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Note on The Moral Maze

I’m indebted to Baudelaire’s Préface in Les Fleurs du Mal, which I translated into verse over forty years ago.  At least I think I did.  With moral choices we have to weigh up the conflicts inside and outside.  Leaving religion aside, is a terrorist bomber or serial murderer redeemable on the moral, that is social, level?  This character is what, at one extreme, Man is, or can be.  Most people would say, as the voice in the poem does, surgically incapacitate him, lock him up for ever, or, to save money (this is not in the poem) kill him.  Strange that the poem doesn’t mention that.  Is it that the writer is so soft-boiled that it didn’t occur to him?  Possibly.  Or perhaps range of solutions is obvious and the capital penalty did not need to be listed.

What is it like to be him?  The verses show that, in part at least.  The presenting voice may be wrong in saying that this man can’t blame his behaviour on his genes.  That would make him a victim too.  But isn’t that what the last line suggests?

                          This is a temper born to live in hell.

Reactionaries of all stripes would rid us of him; socialist George Bernard Shaw, for one.  Liberals, and perhaps I’m one, would have us spend sizeable sums keeping him alive, locked up for life, claiming that the state should not have the power to execute.

The Maze was another name for the Long Kesh prison in Northern Ireland in which prisoners convicted of terrorist offences were kept.  There was also a well-known radio discussion programme called The Moral Maze.

However, the power, or repulsiveness, of this piece comes more from its language than from any implied argument.  Here’s another of my infernal portraits.  There are quite a few, if you allow an overlap between ‘infernal portraits’ and ‘fictions’: Bertram’s Way, Cat Woman, Charm, Confidential, Dad, Death in the Morning, Epigram, Faustus, Glamsight, Jesus Looked Up, Nip Out, Obsession, Pilgrim, Portrait of a Lady, Ridge Mill, Rum Lot, The Alexine Poems, The Captain, The Cleaner, The Moral Maze, The Political Prisoner, Trauma.

Quite why I am drawn to depicting indefensible outcasts, as well as defensible ones, I’m still trying to work out.  In an artistic life our subjects choose us.  I’ve used the word ‘voice’ here: a writer creates a presenter who is also a performer, another character.

Alan Marshfield

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