8 NOVEMBER 1975, Page 16

Hysterics

Peter Washington

The Apeman Cometh Adrian Mitchell (Jonathan Cape £2.50)

The Best of Henri Adrian Henri (Jonathan Cape £2.50) Living In A Calm Country Peter Porte; (Oxford University Press £1.50) Laboratories of the Spirit R. S. Thomas (Macmillan £2.25)

While the rest of us get on with 1975, Adrian Mitchell remains hopelessly stranded somewhere in the mid 'sixties. Unable to wait for the certain sentence of posterity he is taking his revenge now by making a fool of the present. Here is a new book discrediting his causes with all the loud irrelevance of a heckler at the wrong political meeting. He cultivates the Victorian virtues of cosy sentiment and righteous indignation, bellowing and whining by turns and neatly combining both tones in a silly poem called 'Ceasefire':

We have a choice—

Either to choke to death on our own vomit or to become one with the sweet sun which blesses all the world.

To be fair: Mr Mitchell is sometimes quite funny when he isn't wallowing in slop and rectitude. Adrian Henri is merely embarrassing — like the stand-up comic whose act falls flat. How just it is that all the cant about writing for "the people" should come to this: pretentious, smug, and arty beyond all dreams of nightingales and green carnations. Who else could dedicate a poem to "Jim Dine and Ch. (sic) Baudelaire"? These children of the over-rated Rimbaud must have that master turning in his grave as they substitute their lists of smart names and references to knickers for his dedication to a brief and arduous art.

Henri and MitclieIl commit the tiltimat crime: they are boring — boring because of a concentration on surface and gesture that must end in the tawdry. Knowing nothing of form they must be circumstantial. But if a thing is to live it must have its element: for papers this is oblivion, for poetry time. The poet deals with that which endures; he loves what is essential. He entertains — but he goes on entertaining. Which brings me to R. S. Thomas.

His new book has that rare combination of personal honesty and high artistic achievement which isn't so common: even the best "confessional" verse is, by its nature, often more than a little dishonest. And a poetry which consists so largely of statement refuses critical comment. Insofar as Thomas's book has a dominating theme it is formulated at once in the opening lines: Not as in the old days I pray, God. My life is not what it was.

The style says everything here, its sparseness allowing every nuance to register. The poet speaks of himself but he addresses his maker — and God the Creator plays the largest role in this book. When Thomas mentions a place explaining that: I often call there.

There are no poems in it for me. The statement bears its weight of meaning exactly; in a brief poem we learn about a whole way of responding. Everything holds — evil is not outside, it is part: There is no meaning in life, Unless men can be found to reject love. However we feel about Thomas's version of it, we recognise a central truth in his work: that life, however appalling is whole, is unified. It is just this that's missing in Mitchell and Henri; they isolate things, especially emotions, separating love from hatred, for instance, and degrading it into sentiment, tears about children etc. Thomas, a dark man in a dark world, could never indulge himself in this way. His is a marvellous book.

Peter Porter is a fine poet in a different mode. Where Thomas is bare, unadorned, Porter is riotous, prolific. Fond of baroque, he is really a mannerist — that style which isn't a style but a near-chaos of old habits and new fashions fighting for life in an attempt at glory. He often refers to the period: Perhaps it did happen, the Renaissance, when even the maggots had humanist leanings.

It isn't that Porter sees the worm in every apple: for him having worms is all a part of being such fruit. In the same poem he calls it the "central unfairness." In others he takes this further: is it, he asks, essential to have an apple to be a respectable worm? Yes the two are inseparable: as unlikely the worm without edible home as the man without a world.

And a world is what he wants. Brilliant, sombre and always almost excessive, he wanders through gardens and dreams countries, the past, death and books, making each his own for a moment and looking for somewhere to stop:

The permanently upright city where

Speech is nature and plants conceive in pots, Where one escapes from what one is and who One was, where home is just a postmark

And country wisdom clings to calendars, The opposite of a sunburned truth-teller's

World, haunted by precepts and the Pleiades. Porter's quick intelligence, delighting in contrast, plays over the surfaces where "pain clings": resolving not into sureness but firm statements of doubt. Grotesque and Roman by turns, his style can now mock itself — as in 'Baroque Quatrains.' This is important: Porter must transcend his new Elizabethanism if he is to sustain his work at the high level it sometimes reaches in this book.

The blurb says that this is a book about landscapes. It is — not only of place and body, but even more crucially of time and books. A middle-aged man in a dying culture, Porter's "true and disciplined despair" takes fire from precision about date and place. The two become one:

The heart of the storm is now.

as he puts it. And he ranges his various gods about him: literary — Eliot, Stevens, Auden and others are quoted and alluded to — and the other gods of antiquity. At first I was doubtful of them: like the creaking deities in the Augustan poetic machine they did their jobs, I thought, at the expense of all credibility. But re-reading brought illumination. In 'Good Vibes' the poet says that To have trod on ground in happiness Is to be shaken by the true immortals.

Here is a clue: another poet is coming to terms with his world — which is not bereft of gods: they simply demand a whole new language to capture them in and make their existence real to us. Without our perceptions, they do not live or care. They are ourselves.