Any discussion of Ian Hamilton’s poems must face the question of their fewness
and smallness. There had been great non-producers among the poets before
him, of course: T. S. Eliot and Elizabeth Bishop come immediately to mind.
Their cases, however, seem different. Eliot’s performance, in which each
successive publication served virtually as its own manifesto, declaring a
new move in his one-man campaign of modernization and subsequent
retrenchment, was meticulously calculated; while Bishop’s sparse output was
the result of an exacting self-discipline that would allow nothing but the
cleanest and clearest truth to be uttered. Hamilton, too, had a campaign to
wage and an armoury of the sternest values to wage it with, and yet, with
him, the sparseness looks less voluntary, more a matter of frustration or
incapacity.
Hamilton himself was aware of the problem. In the preface to his Fifty Poems
of 1988, he wrote: “Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for
half a lifetime, you might think. And, in certain moods, I would agree”. One
would like to know more about the moods in which he would not have agreed –
he surely deserved a measure of satisfaction – but it was never his style
either to boast or to plead on his own behalf. That preface is usefully
included among the appendices to this Collected Poems, and its air of
slightly combative modesty is bracing and wholly typical. Through one of
those sardonic, spoken-voice inflections of which Hamilton, in his prose,
was a master, the “you” of “you might think” manages to be both general,
equivalent to the French “on”, and personal, a no-beating-about-the-bush
stepping-forward to meet the individual reader and tell it like it is.
The “you” of the poems, however, is quite another pronoun. The reader is never
addressed directly in them, merely permitted to hear, or to overhear, the
poet talking to some second person whose identity is not revealed but whom
one can, more often than not, assume to be either the poet’s father or his
first wife. Hamilton was thirteen years old when his father died and his
first marriage was blighted by his wife’s protracted mental illness, and
these experiences supply the subject matter for much of his oeuvre. In both
biographical instances, Hamilton found himself in the position of caring but
impotent witness to another’s suffering, and it is this anguished
predicament that his best poems powerfully register. In one of the earliest
and finest, “The Storm”, first printed in 1962, the precarious relationship
between sufferer, here frightened by approaching thunder, and lover/carer,
awkwardly standing by, is caught in a simple but eloquent simile:
You turn to me and when I call you come
Over and kneel beside me, wanting me to take
Your head between my hands as if it were
A delicate bowl that the storm might break.
The bowl simile is beautiful, but it would hardly be so resonant if it were
not for the disturbance to the predominantly iambic progress of this central
passage (only a stage in the developing drama) that the fourth quoted line
enacts. There may be a fore-nudge in “Over”, two lines above, but an
inverted foot at the beginning of a line is no great prosodic surprise and
the effect is a long way from the tremor that runs through “A delicate bowl
that the storm . . .”. Three further, disarrayed lines, then a last one that
seems to have regained iambic composure, until the final foot is tripped up,
bring the poem to its overwhelmed conclusion:
You want me to get between you and the brute thunder.
Settling on your flesh my great hands stir,
Pulse on you and then, wondering how to do it, grip.
The storm rolls through me as your mouth opens.
Care for a suffering person and care for the niceties of versification are
not, in truth, the same thing, but it seems that Hamilton wanted to make
them so in his poems. He comes close to saying as much in the extended
interview that was published in 2002, a year after his death, as Ian
Hamilton in Conversation with Dan Jacobson. There he speaks of how, for him,
the “need for a controlled structure” arose from “the sense of being
involved in someone else’s suffering while being helpless to do anything
about it”. Shortly afterwards, he offers this understanding of his own drive
to write, or to catch, poems:
The “it” [he is picking up Jacobson’s wording] you imagine out there to be
discovered by you, or that will visit you, with its mixture of passion and
control, is a poem of perfection. So you listen out for the poem, if you
like, and you imagine it. It’s as if the poetry you write is what you don’t
seem to be able to express in your ordinary day-to-day transactions. There’s
a sort of platonic realm of discourse that you occasionally manage to tune
into. That is the impulse behind the poem – to be able to say in the poem
what ordinarily doesn’t and cannot get said or understood or listened to.
“Platonic”, albeit qualified by “sort of”, suggests more mystique, more magic,
than Hamilton the critic was wont to admit into his vocabulary when
discriminating between the valuable and the fraudulent in the poetry of his
time.
His reviews and essays were famously severe. As Editor of the Review in the
1960s, then of the New Review in the 70s, he earned authority by his
fearless cutting down to size of both senior and contemporary reputations.
Even Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies (1959) was an early and abiding
inspiration, and whose biographer Hamilton later became, was not spared for
the errors of his later work – “a shambles on the page” is how Hamilton
characterizes it to Jacobson, before going on: “He didn’t seem to care what
he published, the act of publication for him was no longer invested with any
momentousness. There was just this sprawling out”.
By contrast, every poem Hamilton wrote and saw published was designed to be
all momentousness: a high artistic ideal, difficult to bring off and fraught
with problems that were not always satisfactorily resolved. Pure
momentousness can make for sameness of tone. Melodrama, too, is a risk. Some
of the very shortest poems have, in the interest of concentration, had
circumstantial detail so efficiently purged from them, they all but resist
penetration. At their best – “Memorial”, for instance, or “Home”, or
“Awakening” – they can deliver espresso-sized shocks of intimate revelation;
otherwise, when they are reduced too far and the human detail has been more
or less obscured, reading them can be as frustrating an activity as
unpicking tight knots in damp string. In Lowell, it was the high-handed
squandering of human detail, the careless, even callous, spilling of beans
about those who had loved and trusted him, that Hamilton rightly deprecated;
but in seeking not to commit the same sin, he sometimes forfeited the very
quality that would have allowed a poem to live and speak.
He was too sharp an operator not to have known the dangers. Nonetheless, there
is a poem thought to be from the 1970s or 80s, “Untranslatable”, which Alan
Jenkins has included in a short section of “Unpublished and Uncollected
Poems”, and which suggests a diehard attitude to the whole business. Its
obvious difference from most of Hamilton’s work is that it is outwardly
addressed, almost a public pronouncement – which may, paradoxically, be why
he withheld it – but it has its own obliqueness of attack and is defiantly
terse. In its totality, it reads:
“There are certain lines – whole poems even:
I have no idea what they mean;
It’s what I can’t grasp that draws me back to them.”
Yours used to be like that, and so did his.
The speaker of the first three lines, to which the fourth is, I take it, the
poet’s reply, or rebuke, in propria persona, could be expressing any
friendly reader’s misgivings – as well as his or her undiminished
fascination. Because the rewards are there in even the most obdurate poems.
They exist in isolated subtleties of versification, deftly placed
line-breaks, choiceness of phrasing, fleeting plangencies, beauties that
seldom depart from the range of the ordinary speaking voice, never advertise
themselves loudly, and yet suggest that the “platonic” poem is indeed within
the writer’s grasp.
Despite the sting that “Untranslatable” delivers, Hamilton’s own career was
not without its easing of high-minded strictures. His first collection, The
Visit (1970), was followed in 1988 by Fifty Poems: i.e., The Visit plus
“fifteen or so” new pieces from the “‘trashy years’” (Hamilton’s inverted
commas inside mine) of the 70s. “Larkinesque”, a poem placed towards the end
of the second volume, would, with its social-comedy scenario involving the
old-boys’ network chatter of opposing divorce lawyers and a wrily jokey
anecdotal tone, have been quite out of place in the austere debut volume.
But if readers who had relished the mocking humour of Hamilton’s criticism
saw this as promise of further comic development in the poems, they were
wrong. The Sixty Poems of ten years later adds ten poems to the slow
accumulation, and a richer, or more inviting, melancholy in the form of such
items as “The Garden”, “At Evening” and “Steps”, but no jokes. One wonders
what Hamilton would have thought of the inclusion among the “Unpublished and
Uncollected” poems in the present volume of “An Alternative Agenda”, a piece
of attempted light verse about a literary conference in Australia, where the
comic timing and tonal precision he could achieve in prose are somehow
missed.
One of Hamilton’s last projects was a book of essays, Against Oblivion,
modelled on Johnson’s Lives of the Poets, in which he set out to gauge the
durability of some forty-five twentieth-century poets, all dead, though not
yet forgotten, their future reputations undecided, but – it was implied –
with the odds weighing heavily against them. What could have been a
melancholy, graveyard-prowling exercise is in fact carried off with much of
the writer’s old critical flair, though qualified with a new tenderness,
possibly the consequence of his own closeness to death. Talking to Dan
Jacobson at about the same time, Hamilton admitted to having long suffered
“battle fatigue” as a campaigning critic. “One became less interested in
destroying the opposition”, he explained, “and more in nurturing the things
one had faith in. You just got on with believing the real thing still to be
important . . .”. The “real thing” in his own work will still need nurturing
and explaining to a posterity uneducated in the values that informed his
writing: moral as well as literary values. Some of the obscurity in his
poems is the result of an old-school belief in the virtues of privacy and
tact – the opposite of Lowell’s unhinged confessional excesses. Yet it is
surely Lowell's influence that prevails in so much of the garrulously
autobiographical magazine poetry of the present day. Nonetheless, Alan
Jenkins’s editing of the Collected Poems offers good reasons to be
optimistic. He adds to the body of work that Hamilton allowed to be
published a small number of poems, both early and late, which the poet
himself might have winced to see in print, but which neither embarrass nor
diminish the central achievement. Jenkins’s notes are lucid, never
over-explanatory or intrusive, and not afraid to seem tentative when that is
appropriate. He devotes an appendix to six drafts of a poem titled “Letter
to the Editor”, and whether or not one agrees that “Prayer”, in the main
body of the book, is the final, drastically reduced, “platonic” article – I
am undecided – it is illuminating to see evidence of the poet at work. So
the fight against oblivion continues.
Ian Hamilton
COLLECTED POEMS
Edited with an introduction by Alan Jenkins
160pp. Faber. £14.99.
978 0 571 22736 5
Christopher Reid is Professor in Creative Writing at the University of
Hull. Two books of his poetry, A Scattering and The Song of Lunch, appeared
earlier this year.
