Essays and Reviews
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ON WENDELL BERRY
The Gift of Gravity: Selected Poems 1968-2000 by Wendell Berry, Golgonooza Press, £9.95
Readers of Temenos Academy Review are likely to be familiar already with at least some of Wendell Berry's work as poet, novelist or essayist. Except for those adept at ordering by way of the internet, however, his books are not easy to come by in Britain. Golgonooza Press's decision to publish this substantial Selected Poems - drawn, to judge by internal evidence, from seven previous collections - is therefore a welcome opportunity to read in some depth one of the most important American poets of the present time.
Wendell Berry is a native of Kentucky and has farmed there for almost half a century. His work as writer and thinker is a natural outgrowth of his experience on the land and, as poets have known since ancient times, the farmer, as producer of most of life's material necessities, occupies a special position at the roots or foundations of human society - something which makes the present state of farming in Britain, and the government's indifference to it, particularly worrying. Virgil knew well that the situation and reflections of herdsmen and cultivators carried a relevance which resonated from the lowest to the highest levels of society. The Eclogues and Georgics, however stylised, explore in some detail the issues involved in responsible use of resources, just human transactions and a wise relationship to nature. And of nature we are, of course, entirely a part: Louis MacNeice's line 'The woven figure cannot undo its thread' expresses the relationship perfectly.
The 'Gravity' of Berry's title is both the cosmic force drawing us down towards the earth, and a certain seriousness or soberness of attitude which characterises his thinking and his use of verse. Like many British poets, Berry is neither a 'formalist' committed to the unvarying construction of rhyming and scanning stanzas nor an ideological devotee of free verse, rejoicing extravagantly in an exclamatory shapelessness. He is as happy writing blank verse as rhyming couplets, and equally at home in reflective free verse where the units of sense coincide, almost, with the lines, but where the line-breaks also add meaning, to dramatise a process of development or hold back small surprises so that poetic form becomes, as it should be, part of the meaning.
'Thirty More Years' is in many ways typical:
When I was a young man,
grown up at last, how large
I seemed to myself! I was a tree,
tall already, and what I had not
yet reached, I would yet grow
to reach. Now, thirty more years
added on, I have reached much
I did not expect, in a direction
unexpected. I am growing downward,
smaller, one among the grasses.
This is a complete poem, and characteristic in its wit, its gentle self-mockery (which is also an implied critique of other pretentiousness), and the small surprises it delivers, not least by way of its final word. Such details embody the unexpected changes of perspective which, the poem points out, come (or should come) with age. The emphasis on images of height and depth, of growing upwards and downwards, are also instances of the manner in which the experience of gravity permeates the poems in the book.
Appearing throughout the volume, this theme is clearly one that is central to Berry's poetic thinking and experience. Partly this is a reflection of the centrality of trees in his work. The book opens with a superb poem, 'The Sycamore', to which we shall return; and trees are an important presence throughout: so like people and so different, our strange elder kin. But the volume's second poem, 'The Thought of Something Else', considers the characteristically modern idea of escaping ourselves by going to 'another place,/simpler, less weighted/by what has already been', with the implication that such dreams are as unrealistic as wanting to live on an earth without gravity. The penultimate poem, 'Again I resume the long lesson', observes a forest in a moment of silence, watching as 'Through stalled air, unshadowed/light, a few leaves fall/of their own weight.' The poem's last lines return to the image:
Here is what will always
be. Even in me,
the Maker of all this
returns in rest, even
to the slightest of his works,
a yellow leaf slowly
falling, and is pleased.
Such poems make it clear that for Berry the 'gift' of the title is no mere metaphor. Gravity is a gift of God, part of a continuous sacred process of creation in which the cosmos unfolds, speaking to us perpetually if we have patience to watch and listen. That the divine 'is pleased' alike in man and falling leaf recalls the moment of completion which seals each day of the creation in Genesis: 'and God saw that it was good.'
In this way Berry is often, explicitly, a religious poet. But his down-to-earth quality, that 'gravity' again, keeps him a long way from hollow piety. 'For God's sake be done/with this jabber of "a better world."' he urges in 'The Future', and if you are not content with the world as it is, then 'Do something! Go cut the weeds/beside the oblivious road. Pick up/the cans and bottles, old tires,/and dead predictions.' - for, properly understood, the present is enough and 'overhead/the sun [is] not yet half finished/with his daily praise.'
Lest all this should make Berry sound too didactic (perhaps an inevitable distortion in a discussion aimed at bringing out some of his ideas and values) readers familiar with British poetry should be reassured that he writes with great subtlety, and that his perception of the interaction between man and nature very often recalls the work of Edward Thomas. A good example is the opening of 'The best reward...':
The best reward in going to the woods
Is being lost to other people, and
Lost sometimes to myself. I'm at the end
Of no bespeaking wire to spoil my goods;
I send no letter back I do not bring.
Whoever wants me now must hunt me down
Like something wild, and wild is anything
Beyond the reach of purpose not its own...
There is also, of course, the note of Robert Frost here, a poet who was friend and encourager to Edward Thomas and inevitably an influence on Berry. What is perhaps most unusual about Berry's work, however, is its serenity. Berry does not seem torn, as Thomas was, by metaphysical doubts. One suspects that for the most part he has dealt with such issues by 'earthing' them, rather as an electrical charge can be earthed and cease to be potentially destructive. The gift of gravity again. But it is also, perhaps, a matter of decorum, for whilst Berry is prepared to be politically very unorthodox (as witness the perceptive and wise remarks in his well-known prose essay on the destruction of the Twin Towers), one suspects that as a poet he is simply not prepared to go into print with unseemly sentiments. The 'confessional' mode is not for him, nor even the dramatisation of personal anguish as Yeats or Eliot sometimes expressed it, trusting that their condition was sufficiently representative to be meaningful, cathartic or even instructive to others. A part of 'gravity' in its psychological and aesthetic dimensions is a sense of when to keep quiet. 'How To Be A Poet' - subtitled '(to remind myself)' - ends, 'make a poem that does not disturb/the silence from which it came.' There are many silences around these poems.
When it comes to politics, however, Berry would probably applaud Yeats's question (asked when he was a year or so younger than Berry is now), 'Why should not old men be mad?' His sequence of 'Mad Farmer' poems overturns, or simply bypasses, conventional 'wisdom' about the world in countless ways:
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
Though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
For power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
A woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
Of a woman near to giving birth?
Perhaps the finest poems in this book, however, are those where nature is allowed to speak for itself, with Wendell Berry as observant scribe, as in 'The Sycamore':
Fences have been tied to it, nails driven into it,
hacks and whittles cut in it, the lightning has burned it.
There is no year it has flourished in
that has not harmed it. There is a hollow in it
that is its death, though its living brims whitely
at the lip of the darkness and flows outward...
It has gathered all accidents into its purpose.
There is no need for explicit moralising: the relevance of the description to Berry's poetry, and to life, is evident. Similarly, towards the end of the volume, 'Slowly, slowly, they return' presents observed facts which are their own lesson:
Slowly, slowly they return
To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light...
They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.
The Gift of Gravity is a delightful book, full of wisdom and subtlety, exemplary in its modesty, clarity and (for writers wishing to learn from a master-poet) in the range of fully-realised techniques it displays. Readers will enjoy it on many levels and will find their sense of nature, of priorities, and of their place in the world, refreshed.
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AN AFTERNOON WITH
R. S. THOMAS
AUGUST 1997 was an exceptionally hot month, and on one of its hottest afternoons I found myself following a faint footpath across rough sheep-pasture in the north-west corner of Anglesey, heading for Llanfairynghornwy.
I was in a state of trepidation, and not at all sure I was doing the right thing. The sweat induced by a slow progress uphill, over the acres of long dry grass, through rusted iron gates and over stiles built into dilapidated grey stone walls, did nothing to raise my confidence as the horizon shimmered and the village came into view, straggling along the side of a low hill. I plodded on in a spirit of grim determination.
For several years I had come with my family every summer to stay on a farm at Cemlyn, not far from Cemaes Bay. It was, in good weather, a quietly marvellous place. The sea was five minutes' walk away. The roads were tiny and led only to other farms, or petered out by the shore, so cars were a rarity. A lighthouse, spectacular at sunset, blinked on the horizon in one direction; in the other, gently rolling fields stretched away to the skyline, dotted with sheep and the occasional house or ruined, enigmatic stone farm building. Seals groaned and hooted in chorus from the rocks, or lolled in the shallow offshore waters, occasionally lifting a round, doglike head to return one's gaze, relaxed and supercilious. Children could be left to run wild over the fields or seashore whilst the adults did pretty much the same at a slower pace.
And every year, at some point during our visit, the farmer in whose house we stayed would tell me, as if for the first time, that I should visit R. S. Thomas, who, he said, lived nearby. Thomas, he would continue, was seen occasionally at the local church - a tiny ancient stone building, dedicated to an obscure Celtic saint, overlooking the sea from a nearby headland. He had even taken the service there on occasion. Every year I would consider the suggestion and decide against following it. Not that I was at all reluctant to meet Thomas. On the contrary, I'd admired his poetry since I'd first encountered it at school. The notion of meeting him face-to-face was an attractive one. But it was also daunting. I had heard that Thomas was reclusive, that he didn't like the English, and that he resented them above all as holiday-makers in his country. I would embody, I thought, everything he most disliked. In any case there was no obvious way of testing the water. No one seemed to know his address, though they could describe the house, and his telephone number was (of course) ex-directory.
I'm not sure what changed my mind. Partly, I suspect, the encouragement of my wife, generally braver about these things than I am myself. Also, perhaps, some intuitive sense that the years were passing, that the opportunity might not recur - followed (as in so many of life's less comfortable situations) by the reflection that, at worst, the person concerned could only tell me to go to hell.
And so I found myself at last in Llanfairynghornwy, turning right at the village church and taking the road over the brow of the hill. The house was easily recognisable: a large former farmhouse with a traditional Anglesey courtyard, the various buildings converted into separate dwellings. There was a view towards the sea, about a mile away, and a large garden, evidently well-watered since it showed no sign of desiccation. An open hatchback was parked in the courtyard and a white-haired woman was unloading bags of shopping.
As I approached she turned towards me. It struck me that she was beautiful, and I was startled by the intensity of her pillar-box-red lipstick, a perfect match for the cardigan she wore despite the heat. There was now no turning back so I introduced myself and asked if R. S. Thomas lived here. I also presented my one small visiting card, in the form of a suggestion that Mr Thomas might remember an enthusiastic review of his Later Poems which I had once written for the T.L.S. It was, of course, the right house. The lady disappeared inside, and I could hear her calling 'Ronald!', followed by sounds of muted conversation.
Then Ronald loomed at the door, instantly recognisable: craggy face, white hair, towering height. He wore a blue shirt and grey trousers (as with many elderly men, the trousers somehow seemed to extend a long way up) and a tie exactly the shade of deep red favoured by traditional Labour Party supporters. If he was inwardly cursing my intrusion, he gave no sign of it. His welcome was subdued but unambiguous, and he asked me to come in. I had expected a Welsh accent, but he spoke with an almost exaggeratedly perfect English enunciation recalling BBC radio broadcasts from the 1940s and '50s. The old phrase 'cut glass' floated into my head. I followed him along a passage (his walk a little shaky, a little shuffling, but his bearing very erect) into a cool, attractive sitting-room with stone walls, hefty exposed wooden beams, large windows and antique furniture, including some sofas covered with a sumptuous, satiny Chinese print fabric - Sanderson or the like. There were a great many books, and half of one wall was taken up entirely with the brown spines of something (periodical or vast reference work?) called British Birds.
Thomas seemed interested in the fact that I knew Professor Brian Cox, editor of the Critical Quarterly and my former boss, evidently an old friend, so we made conversation about him and other mutual acquaintances. Any tension rapidly dispersed. Betty (as she had been introduced to me), Thomas's wife, disappeared and returned with a tea tray loaded with, amongst other things, a sponge cake with lemon icing cut into precise squares. (It was a very good cake, and when I said so Thomas looked gratified. 'I made it myself,' he confided, 'in an off moment.')
I suppose he asked me what I was doing in the area; at any rate I mentioned that I'd taken my son to fish from the old breakwater at Holyhead the previous day. Thomas immediately produced extensive information about which parts of which breakwater were the best for fishing. 'My father worked on one of the Holyhead ferries,' he said, 'so I had a marvellous childhood. I could ride on the ferry-boats whenever I wanted.' Holyhead, he said, was now very run down and had terrible drug problems, 'but then it's the same everywhere, isn't it?' Lately, after living for a long time in the Lleyn Peninsula, he had, as a keen ornithologist, moved to Anglesey for the birds. 'But the birds are not nearly as interesting here as in the Lleyn. Though we do go down to Cemlyn occasionally, if there's an unusual bird there...'
Holyhead is a strangely Irish town, its buildings and general atmosphere strongly coloured by the daily traffic with Dublin. I asked Thomas if he he'd had much contact with Irish writers in his youth. His eyes lit up and he explained that at the beginning of his career he'd been 'taken up' by Seamus O'Sullivan and had spent a good deal of time in Dublin. 'O'Sullivan was an oldish man then, but still something of a dandy. Good clothes, close-cropped silver hair, attractive to women. And every so often he would produce a poem and show it round, saying "What do you think of this? I wrote it the other day..." But everyone knew that it had been in a drawer for twenty years. It was very sad. He couldn't accept that he was no longer writing poems. Sheer vanity.' O'Sullivan had advised Thomas to try the New English Weekly, 'and that,' he said, 'is where my first poem appeared.'
Was Thomas himself, I wondered, still writing poems? 'Still writing,' he said, 'but whether anyone else would call them poems is another matter. Anyone,' he added, 'can be pardoned for writing rubbish, but there's no excuse for publishing it!' Such aphorisms came from time to time throughout the afternoon; another was 'Never believe what a man says in his poems. Art is art because it's not nature, that's my belief.'
I was curious to know what Thomas, as a uniquely gifted master of the short free-verse line, would think of William Carlos Williams. It turned out that he liked 'Asphodel, that greeny flower' but was dismissive of the shorter poems, and had no time for 'frippery like "Red Wheelbarrow"'. He couldn't really imagine, he said, how people could write poetry at a typewriter, 'let alone a computer'. Williams must have been 'a very odd man.'
In current British and Irish poetry he saw no value whatsoever; or at any rate, 'nothing of any significance.' 'Heaney?' I ventured. 'A better prose writer than a poet,' was the reply. The only poet of any substance, he thought, was Geoffrey Hill. He asked me if I'd seen Hill's latest book, Canaan. I said I'd read a few of the poems in Agenda and hadn't much liked them, so I'd avoided looking at the book itself for fear of disappointment. 'I'm afraid you were right,' said Thomas. 'But he has been very ill lately, he's had heart trouble and so on, and I suppose it's affected his poems. But his publishers should have noticed the lapse in quality even if he didn't.'
Thomas had recently met Czeslaw Milosz at the house of Dennis O'Driscoll, a mutual friend, and they'd got on well. Thomas thought Milosz 'a very nice man'. ('A very physically powerful man too,' Betty added.)
Since I was then working with Kathleen Raine on Temenos Academy Review I asked Thomas if he knew her. Not really, he said. He'd met her at Vernon Watkins's memorial service. He didn't greatly like her poems, though there were 'a few good ones'. He had included four of them in his Penguin Book of Religious Verse. He had heard her speak on some occasions, and been mildly amused at her self-esteem; he claimed to have heard her refer to herself as 'the world's leading Blake scholar'.
Betty had a good deal to say on the associated subject of Gavin Maxwell, author of Ring of Bright Water, for whom Kathleen Raine had cherished an unrequited passion (chronicled in The Lion's Mouth, the third volume of her Autobiographies). Betty had, it seemed, lived with her first husband next door to Maxwell, and had had to look after 'the blessed otters' when he was away. They had been a huge handful. 'And,' she said, 'don't believe half of what Gavin said about them in his books.' I asked whether she had been bitten (otters are ferocious biters, and the TV presenter Terry Nutkins, a former Maxwell prot駩, lacks a finger to prove it). 'No,' said Betty, 'but then my husband was a hunting man and he wasn't going to stand any nonsense from a couple of otters.' That seemed to settle it.
Betty also knew Wilfred Thesiger ('A very nice, genuine man,' put in Ronald). Gavin Maxwell had, said Betty, conceived a notion that he would like to go to the Empty Quarter with Thesiger, so they had met in London to talk about it. Ten minutes had been long enough to convince Thesiger that under no circumstances would he go to the Empty Quarter or any other place on earth with Maxwell. 'Thesiger,' Thomas summed up, 'had nothing of the playboy in him. Whereas Maxwell...'
Somehow we got on to the subject of poetry readings. Thomas was wary of Performance Poets. He wouldn't, he said, want to read on the same platform as one of them (an unlikely scenario, it seemed to me, though I didn't say so), 'those people who use drums and jazz and things, I think I should come off very much the worse, very discomfited.' Ted Hughes he thought a good reader, of 'plainness and intensity'. He found himself irritated, he said, by 'poets who end the last line with "thank you very much" as if it were the last words of the poem. W. B. Yeats used to do that. Are they anxious to get away?' ('Or maybe just polite,' Betty put in.)
Thomas said he had gone to read at a festival at Cley in Norfolk, agreeing to go partly because it is a famous bird-watching site. One section of the audience turned out to be made up of local fishermen and the like, and 'afterwards one of them came up to me confidentially and said, "Now you're a real poet, you are." I was very pleased at that.'
Betty said that even now and despite his lack of gimmicks, teenagers in Thomas's audiences seemed enthralled by him. 'You do have to rehearse to go on the reading circuit,' said Thomas. 'Ronald's training for the ministry has probably helped there,' his wife added.
In due course the conversation turned to the question of what work I was doing. I said I was editing De Quincey's complete writings, and also Graves's The White Goddess. Rather to my surprise both Thomases turned out to be enthusiastic about De Quincey. 'Especially,' said Ronald, '"The Flight of the Kalmuck Tartars"'. Betty asked how my eyes were standing up to the work, adding that 'one thing about poetry is that you don't have to bother so much with footnotes'. I pointed out that some poets - Southey for example - had used a great many. Was there a correlation: the more footnotes, the worse poet? Thomas cited David Jones as a counter-example, 'though some of his could have been better omitted. It's annoying to find a reference to Llangollen and then a note saying "pronounced Thlangothlen" or something like that. You'd be better off without that kind of thing; but then David Jones was always very meticulous.'
As for Robert Graves, Thomas thought him 'a good poet and a good influence'. John Crowe Ransome, also a good poet, 'came entirely from his [Graves's] work.' Graves had written too much, Thomas thought, but considering the period when he had lived, yes, he had done well. (I was unable to get elucidation of this tantalising remark about the 'period'.) Asked what he thought of The White Goddess, Thomas said he'd never read it. 'More Kathleen Raine's department than mine,' he added, whereupon Betty hazarded the suggestion that perhaps Kathleen Raine had been one of Graves's 'mistresses'. Ronald rejected this idea firmly. 'I don't think so. No, Kathleen Raine was a bluestocking; and Graves, like Yeats, preferred them...' The sentence was left unfinished, but its drift was clear enough.
Betty mentioned that she was trying to fill gaps in their collection of Thomas's own books. They lacked, especially, copies of his first three volumes (The Stones of the Field, An Acre of Land and The Minister), and also 'a little book for children' (which I cannot identify). Booksellers, she said, offered his early books at around ?150 'and they won't reduce them, even for the author, even without the jacket.' 'Well,' said Thomas, 'they're not in the bookselling trade for love.'
It was getting towards evening so I left soon afterwards, with invitations from the Thomases to visit again. I never did, though we exchanged one or two letters and Thomas sent a good poem for Temenos Academy Review (which, through no fault of mine, failed to print it). Within a few months the Thomases left Anglesey for another part of Wales, and some two years after that R. S. Thomas died.
To me, that afternoon at Llanfairynghornwy is still a bright and happy spot in memory, and I remain deeply grateful to the poet and his remarkable wife. Nothing of great significance, perhaps, was said or done. Still, an encounter between a famously 'cantankerous' Welsh Nationalist poet and a holidaying Englishman arriving unannounced on his doorstep might have been expected to turn out rather differently. Since his death, R. S. Thomas's reputation as a poet has shown no sign of sagging, nor do I believe that it will. His integrity and independence have never been doubted. But it seems worthwhile putting on record that his virtues also included generosity, hospitality, wit, and the baking of excellent cakes.
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STRIPPERS
APART FROM THE FACT that there's a bouncer on the door - a bulky man in black with a mobile phone, drinking coffee out of a styrofoam cup - Browns looks like any other London pub, only darker. Wandering into the twilight I cross the thick, royal-blue carpet to join the smoky lunch-time ranks at the bar, a mixture of unplaceable casually-dressed men and city types in suits. We're between worlds here, a short walk in either direction from the dusty construction sites of Shoreditch and the banks and investment houses of the Square Mile. Getting to the counter I give the pumps a glance and order a beer at random.
Having secured a drink, I wonder which way to head. There seem to be very few tables, though the walls and pillars all have ledges where you can rest your glass. This is a place designed for standing up. There are also very few women, and with the exception of one or two chatting near the bar, those who are here seem dressed for a different time of day, as if they'd turned out in their heels, minis and eyeliner seven hours too early for a very serious hen night. A group of them are deep in conversation at the back of the room around one of the few tables, though it's hard to imagine how they can hear each other, because the plump DJ at the console up on a platform near the door is thumping the music out at a volume that produces neat concentric waves in the surface of my beer. Next to the DJ, a large screen between two chromium pillars is showing Sky Sports, a wordless blotchy image of men in red and white hats dithering on a too-green golf course.
After a few minutes the screen, in mid-putt, winds itself up and simultaneously one of the young women from the back of the bar wanders across the shadowy platform. She's blonde, wearing a pale blue halter-top and a short gauzy skirt of the same colour, split to the waist. Her shoes, which can just be seen glinting in the dim lights from behind the bar, are of perspex, with precipitously high heels and platform soles. She leans over for an earnest conference with the DJ. They put their heads together over a pile of CDs. A decision is evidently reached and the formerly lethargic scene comes to life. A bank of spotlights blazes on, revealing the platform as a small, carpeted stage equipped with two chrome poles, the back wall completely covered with mirror and crossed by a ballet barre. The reflection of light from the mirrored wall is so dazzling that I have to move sideways to see anything. Meanwhile other customers are putting down their drinks, folding their Evening Standards and gravitating towards the stage, which is about chest-high to the audience. The girl in blue stands in the darkness at one side while the DJ reaches for his mike, intoning as if drowsily, but nonetheless at immense volume, 'And now will you please welcome the verrry sexy Leonie...'
As his voice fades into the percussive leading-edge of the music (it's 'Californication' by the Red Hot Chilli Peppers) Leonie, who looks to be in her early twenties, strolls into the lights, sweeps an enigmatic glance around the assembled client謥, and grabs the pole nearest her. She lifts her feet off the floor and spins herself around the pole three complete turns, landing with her back to us. Then she leans forward, swaying her hips, her legs a little apart, and still grasping the pole in one hand slides the diaphanous skirt up over her buttocks to reveal a minimal white thong which just covers her genitals. Slipping her free hand between her legs, she runs one finger lingeringly down the line of the thong, then turns abruptly and paces over to the other pole, against which she leans back, sliding down until she is halfway to a sitting position.
Pausing there, and throwing an almost reproachful look at the audience, she caresses her body, pressing the blue top tightly against her breasts and running her hands down her thighs before tumbling away from the pole into a kneeling position, where, with great aplomb, she wriggles the blue top lower and, pulling down the neckline, unloads one of her shapely breasts for our inspection. Another quick glance at the audience and a turn to offer an equal view to those at the far end of the stage, and the other breast follows. The halter-top, having served its purpose, is now in a single movement pulled off and discarded. Leonie rises fluidly to her feet and, apparently seized with amorous passion for one of the chromium poles, drapes herself around it with erotic abandon, squeezing her breasts one each side until the pole disappears between them. She moves sinuously up and down in time to the music, inviting us to make what phallic application we may of the contact between flesh and metal.
Entranced by the spectacle, I don't at once respond to a gentle pressure from behind, but soon realise that someone is insistently prodding me in the small of the back. I turn to meet the smiling face of a dark young lady in a white corset, holding a beer mug one-third full of coins: the next dancer, collecting her tips prior to going on stage. I fumble for change and drop in something in the region of two pounds - twice the expected contribution, as I later learn from observation.
Meanwhile Leonie has been dancing near the front of the stage, where it becomes evident that experienced punters tend to gather for the best views, just in front of one or other of the poles. She now struts to the barre at the back and turns away from us, swaying her hips, grasping the barre with one hand while she detaches her skirt with the other. This encumbrance out of the way, she begins to roll down the thong, an inch or so at a time, and at last drops it neatly to the floor, daintily stepping out of it and kicking it deftly off stage. She is now naked apart from the shoes. More spins follow, on first one pole and then the other, after which Leonie slides to the floor where she lies on her back, points her glittering stilettos to the ceiling and slowly parts her legs until they are at 180 degrees, affording us a panoramic view of her Brazilian-waxed genitals. Then, bringing her legs together, she flips over onto all fours, lowering her face and breasts to the stage to offer us a generous rear view, momentarily caressing herself with a finger before swivelling gracefully into a sitting posture and pulling herself upright on the nearest pole. A few more moments of dancing between the poles and against the vast mirror at the back bring her act to an end, with incitement from the DJ to give 'a big hand for a verrry sexy lady' and sporadic though by no means tumultuous applause. The spotlights go out, the screen rolls down, golf resumes and a naked but now unglamorous and matter-of-fact Leonie (not her real name, by the way) collects her scattered garments and perches on a corner of the stage to dress herself, exchanging a few remarks with the DJ as the client謥 turns back to its conversation and newspapers.
And so the cycle continues. Ten minutes of Sky Sports, a small flurry of excitement, another girl up on stage, the momentary distraction mid-act of the next dancer coming round to collect her tips, completion of the performance, and a return to the relative tedium of golf or motorsport. The acts are as varied as the origins and costumes of the dancers. In the course of the afternoon, to judge by the accents and by information given by one girl in a whispered conversation, we encounter a Russian, a Hungarian, two Home Counties girls, a Swede and several Brazilians (who seem to have a particular aptitude for this work).
Some of the girls can be called dancers only by courtesy, and make their impact simply by sinuous movement and seductive undressing. Others offer highly theatrical turns. Shannon, for example, is a 'character' stripper who dresses to resemble a parodic fantasy of the most predatory kind of female boss, in huge spectacles and padded-shoulder pin-stripe jacket over black lace-topped hold-up stockings. Rather too much of a dominatrix for my taste, she nonetheless seems to have an enthusiastic constituency in the audience. One or two dancers display astonishing technique, suggesting circus rather than theatre: a girl introduced as Alexandra has a stunningly energetic act, performed to the punkish tones of Joan Jett's I Love Rock 'n' Roll. She kicks off her shoes before going up, evidently a necessary safety-precaution, for she hurls herself around the stage, turning somersaults and back-flips as she undresses. At the climax of her act she leaps, stark naked, into a hand-spring, grabs the top of a pole with her feet, and pulls herself up into a sitting position near the ceiling. From there she slowly glides down. The effect is not, to my perception, particularly erotic, but gains loud applause and several punters come up to her afterwards to offer her their appreciation.
Certain dancers have notable artistry. A striking blonde Brazilian announced as Carina dances to American Blues music, in a style that mixes allusions to old-style burlesque with moments of humour and a certain melancholy lyricism. Tall and authoritative, she seems to enjoy herself immensely and uses eye-contact to conscript the audience into joining in the sheer physical ebullience of her performance. Her dark, willowy compatriot, Nicole, greets the audience with a delighted smile as if astonished and amused to find us all gazing at her. Strutting to the first pole she leans back against it and slides up and down once or twice, bending her knees to show off a diaphanous red dress whilst she fixes the punters with glittering eyes that mimic a blend of challenge and invitation. As her act develops (she dances to a live recording of Elton John's surging, sentimental Don't Let the Sun Go Down on Me) it's evident that we are watching a naturally gifted dancer who is powered by the music rather than just exploiting it. Spinning, balancing, bending sinuously double to grip her own ankle and glare round at us from the mane of dark hair which she then hurls back over her shoulders, she seems to disappear into her own body and respond to the music rather than the audience. With performers like these striptease (that shoddy word) is transcended by an inner passion and the result is pure, ferocious dance.
Just as I'm wondering whether to get another drink, a blonde girl strolls up. I recognise her as Leonie, though she has now exchanged the blue skirt-and-top for a clinging black dress. She asks me if I'd like a private dance, and when I accept beckons me towards a curtained area at the back of the bar. As I follow her it occurs to me that it's surprising how few references there are to striptease in modern poetry. Considering its persistence in popular culture over the past century, and its share in the ambience which nurtured popular music (from the Jazz musicians of the New York burlesque houses to the Beatles, serving their apprenticeship in the sleazy clubs of Hamburg) it's astonishing - and maybe symptomatic - that poetry (in English at least) seems to have passed this rich subject by almost unnoticed. Arthur Symonds, Ernest Dowson and the 'Decadents' of the 1890s, with their interest in eroticism, dance and the music-hall, would surely have relished it, but were three decades too early. Who else has touched it?
Yet the antecedents are there, and in surprising places. A visual interest in the erotic power of partial, or gradual, disrobing seems to have entered European culture at the Renaissance. Classical cultures were certainly interested in sex, but they did not associate it especially with nudity, and their erotic literature shows no particular interest in gradual undressing. The first literary signs of an interest in the erotic play of partial concealment by garments, of teasing hems, tassels and fringes, of enticing sartorial slits, slashes and openings, appear in Italy in the late fifteenth century. And so much are these games dependent on viewpoint and precise angles of gaze that it is tempting to speculate that they developed as part of the new way of looking which came with the discovery of linear perspective, usually dated from Brunelleschi's demonstration at Florence in 1425. Together with the techniques developed by Renaissance painters for making classical nudity acceptable to Christian taste by the careful deployment of fluttering garments or strategically-placed tresses of hair, such manipulations of the onlooker's gaze seem to have taught the Western imagination a fascination with erotic visual boundaries, an ability to read the just-hidden as more significant than the revealed.
Albrecht Durer's 'Man Drawing a Reclining Woman' (1520), a textbook illustration of an early device for perspective drawing, seems to sum it all up. A man peers through a tiny hole in the tip of a vertical rod, then through a rectangular grid marked off in squares by criss-cross wires, to draw on squared paper a woman who is naked except for a mantle whose corner just covers her genitals. Voyeurism, mathematical perspective, the female nude, and a vestige of clothing just sufficient to stave off careless, pagan nakedness: all are epitomised. The picture teaches not only a new way of representing space but a new, visual way of enjoying a woman.
Within a generation of Brunelleschi's experiment Francesco Colonna's allegorical dream-vision Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1467) not only describes grandiose architectural visions indebted to Leon Battista Alberti, pioneer of perspective theory, but also invites us to watch flocks of enticing nymphs in clothes which are diaphanous, scanty, and generally about to blow away. Thus, for example, he encounters
maidens...luxuriantly dressed in transparent material that waved and wafted in the brisk and gentle breeze...Adea and Cupria were dressed in a splendid honey colour, with a loose and intricate weave pierced by numerous tiny slashes, with gold leaves placed underneath at the outer fringes...The fresh and wanton breeze revealed, according to its motion, now the form of the rounded, firm and chaste belly and the pretty pubis, now the plump hips, and now the tremulous buttocks. Then it revealed the shoes on their long, slender feet, tightly laced with little horn closures...(1)
Or,
Their extended arms were clothed...with generous cotton sleeves that allowed the colour of the flesh to show gracefully through them ..The hems surrounding their garments were decorated with unimaginable knotwork fringes, which were sometimes blown by the gentle breezes to give a glimpse of their rounded, ivory legs. (2)
Significantly, Colonna's narrator, Poliphilus, attributes all his amatory sufferings to his 'insatiable and unquiet eyes'.(3) The unquiet eye seems to have spread rapidly across Europe, often manifesting itself in the dignified setting of Renaissance epic. Here, for example, is Cam?s Venus in the Lusiads (c. 1559), begging Jupiter to save Vasco da Gama and his men from shipwreck and enhancing her petition with what a recent translator bluntly calls a 'striptease':
Os crespos fios de ouro se esparziam
Pelo colo que a neve escurecia;
Andando, as lᣴeas t괡s lhe tremiam,
Com quem Amor brincava e n㯠se via...
Cum delgado cendal as partes cobre
De quem vergonha é ®atural reparo;
Poré nem tudo esconde nem descobre
O v鵬 dos roxos lí²©os pouco avaro;
Mas, pera que o desejo acenda e dobre,
Lhe p?iante aquꬥ objecto raro.
Já ³e sentem no C鵬 por t?a parte,
Ci?em Vulcano, amor em Marte.
[With careful carelessness, her gold hair
Tumbled on her white shoulders;
As she moved, her nipples trembled
As if Love were playing there invisibly;
With sheerest silk she hid those parts
Normally veiled by modesty,
Though not so demurely as to hide
Or quite reveal her mount of lilies,
But using the barrier of transparency
To fire lust with redoubled ardour.
Vulcan raged with jealousy, while Mars'
Rekindled passion shook the farthest stars.] (4)
Thirty years later Spenser, in the second Book of The Faerie Queene, offers a magnificently opulent and humorous tableau in which a whole team of nymphs conducts the visual as well as tactile seduction of the dissolute Cymochles, who is found
all carelessly displaid,
In secret shadow from the sunny ray,
On a sweet bed of lilies softly laid,
Amidst a flock of Damzelles fresh and gay,
That rownd about him dissolute did play
Their wanton follies and light merriments:
Every of which did loosely disarray
Her upper parts of meet habiliments,
And shewed them naked, deckt with many ornaments.
And every of them strove with most delights
Him to aggrate, and greatest pleasures shew:
Some framd faire lookes, glancing like evening lights;
Others sweet wordes, dropping like honny dew;
Some bathed kises, and did soft embrew
The sugred licour through his melting lips:
One boastes her beautie, and does yield to view
Her daintie limbes above her tender hips;
Another her out boastes, and all for tryall strips.
The episode culminates in an astute analysis of the intricate visual and psychological perspectives involved, in which poet and reader are, of course, implicated:
He, like an Adder kurking in the weedes,
His wandring thought in deepe desire does steepe,
And his frayle eye with spoyle of beautie feedes:
Sometimes he falsely faines himselfe to sleepe;
Whiles through their lids his wanton eies do peepe
To steale a snatch of amorous conceipt,
Whereby close fire into his heart does creepe:
So he them deceives, deceivd in his deceipt,
Made dronke with drugs of deare voluptuous receipt.
This kind of exuberance could not last - though there are traces of it here and there in the seventeenth century, as in Herrick's 'Delight in Disorder' ('A sweet disorder in the dress/Kindles in clothes a wantonness...') - and it revives in Keats, most Spenserian of the Romantics, above all in The Eve of St Agnes, where Porphyro, from his hiding-place in Madeline's closet, watches her undress. Those miraculous 'warmè¤ jewels' render her disrobing tactile as well as visual, but whereas a young girl in an unheated room on a night of 'bitter chill' would surely bundle her clothes off and jump into bed, Keats has her undress slowly and tantalisingly, with all the emphasis on gradualness and partial revelation which is the hallmark of post-renaissance eroticism. She unclasps her jewels 'one by one'; she
Loosens her fragrant bodice; by degrees
Her rich attire creeps rustling to her knees.
Half-hidden, like a mermaid in sea-weed,
Pensive awhile she dreams awake...
Leaving her 'half-hidden' but also somehow gathered around the knees, the disposition of Madeline's clothing suggests that Keats, always richly aware of the visual arts, may have the Venus de Milo in mind. At any rate, what Porphyro sees from his hiding-place is not a glimpse of reality but an icon of male fantasy.
Not surprisingly, most nineteenth-century poetry in English stays far from such subjects. There is no parallel to Baudelaire's 'Les Bijoux', where Jeanne Duval knows exactly what will please her lover and, otherwise naked, keeps her jewels on, earning the poet's commendation for her sense of aesthetics. Nor have I found anything comparable in British poetry of the past hundred years. The word (or words, or hyphenated compound) strip[-]tease occurs, of course - usually in a context that implies disapproval. MacNeice's catalogue of irresponsible distractions in Autumn Journal ('Strip-tease, fireworks, all-in-wrestling, gin') is a good example. There are cloudy metaphorical uses aplenty - the database I checked threw up a pile of such phrases as 'the striptease of reality' and 'the striptease of the psyche', none of which seemed likely to advance human wisdom greatly. And, in another league altogether, there is the shocking power of 'The big strip tease' in Sylvia Plath's 'Lady Lazarus'. Plath understood the power of the unquiet eye as few have done. But in her poetry the erotic is bitterly distorted, subsumed into nightmare games of power and destruction. Tenderness is reserved for children.
Laurence Durrell, always the Bohemian, has an interestingly oblique poem from 1963, 'Strip-Tease', which begins in intriguing and slightly surreal alienation: the dancers are 'Soft toys that make to seem girls...with two coral/Valves of lip printing each others' grease'; but the overwrought disapproval soon reduces the diction to cliché ¨'Cold witches of the elementary tease/Balanced on the horn of a supposed desire'). One senses a writer ill-at-ease with his own desires and fantasies, reluctant to face or explore them. By contrast - and how interesting that a woman should have written it - there is Anna Adams's 'Lullaby for a Man Asleep in Brewer Street' (in Green Resistance, 1996), a poem both genial and tolerant, though it presents its Soho premises only from the outside, and I would not advise anyone to waste their time and money in grubby Brewer Street.
Predictably, the Americans have done better. Jim Daniels has an interesting poem, 'The Sleeper Hold', about watching Colpo Grosso, a striptease gameshow on Italian TV, which sums up one aspect of the business unforgettably in two short lines: 'We loved the flesh we saw,/We loved the flesh we didn't see'. Colonna or Cam?could hardly have put it better. William Carlos Williams, in the midst of a somewhat flaccid and pretentious late poem, 'The Desert Music', has a good and not unsympathetic sketch of an ageing stripper in a Mexican bar. Despite the usual defensive disavowals ('You'd have to be/pretty drunk to get any kick out of that') he makes some interesting observations:
She gyrates but it's
not what you think,
one does not laugh
to watch her belly.
One is moved but not
at the dull show...
There is another music. The bright coloured candy
of her nakedness lifts her unexpectedly
to partake of its tune:...in her mockery of virtue
she becomes unaccountably virtuous
though she in no
way pretends it.
The Indian poet A.K.Ramanujan has a superb (and, I think, quintessentially American) poem, 'Highway Stripper', which sums up more intensely than anything else I have seen the intensity of the erotic viewer's experience. Far from being about striptease as such, it recounts the experience of a man who is driving on a freeway when, from the window of the 'speeding car' in front, 'a woman's hand/with a wrist-watch on it' discards a series of garments: a straw hat, 'a white shoe fit/to be a fetish', and in due course 'a fluttery/slip, faded pink,/frayed lace-edge/and all/ (I even heard it swish)', then 'a rather ordinary,/used, and off-white bra', and finally
bright red panties
laced with white
hit
my windshield
and I flinched,
I swerved,
but then
it was gone, swept aside
before I straightened up[.]
Desperate with curiosity and 'Frustrated by their/dusty rear window/at fifty feet', Ramanujan, or his narrator, steps on the gas and eventually overtakes the car, to see only a forty-ish man, apparently alone, staring ahead, listening to a football game on the radio. No sign of a woman. Had the driver stripped off, Ramanujan asks, not only the clothes but maybe 'even the woman he was wearing'? Or
was it me
moulting, shedding
vestiges,
old investments,
rushing forever
towards a perfect
coupling
with naked nothing
in a world
without places?
Considerably less disturbing are two poems about burlesque by Charles Bukowski, a poet at times almost too much at home with his desires and fantasies. 'Love Poem to a Stripper' (in You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, 1986) is a poem of old age:
50 years ago I watched the girls
shake it and strip
at the Burbank and the Follies
and it was very sad
and very dramatic
as the light turned from green to
purple to pink
and the music was loud and vibrant...
Affectionately he catalogues those of the dancers' names he can still remember - 'Darlene, Candy, Jeanette/and Rosalie' - doll-like names of the sort still used by dancers and cherished by the punters - and singles out Rosalie (who 'was/the best, she knew how') for praise and elegy:
Now Rosalie
either so very old or
so quiet under the
earth,
this is the pimple-faced
kid
who lied about his
age
just to watch
you.
'You were good, Rosalie/in 1935', he tells her, 'good enough to remember/now'
when the light is
yellow
and the nights are
slow.
Like its companion piece, 'Burlesque' (in Bone Palace Ballet, 1997), 'Love Poem to a Stripper' is less simple than it looks on first reading. There is a haiku-like intensity of focus on the intersection of brief moments and long temporal perspectives, and both poems have a strong sense of melancholy.
Perhaps some of that melancholy stems not only from a sense of shared mortality but from a recognition that poet and stripper have a great deal in common, in an age when the poet must perform and where every poem is assumed to be 'Confessional' or at least autobiographical until proved otherwise. Such, at any rate, seems to be the one implication of Paul Muldoon's 'Gypsy' (in Meeting the British, 1987):
it's knowing exactly when to stop
that matters,
what to hold back, some sweet disorder...
The same goes for the world of letters.
Muldoon seems to anticipate, even hope for, a change in readers' expectations: Gypsy is used to living with her own image, in the form of a life-size cardboard cutout from the World's Fair, but still
I keep that papier-mache cow's head packed
Just in case vaudeville does come back.
Meanwhile, back at Browns, Leonie is well into her performance on one of the small podia in the curtained and settee'd area at the back of the bar. She goes through essentially the same routine as on stage, but watching it as a one-man audience greatly heightens its intensity. The experience of having this personable stranger undulate three feet or so from me, naked except for a pair of perspex stilettos, is an extraordinary one and well worth the modest payment requested. Leonie signals the end of the performance by leaning forward and giving me a modest peck on the cheek - I have felt more passion in the kiss of an octogenarian aunt - then hops down to retrieve her clothing from the floor. I compliment her on her performance, and ask her how she maintains the agility necessary for her dancing. 'Ten years of ballet training,' she tells me, 'and I also practise yoga. And when I'm not working here, I'm a personal trainer in a gym.'
I leave her to reassemble herself and wander back into the main bar, where another agile young lady is now on stage, beguiling the somewhat diminished clientele. I'm impressed by the courage, skill and tenacity of these girls, who seem to have limitless good humour, a sound grasp of psychology and an impressive range of physical skills. Certainly, as much as any Indian juggler or stage magician, they are artists in their way: not 'fine' artists - the insistent evocation of desire is far too essential for their art to satisfy the contemplative ideals of a Kant or a Schopenhauer - but manipulators of the imagination, artists in sleight-of-hand and the margins of perception, playing in that glamorous and shadowy perceptual borderland which has generated so much of the art, and the ambiguity, of Western culture since the Renaissance. And whilst their art is erotic, they are not - any more than a soprano who sings the great erotic arias of Wagner or Richard Strauss - 'sex workers'. Their performances are about sexuality, but they are not sexual acts; and they are also, in their more graceful and lyrical moments, about love.
After a few minutes a pony-tailed girl in jeans, trainers and a woolly coat emerges from a door marked 'Staff' and heads for the exit. Behind her she tugs what I take to be a shopping- trolley, until I realise it's actually one of those little suitcases with an extending handle and castors. In nondescript clothes and minus her extravagant makeup she is just recognisable as Leonie. The case, I suppose, is full of flimsy dresses and makeup and perspex shoes. Other girls with similar luggage follow. The afternoon shift is over and already new girls are arriving ready for the post-office-hour rush which will begin around 5 p.m. It's time to go, and I brace myself to rejoin daylight and the street. That will be quite a shock after this strange dim dreamworld, this place of smoke and mirrors and deception and blatant flirtation and a strangely honest acknowledgement of things that the outside world tries not to recognise. It's time someone wrote about it.
References
(1) Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: The Strife of Love in a Dream, tr. Jocelyn Godwin, London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. p.277
(2) Colonna, pp. 75-6.
(3) Colonna, p.144.
(4) Lusiads, II. 36-7, tr. Landeg White, Oxford World's Classics, 2001.
(5) The Faerie Queene II. V. xxxii-xxxiv.
(6) The Eve of St Agnes, 228-233.
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