The faint odium of official disfavour
John Whitworth
LIFE BY OTHER MEANS: ESSAYS ON D.J. ENRIGHT edited by Jacqueline Simms OUP, f15, pp.208 SELECTED POEMS 1990 by D.J. Enright OUP, f6.95, pp.176 What is the sociological import of the literary fashion for initials instead of Christian names and was the simultaneity of its decline with that of the army-style male haircut accidental? Though D.J. En- right was coralled into the Movement (Larkin's lot), he seems to belong, along with those initials, to something earlier; his politics are wrong (liberal), his verse is free and quite a lot of the poems are about abroad, Egypt, Japan and Singapore; this put me off them when I was younger and found the railway journey from Edinburgh to the south of England quite as far abroad as I wanted to contemplate.
His early career as a 'mendicant profes- sor' of English Literature, spreading Arnoldian sweetness and light rather than selling English Language by the yard (as I did), similarly dates him. The clash of old and new came in 1960 when Enright, unwise enough to suppose that academic freedom meant he could say what he thought, used his inaugural lecture at the University of Malaya to condemn the efforts of politicians to spread a spurious national identity like margarine. He used the term 'sarong culture', offensively pre- cise, and nearly lost his work permit. A government minister in a splenetic letter suggested that mendicant professors who want to continue to receive their pay cheques should refrain from insolent med- dling; he, at least, sounds thoroughly up-to-date. But in all fairness it must be conceded that Enright kept his post for ten years, though 'in the faint odium of official disfavour'. It is not unhealthy that profes- sorships should be held on such terms. Though these essays for Enright's 70th birthday are in general anecdotal (the ones I like best; his after-dinner habit of dancing a fandango with Gavin Young is appealing) or celebratory; I do detect a similar faint odium attaching itself to his poetic reputa- tion. Jacqueline Simms puts it most bluntly by wondering whether he is really a poet at all, or saying that others wonder, and Donald Davie, on his high horse rather, concludes that a good deal of it isn't. In which conclusion, though reached by a different route, would concur, say, the editor of The Literary Review and many of my adult education students. Is this the tongue that Shakespeare spoke? It doesn't rhyme or scan so as you would notice, is weak on jewelled adjectives, Shelleyan uplift or even Larkin's big finishes. These are not necessarily unworthy objections, though Enright has his answer, typically oblique and sardonic.
As Leverkuhn began his last address To the cultivated ladies and gentlemen There assembled, They were highly bewildered.
Till one of them cried, 'Why, it is poetry! One is hearing poetry!' Thus relieving them all immensely.
I find this very telling. The idea that a poet, say Pound, say MacDiarmid, can put for- ward repulsive ideas as a kind of all- licensed fool who says odd things in odd language is worse, for art at least if not for the poet, than any amount of official odium. What one likes about Enright is that, like the old lady in Trollope, when he says cork soles he means cork soles. I think (as Davie does not) that The Terrible Shears: Scenes from a Twenties Childhood works very well. It could be dangerous territory — all that warmth, real life and agglutinative rhetoric of class solidarity, an amalgam of Dylan Thomas's horrid A Child's Christmas in Wales and Arthur Scargill — but what David Ellis, in a neat essay, calls Enright's 'linguistic puritan- ism', his 'rigorous laconic manner' comes to the rescue. I would say further that it is poetry itself, always rigorous, that comes to the rescue. Think of Dylan Thomas's own 'Fern Hill' purged of the ethnic comfiness through all those drafts to some- thing transparent and universal.
But can Enright do that? Well, no he can't; the hallucinatory, the incantatory is not what he does. Though he likes alcohol and has liked opium he does not want to be mad. His is a poetry of flashes, of single lines. A poem called 'Whatever Sex Was' begins:
It was the two sisters next door Quarrelling over their husband, or Their drunken husband punching them.
It moves through language well-drilled and witty to this, surely poetic, conclusion:
It was crying, or it was silence.
Whatever sex was, it was another enemy.
It is a bleak poetry though, kind but desolate, beautiful, sparse and let us hope as devoutly as we can that it isn't true.
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