Untitled

In Parenthesis was first published in London in 1937. I am proud to share the responsibility for that first publication, On reading the book in typescript I was deeply moved. I then regarded it, and I still regard it, as a work of genius.

A work of literary art which uses the language in a new way or for a new purpose, does not call for many words from the introducer. All that one can say amounts only to pointing towards the book, and affirming its importance and permanence as a work of art. The aim of the introducer should be to arouse the curiosity of a possible new reader. To attempt to explain, in such a note as this, is futile. Here is a book about the experiences of one soldier in the War of 1914-18. It is also a book about War, and about many other things also, such as Roman Britain, the Arthurian Legend, and divers matters which are given association by the mind of the writer. And as for the writer himself, he is a Londoner of Welsh and English descent. He is decidedly a Briton. He is also a Roman Catholic, and he is a painter who has painted some beautiful pictures and designed some beautiful lettering. All these facts about him are important. Some of them appear in his own Preface to this book; some the reader may discover in the course of reading.

When In Parenthesis is widely enough known—as it will be in time—it will no doubt undergo the same sort of detective analysis and exegesis as the later work of James Joyce and the Cantos of Ezra Pound. It is true that In Parenthesis and David Jones's later and equally remarkable work The Anathemata, are provided by the author with notes; but author's notes (as is illustrated by The Waste Land) are no prophylactic against interpretation and dissections they merely provide the serious researcher with more material to interpret and dissect. The work of David Jones has some affinity with that of James Joyce (both men seem to me to have the Celtic ear for the music of words) and with the later work of Ezra Pound, and with my own. I stress the affinity, as any possible influence seems to me slight and of no importance. David Jones is a representative of the same literary generation as Joyce and Pound and myself, if four men born between 1882 and 1895 can be regarded as of the same literary generation. David Jones is the youngest, and the tardiest to publish. The lives of all of us were altered by that War, but David Jones is the only one to have fought in it.

I have chosen as title for this brief and inconclusive debate a phrase from Richard Ellmann's Eminent Domain (1967, 52). It is there said of Yeats that to the end, even in his last poems where everything estimable is imperilled, he remained stubbornly loyal to the conscious mind's intelligible structure.' I think it proper to emphasize that I am taking the phrase out of context and employing it in a possibly-arbitrary fashion.

The debate begins, somewhat remotely, by attempting to distinguish between various kinds of objectivity, in the hope that the distinction may profitably be applied to a consideration of modern poetry, particularly that of Yeats. At the outset it is necessary to refer to three epigraphs or texts. The first is from Donald R. Pearce's introduction to his edition of The Senate Speeches of W.B. Yeats (1961):

Mrs Yeats once explained to me that [Yeats] was accustomed to distinguish those pages of manuscript that were to be discarded from those that were to be kept and filed by referring to the latter as 'history'; early drafts of certain poems, abandoned ideas for a play, alternative versions of some essay - all had their place in an intellectual and personal 'history that was as objective to his scrutiny as if it were not his own but the life of another man (p.22).

The second text is a phrase from an essay by Matthew Corrigan, in which he writes of the 'primary objective world... its cruelty and indifference (Encounter, July 1970, 85). The third citation is from Simone Weil:

Simultaneous composition on several planes at once is the law of artistic creation, and wherein, in fact, lies its difficulty. A poet, in the arrangement of words and the choice of each word, must simultaneously bear in mind matters on at least five or six different planes of composition. . .Politics, in their turn, form an art governed by composition. on a multiple plane. (The Need for Roots, translated by AF. Wills, 1952, 207)

One understands Simone Weil to be suggesting that poetry recognizes the primary objective world not so much by exercising its discursive faculty as by enacting a paradigm: a paradigm in which objective... scrutiny', in the Yeatsian sense, is put into the arena with Corrigan's 'primary objective world'. The value of her statement, from one's own point of view, is in her recognition that one does not attain objectivity simply by surrendering to the primary objective world. Corrigan, of course, sees this too. I am employing his phrase for its succinctness, not because I have any quarrel with it. One's debt to Simone Weil is precise. Within the circumference of her 'law', lyric poetry is necessarily dramatic: indeed, the 'different planes' actually available to a director on his theatre-stage could even be regarded as an indication of what takes place 'simultaneously' in the arena of the poem. When Yeats depicts his own search for a speech 'natural and dramatic' (Letters, ed. Wade, 1954, 583), 'simple and passionate' (ib, 668) he is far from advocating spontaneous lyricism. He is, even, in the second instance, possibly echoing Milton. An early use of the word 'passionate in Yeats's Letters is to be found in his reference, in May 1887, to T.M. Healy's 'rugged, passionate speech' in the House of Commons, 'the most human thing I heard. (35). It is arguable that Yeats's sense of 'simple and passionate speech was always forensic rather than domestic.

Yeats recognized himself, though not without irony, to be an artist in the nineteenth century Romantic tradition. This is a self-limiting truism which requires prompt qualification since, on investigation, no such simple entity as the Romantic tradition can be discovered. To make a distinction based on Yeats's own terminology in A Vision, one might suggest that Romanticism had (and has) both false and true masks. The false mask is formed from what Jacques Maritain admirably summarized as the two unnatural principles: the fecundity of money and the finality of the useful (Art and Scholasticism, translated by J.F. Scanlan, 1930, 37). The false mask either gleams amid the fecundity of money or utters, in terms of the finality of the useful, the wrong kind of moral answer. The London commercial theatre, at the turn of the century, flaunting the fecundity of money, aroused Yeats s contempt (Letters, 308–311). He was equally accurate in taking issue with George Bernard Shaw. As early as 1900 (Letters, 335) Yeats was calling Shaw 'reactionary', a particularly prophetic epithet in the light of Major Barbara. It is at least open to suggestion that Shaw's adherence to the finality of the useful, far from being antithetical to the false mask of Romanticism, is but a further manifestation of it. In paying lip-service to the realist, the practical man, Shaw makes the fecundity of money finally useful It is a synthesis of a kind, but such a synthesis as to mak Weil's 'composition on several planes' a preferable alternative.

Having sketched this view of the false mask one will rightly be required to present an image of the true mask. Thus, the 'true mask' could be shaped in one of two ways, each of which is in accord with the conscious mind's intelligible structure The first way presupposes a grammar of assent. The second w: is available if the first is not; and is the way of syntax. Synt: could be understood as Donald Davie presents it in his bor Articulate Energy (1955) or it could be extended to accomodate Simone Weil's 'law of artistic creation', as defined The Need for Roots.

In setting the phrase 'grammar of assent' in lower case ty one is arbitrarily making a metaphor, a metaphor to take place of Newman's reality. A Grammar of Assent is not same thing as a grammar of assent; and one's metaphor exists to acknowledge the difference 

As the structure of the universe speaks to us of Him who made it, so the laws of the mind are the expression, not of mere constituted order, but of His will. (John Henry Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 1913 ed., 351)

The shape of my debate, if it can be said to have one, require 'mere constituted order' to be held in equal observation against 'the conscious mind's intelligible structure'. It will not have escaped notice that my discussion relies heavily on a law' devised by a writer who, in the words of E.W.F. Tomlin, devoted a good deal of 'wistful attention' to the Church but who was unable, finally, to assent. One is, with the greatest reverence and respect, citing Simone Weil's predicament as being an exemplary one. She has been dead nearly thirty years; the issues have long been public; one is not trespassing on any privacy. It needs to be said equally strongly that one is not trespassing on one's own privacy. There is nothing 'confessional' about this debate. The situation is far from being intimate. Arguably one is describing, albeit hypothetically, a common cultural predicament: so common as to verge on mere truism. One cannot, however, pervert the purity of Newman's meaning. A Grammar of Assent would have to be Catholic: 'Non in dialectica com-placuit Deo salvum facere populum suum'. A grammar of assent, which is a lesser thing, a metaphor, does not have to be Catholic, though it could be:

. . .when faith is informed by what Newman calls real assent, which involves the imagination, it is as living as the imagination itself', and this means to say that it not only leads on to action, but is enriched and deepened by action. (Alexander Dru, Peguy, 1956, 60)

Readers of Alexander Dru's book will recognize that my emphasis does not do his argument justice. I have chosen to interpret as metaphor a statement that he did not necessarily set down as metaphor; and for this I would ask his forgiveness.

It is my contention that there are certain sectors, not necessarily or exclusively Catholic, where real assent, involving a reciprocity between imagination and action, can be observed. There is a sense in which Conrad's assent to the code of the British Merchant Service provided him with a grammar that transfigured syntax as effectively as it transcended dangerous spontaneity. Óne thinks particularly of the two polemic essays, first published in the English Review in 1912, on the sinking of the 'Titanic. His imagination not only leads on' to action but is 'enriched and deepened' by his grasp of right action:

So, once more: continuous bulkheads — a clear way of escape to the deck out of each water-tight compartment. Nothing less. And it specialists, the precious specialists of the sort that builds 'unsinkable ships, tell you that it cannot be done, don't you believe them. It can be done, and they are quite clever enough to do it too. The objections they will raise, however disguised in the solemn mystery of technical phrases, will not be technical, but commercial. (Notes on Life and Letters, 1921, 314)

One notes here how facialties come together: the faculty of moral indignation with the faculty of practical amelioration. Contrasted with this, Arnold's 'sweetness and light' is inane and what Yeats called Burke's 'great melody sounds off-key, reveals itself to be, for all its resonance, a protest against natural right in the name of expediency'. (H.J. Laski, Political Thought in England: from Locke to Bentham, (1920), 1932, 187).

With Burke, however, we approach our second category. Failing a grammar of assent, syntax may serve. Possibly it is not untrue to say that the best answer to Burke's conservatism is to be found in his own pages.' (Laski, 176). In this respect Laski's suggestion conrelates with Arnold's praise of Burke's return... upon himself'. In his essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time', Arnold cites the concluding passage of Burke's 'Thoughts on French Affairs' of December 1791:

The evil is stated, in my opinion, as it exists. The remedy must be where power, wisdom and information, I hope, are more united with good intentions than they can be with me. I have done with this subject, I believe, for ever. It has given me many anxious moments for the two last years. If a great change is to be made in human affairs, the minds of men will be fitted to it; the general opinions and feelings will draw that way. Every fear, every hope will forward it; and then they who persist in op. posing this mighty current in human affairs, will appear rather to resist the decrees of Providence itself, than the mere designs of men. They will not be resolute and firm, but perverse and obstinate.

Burke's passage is plangent with futile simplistic determinism and witless platitude (the minds of men will be fitted to it... this mighty current in human affairs). If Burke were spontaneously ejecting platitudes it would be contemptible. It is his very recognition of the force of the contemptible, in oneself and in others, that makes the passage an arena of 'several planes. The fact that such a quality of recognition may be thought uncharacteristic of Burke's general mode does not invalidate its particular power or detract from the effectiveness of Arnold's choice. 'That return of Burke upon himself' says Arnold, has always seemed to me one of the finest things in English literature, or indeed in any literature.' At the moment that one recognizes the justice of Arnold's praise, one simultaneously seizes upon the nub of his situation. Burke's words, which have impinged upon Arnold's critical intelligence in their true nature, that is, as thwarted politics, are made to issue from Arnold's critical intelligence as a quite distinct entity, that is, as English literature'. If, as Alexander Dru suggests, assent in the illative sense 'not only leads on to action, but is enriched and deepened by action', , then Arnold, for all the fineness of his critical eye, is subjecting Burke's sentences to a process of negative conversion. How an intuitive sense of this can oppress a fine intelligence is, I think, nowhere better described than by Arnold himself, brooding over 'Empedocles on Etna':

What then are the situations, from the representation of which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived? They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action... in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. (Preface to Poems, 1853)

If one cannot have a grammar of assent one has a dichotomy. On one side of this will be, at worst, a dependence on tones of voice, Arnold's fastidious whining about an original shortcoming in the more delicate spiritual perceptions'; at best, syntax or 'the conscious mind's intelligible structure. On the other side there may be merely 'manic and depressive phases of activity and inactivity, mostly of an 'intermittent character', as Conor Cruise O'Brien suggests in his essay on Yeats's politics:

If a Marxist, believing that history is going in a given direction, thinks it right to give it a good shove in the way it is going, it is natural enough that one who, like Yeats, feels that it is going in the opposite direction, should accompany it that way with, if not a shove, at least a cautious tilt. (O' Brien, in A.N. Jeffares and K.G.W. Cross, eds., In Excited Reverie, 1965, 263, 265, 278)

Though his phrasing here is callous and slovenly, the critic is not at fault. He knows perfectly well what he is about and his words mimic effectively the nature of Yeats's error: an error which we are to discern amid the shambles of phrases like 'natural enough' and 'if not a shove. In Yeats's poetry there is imagination; in Yeats's politics there is action; but the one does not enrich and deepen the other. There is no real assent; there is no illative sense, no grammar. In politics, therefore, Yeats's aristocratic bias does not save him from vulgarity; the 'aristocrat' is conned by a pseudo-aristocracy of the gutter.

If, however, we accept the dichotomy as a simple datum, we have the right, within the terms of such a proviso, to praise the persistent energy of Yeats's poetic syntax. Arguably, the entire melody of Easter 1916, a poem that Maud Gonne, dedicated to the finality of the useful, thought wholly inadequate to the occasion, is itself an articulation of the Burkean 'return'. So, perhaps, is the second stanza of section five of 'Vacillation', though here one's argument is less secure. Yeats's gesture strikes one as being formulistic:

Things said or done long years ago, Or things I did not do or say But thought that I might say or do, Weigh me down, and not a day But something is recalled, My conscience or my vanity appalled. (Collected Poems, 1950, 284)

The mannerism of lines two and three is close to being a travesty of what Arnold meant when he praised that return of Burke upon himself. Perhaps, though, the last-minute snatching away of the formula constitutes a more genuine 'return'. The last four words of the stanza redeem the truism. One could speak of 'conscience' with firmness and without appearing a fool. It is 'vanity' that, at the last moment, effects the 'return', that concedes the element of clownishness in the man who might have preferred to be a hero in remorse.

It is the final lines of 'The Second Coming that offer what is perhaps the finest of these returns. Scholars have made us familiar with the volatile emotional essences, what one might call the petty romanticism, out of which this major Romantic statement developed. We have learned of the possibly subconscious recollection of Shelley's 'Ozymandias' in Yeats's mental image of a desert and a black Titan' (see Jon Stallworthy, Between the Lines, 22-3) and we have read, in Yeats's own note in Wheels and Butterflies (1934 ed., 103) of a brazen winged beast' that he 'associated with laughing, ecstatic destruction'. I have called such recollections 'petty romanticism'. Yeats made his major discovery in the poem itself, ending:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? (C.P., 211)

As far as the original petty vision of laughing ecstatic destruct-ion' is here concerned, Yeats has revoked it, in the energy of imagination needed to recall it. He has returned upon himself and, as in the case of Burke, one would hazard the suggestion that the revocation is the outcome of acute historical intelligence drawing its energy from the struggle with that obtuseness which is the dark side of its own selfhood. In. Yeats's case, however, one does not refer so much to the conceptual intelligence operating through language-as-medium, as to the intelligence activated by the pitch of words. Jon Stallworthy has said (Between the Lines, 1963, 6) that 'where words are concerned [Yeats] has almost perfect pitch'. A poet who possesses such near-perfect pitch is able to sound out his own conceptual, discursive intelligence. The simultaneous bearing in mind described by Simone Weil would here relate to Stallworthy's suggestion about 'pitch. The poet is hearing words in depth and is therefore hearing, or sounding, history and morality in depth. It is as though the very recalcitrance of language - and we know that Yeats found the process of composition arduous - stood for the primary objective world in one of its forms of cruelty and indifference; but also for the cultivation of that other objectivity, won through toil (as objective to his scrutiny as if it were not his own but the life of another man').This is the most rewarding implication to be drawn from the exchange of letters between Yeats and Margot Ruddock. The debate between the old man and the young woman is emblematic, as when Yeats writes in reproof When your technic is sloppy your matter grows second-hand there is no difficulty to force you down under the surface _ difficulty is our plough." To this Margot Ruddock replies Do you know that you have made poetry, my solace and my joy, a bloody grind I hate! . . .poetry should not be worked at.' (R. McHugh, ed., Ah, Sweet Dancer, 1970, 81, 88). The irony is that both Yeats's reproof and Margot Ruddock's retort would have to be construed as belong. ing equally to the Romantic tradition, if such a simple entity did in fact exist. Rather they should each be recognized as an individual gyre within the so-called 'stream' of Romantic think-ing; each of necessity involved with the other and yet radically in conflict.

As I have already suggested in referring to Conor Cruise O'Brien's essay on Yeats's politics, it may sometimes be necessary to mimic a dilemma. At this point in the debate one must suggest, on the one hand, that sincerity is not enough, that creativity means cunning and artifice and that 'spontaneity' is an illusion. On the other hand one may have to concede that social empiricism has made of 'sincerity', especially in its current guise of spontaneous reaction to pressures, a potent arbiter of artistic motive and conduct. Put in its most extreme form, the sincerity of the primary objective world finds utterance in a book by the Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz:

The work of human thought should withstand the test of brutal, naked reality. If it cannot, it is worthless. Probably only those things are worth while which can preserve their validity in the eyes of a man threatened with instant death. A man is lying under machine-gun fire on a street in an embattled city. He looks at the pavement and sees a very amusing sight: the cobblestones are standing upright like the quills of a porcupine. The bullets hitting against their edges displace and tilt them. Such moments in the consciousness of a man judge all poets and philosophers. (The Captive Mind, translated by Jane Zielonko, 1953, 41).

Granted that this is a parable and not a manifesto; even so this passage moves from a first sentence of general acceptability to a third sentence that excludes from acceptability all those unbaptised by an arbitrary fire. The passage purports to establish new terms of the utmost purity: things and moments. What it does, in fact, is to elevate the man-of-the-moment. However humbled one may be by this, it is still necessary not to be bullied by its absolutist élitist tone. For those who detect the élitism, yet remain humiliated by their implied failure to live up to such demands, the poem of rigorous comfort is Yeats's'Easter 1916'. This poem could be described, in Simone Weil's terms, as a 'simultaneous review of several considerations of a very different nature (The Need for Roots, 206). It comprises middle-aged uncertain envy of those possessed by single-minded conviction, together with a humane scepticism about 'excess and romantic abstraction. One is moved by the artifice of the poem, the mastery of syntactical melody, that enacts this tension of 'several considerations'; the tune of a mind distrustful yet envious, mistrusting the abstraction, mistrusting its own mis-trust, drawn half-against its will into the chanting refrain that is both paean and threnos, yet, once drawn, committed utterly to the melody of the refrain. It is not Newman's real assent; it is not what I have chosen to call Arnold's negative conversion; it is certainly not Milosz's 'validity of moments in the con-sciousness. One can say only that it is a paradigm of the hard-won 'sanctity of the intellect (cf. Letters, 525). 'Intellect' is bound to be misunderstood but, in context, it should not be. One is in no way seeking to equate it with 'cerebral'. Yeats claims in A Vision (1962 re-issue, 268):

A civilisation is a struggle to keep self-control

but this poem, in its measure and syntax, stands as his more exact imagining of that struggle and that civility. One may well feel that Yeats presents arguments, or theories, that require to be answered. Yet even when this is so it remains true for him as for Burke: that the best answer is to be found in his own pages.