A hard act to follow
Nigel Spivey
CANAAN by Geoffrey Hill Penguin, £7.99, pp. 72 Slim volumes of contemporary verse are not normally honoured with notice in these pages. What is there in this new collection by Geoffrey Hill that appeals to us?
To seasoned admirers of Hill's work George Steiner and Christopher Ricks give the senior imprimatur on his covers — the question is absurd. Hill, they will say, rises mountainously above his fellows (a judg- ment warmly endorsed by Hill himself). From his Oxford debut in 1952 with 'Gene- sis' (a strident sequence still barely recog- nisable as juvenilia), he has steadily buttressed his reputation through the decades. By 1989 he was widely regarded as the most sure-handed pilot of our language, or so one would conclude from the fact that he was chosen by the Times Literary Supple- ment to review all 20 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. He is, after a fashion, laureate, if that is what it means to be hailed as 'a poet's poet'. Whatever accolade one gave to Hill, he would wear it like a crown of thorns. But to have one's work made virtuous by its oft- cited 'difficulty' is a barbed plaudit in any case. Why should intelligent readers need the literary priesthood to gloss a Delphic garble? What is the point of writing without perspicuity, unless it simply aims to tinkle? One might as well be puddle-deep as unfathomable. So if in Canaan Hill yet again courts the dubious tribute of perplex- ing us, I cannot recommend him for that. In these new poems, his liking for half-lines and stinting punctuation makes his mes- sages more bitten-off and astringent than ever. He assumes his audience will be severely schooled in European history, and capable of coping with snatches of Latin and dog-Latin without a crib. He does nothing to democratise his medium. But those who last his course do not end in a void. Their reward is a true measure of moral advancement.
Seven of the poems are gathered as `Psalms of Assize'. Those who have seen Hill read publicly know his posture of assize: in pseudo-clerical garb, arms folded, unsmiling, teeth clenched. So Canaan begins with a brief and pungent jeremiad addressed To the High Court of Parlia- ment', on the occasion (unstated as such, but the date assists) of its members charg- ing vested interests the sum of one thou- sand pounds to raise a question in the House. 'Where's probity in this — /the slither-frisk/to lordship of a kind/as rats to a bird-table?'
A grand for a question; one pound for a Westminster cemetery. Here is the removed prophet — now a professor at Boston University — watching England shoddily descend down conduits of repeat- ed self-betrayal. And though the phraseolo- gy concedes next to nothing to modern parlance, the sentiment here is perfectly plain. Those who claim they represent us their country — are touts. What is ancestral history worth when all it amounts to is this — lords', brazen in 'sleaze'?
`I say it is not faithless/to stand without faith, keeping open/vigil at the site./Who shall endure? What force throws off/the verdict of each day's/idle and taunting hon- ours,/the lottery, the trade in grief,/the out- rageous quittance, the shiftless/orders of fools?' (`To William Cobbett: In Absen- tia'). Apparently marginalised — by his scholarship, and more — Hill in essence is centrally involved in the conscience of Eng- land, and of Europe too. And so it is that his fine poetic voice allies with the cracked despair of an old contemptible. Where are the homes fit for heroes? What became of the Promised Land, the New Jerusalem?
The elegies grouped under the title `Churchill's Funeral' push recall beyond the 'fierce tea-making' of London in the Blitz. They demand the memory of Paddington and St Pancras, the 'dim roofs' under which men in khaki and crepe ban- dages, 'scuffed hands aflare', were herded like cattle. The intuition that when the Church Lads and the Pals' Battalions were lopped in Flanders something ebbed out of Britain, and has never been restored, is not Hill's alone. But no one has caught it in so few words as he.
`Evil is not good's absence but gravity's/everlasting bedrock.' Once more Hill turns to the Holocaust, as if (to twist Adorno's dictum about `no lyric poetry after Auschwitz') no corpus of poems can be complete without another struggle to articulate the horror. This time a halo is cast about those rare individuals in Ger- many — very rare, if Daniel Goldhagen is right — who fought against Hitler, not for him. The butchers' hooks whereon Moltke, Trott and others of the Kreisau Circle were festooned for vengeance may still be seen at PlOtzensee: Hill deposits his own gar- land.
Hill's poetic celebration of a moral aris- tocracy is a constant of his output. Of course he must regard as specious any poet (or rather poetaster) who fails to join that project. In a footnote of an essay contribut- ed to the current issue of Agenda (itself a homage to his work), Hill stoutly rebukes those who cannot come to terms with the posthumously exposed nastiness of Philip Larkin:
Larkin betrayed no one, least of all himself. What he is seen to be in the letters he was and is in the poems. The notion of the acces- sibility of his work acknowledged the ease with which readers could overlay it with transparencies of their own preference.
By quoting that, there is no intention to excuse any lack of 'accessibility' in Hill's work. But, as I say, the costiveness or 'diffi- culty' of Hill's poetry is mythical. His father was a policeman. He is an enforcer of laws of a kind, and he patrols his beat with judi- cial devotion. 'There being now such riotous shows of justice,/yet, of righteous- ness, the fading nimbus/remains to us, as a perceived glory.' This is more than a homiletic stand against Philistinism (and original Philistinism, the defilement of Canaan). Appealing to proper pathos, it is credible censure. It is poetry that would improve our world and our selves.
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