LA TROBE UNIVERSITY ESSAY Vincent Buckley: Aspects of the Imagination Peter Steele This is one way of doing it: No New Thing No new thing under the sun: The virtuous who prefer the dark; Fools knighted; the brave undone; The athletes at their killing work; The tender-hearts who step in blood; The sensitive paralysed in a mood; The clerks who rubber-stamp our deaths, Executors of death’s estate; Poets who count their dying breaths; Lovers who pledge undying hate; The self-made and self-ruined men; The envious with the strength of ten. They crowd in nightmares to my side, Enlisting even private pain In some world-plan of suicide: Man, gutted and obedient man, Who turns his coat when he is told, Faithless to our shining world. And hard-faced men, who beat the drum To call me to this Cause or that, Those heirs of someone else’s tomb, Can’t see the sweeter work I’m at, The building of the honeycomb. The ‘Preacher’ who tells us in Ecclesiastes that there is ‘no new thing under the sun’ is the one who sums up human life as ‘a vapour’s vapour’, and there are few moments in his lamentation when he does not sound like a beleaguered man. In prose or in poetry, Vincent Buckley (1925–88) could sound like his sibling, though it was also often his pleasure to ironise the ironist. He approved of people’s fighting their corner, but, like most of us, he pre-ferred not to be cornered in the first place. I think of ‘No New Thing’ as one of his tutelary poems; stark-eyed about the troubles to hand, or conceived of, he mounted defences instinctively, of a characteristic and often of a complex kind. One species of defence is verbal tradition, and at least in ‘the West’, that is going to include the catalogue. Wittingly or otherwise, we make such sense of the world as we do by courtesy of catalogues, be they as archaic as the names of foodstuffs or as contemporaneous as the multitudes waiting to show up, addresses and phone numbers about them, from the electronic dormitories where they sleep most of the time. And poets, aggrieved or exultant, bemused or swaggeringly confident, turn to cataloguing as to something which keeps us in touch with ancient and fertile practice, and can also promote novelty of address. Buckley’s poem chimes in with many earlier tallyings of human malpractice and dysfunction; not only Ecclesiastes is there for the echoing, but plenty of other voices from the Bible. That sombre choir is amplified by Roman satirists, medieval lamenters, and Elizabethan and Jacobean keeners over the debauching of innocence, the death of hopes. Perhaps Shakespeare’s ‘Tired with all these ...’ is in effect first violin in it all, so far as Buckley is concerned. Even though in a great deal of the poetry he wrote after ‘No New Thing’ he seemed intent on shrugging off the influence of formal exemplars, this poem comes from a book, Arcady and Other Places (1966), which includes, for example, eight ‘Versions from Catullus’, and a poem with the satirical edge of ‘Preacher’, which goes, ‘With simple piety, in simple words, / His personal ardour warming every pause, / He calls and jests and woos the worldlings back / To the world’s cause.’ If he was to find traditionally cast poetry insufficient for his purposes, this was not because he had failed to make it as well as he could. If there is indeed nothing new under the sun, then neither can the poem be so. The point is not pedantic, as the ‘Poets who count their dying breaths’ might alert us. Buckley often wrote with a pronounced sense that the things he prized most — and poetry was one of them — were peculiarly under threat, and that whatever rescue came would be by a slender margin at best. He found it remarkable that poetry should beat fate’s odds, and the poems themselves often bear the stamp of his surprise. Still, ‘No New Thing’ is plainly in part about a mustering of energies and a fortifying of aspiration. And as was often the case with the Yeats whose work he so admired, the poem is played out as a drama in which the primary personnel are ‘They’, ‘I’, and ‘We’. Here, ‘They’ are questionable and sometimes discreditable, are the mobbish crew who may be distinct in their agendas but are shadowy at best in their assuming of responsibility; ‘I’ is the perhaps resentful and certainly rueful apprehender of human disarray; and ‘We’, by supposition, are somewhere between the two conditions, at best custodians of the world as gift, and at worst collaborators with its abusers and defacers. ‘No New Thing’ is unusual in Buckley’s poetry in the clarity of delineation of these figures or forces: but it is safe to say that the elements of experience which they represent, the benign or malign presences, are to be found from very early in that poetry up to the end. For him, even though part of him deeply disliked the fact that this was so, experience was very often contested experience. Formally, the second stanza of this poem, one line shorter than the first, undergoes what might be called a swirl of rhyme in its middle something which mimes the disarray which it is describing. There is, I think, a peculiar, and a characteristic, pathos in the lines, ‘Who turns his coat when he is told, / Faithless to our shining world’. Buckley was about as unbiddable as they come in many of life’s affairs often a courteous contrarian and, perhaps for that reason, he had a particular distaste for turncoats, be they political, literary or social. He was also someone for whom the motif of the world as luminous was something dear, and the spectacle of what he took to be failure to keep faith with that sort of world was in effect outrageous to him, however frequently he recorded it or alluded to it. This awareness of ‘our shining world’ was no doubt something which was confirmed to him at various stages by poems and other writings which he prized most, as also both by the natural world in its striking arrays and by various works of art which were for him vectors of the luminous among them, Leonard French’s Campion paintings. William Blake was a poet of central importance to him, less the expository and ‘systematic’ Blake than the Blake who represented what might be called domestic apocalypse, localised revelation. There is another poem of Buckley’s, also from Arcady and Other Places, which is called ‘Shining Earth: A Summer without Evil’, a title with which one can imagine Blake resonating, both for its Edenic overtones and for its awareness that other conditions are possible indeed. But however Buckley was himself illuminated, and heartened, by the practice of Blake or W.B. Yeats, the fascination with what Jonathan Swift called ‘sweetness and light’ was something native to him. ‘Our shining world’ was indeed something which he took for a common patrimony, but he was also without illusions as to his own need to make a distinctive artistic contribution edged affair though that might be. He has a sardonic little poem, ‘Stand Up and Be Counted’, which runs,‘“Stand up and be counted”, they keep saying, / and every time I stand up / and every time I’m counted, and every time / I count only as one. / Wouldn’t it be better for the Cause / if I squatted back with the others, / lifting my hand only in unison / happier, and looking like a million?’ One can imagine this as having been written by an Eastern European ironist, and Buckley had sympathies with a number of such figures, partly for reasons to do with politics. In the end, though, it was the lyric calling that was most imperative for him. Just as Yeats had celebrated the bees building in time of civil war a highly traditional motif, powerful in Renaissance iconography Buckley judged that he, like Yeats, was obliged to make for nutriment and luminousness. He rarely wrote, however, as though this was to be an easy ride. Speaking of rides, this is another way of doing it: Jumps Jockey (for E. Byrne) They turn their bodies this way and that, stepping sideways, listening to the floating ships, but shifting always towards the gates Then the surge, glowing and stopping, as the checks come, and the pins of light sting his nostrils, bringing into his brain’s circle deed, promise, pressure, the crisp sound of his feet steepling brush; pre-empting space, with a flick of gesture in the air; at one lunge, stepping inside the bubble of our freedom with the autism of bird or centaur, plunging along, against the stretch of hills You, keeping his head true, but glancing sideways at your dead riding beside you and a boot, not yours, slapping timber: careful of the corners, jumping Irish: Your eyes almost bitter behind goggles, your arm and the whip one baton, as you lean back, over the weight of your hand pulling like weeds on water. Chips of sound in the air. Buckley’s first book of poems was called The World’s Flesh (1954), a title calculated to alert the reader to a sensibility fundamentally Romantic, in that whatever assaying of experience might be about to take place, both the human body and its physical circumstances would bid high for attention. This was, if anything, to become more the case rather than less as the years passed. Horse racing fascinated and entertained him, and he went to meetings as often as he could. He wrote once of Yeats’s ‘At Galway Races’ that it was ‘something of a sport in Yeats’ oeuvre; one does not associate him with the Silver Ring; but it is a lovely, innocent invocation, from which, interestingly enough, all sense of horse-racing as a context has disappeared, to be replaced by a sense of communal joy in action ...’ I think that one vein in Buckley’s sensibility was an elation at the spectacle, or the prospect, of just such a ‘communal joy in action’ and in his case, the communing in question was one between this or that embodied consciousness and the whole ‘flesh’ of the world. Some years ago, Diane Ackerman published A Natural History of the Senses (1990) many of Buckley’s poems read as if they are, in part, dramatised segments of a book of that kind. In ‘Jumps Jockey’, the whole is launched by the one defining verb in the entire poem, as ‘They turn their bodies’. Seventeen times after that, we are, as it were, invited to participate in the mobility of horses, of the jockey himself and of his dead comrades, as the ‘stepping’, ‘steepling’, ‘plunging’ and so forth exfoliate in time, and process is both specified and gloried in. I have little liking for the notion that poems are au fond about poems, but that many poems should and do relish their own procedures seems to me straightforwardly true, and ‘Jumps Jockey’ is a case in point. If Buckley loved the corporeal, he loved it partly in its animation, and this poem does in a concentrated way the kind of thing that is seeded or sifted through much of his verse, and indeed through much of his prose. Goethe is reported as saying that if a dictionary can catch up with an author, he is no good: and although the saying has the limitations of the aphoristic, he is surely right, at least where some of poetry’s gambits are concerned. In conversation, as well as in much lecturing, Buckley was devoted to having the appropriate word rise to the surface of consciousness, the word that did indeed fit the experience being characterised, but also the word that had a suggestiveness beyond its immediate use. It was in fact as if he hoped that words could have some of the dynamism which, courtesy of the time-lapse camera, one can see revealed in many programmes concerned with the natural world: he wanted the words to have drive, to be fledged with significance. I think that ‘Jumps Jockey’ is carried as it is by just such an eagerness. It is easy to speak foolishly about such matters, but underestimation can be a species of folly, too. I think that one element in the various poems of Buckley’s in which horses occur racing, foaling, flexing is his sense that the historical mythicising and sacralising of horses answered to the ‘riding’ of language which is a poet’s inescapable affair: its curious blending of mastery and surrender, its looking to powers which have to be courted as well as commanded. Not all poets think of their craft or their art in such terms, granted. I remember a poetry reading, decades ago, in which a number of us were involved, where one poet disavowed any belief in poetry as mysterious: to which Buckley replied, with some vehemence, ‘Well, if it’s not mysterious, what are we all doing here?’ a question that would have been difficult to answer in a correspondingly high-toned way. In the middle of ‘Jumps Jockey’, we have one of those imaginative high points to which Buckley’s poems often move the remarkable, ‘stepping inside / the bubble of our freedom / with the autism of bird or centaur.’ It may be a moment at which Robert Lowell’s poetic presence can be sensed, the Lowell whom Buckley valued significantly, though with little sympathy for the violence which smoulders in Lowell pretty well from first to last. But whatever of influences, the phrases exemplify a matter of major importance to Buckley’s poetry, namely its aspiration to fuse diverse realities in the one formulation. The ‘bubble of our freedom’, taken in isolation, might be a reductive matter, analogous perhaps with the bubbles to be seen in plenty of ‘vanitas’ paintings. But that it should be stepped into by the horse which has just been ‘pre-empting space’ aggrandises that bubble after all: the moment is seized with an almost Pascalian sense that grandeurs and miseries inhabit us, incessantly, whatever we make of them, and whether or not we attend to them. There is, too, crucially, that ‘with the autism of bird or centaur’. It is in effect an insight plucked or grasped in the midst of a larger and more persistent motion. Autism is peculiarly human and not to be shared with bird or centaur and yet, from our perspective, what could be more appropriate to the self-enclosed realm of so many birds, wild or tame? And what, given their compromised condition, might better suit the perpetually alien centaurs? Birds are natural, and centaurs are mythical, but we who designate them both as such, and who can rarely in any settled way see our-selves as purely natural or purely mythical, may see them as being alike ‘othered’, for all our skills at categorising them. Whatever else the two lines’ expressions may do, they certainly estrange the horse, and they prepare the way for some estrangement of his rider. Buckley has a deeply eloquent poem called ‘Ghosts, Places, Stories, Questions’, and that title might be an epigraph for the great bulk of his work, whether in verse or in prose. In ‘Jumps Jockey’, the dedicatee is riding in concert with the dead, which makes for an eerie othering an othering of the stranger for the pragmatic ‘keeping his head true’, for the calculation of ‘glancing sideways’, and for the abruption of ‘slapping timber’. The ghosts here are adduced explicitly, but they are implied or fore-shadowed at many points in Buckley’s writing. Sometimes they are what W.H. Auden calls ‘our good dead’; sometimes wraith-like extenders of the imagination; sometimes, as in Anthony Hecht’s ‘The Ghost in the Martini’, revenant versions of his younger self. In any case, they are rarely merely ornamental, or provokers of frisson. Commonly, they are about partly because Buckley was intensely haunted by the past his own past and the quasi-tribal past of Australians and the Irish and partly because, as it seems to me, he took it that we are all ‘placed’ in some deep sense, are ‘storied’, and become ‘questions’ to ourselves or to others, insofar as we are both haunted and haunting. Perhaps more than anyone I have ever known, he was a living rebuke to the notion that there is not much to human personality, or that the self is atomic. He once wrote a paper, in its time mildly controversial, entitled ‘The Strange Personality of Christ’: and although he thought Christ unique indeed, he may well have judged him representative in that very strangeness. Which is not to say that Buckley could not relish ‘characters’ in the companionable sense of that word: much of his prose work Cutting Green Hay (1983) is populated by these, as is a good deal of the later Memory Ireland (1985). He could have an almost Swiftian sense that some people are larger than life, and all too many smaller than life but the ‘lifesize’ ones could be all the more cherished for that very fact. Here, for example, is some of his portrayal of Gwen Harwood: However much a lover of humanity (because a lover of the comic and the ecstatic, equally), she is basically a ‘solitary’, as she avowed in a letter. Probably because of that, her ‘life is linked together by very long friendships’. These friendships involve (and perhaps invoke) a reverence for the imagination and for people in whom imagination is strong and active. More than any other poet I know, she is a poetry lover; and although she has strong likes and dislikes, she is quick to praise work that she takes (often mistakenly) as superior to her own. Her attitude is at once proud, for she reacts instantly and abruptly to some kinds of criticism, and quite selfless: in contact with art, the ego in her is raised to a power beyond egotism. She claims that ‘my memory seems to be musical rather than verbal’; yet words start up like a spring, in full curve and rhythm, whenever her deepest life interests are touched. The ease with which she composes formal poems is remarkable. One of her favourites among her own poems is her poem for A.D. Hope. So far as I know, that had its genesis in a phone call I made to her from Melbourne, telling her that I had just come upon Hope at some reception, and that he seemed to me wretchedly ill. Let us, I suggested mildly, write him a poem apiece and send them to him (whenever in doubt, persecute the Muse). Certainly. She must have written her sparkling poem that night, for it arrived in the mail thirty-six hours after my call; my own poem was then seven lines long and peaky, and the arrival of Gwen’s knocked it out of the growth business. Patently, this is itself the characterisation of a friendship, and I suppose that those who do cherish friendship are likely to think of it in terms of ease and accessibility. Certainly, that was one element in Buckley’s view of the matter. But his intellectual and imaginative temper was such that complexity, sometimes to the point of paradox, kept on commending itself to him, which is why the first sentence in this portrayal is as it is. So far as I know, he had never made any study of the phenomenon of the literary ‘character’, as derived all the way back from Theophrastus, and as practised by, say, Samuel Butler in the seventeenth century, and with feline intensity by Swift in the eighteenth. But one thing which his de facto ‘characters’ have in common with Butler’s and with Swift’s is a combination of imaginative fluency and intellectual tautness. Those earlier writers affected transparency, and delivered design: a coiled aphoristic spring of critique was there, first to last, however urbanely the prose was deployed. That, at least, was the case when the bad news of knavery or folly was at issue and for one reason or another, the blackguarding ‘characters’ tended to be the ones to be written, and to last. Buckley was at least as aware as the next person that ‘against stupidity, the gods themselves struggle in vain’, and he knew that there are plenty of worse things than stupidity around witness, for example, ‘No New Thing’. But the ironist in him could be out-fenced by the celebrant, and often was. What might then be on display was both the ease and the precision of a passage like the present one. He thought that friendship both expanded attention and rewarded it, thought that friendship was intrinsically dramatic and was best addressed in intellectually dramatic terms. Over and above the fascination of any and all traits of personality, those of friends as such mobilised his attention. The first word in the subtitle of Cutting Green Hay is ‘Friendships’: the last line of that book appropriates Yeats’s line, ‘And say my glory was I had such friends’. His description of Gwen Harwood is tantamount to the same claim. Buckley’s immersal, at critically important parts of his life, in Catholic social and conceptual milieux, probably contributed a good deal to his sense of the complex and the paradoxical, since that religious tradition is one in which those traits are brought emphatically to the fore: to be stressing, unblinkingly, both the transcendence and the groundedness of God, is calculated to bring on the paradoxes. Somebody, though not I, could do some fruitful investigating there, and perhaps somebody, among the various people rumoured to be writing extensively on Buckley, is doing it. But I think that the mental moves to be seen in his first sentence on Harwood came naturally to him: ‘However much a lover of humanity (because a lover of the comic and the ecstatic, equally), she is basically a “solitary”, as she avowed in a letter.’ The sentence is suggestive beyond its occasion. It is a reminder of what I take to be true, namely that Buckley’s subject was ordinarily, over and above the person or persons under inspection, the human itself. His singling out ‘the comic and the ecstatic’ is a piece of excellent judgment of Harwood and her works, as anyone who knew her and them would be likely to agree, but it is also a way of specifying what might be called humanity’s ontological DNA. It was instinctive in Buckley to remember telling dicta from those he met even briefly the sapient taxi driver was a frequent candidate as well as those he knew well or had studied long. He was, in the European sense of the word, an anthropologist, a scrutiniser of Homo sapiens. He had no enthusiasm for G.K. Chesterton’s works, but he did have something of Chesterton’s fascination with the bipeds who stalk through our cities, some of them ourselves. His temper was of course often much darker than Chesterton’s, and better keyed to nuance. Once, asked aggressively by a companion whether he ‘made what he liked’ of some Catholic teaching, he replied that, no, ‘I make what I can of it’, and the response was more than riposte it was an example of his need to distinguish, in order to get the state of affairs understood as precisely as possible. ‘I don’t think you’ve quite understood what I’m saying, mate’, was almost a refrain in some conversations, and although this could in part be a strategic rhetorical manoeuvre, it was, I think, primarily an effort to keep attention as refined as the subject demanded or the occasion asked. He was by nature at home in complexity, but he did not like loose ends. One characteristic feature of the passage on Harwood is the way in which the account moves from delineation into anecdote an example of the ‘drama’ which I have mentioned earlier. His attitude towards ‘the indomitable Irishry’, past or present, was more complicated than some might suppose: but he was certainly of that stock in this constant pulsing between formulation and enacted display. His sequence ‘Golden Builders’ has this, I think, as one of its biorhythms the intense assaying of experience thus far, and then the fragment of narrative, and then the halting for a new, concentrated assessment. Its provenance, so far as literary history is concerned, would include, for example, William Shakespeare and George Eliot and Henry James, masters all of the meditative but to me at least it does not seem derived from anybody: it is his own as his voice is his own. When he refers to Harwood’s ‘sparkling poem’, he has that dead to rights: ‘To A.D. Hope’, in its eighteen four-line rhymed stanzas, is full of brio, as it is full of learning, conjecture and yearning. No wonder it ‘knocked out of the growth business’ his own ‘peaky’ poem. That last sentence interests me not only on account of its geniality and generosity, but because it is an example of a shift in idiom, in what Heaney often calls ‘acoustic’. Buckley’s speech, and the speech of both his verse and his prose, could be ceremonious, but like many poets he could take to ringing the changes on language in its various keyings. Profoundly humanistic, he had no time at all for the theoretical position that language speaks us rather than we it; but at the same time, the Romantic and pre-Romantic notion that poetry when it is going well is somehow being ‘inspired’, that the forces of the cosmos conspire to a good end with the forces of the psyche, is, I think, implicit in much that he wrote. This does not inevitably make for gravity his applauding Harwood as ‘a lover of the comic’ is significant and in fact his prose in particular is often flecked with half-submerged jokes. Broadly speaking, the later the poems, the more open they are to framings, to stressings and touchings, which could be anywhere from the seemingly offhand to the manifestly exalted. There is a revealing passage in his Poetry and the Sacred (1968) where, having been writing about Donne’s ‘Hymne to God my God, in my Sickness’, Buckley says: Everything in this poem delights me; and it seems to me one of the glories of our literature. To call it ‘revelatory’ in the sense I have formerly used would doubtless be misleading; its note is nowhere apocalyptic, and it does not work towards any revelation. Yet one might say that it is itself a revelation, even an apocalypse. The relaxation of tone is, in a sense, the passion’s atmosphere, and the condition of the ecstasy’s growth. We have here no merely didactic certainty, and no tactic of persuasion; we have, rather, a passionate composure whose emotional roots go as deep as the imagination can conceive ... Donne is a most difficult case, not simply because of the frequent sensuality of his religious poetry and the metaphysical questionings involved in his love poetry, but because of the way in which his expository method, which is one of concentration, creates an imaginative world whose chief feature is its expansiveness. It would be ridiculous to think of this as being a poetical manifesto for his own work, but it is often the case when poets write admiringly of the work of others John Keats on Shakespeare, say, or Randall Jarrell on Walt Whitman that you can learn a lot about their own magnetic north. And so things stand with this passage, without that being the whole story. Among the posthumous Last Poems (1991) is one which might, here, have the last word. It is called ‘Bard-Price’: This is the world as the hand of the killer displays it, held up, shoved forward, with leaves of blood on the forehead, Is this what the poet will celebrate, in the future court? What he learned in darkness to compose in darkness and sing with closed eyes? Food and drink are pressed on him, women rub against him, he turns and jeers at servants. Before he sings of victory, and of the severed heads, it is a life of chiacking, learning the arts of mockery if they’re not to grow sick with dislike of one another. He keeps the chanter in his bag, with the change of reeds and the cloths. He carries his music inside him as they carry their massacres. He was solitude by the river; he was the gaze-at-hunting that fills the brain with harmonies, and gasps of new tunes. He saw and drew up the images that wavered there, hour by hour,as the eel slides, for mocking minutes, under the breast of the kingfisher. Of apt prose and a fortiori it is true of poetry, too William H. Gass would have us remember that its: language is not the lowborn, gawky servant of thought and feeling; it is need, thought, feeling, and perception itself. The shape of the sentence, the song in its syllables, the rhythm of its movement, is the movement of the imagination too; it is the allocation of the things of the world to their place in the world of the word ... Buckley would have agreed with every word of this, and his own ‘best practice’ in poetry, as in prose, bears it out. And insofar as these guesses have any use, so would the traditional Irish bards of whom Buckley is thinking in ‘Bard-Price’. Those poets trained for twelve years, through seven grades of learning and expertise. Classically, they composed while lying, cloaked but cold, in complete darkness. Their stock-in-trade included praising the prominent (who were usually embattled, or about to be so) and bad-mouthing their enemies, with a view to reward in the form of a sword, a horse, a jewelled brooch or the like; they moved from spot to spot, and so might one week be lauding the magnate whom they had blackened the previous week. Two-thirds of the way through one’s training, one was called a ‘noble stream’, since, ideally, ‘a stream of pleasing praise issued from him, and a stream of wealth to him’. Buckley is not the only modern poet whose attention has been caught by this institution and its practices. (Much earlier, Elizabeth I, instructing her captains in Ireland, directed them to ‘hang the harpers, wherever found’.) The figure of the bard, even when not sentimentalised, has often been seen in a sunny light, which is fair enough. But as I have implied earlier, Buckley’s is frequently a clouded light, and it proves to be so this time. He is drawing directly on Celtic tradition when he refers to the heads taken Cuchulainn’s severed head, placed upon a rock, splits the stone and buries itself deep within it but the ‘leaves of blood on the forehead’ is a brilliant touch, fusing a leafy ‘world’ both with its sap and with its termination. Auden, in ‘The Cave of Making’, deprecates being ‘a bard in an oral culture, / obliged at drunken feasts to improvise a eulogy / of some beefy illiterate burner, / giver of rings’, but Buckley’s man can look after himself well enough, what with the jeering and the chiacking. Well enough, too, in that, even though the carried music will have to do with massacres, it is still his, and still music: even in a dark time, the honeycomb is being constructed. At Buckley’s funeral, as he had requested, the uilleann pipes were played, and this, as I take it, was more than an allusion to a cultural tradition which he had made deeply his own. It was, speechlessly, something in concert with the music which he too carried inside him, and which had issued, more rarely than he liked but more memorably than he sometimes feared, in his own poetry. He once wrote of ‘the few poems / that are the holy spaces of my life’. Few or not, ‘Bard-Price’ is surely one of them.