The debate over Jeffrey Side’s article in Jacket which kicked up some dust
here seems to have subsided, and as I’m tired of it myself I don’t especially
want to prolong its life. But having a few things to add, I’d asked the editor
John Tranter if the door was still open. He felt, quite reasonably, that it had
gone far enough on Jacket. Given that Jeffrey Side raised the issue here and
that I mention this list in my response, it seemed the natural place to send it.
I can see the topic of Heaney will not be a matter of pressing interest to
many poets here, so I apologize beforehand for its length and any imposition
on your patience.
As I haven’t being paying much attention to the more zany and enraged
exchanges on this list, my reference to Desmond Swords refers only to his
comments at Jacket.
The first section is unavoidably bogged down in tedious detail. For those
utterly bored with the stuff, but still willing to read on, it might be marginally
more rewarding to start after the asterisks.
Best wishes,
Jamie McKendrick
[Dear Editor,]
Though I meant to let it be, there are some replies to points raised by
Jeffrey Side I’d like to add as well as some further thoughts about the whole
exchange.
Side’s last response sets up a series of peripheral and distracting skirmishes.
The pedantry of some of these is dispiriting, and, by replying, I’m afraid I’ll be
unable to avoid the same charge.
When I wrote, for example, that I believed many of the authors footnoted in
his article, even Fenton, would be appalled at the uses he put them to, Side
replies that “Fenton isn’t quoted in the article, Alvarez is.” I was quite aware
that Side was quoting Fenton’s quotation from Alvarez, and this is why I
wrote “footnoted” and not “quoted” – the same goes for my mention of
Easthope, the probable source of Side’s zealous use of the term “empirical”.
My remark was in parenthesis, but I see no reason to withdraw it.
Whilst his reading of that phrase “not disjunct from or ever entirely
manumitted by...” is now more enquiring, it only reinforces my point that the
wording signals a tension between art and life in Heaney’s criticism rather
than, as Side originally argued, a dismissal of art.
On a subsidiary question, Side writes:
I have not blamed the mainstream in this matter. I mentioned nothing of
this in my article or in my response to your initial response to the article.
And yet in the article he wrote:
It seems not to have occurred to Heaney that any “cult” status these
poets have acquired was, perhaps, the consequence of being
marginalised by the mainstream.
To avoid further disagreements I should say that I’ve spotted the “perhaps”
in that sentence.
Another characteristic moment occurs when I attempted to introduce a
few lines from Heaney’s poems; I did so to show how they diverged from
Movement aesthetics, not as evidence of Heaney’s unassailable genius – to
take just one of them, the idea of water which “spells itself” doesn’t at all
seem to me an empirical phenomenon. But Side seizes on these lines to
declare, as I feared he would, that they are “mediocre examples of poetry”
and merely “descriptive”. He goes on to say:
Where his poems attempt to use linguistically interesting words, these
words usually only serve to shore up reality...They are tools to make
explicit what would otherwise remain vague, or connotative.
At this point, I feel something like gratitude that his article spared Heaney’s
poems such a monothematic way of reading: it’s like a tone-deaf person trying
to conduct a full orchestra, paying exclusive attention to the triangle section.
Regarding my claim that Side’s accounts have willfully distorted Heaney’s
essays on Clare, Thomas and others, I’m happy to let the matter rest, and am
confident that any reader who can face the task of setting the two side-by-
side will acknowledge the truth of it.
Side writes that by giving credibility to Desmond Swords I “lose credibility,
to some extent”. Maybe so. I’ve no desire to join any clubs but, if pushed, I’d
rather lose all credibility alongside Swords than give any credence to Side’s
kind of criticism. At least Swords can see what is happening in the article: it
tries to belittle a poet who has created, to say the least, a varied, rich and
considerable body of work over some fifty years, and it keeps calling his
honesty into question in ways that are ludicrous. For readers who may have
forgotten the article, looking at the first two paragraphs might be a reminder.
There they’ll encounter dismal and nonsensical propositions such as:
Interestingly, if Ashbery is a mainstream voice this would imply that he
and Heaney are both writing poetry. To re-position Ashbery within the
boundaries of mainstream verse, all Heaney seems to be doing is to
flatter his own poetic practice by association.
One of the persistent ideas behind the piece is that Heaney is anxious on
behalf of his imperiled “posthumous reputation”. But just because Side believes
this so fervently doesn’t make it either true or interesting.
***
My response to Side’s article was by no means motivated by the feeling
that Heaney’s poems, prose, or even interview remarks, were beyond
criticism; what I was objecting to was Side’s sequence of projections onto
Heaney. Again I have to acknowledge that John Muckle has put this far more
elegantly and incisively than I have. If I'm right in assuming Heaney's poetics
are not especially close to his heart, that just makes his contribution all the
more disinterested.
The argument has since spilled over onto other sites, including the avant-
garde British-Irish-Poets list. I notice the poet Peter Riley takes issue there
with my “heavy authoritative sneering, without saying anything” – and sees
that as symptomatic of such disputes. There may be some justice in this, and
I’m aware that my irritation with Side’s whole approach has led me to reply
irascibly to various other contributors – latterly to Todd Swift, for example,
whose point, that there was a more interesting world out there beyond this
tedious mainstream v. avant-garde battle, deserved more consideration than I
gave it. Sneering is always ugly and I’d prefer to wear a different expression.
However heavily, though, I think I have actually raised certain points of
interest. Among other things, I’ve explained, in some detail, why I think Side’s
approach is spurious and untrustworthy. I have questioned what I take to be
a false and often repeated connection between Heaney and the aesthetics of
the Movement – and this, to my knowledge, hasn’t been challenged before.
And I’ve even tried, briefly, to no avail, to bring some poems into the
argument.
What surprised me about the discussion on the Britpo list was the general
lack of any dismay at the charge of bad faith being leveled at another poet on
such insubstantial grounds. It seems to me this is a question that should
transcend any entrenched opposition between different poetic practices. Riley
for his part hasn’t said much more than that he finds Heaney’s fame absurd
and that, though a discussion of his poems might be more appropriate, he’s
not personally inclined to bother (but at least he does quote one line with
approval). This is fair enough, but surely not a reason to give tacit – and
authoritative – support to an article that calls Heaney’s honesty into question.
Does Heaney’s extensive fame, deserved or not, make him somehow fair game
for any and every attack?
Let’s imagine that someone publishes an essay that snips bits out of
Prynne’s remarkable monograph on Shakespeare’s sonnet 94 to try to make
out that it was all a defensive ruse to buttress his own poetry’s flagging
reputation, and in doing so the piece keeps suggesting Prynne is not much
more than a canny fraud, and claims that, because he was once taught by
Donald Davie at Jesus College Cambridge, he was therefore the unquestioning
purveyor of Movement aesthetics. Anyone who constructed such an
argument, however studiously footnoted, would rightly be dismissed as a fool
or a knave, probably both. And not, I hope, just by Prynne’s admirers.
The most generous construction I can give to Side’s article is that he
considers a huge injustice has been perpetrated by the ‘mainstream’, and that
any means whatsoever are therefore licit in an attempt to expose someone
admired by and a part of it. But his methods devalue the art, no matter which
school you belong to.
I can understand how Heaney’s remarks about avant-garde poetry could
irritate a number of poets and readers – they are brief, done in very broad
strokes, cooler than lukewarm. But is he under any diplomatic (or “senatorial”)
obligation to pretend he likes what he doesn’t? Had he done so, then there
might really be some point in calling him “dissembling”.
Jamie McKendrick
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