The non-conformist vision
James Simmons
WRITING TO THE MOMENT: SELECTED ESSAYS 1980-1996 by Tom Paulin Faber, £16.99, pp. 318 Tom Paulin is an honorary Irish poet by virtue of having spent his schooldays in Belfast and because of his continued inter- est in Northern Ireland. He features in Muldoon's exclusive anthology of Irish verse and speaks regularly at the Hewitt Summer School. However, he works in England, teaching at an Oxford College and appearing as a quirky and dogmatic pundit on BBC's Late Review. This book includes a selection of his reviews, essays and introductions of the last 16 years.
The range is impressive: he includes early essays on Conor Cruise O'Brien and Ian Paisley, an introduction to his anthology of political verse, and numerous literary essays, all fresh, connected by his interest in the political roots of imaginative writing and his espousal of what he calls alterna- tively 'vernacular' or 'baroque' poetry. He speaks lovingly of neglected poets like John Clare, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Lawrence and MacNeice, relating them to late Shakespeare, Smart, Hopkins, Brown- ing and Hardy as part of a tradition which is often thought less central than a smoother tradition which the reader can readily imagine. He is dauntingly and illu- minatingly well-read and thorough. I was fascinated to read about Hopkins' reluctant debt to Whitman. He also has essays on American Primi- tive painters and Jack B. Yeats, and refers several times to action painting, which he takes to be a Protestant phenomenon. He also tries to enunciate a definition of the special quality required for good reviewing, `writing to the moment', which is a quota- tion from Hazlitt that gives this book its title. His writing is at its best when he is approving and tender, as in his essay on Hardy, for when he gets excited (and he loves to get excited) he sometimes goes over the top, as he does on television. He likes this quality in D. H. Lawrence and quotes a lengthy attack on Englishness by that author, which seems to me silly. He is in love with vernacular, dotting his own poems with little known dialect words and approving of them in Clare etc. He casti- gates an early reviewer for wanting a glos- sary included with Clare's poetry; but wouldn't that be helpful? How can a stranger to the district make head or tail of unfamiliar words? Guessing and instinct will not do.
The passages he quotes from Clare do not impress me:
I lost the love of heaven above; I spurn'd the lust, of earth below; I felt the sweets of fancied love, And hell itself my only foe.
I can't see the point of retaining this odd punctuation, nor can I find any interest in what is being said. Then you get irritated by the critic trying to twist your arm into approval: "A Vision' tersely enacts what it felt like to be touched in both senses by poetry.' You feel that Paulin is being senti- mental about the neglected poet whose plight inspires compassion. And yet Paulin is not just a blanket supporter of the neglected and the revolutionary Left. He castigates Lawrence critics for concentrat- ing on the message rather than the art. He much admires Jane Austen despite her conservative vision. I-le has very proper reservations about MacNeice (`This throw- away lyricism often resembles a commer- cial jingle'), although he closes the essay with: 'There are many places that should be proud to lay claim to him.' You can feel Paulin identifying with MacNeice's `anguished sense of displacement' which must be his own, although his displace- ments are the opposite of Mac-Neice's.
I am in two minds about this collection; but on the whole I think my reservations and his occasional lapses (Bishop's admired black singer is surely Bessie Smith, not Billie Holliday) are more than offset by his engaged and engaging intelligence, stylish writing and strong feeling. Many readers will be challenged and excited by insights such as these: 'Tennyson is in bril- liant command of a dead language'; and `Hopkins cannot tell Bridges or Patmore that Whitman's barbaric yawp represents for him danger — lovely danger — sav- agery, democracy, wildness, hugely attrac- tive working men.'
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