Grand manners
Peter Washington
Primal Vision. Selected Writings Gottfried Benn (Marion Boyars £6.50) Man is the animal who questions his own existence; that is the proposition to which Gottfried Benn devoted his whole life's work (he died in 1956), and it is an attitude which invariably confers upon the artist a place of the highest honour among men. Benn accepted this place, and it is his recognition of the artist's peculiar significance that gives his work that mixture of egoism and ecstacy, personal disgust and weltschnierz. It is for this reason, too, that he has not been popular in this country. The English are both too stupid and too clever to warm to such writers: too stupid, because they are frightened of the rhetoric, that grand lyrical manner which is so remote from the domestic, rational virtues which we cultivate here. And too clever for the same reasons—we may find Benn primitive, noisy vulgar and politically naïve. So we mistrust his `pseudo-scientific' language: such things, we feel, should be left to experts; art and science do not mix.
This is precisely what Benn refused to believe. Even in his novels, the characters are constantly speculating about ideas in a way that has nothing to do with traditional fiction; the ideas transcend the narrative. But Benn's verse, though always vivid, is too often merely meretricious. It must be said that the selection printed here does not show him at his best : there should be more from the poetry of his maturity and old age. However, the translations are generally good precisely because they show up the poet's failings as well as his virtues: the gratuitous violence, for example, which must be more exciting in German, a language more bound by conventions than English. They also suggest that behind the violence and the 'modernism' there is a relatively conventional German lyric poet in the tradition of Meirike.
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