Growler
Peter Levi
The Private Art (Allison & Busby £9.95)
Collected Poems 1963-1980 (Allison & Busby £9.95)
Blessings, Kicks and Curses (Allison & Busby £9.95) Geoffrey Grigson
pu,blishing three books at once is a chal- Criplerige to public attention. If Geoffrey lat "1.3," were less furious and less particu- and,e would be a Grand Old Man by now, seri n is certainly time that we all took read°1-Is notice of him. His criticism is more reZhle than that of any other living DleLwer, his poetry notebook gives the—I-Ire after pleasure; among his poems, reek translations from Ronsard and from 1toh, ePigrams are as good as any verse Die;,.slati°os of the last 200 years. He gets Neas-Aire, he shows pleasure, he gives eiiiiv tire. But not all of the malice which so or e,ells his verse and his prose is amusing booi"ever or quite sane. Living with his "s is like Cotswold weather; on a bad is :sne can see nothing and the only smell ttay-Zbages, it is intensely dull. On a good and ":e sky is vast and thrilling, the air pure Ore lull of scents, but one may get a , 1,11,eh1ng before dusk. fur -13 Much highbrow integrity may be bad truth a Critic, too much empirical sensory ttki, In, aY be bad for a poet. Why be so Doti aloout Eliot's religion, about Pound's to rrY, about Lowell's poetry? Why reprint
ce an attack on Day Lewis at this time
of day? The old growls about Maurice Bowra and Edith Sitwell and Cyril Connol- ly are fair enough in the sense of being ex- pected; we all know how that generation hated one another. Some of the new growls are well worth having. The best in prose is a deadly and hilariously funny onslaught on Donald Davie, which John Gross refused to print in the Times Literary Supplement. All the same, one can have too much growling. Grigson moans even over Larkin. He reserves his love for the poets of nature: Wordsworth, Clare, Barnes, Gurney,
Basho. His best weapon as a critic, both friendly and unfriendly, is a power of quotation. There is no doubt of his genuineness, of his eye and his ear. One would like to say the centre of his lifework has been his own poetry; he is surely a genuine poet, and perhaps if this collection were pruned, he would appear more impressively.
As it is, one must pick about for the good poems, for what is alive, among duller, deader pieces. The most convincing of the three books is his poetry notebook. Is that because the pricks and shin-hacks elsewhere are deliberate, a kind. of showing off, but the notebook was private, tranquil, virt- uous? It does resound with a few growls, all the same. Geoffrey Grigson has an authenticity no writer can command; it is a personal quality. Whatever is wrong with his poems, or some of them, is wrong with him. Criticism of so honest a poet is bound, therefore, to seem personal.
It all makes him far more interesting, more up and down and more amusing to read than anyone since Auden. Did the mantle of Wyndham Lewis possibly fall with blighting effect on the young Grigson? Did the free air of the Twenties intoxicate him? Is he being, so to speak, loyal to the principles of his sixth form or his university days? But he is far too grown up in other ways, and always has been, to be im- aginable as a student. The only youthful weakness he admits to is a fondness for James Elroy Flecker whose verse he shows, in a diabolically persuasive piece, would sound wonderful in French. Grigson fulfils perfectly the most important function of a critic even if he muffs some of the others. That is, he extends the reader's range and understanding, he shows one new things, he points to what is alive. So I could hardly bear it if I found myself quite unable to praise him as a poet; it would be too mean. Nor do I believe the muses ever lavish such gifts as his on any mere critic. He seems to be really in love with the earth, a condition he attributes elsewhere to Herbert and Hopkins. Fresh nettles smell to him like the sweat of Young girls and wood anemones like aestuous women. I like that in him. Sometimes my ear fails to detect his rhythms. At other times I hear them. For some reason I prefer the simpler poems of perfectly coherent feeling to any others. This, on Sea Water, for example: The property of sea water is colour, Let its blue become rather more blue Than light blue. Then let it spread Shallowly over light and extensive sand Into selected bays Making it green, but with blue still as neighbour.
I speak of sea water As not too cold anklet-water, not too cold Thigh-water as well.
I speak of it also as that On which reflections rarely may undistorted float Before darkness puts colour out.
This is not pretentious poetry, but it is not as easy as it may look. It moves beautifully and purely. In other poems, thoughts or phrases may so clash that they cancel one another and die. But here is a rhythm, and a not uncomplicated thought, that one can follow.
These Collected Poems are not to be dismissed. What haunts them is something stronger than that old ghost of poetry, the critic as poet. His muse recurs continually, she is very much alive. One would have known even from the meanest of the reviews, through innumerable phrases and above all through the power of quotation, that Grigson really is what he claims to be, the poet as critic, a rather rare bird. If he has been scarred by pre-war literary squab- bles, or perhaps more deeply by his sense of religion without faith, being a Cornish Vicar's son discernibly in his writing to this day, that is a pity, but it makes him all the more readable.
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