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(Young Writers of the Thirties Exhibition, National Portrait Gallery, London, Sept. 22nd 1976.)
They
seemed, even in their not-knowing, to be prescient.
Their
confident tone, perhaps, was the starting of this,With all the assurance of hikers lightly equipped
At daybreak who measured the mountain and its squat cone
Of cloud with a thumb. And in books, studies and extended
Articles, our affair with the lacunae that constitute the past
Has built a significance to chivvy their every aside
Into order, almost demanding that the wide dance
Of the Thirties come clear in their pages. Only later,
In the broken grass, did we notice the notebook with its leaves
Torn out. In such ways we make sense of the past:
But insofar as we deal with an image between us
And an act, whose location in space-time we don’t know;
A gesture, the limits of which are inevitably lost;
And a thought inferred from a jotting hurried for the post;
That is, as we bully the material to create something
Consistent as evidence but impossible to verify, perhaps
It is best to pack the archives in the college vault
And let the scholar descend to return with ordered
News. For here under the hidden lights
Which put brown in the corners, and the matt dusk
Of respect which leans across cases like a bearded professor
With eyeglasses, these gathered samples are measly stuff: –
The first editions become anaemic from afternoons
Lost beneath shelves, their spines hanging like doors;
The programme notes, the wrinkled photographs of friends
In Oxford bags with legs as carved and faceted
As English oak; but mostly the letters and scrawls,
Lonely and silent like the restless faces of patients
On pillows when beckoned by the surgeon’s nod – all
Testify to the imaginative work performed
When papers are fingered and lamps adjusted to reveal
Significant objects from significant lives. Retrieved
From the interstices of the forgotten day they disclose
The frenetic, large-eyed men, with grins as confident
As impresarios’ (the world turning gravely about them),
Who wagered amid the discussion of books and payment
Of fees the nervous tic of their doubt on a strenuous
Effort to stand as close to their time as a simile.
But from mornings at a desk with pencil and paper; meetings
With connections at luncheon; and dull afternoons with Goethe
Or a tract for the times, they hurried to the challenge of evening,
And like those who rushed across town through soaking streets
On numerous and crucial errands, fell back exhausted
But released from the unequal struggle with the misread map.
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Spain
arrived like a telegram with the vital clue
Putting
an end to the business of the gleaming bowl.Rooms were tidied for serious work, the collectings
Of a life were put aside, and dust knocked
Under carpets. Here was the moment demanding fidelity,
A fastidious handshake with a greasy palm, for beneath
The horizon justice loomed like a principled sun
And the red mandate of morning would purge the villa
And mansion, emptying galleries of lethargic dust.
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In
a corner where shadows quietly mused the remnants
Of
that welter stood in silent conjunction – cap,Banner and book. Unknown, one of the Brigade
Had worn this cap, hanging with its deep fold
Shadowed and stained with the sepia of a Spanish landscape.
The banner stood by its side with folded colours
Like a hooded mourner grimly rehearsing a tale
Of the fiery day and putting into legend the exposed
Fighters on the hilltop. The book – “Illusion and Reality” –
Sat like a squat bomb in its chocolate-blue wrapper
Decrepit but put to one side as if no-one knew
Whether the charge of its title were active or not.
Doubtless, there were many illusions under that cold cap,
In the beating head which wore it until the body fell,
But what collected works or piece of paper,
Discovered in a trunk with shouts and outstretched hands,
Can hint at him, the man without a face,
Who stands behind the public talk of history?
He is the empty shelf at the end of the room,
The forgotten corridor, the place where no light goes.
The prodigious schoolboys charged about the decade,
Scattering the white gleam of ideas over stile
And factory wall; the public figures wore
Their perplexity like evening dress, and kept diaries
For later publication; but the fallen tool or weapon
Were not so manifold. Yet he, too, was to wear
A passbook by his heart and make the fateful choice: –
Washed and shaved perhaps he went out to the day,
Down streets and narrow lanes where men played cricket
By the corner shops, and through the long, immobile
Afternoon questioned the sky, listened
To the rustle of his clothes and the dusty rumble of traffic
In adjacent roads, and finding passion tightening
His hands returned to a supper of cheese and tea,
Deep in the latest news from a paper. He had chosen
The cold romance of the plain. His mind was a handbill.
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It
is all years ago and years are cunning
Things.
They go so slowly through your ambush;At any time you have them where you want them,
But whenever you look back they are there in a bunch
Like grinning foxes – and your legs have begun to buckle.
Who can bear to study the attrition of age?
To follow a life year by year as flesh,
Plump and fragrant as new-baked bread, is stripped
From the bone, leaving only a sour and pitted rind.
What if he survived? Back from the horror, the long
Disillusion (some were left to whisper to the soil),
Where did all that significance go? Beneath
The smoky skyline of Britain lives disappeared,
Thinning until the silt of self sat like a puzzle
In a ragged throat, expiring in public wards.
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History,
my friend, is upon us in the thoughtless moment.
This
empty day, when clouds doodle and windShrugs to itself; when someone hugs his rib-cage,
Longing for the safety of lamplight; when a stomach upset
Like an evil child punches you in the guts –
This day is history. All sorts of prodigies wander
In the wind, and conscience shakes its head in disbelief.
You can choose or not choose but you cannot escape history.
The unseen hand is tapping at your pulses, collecting
Chances, reducing you to a stain on the air.
Seize it while you can. The dropping hour passes
And a forgotten letter settles behind the wainscot.
The face in the mirror departs – its chill gap
Of absence is sewn like a surgical wound. And history –
The intransigent record of human intransigence – frays
At the edges, slips into the horror of geological time.
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Those
lives which are remade in biographies, those events
Which
are transformed into symbols, have to stand
proxy for all Who are forgotten – the brave but dead owner of a hand
In the rubble – and so teach us about the commitments of the present.
For the individual will fall from our fingers like sand:
A few will survive as a name and a gesture but most
Will bundle up the unique transactions of the mind
And heart and step into the earth unknown. And when
The grave has settled and the wind for many years
Has combed the grass, there will still be the sun beaming
On a wide stretch of land and a wide stretch
Of water, and who will know if a warm hand touched
This rock? How long does a footprint last in mud?
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I
shall sift my allegiance. My thoughts return to that cap,
Reject
the banner, respect the book. We cannotLive in a world of banners, nor of subtle analyses
Conducted through one eye. But the cap and its owner represent
A value which we can with difficulty sustain.
We have lost sight of this man, we shall never see him
Again; the abyss is too dark for our candles.
We can only search the air for the sudden chord,
A silent note in time, when we touch his trace,
Already refined by the blunt, invisible wind,
And discover in ourselves the disrupting vision which warms
The bubble of our being. It is the realisation
That we are kin to those who have gone before,
Whether they dress in Republican colours or anything
Else made outlandish by time. We share our thousand
Worries, some of death, some of manners,
About this oily lung the body. And with this
To think on we are drawn into the annals of the species
As they stretch through time and history. The recognition
Of ourselves is the basis of all solidarity, but the moral
Significance of the dying animal teaches us love
And makes us friendly with those who preceded us.
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I
hope I could trust that cap, not knowing the man
Who
wore it, risking the boredom of his vanities (as heWould risk mine), bearing his hatreds and discontents;
And learning a little of how it feels to behave in an historical
Situation you know of only through the ice on the provision
Sack, the distant contact with your nearest neighbour
In the line, and resigned fury that the low clumps
Which are not bushes must lie out for another day.
Cap,
banner and book. Things to their places,
Things
to their time...
----- Unfinished -----
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© 1976. Revised March 2013