Today

26 December/January April/May 2011 2015/16 Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today www.KCWToday.co.uk 020 7738 2348
December/January 2015/16
Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today
27
Literature
Poetry
online: www.KCWToday.co.uk
Blood Meridian
By Max Feldman
Great works of literature frequently
reveal the deepest workings of
human consciousness. Writers
like Dostoyevsky or Austen take us
into the very soul of their characters
and let us perceive their world filtered
through their carefully author-curated
perceptions. Cormac McCarthy however,
doesn’t go in for any of that shit. His
characters are dropped into the narrative
like impassive stone idols, their innerlives
and thoughts locked far away from
the savage world that McCarthy conjures
into being.
Having spent his career up to
Meridian toiling in wilful Southern
Gothic obscurity, in 1985 McCarthy
set his sights on writing a Western. The
Western that emerged had as much
in common with Dante’s Inferno as it
did with True Grit. Based in part on
the memoirs of soldier/bandit Samuel
Chamberlain, the novel concerns itself
broadly with the fortunes of a not
particularly pleasant (on the first page
our initial introduction limits itself to
the fact that “He can neither read nor
write and in him broods already a taste
for mindless violence”) fourteen year
old runaway as he falls in with a gang of
scalp hunters on the Mexican-American
border. However great swathes of the
novel pass without word or thought
from our ostensible lead and instead deal
exclusively in the Miltonic fury of the
narration, wherein the passage of the
scalp hunters through the desert seems
to have been transplanted directly from
the Book of Revelation.
Befitting such a brutal profession, the
novel roils in a red tide of unconstrained
brutality that moves beyond shocking
into almost psychedelic territory.
Violence is not the defining quality of
the novel, violence is the novel. This
can’t be stressed enough; the blood
is not cathartic or even necessarily
representative of greater themes, instead
it is numbing, senseless and brutal, much
like real violence. Rather than a reductive
presentation of any race as particularly
victimised, Blood Meridian draws its
distinctions along more Darwinian lines
between predator or prey instead of black
or white. It’s in this stark and brutal
landscape that McCarthy introduces a
character who is as indelible a literary
figure as Moby Dick’s White Whale;
Judge Holden. The Judge is a leviathan
of a man, entirely hairless and prone to
expounding on bizarre philosophy that
set him apart even in the company of
the murderers he rides with. Presented
as something not quite human and
possibly immortal the Judge preaches
war as the platonic ideal that mankind
should strive for, declaring “war is god”.
Even in landscape as unreal and hellish
as Blood Meridian the Judge stands out
as something unknowably ghastly yet
intensely captivating.
So far, so unrelentingly brutal,
wherein lies the issue of the novel; it’s a
non-stop death march through all the
worst parts of the bible. This can make
it hard to recommend, or indeed, even
enjoy but within the novel lies some of
the most starkly beautiful writing of
the 20th century. For full disclosure I
should admit I am not a particular fan of
McCarthy but with Blood Meridian he
achieves a kind of literary transcendence
that most authors would kill to even
dream of. With the novel he unleashed a
bestial howl that Leonard Pierce called
“the ultimate Western” as in the final
completion of the form.
Quake before its majesty.
Literary criticism
By Max Feldman
“Much literary criticism comes from
people for whom extreme specialization
is a cover for either grave cerebral
inadequacy or terminal laziness, the
latter being a much cherished aspect
of academic freedom.” -John Kenneth
Galbraith
When Freud admitted that
sometimes a cigar can just be a cigar;
rather than a cloaked metaphor for
repressed homosexuality, American
imperialism and the month of January
he was unintentionally slamming a
stake through the heart of traditionalist
literary criticism (which would, with its
dying breath, hiss out something about
how a stake through the heart was not
only a figurative sexual penetration,
but also emblematic of the collective
unconscious response to 9/11). In the
relatively cloistered world of academia,
nothing is allowed to be what it seems.
Novels are interpreted via Marxist/
Feminist/Nilhilst/Classist/Astrologist
filters at the drop of the proverbial hat
and suddenly Harry Potter has always
been a metaphor for gender roles in
times of warfare.
Of course a quick look up the page
at my Blood Meridian retrospective (and
a longer look back to my Literature
degree) will prove that rather than
being immune to these tendencies, I am
instead biting the hand that feeds with
cheerful hypocrisy. Still even someone
as pretentious as myself can occasionally
baulk at the more sesquipedalian
loquaciousness of some of the more
hysterical interpretations (and I’m
pretentious enough to use the phrase
“sesquipedalian loquaciousness”). At
their higher levels the institutions of
higher education can become something
of an echo chamber of the terminally
solipsistic, friends who have reached
PhD level have sometimes complained
to me that their perception has grown
so sharp that they find themselves
using queer theory to analyse take-out
menus when they were just looking
for a large macaroni and cheese. To
(badly) paraphrase Alan Ginsberg: “I
Happiness
New poetry by Jack Underwood
saw the greatest minds in my generation
destroyed by academia”.
There is definitely a happy
medium to be found between blithely
taking art at face value and surrendering
to total academicisation (wherein one’s
opinions and beliefs become opaque
and impenetrable to those who aren’t
equally far along the intellectual garden
path). Whilst such depth of study verges
on necessary for such light reading as
Gravity’s Rainbow or Infinite Jest, when
applied to the wider world of literature
it threatens to reduce a piece of art to
a twitching pile of severed constituent
influences. Criticism can always stand
a critique and it can feel wrong to
surrender too totally to the head for such
a timeless substance as literature; give the
heart something to work with.
Bright and beguiling, daring and funny, an accomplished and memorable debut
from a distinct new voice.
Jack Underwood was born in Norwich in 1984. He graduated from Norwich
School of Art and Design in 2005 before completing an MA and PhD in Creative
Writing at Goldsmiths College, where he now teaches English Literature and
Creative Writing. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2007 and Faber published
his debut pamphlet in 2009 as part of the Faber New Poet series. He also teaches
at the Poetry School, co-edits the anthology series Stop Sharpening Your Knives, and
reviews for Poetry London and Poetry Review. Happiness was published by Faber in
2015. ISBN-13: 978-0571313617.
Photograph © Faber & Faber
THE ATTACKS ON CHARLIE HEBDO LAST JANUARY and the recent shootings in Paris have brought about a wave of uncertainty as
to what to expect from 2016. These unacceptable attacks on freedom of expression, unfortunately, are not unique to our times. Many writers
have been struck down in their prime as a consequence of extremism. Frederica Garcia Lorca (1898-1936) Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938) and
Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) are just a few who held extremism to account using the pen rather than sword and who tragically paid with their lives. The
fate of these doomed writers is captured here in this month’s poetry page in two poems by Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). Veronezh is a chilling portrait
of Stalin’s communist Russia and For Osip Mandelstam, a memorial to Akhmatova’s close friend and one of Russia’s most significant poets who did not
survive the Stalinist great purge of 1935 -1940.
In contrast poets have also employed language as a means of exploring the individual and international wounds brought about by war and revenge.
Arguably, some of the greatest lines of modern times that examine these age-old themes can be found in The Cure at Troy by Seamus Heaney (1939–
2013). Heaney’s own experiences of the political divide in Northern Ireland during the 1980s and the troubles that ensued gave him a unique position
from which to consider the tension between individual needs, a loyalty to a cause and the possibility for growth and transformation.
So with these humble offerings from Akhmatova and Heaney we look forward to 2016 with intelligence and sensitivity and wish you all
a ‘Joyeux Noël et Bonne Année’.
Portrait of Seamus Heaney by Peter Edwards. National Portrait Gallery
The Cure at Troy
(1990)
Seamus Heaney
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols [jails]
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that a further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracles
And cures and healing wells.
Call the miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
Literature & Poetry edited by
Emma Trehane MA Ph.d
Voronezh
For Osip
Mandelstam
Anna Akhmatova
And the town is frozen solid in a vice,
Trees, walls, snow, beneath a glass.
Over crystal, on slippery tracks of ice,
the painted sleighs and I, together, pass.
And over St Peter’s there are poplars, crows
there’s a pale green dome there that glows,
dim in the sun-shrouded dust.
The field of heroes lingers in my thought,
Kulikovo’s barbarian battleground.
The frozen poplars, like glasses for a toast,
clash now, more noisily, overhead.
As though it was our wedding, and the crowd
were drinking to our health and happiness.
But Fear and the Muse take turns to guard
the room where the exiled poet is banished,
and the night, marching at full pace,
of the coming dawn, has no knowledge.
For Osip
Mandelstam
Anna Akhmatova
I bow to them as if over a cup,
Those innumerable precious lines –
This is the black, tender news
Of our youth stained with blood.
The air is the air I breathed
That night above the abyss,
That night of iron emptiness,
When all calls and cries were vain.
How rich the scent of carnations,
That came to me once in dream –
There where Eurydice circles,
The bull bears Europa through the foam.
Here the shades go flowing by,
Over the Neva, the Neva, the Neva,
The Neva that splashes on the stairs –
And here’s your pass to immortality.
Here are the keys to that place,
About which there’s never a word…
Here’s the sound of the mysterious lyre,
Guest in the meadow beyond this world.
Cover extract taken from The Cure at Troy © Estate of Seamus Heaney and reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd