a stretch of the Rocky Mountains

Literary history can give us a bit of a Tralfamadorian view of significant events.

While I was at university I attended a class taught by China Mieville, the sci-fi author, on ‘Weird Fiction’ – the kind-of-movement, kind-of-genre in the early part of the twentieth century associated with HP Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, etc. China described the First World War as a ‘shotgun blast’ in this context: emanating outward in its influence in both directions in time, a peppering of shot around a central explosion.

Literary history is good for this. It shows, paradoxically, the influence of future events on the sociological moment; it also doesn’t quite allow the event to have changed everything that happened after it, peppering its influence outward in bursts and blasts, sometimes hidden, sometimes direct and explicit recreations of that past moment.

China Mieville was talking about the First World War; I wish to talk about the Second, and about other things as well. But while we’re thinking about the First: Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, famously thought of the First World War as a watershed for European culture, a blast that even changed the meanings of words - forcing innuendos upon innocent language, a kind of original sin for culture to bear from then on. He quoted that brilliant Larkin poem, MCMXIV, the one which describes the crowd of young men signing up as volunteer soldiers for the Great War; its final line, ‘never such innocence again’, summed up the influence of that war for Fussell. Here is the last stanza of that poem:

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

Fussell’s book is very good. It was in the papers again recently, because he died of old age last May. So it goes.

But these poet eyes of Larkin’s are kind-of-significant in terms of how time kind-of-folds-over-itself. The innocence, actually, hadn’t existed before that moment of the photograph either – yet it has a kind of infinite quality in it, encased as it is within the stillness of the image – it seems to stretch out repetitively, like holding a mirror to a mirror – in it we see the ‘little while longer’ of the thousands of marriages in time, the tidied gardens in space. The moment of departure from one world into the next reverberates in all directions. The watershed is not part of a linear progression, it is a shattering of time, the violent dispersal of a shotgun blast.

Two very famous accounts of the Second World War, and the American experience of it, take place in shattered time. There is Heller’s Catch-22, about American bomber crews; where things seem whimsical at first, a kind of anarchic humour, but there is an underlying order gradually being revealed to the chaos, revealed through a totally non-linear approach to time. There is Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse 5, about the bombing of Dresden as seen by American POWs; here, the central character ‘has come unstuck in time’, living the moments of his life in a random order. He also encounters aliens, the Tralfamadorians, who see every moment at once,

All moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamodians can look at all the different moments just the way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

Let’s say each of these books has pure trauma at its heart, encapsulated in a single moment (though one which sums up a series of moments, perhaps all moments, leading outward in both directions in time) - like the photo that Larkin is looking at. The traumatic event is so vast, in its own magnitude as in its significance upon other events, that it cannot really be approached unless it is approached by all angles, surrounded on all its chronological flanks.

I wanted to read and write about the Second World War because tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day and I believe in memorial days.

The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.

John Banville's article in yesterday's Guardian, reviewing the Complete Poems of Larkin (edited by Archie Burnett), was a reminder of how exciting Larkin's poetry is. Banville notes that we need not take Larkin at 'face value' - that is, we need not see Larkin's persona (or indeed his authorial voice) as the definitive interpretation of his work. Burnett is a 'definitive' editor, writes Banville, and we should be grateful for this; the work can speak for itself, the voice of the author being a (sometimes useful) parallel to its reality.

Larkin is one of those poets that gets in your head and doesn't leave. It doesn't matter if it's been years or days since you read him, he's still present, still there; an extra voice in any conversation. Lines like 'never such innocence again', 'this is the first thing I have understood' and 'the clouds cast moving shadows on the land'; isn't there something of them that is now, that is the way we live now? Here is a shifting bitterness that comfortably accommodates an honest relationship with death (something we've always looked for in poetry, since Homer; poetry being perhaps the only place that it can be found).

This was your place of birth, this daytime palace,

This miracle of glass, whose every hall

The light as music fills, and on your face

Shines petal-soft; sunbeams are prodigal

To show you pausing at a picture’s edge

To puzzle out a name, or with a hand

Resting a second on a random page –

The clouds cast moving shadows on the land.

Are you prepared for what the night will bring?

The stranger who will never show his face

But asks admittance; will you greet your doom

As final; set him loaves and wine; knowing

The game is finished when he plays his ace,

And overturn the table and go into the next room?

(II from The North Ship, 1945)

I saw the Turner Prize exhibition at the Baltic in Newcastle; the programmer for George Shaw, a painter from Coventry, had given the poem above, one of those Larkin pieces that's never let go of me, as an example of the corrolation between the poet and the painter. At the time I thought it was inappropriate, a misunderstanding of Larkin based on biography rather than on poetry, but now I look at Shaw's paintings again and I understand: Larkin is a poet of this moment, just like Shaw is a painter of it, and the richness of their styles is a celebration - both ironic and heartfelt - of the arbitrary place of birth alongside the inevitable next room of death.