On Tue, 14 Oct 1997, Karlien van den Beukel wrote:
> Is there not a Romantic dialectic between Pearl and BOD? "Pearl" seems
> prelapsarian, not just the pastoral it generously writes
> ("Skybrightness drove me to the cool of the lake/ to muscle the wind/and
> wrestle the clouds/ and forever dream of Pearl") but the figure of
> Pearl herself who, in the condition of having no articulated verbal
> language, is also inextricably part of that idyll, indeed, unfallen
> ("what there is of my mind/tumbled into the lashing trees")? Only the
> lyric voice can mediate the being of Pearl. In BOD, bathetic urban
> space, such as public lavatory, and ego full of swagger-lingo, as if it
> were its own persuasive verbal pyrotechnics (cf. "christmas crackers"),
> the very gift that enables sympathetic medation, that now drives it to
> destruction? These are but the most initial and simple of comments. I
> would like to hear what you made of it.
- Karlien I like your reading of the implied synergy between Pearl and
Book Of Demons - obviously the two have a lot of links and overlaps
(particularly echoes of Pearl in Book Of Demons). But to me there are
fundamental differences - to oversimplify it, Pearl is outward looking;
BOD inward. And of course, tho they appear together in this volume, the
two have very different origins and histories - in bibliographic terms,
for a start, but in other respects too.
I guess the fact is I haven't lived with Book Of Demons long enough to
come to terms with it in its own right (tho I've seen parts or versions of
it at many times over the past year or so) - I'm still fighting it
somehow. What strikes me at the outset is that it's a book with a
programme (I mistrust programmes), a direct purpose in the telling of BM's
fight with alcohol addiction (the publisher's blurb hammers that home with
six inch nails of course, but it's obvious anyway). And that a fairly
self-centred one: this is me, how I went into the pit and came back -
swagger-lingo and verbal pyrotechnics, as you say. It's rich in
self-mythologising names: Pookah Sweeney; Sweeno; etc. BM links up
explicitly to confessional poetry (Anne Sexton) which I guess doesn't help
me to like it (that's my problem rather than anyone elses), and also nods,
as I suggested, to a whole range of other stereotype models of The Poetic
Drunk (the genre I refered to) in a way I feel does him no favours - tends
to sound a little of the standard poetic egomania which the packagers of
poetry like; makes him very much more obviously a poetic "product".
This isn't to deny the sheer crackle of his writing - all the things I
like in Dylan Thomas, for instance, are concentrated and distilled in BOD.
It gives Barry a text he can perform perhaps more than any other. And it
isn't to deny BM's courage in doing it, living it, writing it. But it is
to flag up what I see as a potential problem: a degree of self-centring
which was offset by other awarenesses, other focussing in Pearl.
Hope this helps. I'd love to be wrong in my doubts.
RC
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|