New Voice

The subject of today’s sermon, brethren, is last night’s programming on BBC 4 – a selection of doucmentaries on selected, British poets. Incidentally, BBC 4 is, increasingly, becoming a good reason to stay in on Saturday nights (well, that, the recession and a god-awful hangover from the night before). Anyway,  we had Paxman on Wilfred Owen, the most interesting part of which was an opportunity to view drafts of poems, complete with Sassoon’s suggestions. This documentary, though, put me in mind, not only of Owen and his brilliant poetry and tragic, ironic life and death, but of Owen as portrayed by Pat Barker in the exceptional Regeneration trilogy.
The Arena film on Dylan Thomas sought to separate the man from the myth, while the programme about Ted Hughes, made shortly after his death, was interesting for many reasons, not least of which, I found, were Heaney’s reflections on his friend and the recent volte-face by feminists, previously all too willing to blame him for Plath’s death (though it seems no one got too het up about Weevil’s).
Ian Hislop’s potted history of the poet laureateship while, predictably, a little annoying, was not without interest, as was Betjeman’s “interview” of Larkin, or at least it was the odd time Larkin got a word in edgewise.

The most interesting, and the best film of the night, and indeed the reason I was moved to write this, was the documentary on the poet Stevie Smith. This was a fascinating, bizarre, idiosyncratic look at the poet, of whom, I am ashamed to admit, I had never heard, but who seems to have been, herself, fascinating, bizarre and idiosyncratic. The film itself was an engrossing study of middle-class English suburbia, something that is, as it turns out, quite exotic. The interviews with her (all fairly eloquent) neighbours was a refreshing change from the usual parade of talking heads, and the brief glimpse into their stiff, formal, dreary (to my eye at least) front rooms, was a glimpse into a strange world. Here we learn about the kind of hat she wore upon being invited to meet the Queen. We are told about the afternoons that she came to “take tea” and the pinafore dresses and white socks she liked to wear. One interviewee is questioned by the local hairdresser, a Ms Ballard (fittingly enough in a study of art produced from suburbia), at the end of which she is interrupted by a Mrs Lambert – in to make an appointment “Oh good morning Mrs Lambert, would you like to make an appointment”. That’s the kind of film it is. The front rooms are what I woke this morning (or this afternoon, to be pedantic about it) thinking about – dull and staid rooms, the kind of rooms kids, you imagine, would not be allowed to enter, lest they break the ugly glass animals or the plates marking various royal occasions. One elderly couple sat in a front room on huge black sofa, that seemed to curve around a good part of the room, looking for all the world like some piece of S&M equipment and entirely, weirdly incongruous.
An excellent, quirky film that serves as a study of middle-class British suburbia as well as a compelling, compassionate view of someone whose books I will most certainly seek out and read. I particularly want, on my shelves, the poem that contained the fabulous, tragi-comic lines that were quoted so often throughout the film:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving, but drowning.

Finally, to return to the pinafore dresses, earlier today, when putting myself through the ritual self-punishment that is my Sunday 13 mile run I was, contrary to habit, thinking. I was thinking about the programmes and the poets and what, if anything links them. Or, rather, the thing that I think that links them – childhood. In the Smith documentary, much is made of her child-like dress sense and, indeed, the perceived child-like nature of her lifestyle and poetry. Someone in the film mentions how she brought the child into adulthood. This is, to my mind, what links the poets, Thomas, Hughes and Smith, and Owen, in that the destruction of youth was his subject and his fate. The first three, though, especially have all been described as childlike and it is this quality that seemed to add to the air of tragedy and sadness associated with them. Certainly Thomas is described as being like a child, and his poetry contains a child-like playfulness, exuberance, and sense of wonder - though he is also described as being cynical, a ‘sponger’ and a manipulator. Hughes too, is formed by and retains the habits he acquired as a child, however sophisticated his poetry and thought. The letters from his youth display a precocious talent and literacy and literariness, however, as he grows older they never quite lose a naïve quality, particularly the letters to his brother proposing plans and schemes that would enable this brother to return from Australia.

That person, in the Smith film, mentions that this retention of the child in adulthood is dangerous, as there is nothing as vulnerable in the adult world, as a child. To be a poet, however, perhaps it is necessary to regard life with the wonder of childhood, to look and listen with the opennness of the child, with as few of the protective, but obfuscating layers of the super-ego as possible.