Review: '1000 Things Worth Knowing' by Paul Muldoon

I don’t blame myself. Because though I "like poetry" and Paul Muldoon, after the death of his mentor and Northern Irish compatriot, Seamus Heaney, is perhaps the world’s preeminent English-language poet, I have not read much of his work. I blame chance. I blame fashion. I blame the so-called tastes of the so-called general public. I blame the inevitable, unavoidable skew from poetry towards fiction in the study of English literature and university curricula. 

I certainly wouldn’t dare to blame the poet himself. For Muldoon’s CV is of sufficient lustre to back up the greatest-living-poet shtick. While still at Queens University Belfast in 1973, his first major collection, Knowing my Place, was published by Faber and Faber. Since, he has released ten collections, received the T.S. Eliot Prize, for The Annals of Chile (1994), as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, for Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), been Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999-2004, as well as president of the Poetry Society, been crowned with the poetry editorship of The New Yorker, picked up a couple of important sounding titles at Princeton and generally become a bigwig in the poetry world. So, when Muldoon gave the eulogy at Heaney’s funeral in 2013, it seemed safe to assume that the mantle had been passed. Yet for that, Muldoon’s poetry is difficult - obstinately - in a way Heaney’s rarely was. 

One Thousand Things Worth Knowing is his twelfth collection. Judging by the reviews, it is classic Muldoon - perhaps too classic for those coming to his poetry for the first time. Heaney’s death practically begins it. He writes in the third stanza of ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’:

I’m at once full of dread and in complete denial.
I cannot thole the thought of Seamus Heaney dead.

 The Anglo-Saxon “thole” (to bear or suffer) is a word choice typical of Muldoon, never scared to send the reader scuttling for the dictionary before the days of google and certainly not now. The poet’s interest in etymology is conscious - “Refrain as in frenum, a “bridle.”” - and wordplay literally spelled out - “In the way we swap “scuttle” for “scutter””. There is something curiously of the internet, a scent of Wikipedia, running through the poem, as it asks us to compare statements like “The wax moth lives in a beehive proper. It can detect sound/ up to 300 kHz” and “The horse in the stable/ may be trained to follow a scent.” or “A prototype of backgammon/ was played by the Danes.”

Muldoon’s lines follow one another often without explanation. Sure, one gets that this is the point but sometimes it seems that confusion is the sole end. As, in ‘Barrage Balloons, Buck Alec, Bird Flu, and You’, when “The Swede who invented the Aga/ had previously lost his sight to an explosion.” follows, as if naturally, on to memories of The Troubles: 

                    …The rain summoned by a blackbird’s raga
came sweeping over Shankhill, over the burning car
where Boston and Lowther were dumped, having been fingered in the bar
as a Prod and a Pape
enjoying a wee jar together.

To return to ‘Cuthbert and the Otters, as suggestions of Lake District tearooms, Irish bogs and images of otters recur, all threaded together somehow by Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, you certainly feel that Muldoon would be a good man to have at a pub quiz. Or he would if you could be sure even half of it was true… There are a few more long poems in One Thousand Things, including the closer ‘Dirty Data’, which incorporates a prolonged riff on Ben Hur and is addressed to its author Lew Wallace. Perhaps, probably even, it is my failing, but I couldn’t make much sense of these longer poems, though I am sure they will bead many a brow in university classrooms.

The shorter poems are, for me, more successful: ‘Pelt’ teasing out the beguiling double meaning of its title, in two suggestively broken sentences (see bottom). Still, a poem like ‘Catamaran’ is indicative of this expansive collection’s dilemma, even in its moments of concision. “Between Dominica and Martinique/ we go in search of sperm whales…” - the we being the speaker’s family. The poem builds to a kind of history of its title in the third and final stanza, placing the figures there both as a result of the speaker’s dead wife and, poignantly, the vessel they travel on:

A corruption of the Tamil term for “two logs
lashed together with rope or the like,”
the word we use is “catamaran.” 

Yet, it as if, even in this emotive territory, Muldoon cannot resist the self-assured aside of the keynote speaker, dispatched in stanza two:

My son is reading Lord of the Flies. I can think of that book
only as the dog-eared manuscript Charles Monteith would pick
out of the slush pile at Faber’s.
I’m pretty sure Charles recognized
a version of himself in Piggy. The same prep-school anguish.
Same avuncularity. Same avoirdupois.

Perhaps, with the certainty of success, this world has become all a bit too urbane - lacking danger - in Muldoon’s hands. In ‘Near the Grace of God Nail Salon’, ‘set’ in Ghana, an elusive series of images - “slaves pushed from pillar to whipping post”, “a mess of fish in a basket set on a blue latex foam/ mattress pad no/ self-respecting fish would be seen dead on.”, “the military coup/ that ousted Kwame Nkrumah.” - are tied together by a picture of woman and boy - “(her son?)”. At the poem’s limp payoff the speaker muses:

Now I see that his entire outfit, from his football shirt
to his sneakers shining in the dirt,
comes courtesy of Puma.

Is this it? Some lame riff on the ironies of globalisation? Cuba (2) - Cuba being one of Muldoon’s most famous poems - opens:

I’m hanging with my daughter in downtown Havana.
She’s worried people think she’s my mail-order bride.
It might be the Anseo tattooed on her ankle.
It might be the tie-in with that poem of mine.

It’s all rather too self-knowing, too consciously witty, too metropolitan. Muldoon is a wonderful reader of poetry. I had the pleasure of hearing him read his own work in St Andrews (one of the few of countless similar opportunities I did not squander) and his eloquence is plain on the semi-regular New Yorker poetry podcast among others. And it seems undeniable that in purely technical matters, Muldoons remains masterly. Often in One Thousand Things Worth Knowing, the intricacies of form, rhythm and half-rhyme in particular, provide the central coherence, the glimmer of meaning. But it is telling that it is hard to imagine any of these poems being recited rote.

Is there no room for suffering in Muldoon's world beyond the death of Seaney Heaney and the legacy of the Troubles or is the rest just wordplay? I know enough of the poet’s back catalogue to let the original ‘Cuba’ answer the question. 

Cuba 

In her white muslin evening dress. 

‘Who the hell do you think you are 

Running out to dances in next to nothing? 

As though we hadn't enough bother 

With the world at war, if not at an end.’

My father was pounding the breakfast-table.

‘Those Yankees were touch and go as it was — 

If you'd heard Patton in Armagh — 

But this Kennedy's nearly an Irishman 

So he's not much better than ourselves. 

And him with only to say the word. 

If you've got anything on your mind 

Maybe you should make your peace with God.’

I could hear May from beyond the curtain. 

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. 

I told a lie once, I was disobedient once. 

And, Father, a boy touched me once.’

‘Tell me, child. Was this touch immodest? 

Did he touch your breasts, for example?’

‘He brushed against me, Father. Very gently.’ 

Pelt

Now rain rattled

the roof of my car

like holy water

on a coffin lid, 

holy water and mud

landing with a thud

though as I listened

the uproar 

faded to the stoniest

of silences…They piled

it on all day

till I gave way

to a contentment

I’d not felt in years,

not since that winter 

I’d worn the world 

against my skin,

worn it fur side in. 

My Favourite Book: AN INTERVIEW with Eloise Porter

Ellie and I met in the first year of university. It did not take me long to learn that she is a voracious reader. Not only does she read enviably quickly – she finished several Song of Fire and Ice books in the time I read one – but she also reads from a vast number of genres, though her favourite is epic fantasy, especially J.R.R. Tolkien’s work. Ellie has been known to keep somewhat quiet about her reading habits. I think I only discovered her love of literature by way of obnoxiously chatting about my own. Besides books, Ellie loves languages – she is proficient in Spanish, French and Russian – cricket, bourbon biscuits and Jason Derulo. She currently resides in Japan, working as an English teacher. We discussed Tolkien, reading in translation and Orwell, as well as spouting some nonsense about fish and lightning.

DANIELA: What is your favourite book?

ELOISE: The Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien.

D: Why do you like it?

E: I like it because it is, and this is going to sound weird to anyone who isn’t a fan of Tolkien, but it’s more like a history book than a fantasy book. It’s got twenty languages in it and it’s almost impossible to remember all the characters and all the places and it’s like a labyrinth…of magic.

D: You like it for the reason that it’s almost impossible to remember all the names of all the characters?

E: Yes, and you have to keep going back to the pages in the back and looking at the family trees and even though it doesn’t sound like a fun time, it’s a fun time.

D: I recommend Vanity Fair to you. There are over three hundred named characters.

E: Are there orcs and elves?

D: No, none, none of the above. Just Victorian people.

E: Then no, thank you.

D: What do you get from reading that you don’t get from watching a movie? Why do you read even though there are so many other, perhaps easier, ways of spending your free time?

E: Obviously it wasn’t the first reason I ever read, but definitely now, between reading and watching films, I certainly hate my life and hate myself less when I read. There’s definitely part of me that feels like I’m enriching myself rather than rotting my own brain.

D: Yeah, that’s funny, isn’t it? I never thought about it that way. You do hate yourself less if you spend six hours reading than if you spend six hours watching TV.

E: Exactly. If you read for seven hours it wouldn’t feel like you’d wasted your day, whereas, if you sit in front of Netflix for seven hours, you definitely do.

D: Why do you think that is? Do you think it’s just because reading is harder?

E: I guess you have to concentrate more and, generally, if I’m on the internet, I’m doing more than one thing but if I’m reading I can only focus on one thing.

D: Yeah, you can’t do anything else. Do you mostly just read novels or do you read non-fiction or poetry or anything else?

E: I read a bit of everything. I go through phases. So, sometimes I’ll remember how much I love poetry and I’ll read poetry. I would say I read more fiction than non-fiction but what happens when I kind of forget how much I love reading or go through a lull in reading, I read a fantasy book again and I get back into it.

D: Who are some of your favourite poets?

E: I think my favourite poet is Baudelaire.

D: Ohhh, he’s French, right? [This is a joke.]

E: Yeah, and I like reading him in French even though it’s kind of a struggle sometimes. I haven’t read any recently but, in school, my favourite poet was [Thomas] Hardy.

D: Like Milla [our friend Camilla Bryden]!

E: Yeah, we were in the same English class, huh. I definitely like reading poetry in the original language.

D: I was just going to ask that. Do you read anything else besides poetry in Spanish or French? Or Russian? Or Japanese?

E: I try. I haven’t yet found any Spanish literature that I’ve fallen in love with but I definitely feel a sense of guilt if I don’t read it in the original language. I feel like I’m cheating. So, I always do try if I’m reading an author whose language I speak in the original.

D: Do you think things get lost in translation?

E: Yeah, I think so. Definitely with poetry. It’s almost impossible to translate poetry. So much of it is about how certain words sound together and the rhythm. Sometimes, I do find the translation is beautiful still, but it’s definitely not the same. I think with novels, it’s more or less captured.

D: Jeremy and I have talked about translation and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing. There are obvious drawbacks to it but if it didn’t exist then you couldn’t ever read the book at all and you have to be so good at a language to read a novel in the original language, so a massive percentage of people could just never read it. It’s hard to say what’s better.

E: Definitely in my field as well, there have been a lot of writers and lovers of literature who get angry and upset when things have been lost. Especially in philosophical writing and stuff like that where translation hasn’t gone down that well. I wouldn’t like to have the pressure of translating.

D: No, it’s just going to make everybody mad. Well, not everybody but definitely some people. Did you read the same kinds of books in high school that you read now or do you feel your tastes have evolved?

E: In some senses. I’m still very much a fifteen year old in my taste in fantasy books and what I find to be easy reading but I’ve definitely become a lot more cynical as I’ve aged. Now I definitely like things a bit more political. And I think that’s a trend that’s probably going to continue.

D: What’s an example of something political that you’ve read recently that you liked?

E: I’m definitely a big Orwell fan now.

D: Really?

E: Mmhmm, and books along those lines. And books that are critical of war like Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22. When I’m not taking my time off to read fantasy books, that’s what I like to go back to. Actually, my favourite thing I’ve read by Orwell is this tiny little book, I can’t remember its name, but it was a tiny little, I don’t know, essay on what he thought it was to be British and until I read it I never really thought Britain had culture or, like a national feeling that held us all together, but he just said it was things like, even dull things like always complaining about the weather and having a bit of a stiff upper lip and that was the first time I think I realised that we actually had a way of being.

D: That’s interesting. Have you seen the whole Penguin Eightieth anniversary thing?

E: No!

D: Oh, well, it’s the eightieth anniversary of Penguin this year and to celebrate it they’ve put out eighty tiny little books that are either a chapter from a book or a little known piece of writing from a famous writer or a bit of an ancient text. And they’re all 80p.

E: Oh, Penguin, nice work! Little known books that you find in those collections that people or publishers release, I always find that those are somehow more beautiful than the best known works.

D: Yeah, or just interesting in different ways.

E: What I will always remember, or at least up until this point in my life, as the most beautiful thing I ever read was a short story by Vladimir Nbokov called “Terra Incognita.” He wrote it in English even though his first language is Russian and it is ten times more beautiful than anything I could ever write.

D: That’s annoying of him.

E: Yeah. Right? Very annoying. I really want to find my copy again and save it because it was seriously so beautiful. And it was only like five pages but I read it like fifty times.

D: That’s cool. I’ll have to look it up. I’m just curious, and this is a very specific question to you, but when was the first time you read Lord of the Rings? Or did you read The Hobbit first?

E: Good question. I think I read Lord of the Rings first. And I read it when I was like thirteen, maybe. And I’d watched the films before but I thought the films were so boring the first time I watched them. And I fell asleep and made a big point about it.

D: That’s so funny.

E: I know, considering how obsessed with them I am now. Then we had periods in school where English class would be you just take your book in and you read.

D: I frickin’ loved that. We had that in school too.

E: Yeah. I wish that was a thing in university. And I remember I was on the end of book two with the bit [some names and something about a spirit attack that I didn’t understand].

D: Mmhmm. [I say as if I know exactly what she’s talking about]

E: And the teacher was like, right, we’re gonna have ten minutes where we talk about our books and the whole class put their books down and I was like, no! I cannot do this! And I refused to stop reading and I just kept reading…and that was probably the most rebellious moment of my youth.

D: Did you know the first time you read it? Were you like, woah, this book has changed my life?

E: I think it was when I read The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales that I really got, I think obsessed is a fair word.

D: I think it’s a fair word too.

E: I mean, I definitely struggled through The Silmarillion the first time I read it. It definitely wasn’t easy going. But it changed things.

D: Did you like the last Hobbit movie?

E: No.

D: I saw it in the cinema. I didn’t think you would like it.

E: They were all rubbish. I didn’t like any of them.

D: There was a lot of battle in the last one.

E: It was just one big battle.

D: You could tell there weren’t that many pages going into that three-hour movie, or whatever it was. I think I fell asleep.

E: My main qualm, apart from it obviously being ridiculous that it was made into three movies, films, is that Lord of the Rings somehow felt really real. Like it took ten hours for them to do one orc’s makeup and it was all like real stuff whereas the Hobbit was just too much CGI and you couldn’t believe it.

D: I know what you mean.

E: But I also kind of love to hate The Hobbit. So I was glad that I hated it.

D: What are the next three books you really want to read that you haven’t read yet? Or two or one or if there’s any that are just staring you in the face?

E: Let me find my Kindle because I surely bought one and they’re waiting for me to read.  I would like to say for the record…

D: Go on.

E: That I was initially opposed to the Kindle because I like the feeling of a book but this thing is magic.

D: Yeah, I like reading on my iPad as well. I thought I would hate it and I thought I would feel like a traitor but there’s certain books that I don’t feel like I need to buy. If it’s a six hundred page series paperback it might as well be on my Kindle.

E: Exactly. So, the next three books are, The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, A History of the United States by Howard Zinn and…um…where’s it gone…A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami.

D: Cool. That was my last question. Any other final words or final statements for the record?

E: Final words. I sometimes wonder when lighting hits the ocean why don’t all the fish die…you know?

D: Yeah, I do know. That’s a great stopping point for the interview.

E: Actually, final words. Sometimes, I don’t hate myself, but I feel silly that the book that changed my life the most is one about elves because one’s that have affected me in a political and how I view the world way are ones like 1984 and Catch 22 but The Silmarillion and Tolkien is different. And I chose it because I have never been as excited about a book or a concept or a world as I was about that one.

FIN.

           

Review: 'Ten Cities that Made an Empire' by Tristram Hunt

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai (formerly Victoria Terminus, Bombay)

I have mixed feelings about MPs writing books. On the one hand, I wonder whether they shouldn’t be busier fighting the corner of their constituents; on the other, it pleases me that any of them remain engaged in a wider intellectual debate. On a still more mysterious third hand, I concede that many of these books are by turns ghostwritten, curiously conscious of the writer’s own place in the history, shamefully bad novels or bizarrely breezy accounts of Winston Churchill’s career. The (likely returning) MP for Stoke Central and Shadow, Tristram Hunt’s Ten Cities that Made an Empire is, by contrast, a delight. 

Hunt seeks to chart the history and legacy of the British Empire through the urban form and material culture of the ten cities of the title; to explore empire’s changing character through “the street names and fortifications, the news pages, plays and rituals” from Boston in the early 1600s to Liverpool in the present day. In between we journey, in roughly chronological order, to and from Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne and New Delhi (nine of the ten cities started as ports). Ten Cities crosses an astounding sweep of history; each chapter itself often spans a period of more than 200 years. But it is the minutiae that Hunt is concerned with and which he uses to craft a series of urban narratives. In the process, he generates a coherent, if inevitably complex, history of the British Empire.

Boston may seem like an odd place to begin but, as part of Ten Cities’ wider historical narrative, is the natural starting point of both a swing from the West to the East, the Atlantic to the Pacific via Cape Town, and through the processes of colonisation and decolonisation in all their violence. Hunt is a lecturer in modern British history at Queen Mary University, but there is nothing dry or academic about his style. We begin, typically of Hunt’s narrative-driven approach, in medias res, “[as] evening fell on 15 December 1773” - the night of the Boston Tea Party. Hunt is a gifted storyteller, who knows the enticing value of informing his reader that the dissidents included “[men] like James Brewer, a pump- and clockmaker, whose wife had blackened his face with burnt cork…” The insurgents, protesting against a series of unfair, random taxes enacted by the British, proceeded down what today is ‘Freedom Trail’ to commandeer and dump 46 tons of tea into the harbour. 

Hunt asserts that “over 230 years later, Boston, Massachusetts, is still defined by that revolutionary moment”; we quickly become party to his tale: “…turn east from the Old South Meeting House, under the dreary skyscrapers of modern ‘Washington Street’ towards the Old State House and a different Boston peeks out of the past. There, either side of the…balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was read in July 1776, stands a glistening, golden lion and a rearing, silver unicorn” - the coat of arms of the British royal family, ripped down in the aftermath of independence but restored in 1882, now illuminating for us “the hidden history of Imperial Boston”. It is this kind of placement of meaning in the morass of urban sprawl which Hunt excels in. 

Each chapter begins with a map of the relevant city in the central time period covered, helping to locate the reader. For example, in the third chapter, we can pick out how the Georgian areas of today’s Dublin were, under the auspices of the Wide Street Commission, implanted onto the old Norman core, in the process, physically entrenching the ascendancy of the Anglo-Protestant aristocracy over the Catholic majority and transforming Dublin into a city of empire. Hunt is an evocative reporter of architecture, good at combining contemporary sources with his own readings. For example, following a considered description of 1887’s Victoria Terminus in Mumbai emphasising its ‘Italian Medieval Gothic’ stylings, Hunt gushes:

“What this description doesn’t bing out if the joyful chaos: the riot of pediments, sculptures, tympanums and inwards - mongooses, monkeys and peacocks alongside busts of [governor] Sir Bartle Frere and railway worthies…There were so many other startling feats to the station: the marble columns, the cantilevered staircase, the stained-glass windows, the courtyards, verandas, the sheer enormity of a 100-metre heigh and 366-metre-long train shed - and, above all, the high dome of dovetailed ribs, built without centring, Bombay’s answer to Brunelleschi’s Florence Cathedral.”

Ten Cities is tremendously entertaining and informative, if not a heavyweight work of history. As good as Hunt is with urban detail, occasionally passages descend into a tumble of dates, historical figures, quotes and vague architectural terms. Too, he occasionally lapses into a habit I recognised from the lazier (and there were many) moments of my undergraduate career, when it seems he has found a quote saying what he wants and so plonks it in with little explanation of its origin or context. Otherwise, only in the chapter on Melbourne, did I feel that the wider history of the British Empire was being privileged over the city itself; but generally, Hunt’s skill as a historian is that he manages to show rather than tell, using his chosen cities as the vehicle. 

Ten Cities is essentially a survey; not so much of how ten cities were shaped by an empire as how an empire was shaped by ten cities - an idea that is quietly radical and executed brilliantly. In 2015, we have entered an era when it is the influence of global cities that seems to shape people’s lives as much as countries. It is fitting that this book ends with Liverpool, a city perfectly encapsulating the ‘Janus face of empire’, built up by transatlantic trade, brought low by changing global economic forces and now, as the beneficiary of investment by India and China, rising again. 

Hunt backs up his thesis that “…it is the very complexity of this urban past which allows us to go beyond the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cul-de-sac of much imperial debate.” This is not a work of colonial nostalgia and, particularly as we near the present day, Hunt is explicit in clarifying this. But it also recognises that a fruitful approach to a history of the British Empire must amount to more than condemnation; that in all sorts of strange and fascinating ways, the legacies of empire were not something simply passed on from ruler to ruled, but a hybrid collaboration, most potently felt, and still felt, in the fabric of these global cities.