BOOKS
Society of dead poets and others
Peter Levi
HISTORY: THE HOME MOVIE by Craig Raine Penguin, £18, pp. 334 This is a poem which somewhat discon- tinuonsly tells a story: not by any means the history of the modern world or of Europe, as we are told on the cover, but a long series of brief flashes or vignettes of the author's family and his wife's. It is no sur- prise to hear that the huge accumulation has taken ten years growing, but essentially it is a kind of snapshot album, the mysteri- ous and allusive musings of a poet; not short stories and above all not a novel. It is the remarkable concretion or crystallisation of the family mythology of one household. We are warned that the characters are not like any real characters, but certain resem- blances do exist, and others may be inferred, though even at its best it is never a reliable guide to what really happened. Families do mythologise their past and the past of their parents, and in this case the process goes back only to 1908. But the result is unique because of the poet's treat- ment of the texture of reality, in which masturbation is as frequent as the flowers in May, failing as common as the buzzing of bees, and the most gruesome fisticuffs occur.
The mythology has clustered around the fact that Craig Raine married Ann Paster- nak Slater in 1972, which coupled his own mythology with whatever she inherited in that line from Lydia Pasternak, her mother, from her mother's parents, a famous painter and a pianist who had played for Tolstoy, her husband an Oxford psychia- trist of whom she took a dim view, and her brother Boris Pasternak, the poet. Craig Raine I have known and greatly liked since he was a schoolboy at school at Barnard Castle, between the most terrifying moors in England and the Durham coalfields, not far from the original model of Dotheboys Hall, and later at Oxford. They are both now fellows of colleges, they have a lot of children and he has been a director of Faber's, much envied by - his contempo- raries.
The fact that in this world of verse no one behaves well and the life of all the characters is either contemptible or terrify- ing has nothing to do with their originals, but everything to do with poetry. It must be understood that Craig Raine is the most gripping and powerful poet now writing in English. He makes John Berryman look bourgeois and James Fenton look pale and refined. The future of English poetry, if this book does not come to seem an aber- ration, has me worried. As a writer his con- trol is brilliant, and in this carefully calculated outpouring he lets loose all his talent. There has been nothing quite like it since the satires of Donne, to use a remote
analogy, and equally with them it is almost unreadable, at least if it is read complete and under pressure of time. For all his majesty and authority, I do think Donne's satires were a kind of aberration; I more often reread his sermons. However that may be, History: The Home. Movie is too original, possibly too fragmentary to be a novel in verse, which the poet calls it, but it is a work sizzling with a kind of realism.
At least it is what gets called realism today: I do not think the stories really hap- pened, or if they did then not quite as they are written. In the case of Boris Pasternak, this book is more romantic and less reliable than its sources. Mrs Mandelstam in 1972 sounds right, but I do not know whether the English poet ever met her. The jealousy over Boris Pastemak's relation with Renate, his German friend, may be true, but the burning of letters 'demanding recognition' is a story that needs amplify- ing, and it seems a pity that the long con- versation with Mandelstam, while train after train went by, should be given to someone else. The sexual affair with Tsve- tayeva in France must be guesswork and should have been cut.
Into Craig Raine's own family history an amazing number of murders intrude. Sometimes they seem to be dragged in only to cheer things up. It seeins unlikely, for instance, that the head porter of, was it University College?, who pops up as a wit- ness at Yusupov's libel case over a film 'Is it true that masturbation makes you see?' about the murder of Rasputin, was really Henry Raine and a kinsman; without him the story is quite unanchored. Come to that, the encounter of one young character with Yeats seems unlikely too. But no doubt either could be true, and that is all the excuse needed in a string of episodes. Still, I must reiterate that it does not add up to 'an epic history of Europe', a phrase for which Craig Raine may not be responsi- ble. On the credit side, the poet has never been in better form as a Martian: trout breathe like tweezers, a rusty can is raising its hat, gunfire pops like fat, the moon is a thin slice of radish, though 'Every armpit a sodden saltmine' seems overdoing it for a Russian tram. Otto Spek, a concierge, tilts back his head, producing a paunch on the neck of his shirt.
He takes a Josephine Baker and rogers it briskly with a match in the rear before lighting up and suckling the smoke.
The book consists of 87 sections or chap- ters of verse, all divided into threes and some of them rather long. As a narrative medium the verse works, or can at its best work, extremely well. It would not work if it were written out as prose, or if the prose rhythms were really overriding, as in this brief extract they may appear to be. The lines occasionally wander off into German, but luckily not into Russian, though once or twice I suspected Yiddish. Pasternak's sisters were certainly an amazing couple of old ladies. There is a sense in which Craig Raine has done the family proud, though I am not so sure about his own family, but in another sense he has simply perched like a cuckoo in this poem in everyone's nest, but that surely is what poets always do. In some of the sections he seems to know more about psychiatry than is good for him as a .poet. But he is incomparably able in reduc- ing all his material to his own unmistakable poetry. Are there judges tough enough to give him a prize?
On the other hand, toughness is the trou- ble. To write verse in this way, which hardly anyone can do, the other Martians being after all essentially aesthetes, you have to suppress an entire range of tones or feel- ings, and you are likely to end up overplay- ing the obscene or the distasteful. They are off-putting and they can be boring, surely? Fenton has a wider range of tone I think, and Ted Hughes has a broader spectrum of material: why extend the list? And still, this is wonderful verse and a wonderful poem.
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