BOOKS

Saturnine Daylight

By ROBERT CONQUEST

THE quality of Roy Fuller's Collected Poems* must make any honest reviewer ask himself tee more what truly relevant comment he can Offer. To say what sort of poetry it is is not to convey its excellences. Yet in our time, preten- in of 'rigour' in criticism always amount to jud ns Bing a poem by standards applied either to the theme or to the technique, and never honestly deriving from the effect of the poem as a com- plete and immediate single object. One is praised for its snug domesticity, with a wife's behind for hot-water bottle—that is, for Content; another for the supposed suitability of its disrupted rhythms to a time of troubles—that is, for Form. Fuller writes, `truth's half feeling and half

These are not halves that can be seParated, particularly in his case.

His standing as a poet is one of the two or three highest of those now writing. Yet his reputation is mainly among poets and readers °t Petry The professional critics, busy with ultimates of Pound, have scarcely looked at ill). His name does not ring glamorously fr,11„114 the campuses—and this alone is enough American opinion about British verse. This American neglect is even odder when 0le considers that Fuller is in effect doing what Wallace Stevens tried to do, failing because of a streak of frivolity and dilettantism, and perhaps r...et' lack of an adequate rhythmic sense too. For uller's humanism arises not only from the rueralities of society and the particulars of 07e and suffering, but also from the particulars seeing and understanding. of man's grasp of the r phenomenal world. he Wier is (or anyhow was throughout most of Period covered by this book) a Marxist poet. would be idle to deny that this has some- N.111es led him to descend from his broader 'slon to a ludicrous close-up: as when he maintain that support for the constitutional z reek government against the loathsome

dislike can only have been motivated by "islike of bread and peace. To yield this facile seat to formula in a matter of political detail

Political poetically, regardless of the 0,16°4 philosophy. But such blemishes are rare, ve" the commoner oddity of much of Fuller's yertse is that, in a different sense from Betjeman, an equally obsolete one, it still sees That topic all-absorbing, as it was. s new and ever shall be, to us-- CI.ASS. eeroessing one type of oppression only, the (Ilk-4°111k, in an age of many, and worse. Yet e Hetjernan indeed) his rather bygone con- PF!s are a framework for the more permanent. .flow°1',.°11 the whole his Marxism is one side of a 0 "etull and positive virtue. He is doing what tiound pretended to do—seeing the human condi- It in a vast social and historical perspective. 's an insult to Fuller to compare them at all: / r ECT Lie C o'`EEI POEMS. By Roy Fuller. (Andre 25s) but a crucial difference is that Pound affects to work up to the grandiose from a potty little economic fiddle, while Fuller starts with the wide vision. He sees

The aggregate of all the lives in time,

That reef of coral --a various unity forming one long human drama. This gives him what is commonly lack- ing in modern poets, a properly rooted tragiC sense.

For his verse is not social for social's sake, but for man's. His themes, particularly in his later poems, are from the whole human sphere: all those extremities which the philosophies and religions have failed to allay. Ageing, sex, dying, pity, nostalgia, melancholy: the lacrinue rerum, and some of the cachinnatiottes reruns too, played out on a grand stage. Even the comic servant in his Faust cycle, complaining of vulgar lusts which he can no longer satisfy, is essentially an adjunct and broadening of tragedy, and even tragic himself. Moreover Fuller is never really happy with anything resembling a social millen- nium. In the Justish City full of bread and wine I shall dream of the discipline of insomnia And an art of symbols, starved and saturnine.

Similarly, from the Freudian type•of thought he derives not a setpiece of mechanistic con- cepts, but the human being, caught yet conscious,. in his Condition. In fact, the moods and ideas of the Thirties are strong upon Fuller: but he wears them with a difference. It would be hard to deny that the vigour and the inventiveness of .Auden and MacNeice was accompanied by a certain slapdashness, a tenuousness and some- times frivolity of matter. I am not wanting to imply that 'density' and 'tension' are the most important criteria of poetic merit : such a notion is one of the dullest-minded of recent critical generalities, and would involve one in asserting that Crashaw was a better poet than. Marlowe or Dryden. Yet Fuller has, typically, managed to combine the best effects and strengths of both types of writing. He is the heir, not only of the lucidity and power of Auden, but also of the. vividness and penetration of the best in symbolism.

Fuller's phrasing is individual and unmistak- able—to the point sometimes of caricature; though never of contrivance. When he starts his 'Pantomime,' Steeped in a mouldy light, the frightful Witch ...

he is writing what could never be taken for any- thing but Fullerian. The sinisterness, very faintly comic, - is exactly suited to the theme. For even here, there is no feeling that any of the words have been selected for their novelty, or chicness, or violence, or egotism.

In his later poems there is often an uncertain calm, as in the start of 'Images of Autumn': In pools made by the brown and golden litter That chokes the grids, stand tinted grey reflections Of branches with their few leaves hung Against a cloudy sky. The autumn flood Of symbols pile behind the poet's sluices.

But, for 'such death-racked men' as Fuller, the essential of verse is the effort to get beyond the situation where

the sane cannot recognise Their dreams, nor the mad the truth.

Recognition of the dream does not impl!, tidying up the terrors of it. After waking (in 'Sleeping and Waking'):

And yet the terror stayed. Inside these nails. And coloured' by the livid wash of dawn, The darling sleepers copied death. I lay Beside them, like an aeronaut who falls To worse from danger, till the drapes acre

drawn Upon the safe caged savagery of day.

And when he catalogues the frontal properties of the Fullerian daytime, these too are personal and sinister : My real world also has a base of truth: Soldiers -with labial sores, a yellowish stone Built round the common into cubes. uncouth

Reverberations from a breaking bone, The fear of living in the body. . . .

Not that Fuller always concentrates in this way. Suitable for certain effects, it is, as he rightly sees, inept for others. His images have often a wholly classic rightness; : Towards the temple stride young girls v.hose • dress, Taut with the zephyr of their passage . . .

In fact, his resources are all the usable ones of traditional, and of 'modern,' English poetry: a rare and remarkable fusion. Moreover, although this Collected Poems unaccountably omits a number of fine poems from his first book, and the newest `Meredithian Sonnets' are not his best work, we can yet follow the development of increasing scope and mastery. Eccentricity and preconception drop off like boosters, leaving the second stage of a free personality shameless in its skill, sincerity, sanity and sensitivity.

No book by even the best of English poets is faultless, but Filler's flaws are meagre and peri- pheral. Some adjectives ('enormous') are over- done. In spite of his view that 'poetry should be , intelligible,' there are obscurities (what are the `foliate five' acts?). Occasional mannerisms annoy—throwaway images justified only by rhyme; Auden or others echoing too closely; and so on. But in general his verse has that natural- ness and rightness of tone, even when the language is least colloquial, which arises from an intrinsic and personal unity. It happily, com- prehends (as no unity prescribed by critical pre- conception can) lyric and rhetoric, statement and metaphor, concretion and abstraction. On this last one is reminded of Baudelaire (two of whose sonnets Fuller finely translates): and here, per- haps, is a genuine and usable influence from the French for once.

Talk about 'great' and 'major' poets is a. vulgar distraction. These are perhaps suitable words of half a dozen poets, or fewer. None are alive today, and nothing could be more footling (as Bryon pointed out in his own time) than the cries of some weekly critics, like teenagers mob- bing a pop singer, of 'He's the greatest!' But Fuller would certainly be well up among the front runners if poetry was, as some base fellows seem to think, a sort of competition. Even for

those of us who have for years felt his work to be very fine and moving, the assembly of it into this collected volume, read together. does seem to add further to his dimensions and fittingly to celebrate his stature.