Sunday 2 August 2020

Adam Nicolson, "The Making of Poetry" (2019)


Subtitle: ‘Coleridge, the Wordsworths and Their Year of Marvels.’ Capitalisations, sic.

I don't often review books on this blog (here's one exception to that rule), but Nicolson is a writer I like, and I've been reading his latest: an account of 1797-98 in the life of STC, Dorothy and William Wordsworth. Turns out this book is three things: 1, a detailed, elegantly-written account of Wordsworth and Coleridge's friendship over this year and the epochal poetry it produced (with sidebars on Dorothy); 2, interspersed autobiographical ruminations by Nicolson walking around the west country seeking out remnants of Wordsworth-Coleridge Country in the modern world, and 3, twenty-eight woodcuts by artist Tom Hammick. De gustibus famously not admitting of disputation, you may love these. I can't say I did. Some are pretty enough:



Others, though, seemed to me, in their clonking primitivism, wholly to miss the more nuanced resonances and often oblique sublimity of the poems they notionally illustrate. As, for example, this visualisation of ‘Kubla Khan’s woman wailing for her demon lover:



Teen whining at being served brocoli. I don't mean to descend to merely cheap shots, but, come on: that's a flatly lassitudinous and crayon-doodled image to stand for one of Coleridge's most extraordinary images of the erotic sublime, surely. Other images hang on the gallery wall of the same wheelhouse:


An image, there, illustrating Wordsworth's ‘The Bald Man On The Five-Legged Horse’.



... and this from Coleridge's ‘The Selfie-Stick’. I'm snarking. I'll stop. The images are always bright and bold, and if I found them too nursery-colour-scheme and scrawly, you may find more merit in them. And either way they aren't particularly integral to what Nicolson is doing in the meat, that is the prose, of his book.

And what he is doing is good. I have some issues with some of The Making of Poetry, but the bottom-line is: I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, very often thought-provoking and vivid work. Much of it treads pretty familiar ground, and I was already aware of most of what Nicolson quotes, but the book has an energy of commitment to its topic and an, as it were, writerly charm that carried me easily all the way through it.

In a sense saying so touches on a larger issue with respect to my bailiwick, academic literary criticism. I have read and continue to read a lot of this, as you'd expect (I write quite a lot of it too) and I have to say, by bulk, the vast majority of it is balefully badly written. The badness comes in two main flavours: the energy-vampire boring kind and the rebarbatively difficult kind. Where the first of these flavours is concerned, there is simply no excuse. The deplorable truth is that many professional academics, including actual colleagues and friends of mine, just aren't interested in writing as a craft. The second flavour is trickier to account for, I think—you know what I'm talking about: that brand of lit-crit in which the prose is turgidly baroque and thorny with neologisms. Two rationales for this style are sometimes floated. One is: ‘it's just a professional jargon; you wouldn't expect to pick up a work of advanced mathematics or science or whanot and expect to be able to read it easily, now, would you?’ The other is slightly more seductive, along the lines of: ‘the critical-theoretical concepts with which I am wrestling are inherently tangled and complex and it would misrepresent them to talk about them with simplicity and clarity of style.’ The first of these justifications has never convinced me, I'll be honest. Literary critics are in the business of elucidating and contextualising great literature, and some of this literature is baffling (in which case it behooves us to de-baffle it somewhat) where most of it is eloquent and penetrating (in which case it certainly behooves us not to insert bafflement of our own). Besides, the ‘this is how they write science!’ defence won't wash. Origin of Species is beautifully written, every sentence clear as the song of a rimrubbed wineglass, and it's one of the most influential works of science ever published.

It's taken me longer to come to terms with my dislike of the second justification, the Derridean or Jamesonian one. The truth is that, though I've flirted with it in the past, nowadays it strikes me as simply a mode of intellectual narcissism. There are tens of thousands of salaried literary critics in the world whose job entails teaching students, doing admin and communicating with readers about literature. Cultural historians looking back on the history of lit-crit over the last forty years or so will surely scratch their heads as to why so many of us manifested such a precipitous retreat from this last charge, scampering away into thickets of obscurity and onano-referentiality. Still here we are.

I mention this only to note that it is possible to write literary history and literary criticsm well—elegantly, clearly, resonantly; and this book, vividly and clearly written throughout, is a case in point. Whatever issues I have with Nicolson's critical-theoretical approach, I can't argue with his elegance of expression.

The Making of Poetry is at its best as an account of the social and topographical contexts out of which the Lyrical Ballads volume was produced.  Nicolson is particularly excellent on the poverty of that war-drained and starving decade. He knows how to select telling details to bring it home to his readers (that, say, people would creep into farmers' fields in the dead of night and surreptitiously milk the cows there, so starving they were). He's also good on how the landscapes of this corner of Somerset are variegated according to a verticalising logic: how quickly a path will plunge into a humidly overgrown valley, or rise to a barer eminence from which the sea is gloriously visible. And he knows his onions when it comes to the exigences of day-to-day life of his subjects:
You could buy opium in all kinds of preparations: mixed with honey, as an electuary, meaning “something to be licked up”; powdered with chalk; sugared as an opiate confection; mixed with soap; in a liquorice lozenge or troche; in vinegar or wine; as a suppository or enema; as a plaster or embrocation; or, most popularly of all, dissolved in alcohol as laudanum, a name given it in the sixteenth century and meaning “the thing to be praised” because it was so effective at relieving pain and distress. Infants were often given Godfrey's Coridal (also called The Mother's Friend), a mixture of opium, water and treacle, to keep them quiet. In some places opium was added to the beer. [144]
A nation of heroin users! This, you can probably guess, is Nicolson setting the scene for Coleridge writing ‘Kubla Khan’, a section of his book that I especially enjoyed. At some point in the autumn, ‘perhaps early in October’, Coleridge left wife and kids at home and went walking: ‘it was for a few days, heading west, out past Williton and down into Watchet, into the thick drooping, wooded, coastal hills on the borders with Devon’ [139]. But Coleridge's perambulations were interrupted by a dose of ‘dysentery’, and he holed up somewhere in the tiny village of Culbone, where he took a slug of opium to deal with his diarrhoea, blissed out for a while, and returned to consciousness with (as he so famously claimed) ‘Kubla Khan’ fully formed in his head.

Nicolson retraces these steps. ‘Upstream from [Culbone] church,’ he tells us, ‘three or four farms claim to be the place’ where ‘Kubla Khan was written’:
Most think it might have been Ash Farm, perhaps only because it seems to look as such a place might look. Some think Parsonage Farm—but would the parson have taken him in? Few claim Silcombe Farm. Mr R J Richards, who is the fourth generation of Richardses to farm there, and all of whose ancestors are buried in Culbone's tiny streamside churchyard, thinks Coleridge wouldn't have come so far. ‘If he was ill he would have gone to the nearest and the most likely spot, to my mind,’ he told me over the farm wall. ‘That's a place that is no longer there. Withycombe. There is a pond there. Every house has a pond.’

Half a mile along the lane from Silcombe, the little valley of Withycombe itself is a steep cut into the shore-facing hill. Just down from the gate off the lane is a flattened spot which is, I guess, where the house once stood. Ground ivy now covers the grass there. ... The water of the Withycombe stream still bubbles through that abandoned place. The stone dam across the stream, built to make the pond, is still there, but broken, so that the stream now runs over the flat and nettly bed of what was once the pond. On its edge, an enormous oak, undoubtedly growing when Coleridge was here, is now encrusted and burdened with ivy. Limbs of fallen ashes now block the paths so that Withycombe now is buried in space as much as time, occupied on this late autumn afternoon only by two old ewes. Bumblebees drift down on the wind. [143]
‘This is where Coleridge in his illness had written the great fragment,’ Nicolson says. I've quoted, here, at some length to give a flavour of the book's style. Much of it is like this: rich and evocative if a little fruitily-written.

Still, if Nicolson is expert at staging his scenes, his literary critical skills are thinner. It is perhaps inevitable, give his larger approach, that Nicolson's accounts of the poems themselves will revert to a kind of biographical criticism. It's a rather reductive way of reading texts, I feel, but there you go. The take-away from The Making of Poetry is its subjects' ‘intuitive genius’ and ‘supreme awareness’: Coleridge's ‘subtilising mind, inescapable complexity and genius’ [170] and Wordsworth's ‘grandeur’, ‘great and lonely soul’ [230] and ‘poetic gift’ [262]. Wimsatt and Beardsley eat your hearts out. These kinds of judgment get iterated and reiterated throughout (with his ‘subtilising mind’ Coleridge ‘was not a simple man’ [270]; Wordsworth ‘is above the world of flux ... the whole of being, the giant self-fertilising’ [312-6]) and whilst this certainly indexes Nicolson's enthusiasm and love for his topic, it also blunts specificity, drags attention from text back to (Barthesian) dead authors. To an extent it even creates a flattening, even cartoony sense of the two men: Wordsworth deep, Coleride complex; Wordsworth profound, Coleridge restless, and so on. At one point, 21st-century Nicolson, shadowing the routes taken by his subjects two centuries earlier, starts literally to somaticise their physical symptoms like some kind of spirit medium. Reading the drafts in Wordsworth's notebooks and ‘the fugutive thoughts, moments of vision and impossible schemes in Coleridge's’
... my body, to my surprise, also started to fill with those pains, in my back and legs, tightening across my chest, numbing one arm or another, and sometimes so severe that after an hour or so I could not stand up from the chair and desk at which I had been sitting. [181]
‘It was,’ he helpfully adds, ‘psychosomatic’ (‘once I had stood up and left the house in Adscombe, it could be cured by walking’). But it figures in the book, really, as something spookier than that, a kind of daemonic possession whereby Wordsworthian poetry about
                          the obstinate pains
an uneasy spirit, [that] with a force
Inexorable would from hour to hour
For ever summon my exhausted mind
glides down the centuries and sheathes its claws in Nicolson's own muscles. I don't doubt the simple veracity of his account, of course. But as a reading of Wordsworth and Coleridge it muddies aesthetic analysis with a kind of psycho-superstition that seems to me, in the end, more belittling than anything. Perhaps that's inevitable in this mode of celebrity historicising. I don't know.

At any rate, as a literary critic, a couple of Nicolson's readings perhaps knock their heads against the ceiling of credulity a little: as when he suggests, as a key to unlocking ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’, that ‘the friendship and brotherhood between Coleridge and Wordsworth find its reflection in the friendship and brotherhood of mariner and albatross’ [165]. Other judgments inhabit a mode of sometimes vatic tautological-ness. Of Coleridge's ‘Eolian Harp’ we're told ‘the wavering wind-songs of the Aeolian Harp could soothe and seduce the mind’ [85], a line whose nice alliteration compensates a little for its analytic emptiness. ‘Tintern Abbey’, Nicolson tells us, is a ‘triumph’ and ‘represent[s] one of the great moments of human consciousness’ [316] which is fine and lovely and not even necessarily wrong, but doesn't do much to actually unpack the poem.

But The Making of Poetry, despite its title, isn't really a work of literary criticism. If we read the title as implying a question (‘how is it that poetry gets made?’) Nicolson's answer is, nutshell-wise: ‘a couple of great poetic masters really inhabit a particular landscape’. A magnificent nature-writing blankness repels any more analytic interrogation of the wellsprings of creativity. Indeed, there are moments in this book when I found my brow wrinkling at Nicolson's implied model of poetic creativity. One example: ‘for poetry to surface [for Wordsworth] it had first to pass through the great digestive organ of his mind’ [183]. I find the notion of Wordsworthian mental lower-bowel a little ... uhm.

For all that, I liked this book a lot. Quite apart from anything, there's a commendable chutzpah in the enthusiasm with which Nicolson's jogs alongside his subjects, both physically and writerishly. The Making of Poetry quotes generously from the poetry and prose of Coleridge and Wordsworth, plus chunks of Dorothy. To read Nicolson's anthology is to be struck again and again just how extraordinarily good these geezers were at the writing lark, and so to align oneself with Nicolson's ubiquitous praise. And here, Nicolson offers his own:
Walking westward is a walk towards wildness. As you move into the woods and up on to the rough brown open-weave spaces of Exmoor, the Quantocks start to seem smaller and more ordinary by comparison, a gentler younger brother of this big moory expanse on the fringes of Devon, On this path now, high on the broken cliffs, the scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze across the brown and turgid sea. The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as a ploughed field. The path plunges on, up over the rounded thighs of each valley, slipping into the declivities, down into the ferny damp of the streams running off Exmoor, up again to the sound of the sea that rises from the surf breaking miles away in a constant single outbreath from below. [141]
This isn't bad writing, by any means. Indeed it's very nice, evocative and a pleasure to read. And rather like Nicolson finding himself mystically channelling Wordsworth's sore back and Coleridge's various neuralgic twinges, he is here, wittingly or otherwise, blocking out rough-edged blank verse:
On this path now, high on the broken cliffs,
The scale changes. Islands of shadow breeze
Across the brown and turgid sea of life.
The Bristol Channel looks as earthy as
A well-ploughed field. The path plunges on, up.
Over the rounded thighs of each valley
Down into the ferny damp of the streams
Running off Exmoor, and up again to (the)
Sound of the sea that rises from the surf
Breaking miles away ...
... and so on. Credit to Nicolson for the courage in going for it at all. It makes his book stand splendidly out, brightly coloured in an ocean of prose-grey.

And to finish on a note of praise, Nicolson's account of the actual product of this ‘great year’ (‘product’ is too instrumentalising a term, but you know what I mean): the Lyrical Ballads volume itself, is very good, and particularly good on Wordsworth's contributions. It is still a boggling set of poems, really: not so much the fantastical or metaphysical Gothicism of ‘Ancient Mariner’, or the more elevated philosophic versifying of ‘Tintern Abbey’, but those characteristically crudified ballads of the poor and dispossessed, the elderly and broken-down, the mothers with their idiot children and murdered babies. Nicolson thinks of them as some of the greatest achievements in poetry not despite but because of their crudity, or say rather because of their bold, expressive, affectively complex simplifications (if that doesn't look too contradictory).

This aspect of Wordsworth has been very often dismissed, of course; and has even been actively mocked and parodied. Bravely Nicolson spends a long time on, and makes the case for the greatness of, ‘The Thorn’. The occasion for this long ballad is an actual thorn tree, old and twisted, that Wordsworth and Dorothy often passed. The story goes that a young woman, Martha Ray, was once seduced and abandoned by her lover Stephen Hill; that she gave birth to a child, murdered it and buried its corpse by this tree, which place she afterwards returned to over and over in guilt and despair. Indeed, says the story, the ghost of this child can be seen by those capable of seeing it. As Nicolson notes, it is ‘the archetypal lyrical ballad, fringing at its edges into the beautiful and the troubling, but also into the ridiculous, repetitive and loquacious.’ This is the poem in which are to be found Wordsworth's most notorious lines, a couplet of such bathetic badness it is given pride of place in The Stuffed Owl.
Not five yards from the mountain-path,
This thorn you on your left espy;
And to the left, three yards beyond,
You see a little muddy pond
Of water, never dry;
I’ve measured it from side to side:
’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide.
‘His most infamous lines,’ laments Nicolson of that last couplet. Not just bad but hilariously so. Can they be defended? ‘I have spent so long with Wordsworth,’ Nicolson says, ‘that I have come to think of him as a friend who makes mistakes, and for whom things have a way of coming out wrong, but whom I trust and admire for his other qualities.’ He adds: ‘I want to maintain that this childlike simplification of his language, for all its ridiculousness, opens a door into the heart of the poem.’
“But what’s the thorn? and what’s the pond?
“And what’s the hill of moss to her?
“And what’s the creeping breeze that comes
“The little pond to stir?”
I cannot tell; but some will say
She hanged her baby on the tree,
Some say she drowned it in the pond,
Which is a little step beyond,
But all and each agree,
The little babe was buried there,
Beneath that hill of moss so fair.
This simplicity is by turns, and sometimes at once, beautifully penetrating and ridiculously clumsy, and that, Nicolson powerfully argues, is the point.
Ludicrous or tragic, beautiful or absurd, perceptive or superstitious, ‘The Thorn’ is a transcription of the kind of suffering that was everywhere in the England of the late 1790s, and of the frame of mind that attempts or fails to understand that suffering. The poem is an act of empathy. The people of the village are muttering about Martha, as they did of Wordsworth and his family. Their gossip is a means of exclusion. Wordsworth has renounced his membership of that gossiping world, dropped all pretence at decorum and left behind the assumptions of privilege. He now inhabits the voice of the woman for whom he is demanding understanding from his readers. That is the act of courage represented by ‘The Thorn’: the daring to be absurd because the absurd is close to the bereft. And, in that, the poem makes one giant claim: the point of poetry is not beauty but truth, and if truth is awkward and uncertain then poetry should be like that too. [Nicolson, Making of Poetry, 263-4]
This is superbly well-put, I think; and whatever reservations I may have about some of the other bits of Nicolson's critical engagement, he is simply brilliant in his account of the sheer strangeness of these seemingly simple poems: the magazines of the time were, he says, ‘full of poems about the poor, the abused and the deranged, suffering the battery of life itself, but none had been as linguistically radical as what Wordsworth would now write.’ As he notes, poem after poem provides the reader with ‘no destination, but a kind of retraction from reliability’:
Extraordinarily, these poems remain as strange now as when they were written: intractable, uncomfortable, indefinable, unsettling and uncertain, repeatedly motivated by the double negative that lay somewhere near the centre of Wordsworth's own mind. Are the stories they tell true or untrue? Or not untrue? They often seem impossible, but are they not also not unimpossible? Do they matter? Are they about anything at all? Are the tellers of the tales trustworthy, or maybe simply not untrustworthy? Where are the truths they seem to orbit around?
Nicolson is quite right, I think, about how even today these poems retain their power of sheer unsettling oddness of eloquence. Powerful stuff.