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Note on An Age Turns

I divide poetry of the highly condensed and allusive sort into what can be paraphrased connectedly into a single plot or statement and what cannot. An Age Turns cannot. The separate parts can be worked out, but their unity is not derived solely from logical or narrative argument, though there is an obvious theme to do with the struggle with love (‘I renounce love, if love will let me) at a time when humanist civilisation seems to have failed. Music and tone contribute much. The stepping stones are thematic fragments. They are joined and loosely unified by association. The method derives from the fact that we live in a world where, within any discipline, there’s no way of connecting its insights into a complete and sufficient whole. Let us defrag, then: paraphrase the fragments and correlate as far as possible.

The ‘I’ or persona reveals himself, as the poem progresses, to be at the effete end of an over-cultivated lineage, one who knows what ‘Schönberg from a Bluthner Boudoir grand’ might sound like. To him a choke-off, apparently.

He lives among ashes, an aftermath of some sort, his life despondent and meaningless, a Wildean aesthete long after his time. In the 1960s to ’70s they were still around, witness one Kenneth Clark, who made efforts on TV to lecture the masses on civilisation.

Our man never asked to be cut off from feeling, however, since through sensation, he says, comes knowledge.

Depression recurs: no cause, e.g. the humanist enterprise, lasts.

Beauty, prized by most ‘advanced’ cultures, is a by-product of the human mind; it is not inherent in anything.

To whatever supersedes us, both ‘mind’ as we have it, and what our mind sees as beauty, will be irrelevant.

If he had a gun our hero would make sure he is ready to commit suicide (but he doesn’t have one and he is not so inclined).

Desolate weather. He feels de trop.

He isolates himself even more, like a monk in a cell comfortably ‘lit by a Mazda WAM pendant’.¹

The weather is hot. He has no enthusiasm.

Mozart’s music has continued a great tradition, though our man is grouchy about this composer’s exuberance. He’s not sure he can wholly approve if glimpses of eternity have to come to us via a buffo (comic opera singer; comic opera is ‘opera buffa’).

We are animals with minds equipped to see and do more than we, as animals, need. Our intelligence is a curse.

Various members of his family lead absurd and wasted lives. Decorum has gone. Tradition has been destabilised.

An Englishman in a fix, he hankers after an uncomplicated rural idyll. It would be Classical, pre-Christian.

Brunelleschi’s stoa:² an allusion to the beginning of the renaissance. All that genius from Brunelleschi to Mozart is a reproach to modern man’s mediocrity. Perversely eccentric, like the poem and its protagonist, some of the allusions are explained in the endnotes, others just below.

He is decadently fascinated by ruins. The taste, he believes, started with the Romantics of the 19^th century: the Ossian fakes³ and flummery ending in the nihilism of Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape.

To this person, the world has lost touch with meaning, it has rolled away from God’s hand like a crucifix from the hand of a man dying man. I believe I took the image from a sonnet by Antero de Quental (1842-91), translated from the Portuguese by my friend Jim Donalson (The 109 Sonnets of Antero, St Augustine Beach 1971).

The Christian myths about God are over, irrelevant. There’s nothing in human existence, in a man’s ‘undiagnosable smear’, that any ‘real’ God should take note of.

Proust, one of the great interrogators of the heart, faced all love’s forms and enigmas.

Our man thinks that however despondent he is, love has carried him ‘through / many unsustained [discontinuous] selves, sustaining / [his] affair with things’. He has never, in the Christian sense, succumbed to absolute despair. Somehow, he has stumbled on, he has loved life in bits.

Children most of all, perhaps his own, have given him most insight into love. But in truth he doesn’t fully know what love is (‘form in chaos, purpose in the void?’). The idea sets him burbling arcane fragments like ‘in me tota ruens’, which has to do with love falling upon its prey.⁴

Love insists on its importance: every kind of love, the supernatural sort that moved the spheres of the medieval universe; the unnatural, destructive love of Phaedra for her stepson Hippolitus; the communal love of Jesus for mankind. It all chokes this character, he blathers about renouncing it.

In the last lines he seems truly to be out of his mind. Presumably the ‘last / Sinn Fein dynasty in Uganda’ has yet to appear—so, if his skull dates between Tiberius and that future circumstance, he could well be saying, in a high-handed, gnomic way, for he seems not to care if he is understood, that he’s alive at roughly the present time. Pretentious, lui?

His name is Foster or Faust. He sees himself as one who has made a pact with the Devil. As for his last lines, ‘A new god / has monopoly of circumstance’, this could mean, in the light of what he has said about love, that a new religion has replaced Christianity. No doubt he takes little comfort from it, whatever it is.

B.S.Johnson, an old friend from King’s, London, took this for the summer 1973 issue of The Transatlantic Review, which he was editing at the time. Now I’ve looked at it after thirty years, I have to confess that I can only with difficulty paraphrase it connectedly by assuming that the increasingly fragmentation is a sign of madness. Whether I intended this as a satire against modernist shows of erudition from Eliot on through Auden and beyond, and also against some idea of myself, I’m not sure. Does it work as satire? It may not be rough and rude and obvious enough.

Explaining ‘pugging wind’, ‘coigns of my mind’, ‘fed by sea-cows’ may seem unimportant for a poem that is likely to attract only those who already know, but here goes anyway. Whitsuntide: days around Whit Sunday (Pentecost), a Christian feast day on the seventh Sunday after Easter, commemorating the gift of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles. Mozart, Wolfgang: (1756-1791) Austrian composer of phenomenal genius, his Marriage of Figaro (1786) is ‘a comic grand opera’, says Gustave Kobbé in The Complete Opera Book (Putnam 1922). Aurora Borealis: coloured lights in the sky around the north pole. Freud, Sigmund: (1856-1939) Austrian founder of psychoanalysis who held that the unconscious retains the child’s struggle for pleasure which is opposed by external restraints. Beethoven, Ludwig: (1770-1827), German, one of the greatest western composers; and Turner, William (1775-1851): English painter whose exploration of light led to Impressionism—these are cited by the protagonist of An Age Turns as exemplars of the Romantic movement, which he thinks led to modern disintegration. End-tapes in dustbins: a reference to two plays by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989): in Krapp’s Last Tape (1958) an old man listen to his younger self on tape isolating the memories he values; in Endgame (1957) ‘Nothing is funnier than unhappiness,’ says Nell, speaking from a dustbin. Proust, Marcel (1871-1922): author of the 16-volume novel In Remembrance of Things Past. Rale: a chesty, rattling sound. Pugging: punching, packing a gap, as with sawdust between floor joists. Coigns: outer corner of a wall, cf. ‘coign of vantage’. Sea-cow: a large aquatic mammal such as the dugong or manatee. Schönberg, Arnold: (1874–1951) Austrian composer known for his revolutionary 12-tone system and his dissonant works. Boudoir grand: a Boudoir grand piano is a size (5ft–7ft) between a Baby and a Concert grand; Bluthner: a German manufacturer of pianos since 1853. Flygsfors (pronounced flûgz-forz, the û as in French ‘tu’): Swedish glassmakers from 1888. The designer Paul Kedelv had a studio there in the 1950s, when he produced his Coquille (‘Shell’) series of sculptured vessels. In an earlier version of this poem this line read ‘or flowers in my vase by Scabra’, which some might prefer, though I cannot now locate ‘Scabra’. Tiberius: (42BC-37AD) second emperor of Rome, he ruled when Jesus Christ was crucified. Sinn Fein (Irish Gaelic for ‘ourselves alone’): conceived in 1902, after the 1916 Easter rising it blended the constitutional and the military lines of revolutionary protest in Ireland against British rule. Faust: a half-legendary character who is supposed to have sold his soul to the devil in return for youth, knowledge and magical powers. He has, under various other names, been the subject of works by Marlowe, Goethe, Gounod, Wagner, Valéry, Mann and many others. See note on Faustus and endnote 45. Karnak: the temple of Karnak was built on the Nile at Luxor by a succession of ancient Egyptian rulers. An Egyptian cat deity Bastet, which had the body of a woman and the head of a cat, was a goddess of love and fertility. Obsidian, used along the Nile for small statuary, probably came from Abyssinia.

Alan Marshfield

¹ A Mazda WAM pendant was an ordinary electric bulb with ‘WAM pendant’ on the box. I have no idea what WAM meant. (back)

² Filippo Brunelleschi (1377–1446) development an architecture established on mathematical principles. His most famous work is the Florence Cathedral dome, for which he invented a special method, now lost, of construction. In painting and sculpture he understood the principles of perspective, by which other artists were able to devise a method realism not seen since classical times. He is therefore a major figure in the progress from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. A stoa is a portico or roofed colonnade. (back)

³ Ossian (Gaelic Oisín): legendary Irish poet of the 3^rd century AD who was claimed, in 1762–3, to be the author of the epics Fingal and Temora, but these were actually written by the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796). Although Macpherson’s poems were partly based on Gaelic works to do with legendary Irish heroes like Finn and Cú Chulainn, they were largely fraudulent inventions full of echoes of Homer and the Bible. Nevertheless, these fakes were influential in the early days of the Romantic movement. Goethe admired them, Samuel Johnson was sceptical. The dispute as to their authenticity was settled when it was shown that the Gaelic ‘originals’ that Macpherson proffered were his own bad translations into Gaelic. (back)

⁴ Horace (65–8BC), Odes, Bk 1. No 19. line 9: In me tota ruens Venus: ‘Love, falling with full strength upon me’; or as Racine has it in Phèdre, 1.3. 306: ‘C’est Vénus toute entière à sa proie attachée’, which is where I first read it, directed to the Latin by the notes in the Librairie Larousse edition. (back)

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