very great deal for you’, adding that the book had ‘hurt my husband a lot when he was ill and easily upset’.

  For the next thirty years, the debate continued as to the true nature of the Wilkeses – diligent pedagogues or manipulative sadists – and as to the wider consequences of sending small boys away from home at the age of eight: character-building or character-deforming? The photographer Cecil Beaton had been at St Cyprian’s at the same time as Connolly and Blair, surviving on charm and the ability to placate by singing ‘If you were the only girl in the world, and I were the only boy’. He applauded Connolly for having ‘seen through all the futilities and snobbishness of Flip and her entourage’. Others joined in, like the naturalist Gavin Maxwell, and the golf correspondent Henry Longhurst, a stout defender of Flip as ‘the most formidable, distinguished and unforgettable woman I am likely to meet in my lifetime’. Connolly later came to regret what he had written. When Flip died in August 1967 at the age of ninety-one, he turned up at her funeral, doubtless expecting sentimental reunion, the rheumy eye and the forgiving handshake. Not a bit of it. The Major’s boy had turned out a bad egg and a bounder, as literary types often do. Connolly self-pityingly noted that ‘nobody spoke to me’.

  Yet Flip’s death merely led to the most savage and contentious contribution to the debate. Ten years after Enemies of Promise, Eric Blair, by then George Orwell, wrote his essay ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’, as a pendant to Connolly’s account. It was never published in Britain during his lifetime, or Flip’s, for fear of libel; but it did come out in the States, in the Partisan Review, in 1952. Longhurst picked up a copy of the magazine in Honolulu, and was ‘so shocked that I have never read it again’. Forty years after it was first published in Britain, sixty years after it was composed, and now almost a century after the events it describes, ‘Such, Such’ retains immense force, its clarity of exposition matched by its animating rage. Orwell does not try to backdate his understanding; he retains the inchoate emotional responses of the young Eric Blair to the system into which he had been flung. But now, as George Orwe
ll, he is in a position to anatomise the economic and class infrastructure of St Cyprian’s, and those hierarchies of power which the pupil would later meet in grown-up, public, political form: in this respect such schools were truly named ‘preparatory’.

  Orwell also writes with the unhealed pain of an abused child, a pain which occasionally leaks into the prose. He describes a younger pupil – aristocratic and thus entitled to privileges denied to half-fees Blair – like this: ‘a wretched, drivelling little creature, almost an albino, peering upwards out of weak eyes, with a long nose at the end of which a dewdrop always seemed to be trembling’. When this boy had a choking fit at dinner, ‘a stream of snot ran out of his nose onto his plate in a horrible way to see. Any lesser person would have been called a dirty little beast and ordered out of the room instantly.’ Orwell’s denunciatory fervour is counterproductive; readers may well feel sorry for the little chap whose hair colour, nasal explosions and accident of birth were none of his doing.

  If Connolly was by his own admission a tame rebel at St Cyprian’s, Orwell was a true one: Connolly wrote that Blair ‘alone among the boys was an intellectual, and not a parrot’. And if the child is father to the man, the writer’s account of his own childhood is often a sure guide to his adult mentality. (At St Cyprian’s Blair denounced boys for homosexuality – ‘one of the contexts in which it was proper to sneak’. Decades later, during the Cold War, Orwell sneaked on the politically unreliable to the Foreign Office.) ‘Such, Such Were the Joys’ is about life in an English preparatory school; but it is also about politics, class, Empire and adult psychology. And the writer’s mature views on these subjects feed into his corrective vehemence: