Could once be fixed in art, the immortal
Episode be recorded—there he would awake
On a fine day to shed his acts like scabs,
The trespasses on life and living slake
In the taste, not of his death but of his dying:
And like the rest of us he died still trying.
1964/1960
BALLAD OF KRETSCHMER’S TYPES1
(pyknics are short, fat and hairy,
leptosomes thin and tall)
The schizophrene, the cyclothyme
Swerve from the droll to the sublime,
Coming of epileptoid stock
They tell the time without a clock.
The pyknic is the prince of these
And glorifies his mental status
Not by his acts on mind’s trapeze
But purely by divine afflatus.
Oblivious to the critic’s canon
The rational booby’s false décor
He swigs away the Absolute
And then demands some more.
Pity the lanky leptosome
Myoptic tenebrous and glum
Whose little pigs must stay at home
Unless they move by rule of thumb.
Salute the podgling pyknic then
That gross and glabrous prince of men,
Contriver of the poet’s code
And hero of the Comic Mode.
And Lord, condemn the leptosome
To Golgotha his natural home
The pyknic who’s half saint half brute
O waft him on Thy parachute,
And may his footsteps ever roam
Where alcohol is Absolute.
1960/1960
1 Lines 3–6 of this poem first appeared in a letter from the editors of The Booster which was published in the New English Weekly, XII: 4 (4 November 1937).
BALLAD OF THE OEDIPUS COMPLEX
From Travancore to Tripoli
I trailed the great Imago,
Wherever Freud has followed me
I felt Mama and Pa go.
(The engine loves the driver
And the driver loves his mate,
The mattress strokes the pillow
And the pencil pokes the slate)
I tried to strangle it one day
While sitting in the Lido
But it got up and tickled me
And now I’m all Libido.
My friends spoke to the Censor
And the censor warned the Id
But though they tried to hush things up
They neither of them did.
(The barman loves his potion
And the admiral his barge,
The frogman loves the ocean
And the soldier his discharge.)
(The critic loves urbanity
The plumber loves his tool.
The preacher all humanity
The poet loves the fool.)
If seven psychoanalysts
On seven different days
Condemned my coloured garters
Or my neo-Grecian stays,
I’d catch a magic constable
And lock him behind bars
To be a warning to all men
Who have mamas and pas.
1960/1960
APHRODITE
Not from some silent sea she rose
In her great valve of nacre
But from such a one—O sea
Scourged with iron cables! O sea,
Boiling with salt froths to curds,
Carded like wool on the moon’s spindles,
Time-scarred, bitter, simmering prophet.
On some such night of storm and labour
Was hoisted trembling into our history—
Wide with panic the great eyes staring …
Of man’s own wish this speaking loveliness,
On man’s own wish this deathless petrifact.
1964/1961
ELEUSIS
With dusk rides up the god-elated night,
Where plants expire in chaff and husk
On marble threshing-floors of bone.
Here in the gallery where the initiates strained
To lick the sacred ribbon from the soil,
Still wet from the libation’s stains of
Honey, grain and this year’s olive-oil.
Well: to sit down, to anonymise a bit
By some unleavened altar which preserves
An echo of truth for the precocious will,
Of some disinherited science of the nerves.
‘How long will the full Unlearning take?
How long the unacting and unthinking run?
When does the obelisk the sleeper wake
Repaired and newly minted like a sun?’
‘The issues change, alas the problems never.
The capital question cuts to the very bone.
Drink here your draught of the eternal fever,
Sit down unthinking on the Unwishing stone.’
1966/1961
A PERSIAN LADY
Some diplomatic mission—no such thing as ‘fate’—
Brought her to the city that ripening spring.
She was much pointed out—a Lady-in-Waiting—
To some Persian noble; well, and here she was
Merry and indolent amidst fashionable abundance.
By day under a saffron parasol on royal beaches,
By night in a queer crocketed tent with tassels.
He noted the perfected darkness of her beauty,
The mind recoiling as from a branding-iron:
The sea advancing and retiring at her lacquered toes;
How would one say ‘to enflame’ in her tongue,
He wondered, knowing it applied to female beauty?
When their eyes met he felt dis-figured
It would have been simple—three paces apart!
Disloyal time! They let the seminal instant go,
The code unbroken, the collision of ripening wishes
Abandoned to hiss on in the great syllabaries of memory.
Next day he deliberately left the musical city
To join a boring water-party on the lake.
Telling himself ‘Say what you like about it,
I have been spared very much in this business.’
He meant, I think, that never should he now
Know the slow disgracing of her mind, the slow
Spiral of her beauty’s deterioration, flagging desires,
The stagnant fury of the temporal yoke,
Grey temple, long slide into fat.
On the other hand neither would she build him sons
Or be a subject for verses—the famished in-bred poetry
Which was the fashion of his time and ours.
She would exist, pure, symmetrical and intact
Like the sterile hyphen which divides and joins
In a biography the year of birth and death.
1964/1961
PURSEWARDEN’S INCORRIGIBILIA
It will be some time before the Pursewarden papers and manuscripts are definitively sorted and suitably edited; but a few of his boutades have turned up in the papers of his friends. Here are two examples of what someone called his “incorrigibilia”; he himself referred to them as Authorised Versions. The first, which was sung to the melody of Deutschland, Deutschland Uber Alles, in a low nasal monotone, generally while he was shaving, went as follows:
Take me back where sex is furtive
And the midnight copper roams;
Where instead of comfy brothels
We have Lady Maud’s At Homes.
Pass me up that White Man’s Burden
Fardels of Democracy;
Three faint cheers for early closing,
Hip-Hip-Hip Hypocrisy!
Sweet Philistia of my childhood
Where our valiant churchmen pant:
‘Highest standard of unliving,
Longest five-day week of Cant.’
Avert A.I.! Shun Vivisection!
Join the RSPCA,
Lead an anti-litter faction!
Leave your leavings in a tray!
Cable grandma I’ll be ready,
Waiting on the bloody dock;
With a hansom for my luggage—
Will the French release my cock?
Take me back in An Appliance,
For I doubt if I can walk;
Back to art dressed in a jockstrap,
Back to a Third Programme Talk.
Roll me back down Piccadilly
Where our National Emblem stands,
Watching coppers copping tartlets,
Eros! wring thy ringless hands!
Ineffectual intellectual
Chewing of the Labour rag,
Take me back where every Cause
Is round the corner, in the bag.
Buy me then my steamer ticket
For the land for which I burn …
Yet, on second thoughts, best make it
The usual weekday cheap return!
1980/1962
FRANKIE AND JOHNNY
New Style
Livin’ in a functional greenhouse
In tastefully painted tones,
Squattin’ on chairs of tubular steel
And dicin’ with the baby’s bones.
Chorus: He was her man, etc.
Goldfish swimming in a circle,
Swimming round and round like thoughts,
While a frigidaire keeps the bottle cold
And the drinks in their glass retorts.
Chorus: Ibid.
Help us to bear all our follies
In a forest of sanitary bricks,
Where no bed-bug lives in the closet
And no death-watch beetle ticks.
Chorus: Ibid.
With faces blanker than porcelain
In a forest of termite steel
Where the saxophones keep repeating
‘The People shall not feel.’
Chorus: Ibid.
Where the psyche fades like a violet
Overlooked in a dry box-wall;
We’re rehearsing the Second Coming
Unaware of the Second Fall.
Chorus: Ibid.
Riffle a book in the library,
Yawn at the clocks in the sky,
Rove the city streets with a briefcase,
Feeling your life go by.
Chorus: Ibid.
Once the saints were good box-office
And the times seemed full of sap,
But things haven’t been right since Eden.
Come here and sit in my lap.
Chorus: Ibid.
It’s the end of a city culture
And an end of the age of Sex,
Soon we’ll multiply by fission
By courtesy of World Shell-Mex.
Chorus: Ibid.
A kiss to the deathless Helen
An embrace to the Prodigal Son,
For the nerves are dying in their bodies
Horribly, one by one.
Chorus: Ibid.
The taste buds die like mushrooms
And the sex buds die like spore
And this ain’t no time to wake them
Cause there ain’t no Time no more.
Chorus: Ibid.
There ain’t no n-dimensions
To make a place for love
And there ain’t no Space to fit it in
Below or up above.
Chorus: Ibid.
Frankie and Johnny were lovers
But the Lord waxed mighty wroth
When he saw them trying to die together,
A-knitting their own winding-cloth.
Chorus: Ibid.
For their race was the race of Adam,
Their mother was the golden Eve,
But they died in the XXth Century
Leaving nothing to believe.
Chorus: Ibid.
1980/1962
BYZANCE
Her dust has pawned kings of gold,
Bodies the winter entered and tubed
In cerements of damp their fallen stars,
Invader of the minds their lichen covered,
And between the stones moss,
And between the bones fingernails and hair.
Only the objects of their past estate remain,
Dispersing now like limbs in different museums.
The crowns and trumpets tarnish easily,
The tangles of ribbon rot like heads of hair
In cupboards where they kept the holy chrism.
Only the eye in an ikon here or there
Amends and ponders and reflects neglects:
Dead monarchs toughened to a stare.
1966/1963
ODE TO A LUKEWARM EYEBROW
‘Mr Durrell and Miss Compton-Burnett meet with such praise in France as to raise many a lukewarm English eyebrow …’
‘There is something in the English temper that loves a shortage, be it of words …’
The Times Literary Supplement
And dost thou then, Roderick, once more raising
In Blackfriars that traditionally O but so lukewarm
Eyebrow, which doubtless thou spellest highbrow, chide me,
And from the frugal and funless fund of thy native repository
Of culture, lay thyself once more open, O literary mooncalf,
To a creative’s friendly but well-aimed suppository?
Nay, Rod, who from thy bleak and apricot anonymity
Dost in prose bald and breathless exhale an ineffable
Condescension, spattering on poor art thy spinsterish appraisals
Surely thy muse misleads thee, or lies under some shadow cursed,
Forever to gnaw, nibble, gnash termite-wise at thy betters,
With thy English Eyebrow lukewarm, thy lips and sphincters pursed?
Has she not told thee, fog-bound Thames-bedevilled fabulator
That the rewards of laziness will be a conferred mereness, a dark
Sterility, the pedant’s parasitic portion? That somehow thou
Must struggle to snap the gyve and unequivocally quit
The cold steamed cod of thy monochrome prosing or else
Be dubbed forever a pince-fesse of English Lit.?
1968/1963
OLIVES
The grave one is patron of a special sea,
Their symbol, food and common tool in one,
Yet chthonic as ever the ancients realised,
Noting your tips in trimmings kindled quick,
Your mauled roots roared with confused ardours,
Holding in heat, like great sorrows contained
By silence; dead branch or alive grew pelt
Refused the rain and harboured the ample oil
For lamps to light the human eye.
So the poets confused your attributes,
Said you were The Other but also the domestic useful,
And as the afflatus thrives on special discontents,
Little remedial trespasses of the heart, say,
Which grows it up: poor heart, starved pet of the mind:
They supposed your serenity compassed the human span,
Momentous, deathless, a freedom from the chain,
And every one wished they were like you,
Who live or dead brought solace,
The gold spunk of your berries making children fat.
Nothing in you being lame or fraudulent
You discountenanced all who saw you.
No need to add how turning downwind
You pierce again today the glands of memory,
Or how in summer calms you still stand still
In etchings of a tree-defining place.
1966/1963
SCAFFOLDINGS: PLAKA
For how long now have we not nibbled
At the immediate past in this fashion, words,
Regretting our ignoble faculty of failing,
Slipping between whose fingers?
Melting between whose lips?
The disabused ruins of history’s many
Many costumes we discarded.
The little shop has been pulled down
Where we bought stamps, tobacco, Easter ribbons.
A sort of little face now uprooted which
Once determined a whole order of joy,
Ruled over a pulse-rate, made so imperative
And magical the re-reading of a forgotten epic.
How everything in nature diminished
Or increased when it simply spoke!
We did not spot the scaffolding of bone
Until the last winter, the immense despondency
Once more gained full control, the immense despondency.
Old walls wrinkle into dust, windows
Poked out to render sightless
A city loyal to those handsome minds,
Her squares and parks designed for someone’s loving.
The masons’ picks have touched with their derision,
Unspare the whitewash of the old disorders,
Say what you like it’s gone.
One blow can shatter the heroic vision.
1964/1963
STONE HONEY
Reading him is to refresh all nature,
Where, newly elaborated, reality attends.
The primal innocence in things confronting
His eye as thoughtful, innocence as unstudied …
One could almost say holy in the scientific sense.