Zoo in the head

Hyenas: I forgot

The letterbox extrudes a new issue of the London Review of Books, which contains the following letter:

Much as I enjoyed John Burnside’s poem ‘Hyena’, I must point out that he has his hyenas crossed. The ‘giggle’ and pack behaviour referred to in the final stanza suggests the spotted (or ‘laughing’) hyena, but the first stanza (white mane, grey face, bat ears) describes the striped hyena, a solitary animal which does not ‘laugh’.

Mikita Brottman
Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore

Which was the point that started me off on the poem, until I got distracted by falanoucs. Not much point doing zoology if you're not going to bother getting it right.

Poetry corner: Some feliforms

From the London Review of Books, 30 June, p. 16 - "Hyena", one of two poems by John Burnside

Like something out
of Brueghel, maned in white
and hungry
like the dark, the bat
ears pricked, the face
a grey

velour, more cat
than dog, less
caracal
than fanalouc
or civet ...

Whoa! I don't want to give away the ending; besides, it's less the poem that interests me - sorry, John Burnside - than the zoology.

To begin with, what kind of hyena are we talking about? There are three species, the spotted, the brown, and the striped: on the basis of the details Burnside gives ("maned in white", "bat ears", "face a grey velour"), it can't mean the spotted, which barely has a mane at all; he might mean the somewhat scraggy-looking brown, though the mane is less striking than the white ruff under the chin; but taking it all in all, the spotted is the best fit:

And then come some interesting taxonomic details. "More cat than dog" seems counterintuitive, what with the long muzzle and the habit of hanging around in packs, but Burnside is perfectly correct. Hyenas and dogs are both members of the order Carnivora, but hyenas sit alongside your actual felids (cats, such as caracals) in the suborder Feliformia. "[L]ess / caracal / than fanalouc / or civet" seems to imply that, within the Feliformia, they sit nearer the viverrids (genets and civets) and the euplerids (an exclusively Madagascan bunch of mongoose-like animals, of which the best-known is the fossa): again, the consensus is that that's how it is.

That "fanalouc" is a puzzle, though. He seems to have confused two different animals: the falanouc and the fanaloka - both euplerids, and closely related. Which one does Burnside have in mind? Here's a falanouc:

And here's a fanaloka:

Of the two, the fanaloka is, to my eyes, more hyena-like in appearance, and arguably in lifestyle. While the hyena is famous for the bone-splitting strength of its jaws, the falanouc's teeth, set in a narrow, shrewish head, are adapted for soft-bodied creatures, for worms, frogs, slugs. At least the fanaloka (also known as the Malagasy or striped civet) hunts something crunchy, even if it's only small mammals, birds and lizards.

All of which leads me to conclude ... Well, nothing: I've been wasting your time here. If anybody can tell me what Brueghel Burnside had in mind, though, I'd be very grateful.

 

Poetry corner: The far side of the fair

We with our Fair pitched among the feathery clover
Are always cowardly and never sober,
Drunk with steam-organs, thigh-rub and cream-soda
— We cannot remember enemies in this valley.

As chestnut candles turn to conkers, so we
Knock our brains together extravagantly
Instead of planting them to make more trees
— Who have not as yet sampled God’s malice.

But to us urchins playing with paint and filth
A prophet scanning the road on the hither hills
Might utter the old warning of the old sin
— Avenging youth threatening an old war.

Crawling down like lava or termites
Nothing seduces, nothing dissolves, nothing affrights
You who scale off masks and smash the purple lights
— But I will escape, with my dog, on the far side of the Fair.

   "The Individualist Speaks" by Louis MacNeice

I came across this a few weeks ago, through an essay on MacNeice by Peter Green in the New York Review of Books. Although he was conjoined by Roy Campbell with Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden and Cecil Day-Lewis in the leftist panto beast "MacSpaunday", MacNeice didn't have their political commitment. Green writes:

...MacNeice was not born to be a joiner: he was always on the outside looking in, always liable, like his (much-quoted) persona in “The Individualist Speaks,” to “escape, with my dog, on the far side of the Fair.”

The idea that the individualist = MacNeice is, as Green says, well-worn: puzzling, though. I don't know the date, but the poem seems transparently a fable about Britain between the wars, partying away while German resentments smoulder away sur le Continong. But the individualist isn't the hero: he spots the danger, but it doesn't occur to him to do anything about it; all he thinks about it his own safety, and his dog's (it's escaping with the dog that attracted me, you'll realize). At best it's a self-mocking identification; as it happens, MacNeice insisted on coming home from America when war did break out.

Come to that, a good deal of what Green says about MacNeice seems wrong - for example, that "What first strikes a reader of MacNeice’s poetry is its sensual exuberance, its accurate brilliance of imagery." What strikes me is the deliberate inaccuracy of the imagery, how he often aims past the sensual world at some other, half-seen target.

Although that last line gets quoted, the whole poem isn't much reprinted - not included in the Faber Selected Poems, for example. Perhaps it seems too transparent, too one-dimensional and obvious; but the mildly disconcerting rhythmic irregularities, the peculiar images of fairs and lights and dogs, the mix of blitheness and doom: highly adhesive.

Text copied from a comment to a blog post by Paul Muldoon on MacNeice's "The Taxis". The commenter relates this dog to the one at the end of that (much later) poem:

...but the cabby looked
Through him and said: "I can’t tra-la well take
So many people, not to speak of the dog."

I'm grateful for the poem, but his suggestion that this is some recurrent hound from Irish myth is daft.

The version of "The Individualist Speaks" in the Collected Poems is slightly different: the second line of the final stanza doesn't have the phrase "nothing dissolves"; to my mind that reduces the line's force, in scansion and sense. If anybody can tell me anything about the textual history it will save some pedantic fossicking.

The illustration is "Fun Fair" by Clifford Frith, from a series of posters commissioned in 1947 by J. Lyons to decorate their tea-rooms.

 

Penguin: Poland

First Penguin edition, 1970.

Almost the first thing I thought when I heard about Poland's weekend catastrophe - the destruction of a large section of its political class, including the head of state, in what looks to have been an avoidable air-crash - was that I should post this cover. Which shows that I'm getting dangerously fixated. In any case, the logic of the gesture escapes me: showing solidarity with the Polish people? They can probably live without. Then again, you could argue that the long series of disasters that has afflicted Poland over the last century is what created the particular tone of its poetry. This is what Czeslaw Milosz says in his preface to the original Doubleday edition of 1965:

A historical steam-roller has gone several times through a country whose geographical location, between Germany and Russia, is not particularly enviable. Yet the poet emerges perhaps more energetic, better prepared to assume tasks assigned to him by the human condition, than is his Western colleague. One can blame the Polish poet for his irony, sometimes verging on cynicism. Irony, however, for better or worse, is an ingredient of modern poetry everywhere and cannot be separated from the purpose it serves. As for this purpose, elegant scepticism and the will to defend the basic values of man's existence are not one and the same thing.

In the preface to the Penguin edition, five years later, he feels the need the warn the reader against irony:

Yes, I know that man uses irony to cope with evil. He throws his defiance to the evil powers of this world in the name of his frail and helpless values. We should not forget, however, that irony is an ambivalent and sometimes dangerous weapon, often corroding the hand which wields it. From what is a desperate protest masked with a smile to nihilistic acquiescence is but one step. 

The poets are presented in chronological order: Leopold Staff (1878-1957) is a couple of generations older than most of the others, but his short poem "Foundations" - the first in the book - sets the tone, and says something fundamental about poetry and nationhood. "I built on the sand / And it tumbled down, / I built on a rock / And it tumbled down. / Now when I build, I shall begin / With the smoke from the chimney."

As for the cover: Bridget Heal designed it: I mentioned her last year, comparing this cover to the anonymous one for Image as Language. What makes it is the contrast between the spare typography and minimalist conception and that florid - baroque, in fact - Polish eagle. 

Penguin: Border Ballads

 

1965 reprint of a 1952 edition, printed in Australia - the paper is thinner and smoother than most British paperbacks of the time. The cover design is by Chris Wallace-Crabbe, who I'd only heard of as a poet: at first glance I registered it as abstract pattern, as most of the poetry covers were at this period; but it is illustration - castles, crosses, ships, thistles, horses, and a man being stabbed. I guess it's abstract to the extent that it doesn't illustrate individual ballads: Wallace-Crabbe has assembled the elements from which the genre is constructed - a lot of lovers getting slain in their beds by outraged husbands or brothers, a lot of battles, a fair bit of hunting and hawking, plus assorted curses and thefts. My favourite is Clerk Saunders, in which Saunders, murdered by his lover's brothers while he lay with her, returns from the dead to wish her farewell: "My mouth it is full cold, Margaret,/ It has the smell, now, of the ground/ And if I kiss thy comely mouth,/ Thy days of life will not be lang."

A perfect book: £4 from Gough's bookshop in Holt, Norfolk, at New Year.

Not a Penguin

Other brands of nicely designed old paperbacks are available:

And while this blog's policy remains resolutely pro-Penguin, a change is as good as &c.

Published by Doubleday Anchor, 1956. Noah Greenberg was founder and director of New York Pro Musica Antiqua, with whom Auden collaborated several times in the Fifties - providing an English narration for their path-breaking revival of The Play of Daniel, and recording An Evening of Elizabethan Verse and Its Music with them.

The book is beautifully produced, and has an introduction by Auden and Kallman (his young man) to the texts:

"The poet who would write songs is denied many poetic virtues, but he is also guarded from many poetic vices; he cannot be prolix or private or preachy or obscure. When one compares the poetry of the preceding age, so crowded with endless maundering allegories, with the poems in these song books, one cannot but thank God for men like Byrd and Dowland, in response to whose demands the poets were compelled to practice the virtues of graceful ease and conciseness."

There are critics who would claim that Auden's career was an instance of precisely the reverse process: graceful ease and conciseness giving way to the vices of prolixity, preachiness and obscurity. (I admit to preferring the early verse; but that doesn't mean I don't admire and value the knottiness of the later stuff - e.g., In Praise of Limestone - as well.)

I'm not sure what is keeping that lute from falling over, but the illustration is perfectly lovely. It's by Edward Gorey, of all people: see also here.

Off the shelf: The Oxford Companion to English Literature

More to the point, out of the stocking. Santa was pretty good about consulting my Amazon wishlist this year - not so great for our local independent bookshop but avoids that awkward moment when I tear off the wrapping, realise it's something I've already got, and fail to compose my face into a spontaneous expression of surprise and gratitude. And so my haul included the new edition of The Oxford Companion to English Literature, edited by Dinah Birch - will this, I wonder, be the last really chunky reference book I take possession of before all information migrates online forever?

It will be months, if not years, before I've got properly to grips with this edition, but I wanted to point out a couple of things:

1) The cover - it's a painting by David Kirk called The Gardener (2003-4), and it's got a Penguin. More precisely, it's got a Penguin with the vertical grid designed by Jan Tschichold and Erik Ellegard Frederiksen (we think of Penguin as a British design icon, but it was a very European operation). Phil Baines, in Penguin by Design, reckons the grid made its first appearance on a cover in 1952 (earlier on dustjackets); I don't recall seeing it on books printed before the mid-1950s, and it died out in the early 1960s. The title is, frustratingly, illegible, but the first word begins with an A, and the second with a T.

2) Science-fiction - loads of it, to the point where it feels slightly weird. So there are entries for authors like Michael Swanwick, Ian McDonald and Adam Roberts, whose work is virtually unknown to the non-SF-reading public and whose reputations are far from fixed; meanwhile, venerable, influential and good crime writers such as Donald Westlake and Reginald Hill don't make the cut. Nor does Julian Maclaren-Ross - a minor novelist, but the focus of considerable attention in recent years; nor does the poet Philip Gross (an omission that looks particularly daft now he's won the T. S. Eliot prize).

Can anybody explain?

De mortuis, etc.

Pat Robertson's views on the role of Satan in Haitian history have been reverberating around cyberspace. There's a particularly interesting post by Ta-Nehisi Coates on the question of whether good deeds can excuse evil words (short answer: No): in his support, Coates enlists Christopher Hitchens, seen on video explaining his refusal to pretend to mourn the Rev. Jerry Falwell. (Scholars of loon may wish to scan this 2001 footage of Falwell and Robertson agreeing that the USA brought September 11th on itself, on account of all that sodomising and abortion and not supporting Israel enough - you can't knock Robertson for inconsistency.)

The comments after the Coates post, debating the rights and wrongs of speaking ill of the dead, point towards an extraordinary piece of post-mortem invective, H. L. Mencken's obituary of William Jennings Bryan, best remembered now as an opponent of Darwinism - just before he died, in 1925, he made a fool of himself at the Scopes trial. Here's Mencken's assessment:

Bryan was a vulgar and common man, a cad undiluted. He was ignorant, bigoted, self-seeking, blatant and dishonest. His career brought him into contact with the first men of his time; he preferred the company of rustic ignoramuses. It was hard to believe, watching him at Dayton, that he had traveled, that he had been received in civilized societies, that he had been a high officer of state. He seemed only a poor clod like those around him, deluded by a childish theology, full of an almost pathological hatred of all learning, all human dignity, all beauty, all fine and noble things. He was a peasant come home to the dung-pile. Imagine a gentleman, and you have imagined everything that he was not.

Possibly Mencken went too far. Before his evangelising days Bryan had been secretary of state, three times Democratic presidential candidate, and a champion of liberal, democratic ideals - he led campaigns against big banks and America's new-minted imperial ambitions; and a century on, was he wrong?

I always associate his name with Vachel Lindsay's poem, recalling the effect of Bryan's 1896 presidential campaign on a young idealist:

Prairie avenger, mountain lion,
Bryan, Bryan, Bryan, Bryan,
Gigantic troubadour, speaking like a siege gun,
Smashing Plymouth Rock with his boulders from the West  

Demented

(from Media Matters via The Huffington Post)

In case you don't have time to watch the video, or can't believe your ears, a transcript:

"Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, we will serve you if you'll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the devil said, OK, it's a deal. And they kicked the French out, you know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free.

"But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other, desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island, it's cut down the middle; on the one side is Haiti, on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera, Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have, and we need to pray for them, a great turning to God, and out of this tragedy I'm optimistic something good may come. But right now we are helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable." 

The final sentence almost redeems him. The rest takes us back to Blake:

"Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau;
Mock on, Mock on, 'tis all in vain.
You throw the sand against the wind,
And the wind blows it back again."

Straight in your face.

Back to work Penguin

But the feast isn't over:

Yes, it's another Stephen Russ poetry cover - a 1964 reprint. I'd forgotten I had this, consigned for years to an obscure shelf. That's partly because of Browning - I can't think of another poet who can grab me so immediately, and bore me so swiftly - partly because I was never that struck by the cover. The theory that the pattern should relate to the poems seems here to have been reduced to its starkest terms: this reminds us of Browning because it's, well, brown. But looking at it now, in the context of all those other Russ covers, I feel ashamed of not having noticed the variety of shape and colour he crammed into the apparently straightforward, monochrome grid.

Twelfth night past, the Christmas tree gone and the bookshelf exposed again, we can move on to Penguin Scores. But I'm going to go back to a weekly schedule again.