Gorgeous George

Adolescence has a lot to answer for. Harry Enfield's Kevin goes from pleasant, polite young boy to foul mouthed pustular monster when he turns thirteen. My adolescent transformation was less spectacular, but certainly significant, for me at least. I experienced two major changes: my previously wayward treble voice broke quite painlessly to become a rather pleasant baritone and this pleasant baritone developed well enough to allow me the twenty year singing career I have discussed in earlier blogs. The other change was intellectual. I was a rather stolid, desperately shy boy when I first went to Cathays High School Cardiff, without any academic enthusiasms, and I passed my first two years there in well deserved obscurity. But I 'matured' comparatively early (in those days we showered naked after games and PE and compared notes regarding each others bodies. My physical precociousness raised my profile). Intellectual development kept pace with the physical and I began to be interested in, even excited by, things I read. A real watershed moment was provided by an English class where the subject was the old Scottish ballad 'The Bonnie Earl of Moray'. I enjoyed the whodunnit aspects of the story and the ambivalent attitude of the speaker:

Now way be to thee, Huntly

And wherefore did ye sae?

I bade you bring him wi' you

But forbade you him to slay.

Who is this man who gives imperious commands and admires the bonnie Earl?

He was a braw gallant

And he play'd at the ball

An' the Bonnie Earl of Moray

Was a flower among them all.

The speaker has a touching sympathy for the dead man's wife:

O, lang may his lady

Look frae the castle Doune,

Ere she see the Earl of Moray

Come soundin' through the toun.

But retrospectively, the Earl of Moray is doomed: 'He might ha' been a king!' and 'He was the queen's love.' But he wasn't the king was he? Presumably the king is speaking, expressing his dismay at a fate which decrees this fine gentleman must die because he stepped fatally out of line. I was excited by the story and gratified that I 'got it'. I also 'got' that the Earl's accomplishments included falconry 'he played at the glove' (my contemporaries thought this referred to boxing - I felt a warm glow when my teacher agreed with me), and jousting: 'he rade at the ring' (with his lance, for practice).

Thus it was I began to get a reputation for being 'good at English'. I read more widely, I appeared in school plays, I went to poetry readings in Cardiff pubs with some fellow enthusiasts from school, and, as so many of my ilk record, I had a inspirational English teacher (thank you Mr W.G. ('Butch') Lewis). I began to buy books of my own and can still picture the covers of two Penguin paperbacks 'Poetry of the Thirties' and 'The Mid-Century - Poems 1940-1960' which I read avidly, even if with only partial understannding. I proudly (and pretentiously) kept them on my school desk for all to admire and was gently teased by Mr Lewis for doing so...

But this is all preamble. The subject of this blog is a poet I discovered in 'The Mid-Century' when I was, I suppose, about fourteen. The following lines hit me for six:

The act of human procreation

-The rutting tongue, the grunt and shudder,

The sweat, the reek of defacation,

The cradle hanging by the bladder,

The scramble up the hairy ladder,

And from the thumping bed of Time,

Immortality, a white slime,

Sucking at its mother's udder -

Of course, at fourteen I knew nothing about the act of human procreation (not from direct experience anyway) and, almost sixty years later, I can see the limitations of the views expressed here and the 'act' described is, or at least should be, far more than a merely physical one. Having said that, the writer was setting out to shock through bluntness, and he was well aware of the tenderness that could be involved in love-making, as other poems of his clearly show.

The poet in question, and the subject of this Blog is George Barker (1913 - 1991). He was born in Essex into what might be best described as a not entirely typical lower middle-class family - his father was English and had served in WW1, rising to the rank of major. When the war ended he had a number of occupations including that of a policeman. Barker's mother was an Irish catholic, known to the family as 'Big Mumma'. From her, Barker inherited an appreciation of cultural creativity (they shared a love of Irish folk song) and his Catholicism. He left school at fourteen but continued his education as an auto-didact and as the protege of two priests at the London Oratory, a highly influential and fashionable London Catholic church. Barker was clearly highly intelligent and was a precocious literary talent, but his lack of formal education set him apart from the poetic mainstream of the time. Not that this seemed to worry him; he and other writers, grouped unofficially together as 'the New Apocalyptics', made it their business to react against the self-consciously realistic/public intellectual stance of Auden and his coterie with verse that combined myth and surrealism. Barker had early support from T.S. Eliot, who published his work and Faber and Faber, W.B. Yeats, who included some of Barker's poems in his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Edwin Muir, and Robert Graves (who generally took a rather dim view of his younger contemporaries). Not all were so positive: Geoffrey Grigson despied Barker's early work and Dylan Thomas, with whom he is often bracketed, was at best lukewarm, although his attitude was probably coloured by jealousy, both of Barker's sponsorship from Eliot and his undeniable attractiveness to women. Barker fathered at least fifteen children and was the inspiration for one of the most notable broken heart memoirs of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Smart's 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept'.

Before considering Barker's poetry more generally, let us return to the 'The True Confession'. C.H. Sisson considers this Barker's masterpiece, but I can't agree. Barker modelled his 'Confession' on Byron's 'Don Juan' and it shares with this work a desire to shock, but also to keep the reader at a distance with an ironic carapace. To continue with the passage that so impressed my fourteen year old self:

The act of human procreation

The sore dug plugging, the lugged -out bub,

The small man priming a lactation,

The grunt, the drooping teat, the rub

Of gum and dug, the slopping kiss:

Behold the mater amabilis,

Sow with a saviour, messiah and cow,

Virgin and piglet, son and sow? -

The act of human procreation,

O crown and flower, O culmination

O perfect love throughout creation -

What can I compare to it?

O eternal butterfies in the belly,

O trembling of the heavenly jelly,

O miracle of birth! Really

We are excreted like shit.

This is undeniably powerful and technically adroit, but you do not have to be a Christian, let alone a Catholic to find Barker's view of Christ's nativity distasteful, and the final line, though certainly shocking at a first reading, is so far removed from physiological reality that it ultimately seems crassly ridiculous.

It is when he is being far less sardonic that Barker is at his most effective, but at the start of his career his ambitious and profoundly esoteric verse also proved rather hit and miss.. Having said that it was, of course, a palpable hit with Eliot and Yeats but, for me at least, Barker's straining after the extraordinary can become exhausting. Take this extract from 'The Wraith-Friend' from 'Poems' (1935):

O angel in me hidden

Risen from the laden

Sorrow of this dark hand!

Companion and wraith-friend

From the rib's narrow prison

Steps in miraculous person!

Touch into these exhausted limbs

The alacrity of the birds

Which over the greatest ranges

Widely and eagerly range!

This is again technically accomplished, and certainly sounds impressive, but the three exclamation marks suggest Barker believes he is saying something important - I am not convinced. The speaker wants his inner angel to be freed, but why this angel should rise from 'the laden/Sorrow of this dark hand!' is unclear. The darkness of the hand might well suggest it is metaphorically stained with blood. Barker was haunted by the memory of an accident where he blinded his brother Kit in one eye, and this might be a reference to that. 'The alacrity of the birds' is a lovely phrase and it is followed in the poem's final stanza by a number of ecstatic avian images but the poem ends on a note of disappointed acceptance:

For there is no upward egress from

This earthly, this unearthly land

Upon whose dust may stand

None, though heavenly high can fly,

But in whose dust, all brighter dust must lie.

The repetition of 'dust' and 'whose dust' is clumsy, and the conclusion unclear. Essentially, we are not caught up in the struggle described.

Barker's long poem 'Calamiterror' (1937), his reaction to the Spanish Civil War, also fails to find sustained authenticity. There is much that is beautiful:

But until I hear the whipporwill lark sing again,

Or the dove revisits my right hand, and the tree

Springs like a branch from my finger, I continue.

Inclining my ear to the bosom of evenings,

Listening like water diviner for words,

Wondering why the heart's decay

Makes me no pearls, no lovely bubbles,

What have I done that takes my birds away.,

But also much that is over-written and self-indulgent:

The inheritance of chaos I leave him, Love

Only the feathery garter and the girl

Milton nibbling like a mouse at his window,

And always and always the dope of life, death,

Arriving in letters from the Bay of Naples.

I leave him the lost, the stolen and the strayed,

The strange, the erratic, the rich, the mad,

I leave him myself, for this was all he had.

Indeed, self-indulgence is a fault running through Barker's work (and arguably his life, given his sexual and emotional incontinence) and leads to a body of work that is seriously inconsistent. And yet, at his best, he is easily worthy of inclusion in any 1st XI (or perhaps 1st XV) of twentieth century English poets; the work that brings out the best in him is the elegy and, for one reason or another, he wrote a good number of these.

Let us begin, perversely, with a poem that is not an elegy but has an elegiac tone. This is his most anthologised poem 'To my Mother'

Most near, most dear, most loved, and most far,

Under the huge window where I often found her

Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,

Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,

Irresistible as Rabelais but most tender for

The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her,—

She is a procession no one can follow after

But be like a little dog following a brass band.

She will not glance up at the bomber or condescend

To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,

But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain

Whom only faith can move, and so I send

O all my faith and all my love to tell her

That she will move from mourning into morning.

During his brief tenure as Professor of English at the University of Tokyo, Barker gave a lecture on Poetry in the course of which he said that poetry should be 'the apotheosis of common things'. This sonnet perfectly exemplifies this aim. Barker's mother is only 'common' in the sense that she is a creature of flesh and blood but she is given vivid life here, with Barker able to juxtapose the erudite image, 'Irresistable as Rabelais' with the commonplace '...most tender for/The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her, -'. I would suggest that Barker is at his most effective when he writes about other people rather than himself as in, for example, the Three Memorial Sonnets for two young seamen lost overboard in a storm in Mid-Pacific, January, 1940. Barker witnessed this tragedy at first hand. The language used is elaborate but always controlled:

At midday they looked up and saw their death

Standing up overhead as loud as thunder

As white as angels and as broad as God:

Then, then the shock, the last gasp of breath

As grazing the bulwark they swept over and under,

All the green arms around them that load

Their eyes their ears their stomachs with eternals,

Whirled away in a white pool to the stern.

Another, more personal elegy, and one of his finest poems is 'At Thurgarton Church' (To the memory of my father). Here the language is notably simple, even pared down, but still tussling with some of the most important matters to concern mankind, and still showing technical ambition and accomplishment:

The masterless dog sits

outside the church door

with dereliction haunting its

heart that hankers for

the hand that it loved so.

Barkers cranks up the rhetoric in the final stanzas, but an approriate level of dignity is maintained:

The proud flesh cries: I am not

caught up in the great cloud

of my unknowing. But that

proud flesh had endowed

us with the cloud we know.

To this the unspoken No

of the dead god responds

and then the whirlwinds blow

over all the things and beyond

and the dead mop and mow.

And there in the livid dust

and bones of death we search

until we find as we must

outside Thurgarton Church

only wild grasses blow.

I hear the old bone in me cry

and the dying spirit call:

I have forfeited all

and once and for all must die

and this is all that I know.

For now in a wild way we

know that justice is served

and that we die in the clay we

dread, desired, and deserved,

awaiting no Judgement Day.

To conclude, (for the time-being at least, I shall return to him in the future), this is my favourite poem of Barker's

'On a Friend's Escape from Drowning off the Norfolk Coast'

Came up that cold sea at Cromer like a running grave

Beside him as he struck

Wildly towards the shore, but the blackcapped wave

Crossed him and swung him back,

And he saw his son digging in the castled dirt that could save.

Then the farewell rock

Rose a last time to his eyes. As he cried out

A pawing gag of the sea

Smothered his cry and he sank in his own shout

Like a dying airman. Then she

Deep near her son asleep on the hourglass sand

Was awakened by whom

Save the Fate who knew that this was the wrong time:

And opened her eyes

On the death of her son's begetter. Up she flies

Into the hydra-headed

Grave as he closes his life upon her who for

Life has so richly bedded him.

But she drove through his drowning like Orpheus and tore

Back by his hair

Her escaping bridegroom. And on the sand their son

Stood laughing where

He was almost an orphan. Then the three lay down

On that cold sand

Each holding the other by a living hand.

The appropriation of the Orpheus legend is wonderfully telling and the entire poem impresses with a genuine sincerity and empathy.

This then is a relatively short and far from comprehensive introduction to Barker's poetry. I hope I have given some indication as to why he is worth reading. My next Blog will feature more of his elegies, some love poetry, and the only poem by a contemporary Gerard Finzi set, 'Ode Against St Cecilia's Day'.