You are old, Father Enoch

A. N. Wilson

ENOCH POWELL: COLLECTED POEMS

Bellew Publishing, f9.95, pp. 198

Walter Hamilton, my old headmas- ter, always used to say that by far the cleverest man he ever taught at Cam- bridge, when he was a Trinity don, was Enoch Powell. By 'clever', I suppose Dr Hamilton meant clever at Greek, of which Enoch Powell became a Professor at the age of 25. His Cambridge hero was, as he has often averred, A. E. Housman, and in his early poems, the voice of Housman is strong.

The years that took my youth away, They brought to me instead The hunger that from day to day On other youth is fed.

But other youth, past saving, Grows old before my eyes, And young is still my craving And still for youth it cries.

So I in young and younger Must seek my youth in vain; For time that brought this hunger Takes not away its pain.

Had Mr Powell continued in academic life, it is possible to imagine his more favoured pupils saying to one another as they watched his old-fashioned and puncti- lious figure making its way through the courts and cloisters of Trinity, 'Powell used to write verses, you know.' They are precisely the sort of poems you would expect from a Classics don of this type: well-formed, archaic, emotional and con- tained. Their subject matter is that of all traditional European poetry — love and death, nature and patriotism. Those, like the editor of The Literary Review who `Have you met my ex-wife?' prefer poetry to rhyme and scan, will find little to complain about in this collection. The English landscape, young lads slain in war, Homer and Wagner all inspire him. Except in those poems with a date at the top of them, such as 'Mandalay 1945' there is no evidence in this volume that the mid- to-late-20th century has happened at all. An intelligent student, presented with these poems 'blind', would guess that they were the work of a minor versifier of the 1910 vintage.

But Mr Powell, as we all know, did not remain a Professor of Greek for long. He returned to England from Sydney upon the outbreak of war, enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment, rose to the rank of Brigadier, and then, after the war, joined the Conservative Party and awaited his country's call.

I piped, and they would follow At hearing of the sound From field and heath and hollow And all the country round.

I cared not where the road led Nor understood the strain But still my only care was To pipe and pipe again. Alas! Long since afar off I glimpsed the distant goal; Long since the music's meaning Has sunk into my soul.

But still from heath and hollow To warn is wasted breath - They hear my pipe and follow Along the road to death.

This essentially tragic vision of England, and of his own destiny as a Cassandra in the political realm, evidently informs most of Mr Powell's utterances. He tells us in a curious Postscript to the book of verse: For close on 40 years, I was to harangue, lecture, cajole, admonish my fellow- countrymen. In all the vicissitudes through which life led me, my discourse obeyed an imperative necessity to speak. That I was heard by many there seems sufficient evi- dence to believe. If so, it was an ex-poet whom my fellow-countrymen still today, more fitfully, hear admonishing them still.

A visit to Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park will provide the interested observer with plenty of specimens of wild-eyed prophets of doom led by similar compulsions. The difference between these soap-box Cassan- dras differs not so much in what they say as in their level of intelligence. I believe it when people like my old headmaster tell me that Mr Powell is clever. If so, how- ever, he must be the supreme example of that character-flaw, so common among the clever, of perverseness. He shies away from common sense as a wild beast shuns fire. He instinctively rejects the obvious explanation for anything, and it is this, surely, which has led to his very distinctive assembly of well-aired opinions. There is overwhelming evidence that William Shakespeare was an extremely successful • actor and dramatist, so of course Mr Powell joins the brigade who think that the plays were written by the Earl of Oxford. Most New Testament scholars think, on balance, that St Mark's was the earliest gospel; so Mr Powell settles down to write a work of immense erudition to prove that the first gospel was that of St Matthew. This habit of mind leads to many of his celebrated political opinions: the sugges- tion, for example, that the Russians and the English are natural allies because they both have an Established Church, or the dark hint that Lord Mountbatten was murdered at the behest of a very eminent personage once resident in a not-altog- ether-Black House in Washington DC. Verb. sap.

His intensely felt and sometimes moving verses are, I can well believe, an express- ion of the same elegantly encased irra- tionality that made him such an interesting political side-show during the last few decades. But a side-show is all he was. Staring at the murky canal water of Wol- verhampton, he felt like the Roman look- ing on the Tiber, foaming with much blood. There remains something contempt- ible in that famous speech of 20 and more years ago, in which he predicted wide- spread civil broils because the indigenous population shared his inhospitable attitude to 'grinning piccaninnies'. On a television programme from Birmingham to coincide with the 20th anniversary of this speech, one of the piccaninnies, now a grown-up woman, confronted Enoch with the appall- ing unhappiness which his words had caused to such as her who had assumed that she was at home in Wolverhampton and discovered that she was regarded as an unwanted, potentially dangerous intruder. He wriggled beneath the glare of the studio lights, and made the assertion, surprising in a professor, that the word piccaninny had no racial connotations at all. In the Oxford Dictionary, the word is defined, 'a little one, a child, commonly applied in the West Indies and America to negro and coloured children'.

Enoch the batty professor, talking non- sense about Shakespeare or the Bible, is rather an endearing figure. There was something half-endearing about Enoch the Member for South Down, talking nonsense about Ireland and the Common Market, since in neither of these cases did many people feel tempted to follow the piper on his strange dance round the bend. Enoch the demagogue, who is clearly present in this volume of poetry, is not an endearing figure in the least; the man who was confronted by the black woman on that television programme was cowardly, squirming and either deeply ignorant or something rather worse. He has frequently claimed that he did not expect his 'rivers of blood' speech to make so much of an impact. If so, we can be all the more pleased that Enoch the demagogue was a political failure, since this is to suggest that sheer lack of charity was compounded with absence of judgment.