REVIEWS
ISSUE 1 Maybe It's all True by Fred Voss
Published by Pearl Editions, 3030 E Second St, Long
Beach, California 90803
This little pamphlet contains fifty-two poems. Not one of
then is more than half a page long. There are many poets who could learn a
lesson about the virtues of brevity from Fred Voss. This was my first
encounter with this writer whose work I had read reviews of previously but
never bothered to seek out. I now realise my mistake. The first poem is
entitled My Place. I thought it was going to be about the poet's 'personal
space', as they say. No such thing. It is about something very big, but as
with all the poems here, it gets at it in a very modest way. No-one could
accuse Fred Voss of pretentiousness. His poems are astonishingly tight,
utterly unsentimental and bracingly true and honest.
He has lived a life most writers would never dream of,
but which they ought to. A factory worker, he is familiar with the
hopeless, the feckless, the reduced, the marginal, the alienated, the
poor, the abused, all the victims of modern lovelessness. And what
breathes through every one of these poems is simply love. Not a hint of
ideology. No cleverness. No display of learning. Even when Voss mentions
Dostoyevsky he does so as a man who has read him during lunch break. He is
a poet without answers. Finally, his poems say: "What can we poor
mortals do but love one another as best we can?" In an age dominated
by ideology, it is a thoroughly revolutionary message.
Yet these poems contain no anxiety to persuade. They are
extraordinarily modest but have about them the authenticity of a man who
has lived emotionally, who has known the massiveness of despair and the
tininess of hope and beside then much English poetry seems thinly cerebral
and lacking in real feeling. On the page, they look like chopped up prose
and those leading English poets who believe that the primary poetic
responsibility is to rhyme will be vastly disappointed. Yet, they are put
together with fastidious care. Voss's use of enjambement is very original.
He ends lines in ways that no other poet would dare. Sometimes a line is a
single word. But what a word ! His poetry is full of images, yet there is
not a simile or metaphor to be found. He has learned those lessons of
simplicity for which Americans have Whitman and Thoreau principally to
thank.
When I closed this little book after my second reading
the word that came to mind was 'holy'. I can think of no other poet
working in English whose work would evoke that response. Voss is a true
original, Whitman's authentic heir. This is poetry that will last forever
and which repays reading over and over. Such work is rare, but then, so
are such men.
The Self as Agent
/ Persons in Relation
/ Reason and Emotion
by John MacMurray
Published by Faber and Faber
All John MacMurray's work has been out of print in this
country for many years. Recently, Humanities Press International began to
reissue some of his books in America, so it is very welcome that Faber
have responded to the flurry of interest in MacMurray's work by publishing
three of his seminal books. Perhaps interest in MacMurray has something to
do with his influence on a certain strain of contemporary British
politics. If so, this may be unfortunate. MacMurray himself was convinced
that his work could not be made popular. He recognised that he had a
facility for clear expression which made his philosophy look less
difficult than in fact it is. Popularisation would lead to vulgarisation
and simplification. MacMurray had no faith that the kind of change in
which he believed could be brought about by politics which he saw as
limited to establishing a framework of justice. Community, MacMurray's
term for a new vision of human relations in which the personal was to be
elevated over the impersonal, could not be achieved politically. It is
probably because of his wariness of simplifiers and political opportunists
who might want to make use of his work for purposes of which he wouldn't
approve that MacMurray insisted that Persons In Relation was his most
important book, for it is his next dense and difficult, the one in which
his clarity of style is least in evidence.
This book forms the first part of The Form Of The
Personal, whose second is Persons In Relation, the whole being the series
of Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1953-54. In
spite of MacMurray's preference for the first volume, the second is a
better way in to his work. It contains his careful exposition of his
belief that human individuality depends upon mutuality: that "I"
always implies "You":
"Personal Individuality is not an original given
fact. It is achieved through the progressive differentiation of the
original unity of the "You and I".
We are born into mutuality. For the human infant,
isolation means death. Our individuality is formed through a rhythm of
withdrawal and return which becomes the permanent form of personal
relations. This recognition of the inescapable mutuality of our being
forms the basis of MacMurray's rejection of the classic liberal defence of
the individual. For MacMurray, the liberal conception of the individual is
mistaken, for our individuality depends upon our personal relations with
others. Our moral struggles are always struggles between persons rather
than within individuals and morality is, by its very nature, personal. It
is the stress on the personal, on the fact that human life can only be
lived personally, on the fact that personal relations are self-justifying
while the impersonal always requires justification, which leads MacMurray
to his conception of community. Society is instrumental. It exists to
fulfil certain specific ends. Its relations are impersonal and need to be
justified. Community however, like friendship, serves no end other than
itself. It has in common with friendship too that it is founded on
equality, and it is timeless. The nature of friendship remains stable
throughout the ages. MacMurray's debt to Aristotle's ideas on friendship
is obvious. What matters though is that community, those relations into
which we enter for their own sake, which require no justification and
which are founded on the fact of the personal equality of all persons,
should take precedence over mere society. Institutions are made for people
and not people for institutions. The notion that people should serve
society or its institutions is evil: society exists to serve individuals.
It is our voluntary mutualities that really matter, not our enforced
co-operations for ulterior ends.
To read MacMurray carefully is to see just how
dehumanised contemporary society has become, it is to understand, as he
wrote in Freedom In The Modern World that:
"Any moral rule which limits real human freedom is a
bad rule... Freedom is the criterion of good conduct... there is no place
for law and obedience in morality... a man is free only when he does
exactly what he wants to do, without let or hindrance."
There are many in our narcissistic, hedonistic culture
who will see that as a licence for their irresponsibility and carelessness
of others. MacMurray
intends the opposite. To be
completely free is to be completely responsible for one's own life and:
"... we can only be ourselves for other people. Why
so ? Because to be
yourself for yourself is to be turned in upon yourself and so to start on
the path that leads to the unreality of spiritual dissolution."
This is a path along which we have travelled a good
distance. MacMurray's brave, clear and revolutionary (though not in a
political sense) philosophy may help us find a better direction. He
published fifteen books. These three are a good beginning. Let's hope that
in due course the other twelve will appear.
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