A MOVEMENT OF MIND : ESSAYS ON POETS, CRITICS & BIOGRAPHERS

By Tony Roberts

Shoestring Press. 335 pages. £13.50. ISBN 978-1-915553-39-3

Reviewed by Jim Burns

In his introduction to this book, Tony Roberts says that “it may be time to re-evaluate the contribution of a number of writers who have been left behind : overlooked, misrepresented or diminished by fashion. And secondly – as befits autobiography – it indicates a movement of my mind from a fascination with mid-twentieth century American poets, to a more recent return to mid-nineteenth century British writers and a movement from poetry to prose”.

I like the idea of resurrecting the work of writers who have been left behind as fashions change. Their numbers are legion. Yesterday’s popular poet soon becomes today’s forgotten figure. It’s instructive to look through old magazines and anthologies from years past and shake one’s head at the names that no longer mean much to anyone but specialists. Roberts writes in an informed manner about the Scottish poet Norman Cameron, whose writings at one time (mainly the1930s and 1940s) were well-known but are hardly recognised today. He didn’t have a large output – Roberts says around 70 poems, though he also did a fair amount of translations – and died in 1953, which might be another factor in his later relative obscurity. The 1960s didn’t have much patience with the 1950s, and I’m not sure that we’ve ever really recovered from that situation. But I remember and still like Cameron’s 1930s poem, “Public House Confidence”, from a Fifties anthology.

Roberts’ “fascination with mid-twentieth century American poets” is evident in his essays on Robert Lowell, John Berryman,  and Delmore Shwartz, with all of them having a background of breakdowns, marital issues,  alcoholism, and other problems. A less-scrupulous writer would focus heavily on such matters, but Roberts, though not attempting to hide them, consistently draws attention to the work. It requires a balancing act in the case of Lowell’s The Dolphin, for example, because the nature of the contents, with their contentious use of Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters, inevitably leads to arguments about ethical implications which must distract from a fair evaluation of what Lowell wanted to do. Roberts refers to various reactions to Lowell’s book (Adrianne Rich said it was “bullshit eloquence, a poor excuse for a cruel and shallow book”), while reserving his own judgement, as an ardent supporter of Lowell generally, on its overall value. It may be that a gap of many years will be needed before someone can offer a completely detached view of the poet’s intentions and whether or not they succeeded or failed. We are too close to the people concerned, and to the moral and ethical assumptions of our own days, to be dispassionate.

Writing about Delmore Schwartz, Roberts says, “For some the Delmore Schwartz of the short stories is the memorable one”, and I’d place myself in that category.  I could read the stories and his essays and reviews, but the poems, with a few minor exceptions, never spoke to me. Roberts has a different view, and I respect it, though without any feeling that he’s convinced me of Schwartz’s worthiness as a poet. “Troubled lives are memorable”, Roberts writes, and it makes me wonder if Schwartz will survive beyond the sad accounts of his misfortunes and his portrayal as Von Humboldt Fleischer in Saul Bellow’s novel, Humboldt’s Gift?  He ought to, though perhaps not for the poetry.

I’m much more inclined to agree with him about Richard Hugo and James Wright, who Roberts refers to as “old friends, driven by insecurities to depression and drink”. They had, he says, grown up “in Hugo’s phrase in ‘poor, often degrading circumstances‘ during the Depression, with ‘loyalty to defeated people’ they loved and did not want to be like. They shared a ‘feeling of having violated’ their lives ‘by wanting to be different’ “.  It’s a wonderful description and I can’t do any better than quote Roberts even further: “Their work is marked by a loneliness which seeks identification  and acceptance  by a fascination with the rejected (Wright) and the derelict (Hugo) – And yet they wrote with a liveliness of style and a candour that is magnetic”.

Before moving backwards into the nineteenth century Roberts looks at the “Iowa Writers Workshop in the early Fifties”, and makes it seem like a place it was advantageous to be, in more ways than one. It often depended on the qualities demonstrated by the visiting tutors and the attending students. Not everyone was impressed by Robert Lowell, and Philip Levine later recalled, “To say I was disappointed in Lowell as a teacher is an understatement,” though he added “He prodded me to a rereading of Hardy -  for which I am still thankful”. Levine’s was a personal response, and other students spoke more positively about what they got from Lowell in terms of encouragement.

“Alfred Kazin : American Outsider” is Roberts’ tribute to a major critic and to his  early work, On Native Ground, said to be “an astonishing debut, really a series of mini-intellectual biographies relating to the emergent ‘struggle for realism’ in fiction and criticism from 1890-1940”. In his book Kazin wrote about Theodore Dreiser, Stephen Crane, Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris and others, and from a later period, Erskine Caldwell, James T.Farrell, and John Steinbeck, all of them writers I discovered during or just after my army days in the 1950s. And there were Kazin’s own books about what it was like to develop into a New York Intellectual, A Walker in the City, Starting Out in the Thirties, and  New York Jew. Roberts says they’re “lightly fictionalised autobiographies” in which Kazin “avoided the solemnity of the Marxism of his peers”.

I have to admit that reading Roberts on nineteenth century writers and intellectuals was something of a learning process for me. Though familiar with the names – Dickens, Matthew Arnold, Leslie Stephen, Robert Browning, George Henry Lewes, Mrs Gaskell, James Anthony Froude,  – I’d be less than honest if I claimed that, Dickens and Gaskell apart, I have more than a somewhat disorganised  acquaintance with much of their work. So, it was enlightening to read Roberts’ informed accounts of their activities. Writing about an early life of Arnold by G.W.E. Russell, he notes that it “had been compromised by the interference of the estate”, so that, in Roberts’ words, “Gone were decent instances of Arnold’s most characteristic traits  - such, for example, as his overflowing gaiety, and his love of what our fathers called Raillery”.   Arnold’s wife and daughter were uncooperative, and Mrs A “deleted every admiring reference to herself & Miss A every trace of humour”. Roberts certainly tries to redress the balance by pointing to the wide variety of Arnold’s tastes and interests. His admiration for Arnold, as man and writer is made obvious in this essay.

Biographers certainly have a problem if families and friends are not willing to come up with memories, anecdotes, opinions and more about someone’s life and involvements. Mrs Gasskell ‘s life of Charlotte Bronte suffered from the fact that her subject died young and had not led a very dynamic life. As Roberts puts it : “The biography is in fact so dependent upon Bronte’s correspondence – given her unusually quiet and short life – that it is tantamount to being co-authored”. But Gaskell managed to shape a decription of Bronte from her meetings with her, saying “she had gone through suffering enough to have taken out every spark of merriment, and shy and silent from the habit of extreme solitude”.  What a contrast to Gaskell’s own life where she seems to have been happily involved in almost every sphere of entertainment and activity she encountered. Or at least that’s the impression I get from her books.

Roberts says that Leslie Stephen is “now remembered mostly as the intimidating father of Virginia Woolf and her sister, Vanessa Bell”, though he also makes note of his accomplishments as “editor, biographer, essayist, literary critic, historian, mountaineer”, and what was possibly his major achievement, the editorship of the Dictionary of National Biography.  Quite a lot for anyone to pack into a lifetime, though some bright spark will be sure to quote the jibe of “jack of all trades, master of none”. But I always feel that we need people like Stephen to keep the wheels turning. Not everyone wants to be a specialist. Of his work as a journalist, Stephen could see its limitations and drawbacks  - “editors are always begging for ‘light articles’ – damn them” – but at the same time “a journalist is doing a very necessary bit of work in the world & if he is an honest man ...and speaks the truth with some vigour he may help things on a bit”. There is much in Roberts’ essay on Stephen that I found admirable, though he mentions that Virginia Woolf remembered her father saying that he possessed “Only a good second class mind”, and he includes John Gross’s estimation (in his The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters) of Stephen as a writer “of the second rank (though wearing better than others)”.

As I’ve indicated. The majority of the essays concern either nineteenth century writers or some from the middle years of the twentieth century. Does Roberts give the impression that he thinks he could have been intellectually at home in either period? Perhaps. But I want to draw attention to the final piece in his book, a review of Louis Menand’s The Free World : Art and Thought in the  Cold War, to show that Roberts, for all his concerns about the past, is alert to the social and political background to the works produced by poets like Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and Delmore Schwartz. They were not immune to what was happening in the wider society, even if their work, with its “confessional” and personal inclinations, might sometimes give the impression of lives lived without regard to bigger issues. It could be that their kind of writing could only have come out of a time described by Menand.

Menand’s book ranges around the post-World War Two world, when fear of Communism saw Europe divided into two opposing camps, and rumblings of discontent with colonialism across Asia and elsewhere. In addition, there was America coming out of the war with increased power which led to, in Roberts’ words, “how much muscle the USA would be able to flex in Europe.....militarily, economically and artistically”. Menand doesn’t like the term “cultural criticism” (“It’s related to no body of knowledge and names no actual calling, unlike, say, movie criticism or book reviewing”) but he “does share the cultural critics disapproval of the notion of a privileged culture with a capital ‘C’ “. Roberts is quick to point out that “some sense of a ‘high’ culture gave many working class children the aspiration to transcend the felt limitations of their own culture”. As one of those working class children  I’m inclined to go along with Roberts, but with the proviso that not all “high” culture is as good (or “interesting”,  a word I prefer to “good”) as it is claimed to be.

There is much in Menand’s book, as outlined by Roberts, that is of sometimes surprising  interest. He mentions that “most of the Free French Divisions in the Second World War were a majority non-white, hence Leclerc’s Second Armoured Division (75% white) was chosen to liberate Paris”. He could have added that the lead vehicles were manned by Spanish Republicans, and that later none of the coloured troops were allowed to take part in the Victory Parade down the Champs Elysee. And I like the note about Orwell. His niece recalled that the old Etonian had a lot of hang-ups which “came from the fact that he thought he ought to love his fellow men and he couldn’t even talk to them easily”.

I was impressed by A Movement of Mind. I’d seen some of the essays elsewhere (Roberts is a contributor to magazines like Agenda, PN Review, and The London Magazine) and it’s now evident how well they all hang together in book form. They really do point to Roberts’ “movement of mind”. Before closing, let me quote a few lines from something he tells us Susan Sontag said and which, to me, can relate to Roberts’ basic attitude: “But taste has become  so debauched in the  thirty years I’ve been writing that now simply to defend the idea of seriousness has become an adversarial act. Just to be serious  or to care about things in an ardent, disinterested way is becoming incomprehensible to most people”. I have that feeling of the “serious” when I read Tony Roberts’ clean, well-constructed essays which always avoid academic or other jargon, and which approach their subjects with respect and understanding.    

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