Enter a Cloud: On / With / For / After W.S. Graham

This Horizontal Position

One morning in March 1974, W.S. Graham went for a walk on Zennor Hill in Cornwall and fell into a bramble bush. The 56-year-old poet knew the hill well¹. Its stone outcrops rise from the scrubby grass in a range of strange, abstract forms: stacks of broad, grey slabs, striped by deep fissures, stand perennially on the verge of toppling; rocks that have already toppled lean as if by design against or across others that still stand, creating trapezoid-shaped chambers spacious enough to enter and walk through; at the summit, balanced on top of one such chamber-like tor, a large, flat capstone is divoted by a water basin, as though some giant hoofed creature had only recently and quite gingerly stepped there. On the flat land surrounding the hill, these naturally-occurring formations are resembled by dozens of stone-age dolmens. The builders of these monuments appear to have, through their imitations, endowed the process of geological wear with meanings difficult or impossible to reconstruct. “Your letter arrived here,” Graham had written to Edwin Morgan, just after he’d arrived in Zennor in 1950, “among this almost-druidical moor of rocks where this cottage is the only one for a long way. I sit almost surrounded by ‘standing stones,’ cromlechs, and grey piles of rock and grey ‘drystane dykes’ and (I do think I’m the last person to believe in a whymsy way about druid feeling about the landscape) do you know, Edwin, it feels early Celtic and definitely Unenglish.” By the time he fell into the bramble bush, Graham—alcoholic, impoverished, in steep physical decline, but in a period of great poetic productivity—had fewer than eight years to live².

Gently disintegrate me
Said nothing at all.
 
Is there still time to say
Said I myself lying
In a bower of bramble
Into which I have fallen.

This was not the first time Graham had fallen over in life, in a poem. In 1950, drunk after a party in St. Ives, he broke a knee and concussed himself falling off a roof onto a concrete courtyard. In a letter composed during his three-month-long recovery in Truro hospital, Graham wrote: “I work hard at finding my ‘spiritual sustenance’ inside my work and try hard to live in the thoughts of writing my poetry. For the environment is deadly in every way with a radio bellowing bad jazz from 8 to 10 (14 hours). Christ I’ll be glad to get out. I hate this horizontal position.” In “The Night City,” his hallucinatory account of arriving in London, fresh from Greenock, aged nineteen (“Unmet at Euston in a dream / Of London under Turner’s steam”), he swoons and falls, only to be revivified by the heroic figure of T. S. Eliot, who appears from the shadows of the Unreal City to encourage the young poet (“he said yes”) before springing into a “Holmes cab” with exquisite, Chaplin-esque timing. In “The Conscript Goes,” the fall is more broadly figured as a historical and psychological trauma: the poet has fallen not knowing “[b]y what force put down or for / What reason,” before “the young fellow raises / His dreaming bloody head.” Against the backdrop of a conflict that goes on elsewhere—during the Second World War, Graham had avoided conscription by travelling to Ireland, before receiving dispensation from service after being diagnosed with an ulcer—the poem cycles through unsettling visions of his childhood in Greenock, his parents, his younger sister Jean³, before wondering: “Do you think I have done something bad?” (For a period, during the sixties, many people—including his publisher—thought Graham was dead. It was also thought that Jean Rhys was dead, though she was in fact living down the road from Graham in “Bude the Obscure.” It seems that for a number of authors in 1970s Britain, Cornwall was in effect a kind of purgatorial antechamber.) There is something about the act of falling in each of these poems which seems essential to the activities of precise phenomenal observation, emotional directness and playful philosophical speculation which make up Graham’s most fully-achieved works. (Even when he has some luck—as when he received his Civil Pension later in 1974—it’s formulated as an “upfall.”) Falling is a gesture of formulaic zaniness, in which the physical being of the poet, in all its awkwardness and fallibility, is presented as a slapstick caveat, anxiously qualifying or undercutting in advance the “loftier” reaches of his verse. No vantages. (“But I write too large.”) Rather: prostration staged as a means of establishing common ground with the reader, of whose isolated and alien consciousness Graham is always aware and whose attention he always seeks. (“Where I am lying is any where / Near you all.”) Falling is seeking sympathy, too. The isolation he felt necessary to his becoming a poet was only unsatisfactorily compensated for by the community he established with his readers. (“To be always alone is necessary. / One would not ever be otherwise. / Yet our nature is such that we / Want to share our souls with others.”) It’s also, and most intimately, a Miltonic fall, into life, into language, out of the irreplicable community of child and mother onto the lonely horizontal plane of the page, where the failure of poetic language to realise the ideal the poet conceives of is laid bare. (“Mother I have tripped and fallen . . . ready to kill / Reality by my literature.”) It is in this act of falling over and lying down and not getting up that Graham finds his route into his poems, into his way of living. As someone wrote of Kierkegaard, Graham often seems not to have drunk from the cup of wisdom, but to have fallen in it.

Have I seen you before?

Dear Oli,

I have never met you but, of course, I know your work and you have met Michael Schmidt. What are you doing in the wigwam (igloo if so you are inclined) of your soul? It is good to hear you would like to write something about my poetry. Shall I tell you my own measurement of my books? I am getting better I hope. To tell the truth I don’t know if I can really be bothered to speak to you at the moment. All things drag one down at once. Or—It never rains but. I am rather busy. Indeed sorry it is that your old shy self should have entered my house to find no possible Graham. Have I ever met you before? On the other side of this you’ll find a rectangle. Are you there? Is your dog there? O I have made a mistake. I meant to say — How pleased I am to get a letter and to hear from you. Now I’m tired. To slightly answer some of your questions—Nessie and I here would very much like to have you over to see us sometime soon. Would you like to come? Can you manage? Not a soul, not even in St. Ives, that is (apart from knowing anything about poetry) able to talk with a brain humbly and seriously about anything. Christ! I am such a shy man I have to take to the drink to meet somebody. To always want to share the aloneness, to share what happens within one’s lonely room, to wonder how alike or unalike one is from someone else. And we really don’t know each other very well so, whether we like it or not, we will be discovering new things in each other and that is another country we are going to. Any how the test is over. This is where I usually begin to end talking about the weather or whimsy news snippets or Ness making lentil soup. The spring’s coming quickly here and the new rabbits are in the sun already. How lucky you are with such a fine long letter.

Yours Sincerely, W. S. Graham

Dark Dialogue

OH: Thank you for talking to me.

WSG: [Nods.]

OH: Is there something you would like to talk about?

WSG: Slowly the great dialogues darken.

OH: Huh?

WSG: Surely you must maybe want to speak to me.

OH: I do.

WSG: I try to introduce myself I try to speak what I think is my home tongue.

OH: OK. I’ll try to do the same, though—

WSG: Anyhow here we are and never before have we two faced each other who face each other now across this abstract space stretching between us. Surely there must be something to say.

OH: It’s hard to know where to begin . . . but I’m thinking now I’ll just start by making some observations about your poetry, and about your life, and if any of them strike you as interesting or objectionable or provocative please just interrupt me and say whatever you like. [Long pause.] OK. So one of the effects of your poetry, on me, is that I feel like it allows me—or, creates a space in which it becomes possible—to see or to hear myself.

WSG: I could know you if I wanted to. You make me not want to. Why does everybody do that?

OH: I don’t know which of those three statements to respond to first. What would make you want to know someone?

WSG: A name.

OH: I—

WSG: If I had met you earlier walking with the poetry light better we might we could have spoken and said our names to each other.

OH: Where were you walking earlier?

WSG: This morning I am easily walking over the high moor above Zennor ready to be killed by anything. I walk under the lark and who should I see approaching over the sour grasses but you round the carn across the red ground. Hello.

OH: Hi! I’m thrown by your use of tenses.

WSG: He fell he falls (tenses are everywhere) deep down into a glass jail.

OH: You know—perhaps we could start with this—I’ve never been to Zennor, except in your poems. I made all that stuff up about dolmens and trapezoids and falling over. I’m trying to decide whether or not to go. Part of me wants to go to Zennor Hill and see the place where you wrote “Enter a Cloud.” Walk around, read the poem aloud, take some photos. My hope is that I will absorb something from the place, or that you will be waiting there with one of your spooky greetings.

WSG: Standing under the flying blue skylight of our November under Zennor Hill, has anything at all been done? My cheap camera does not allow us nearer.

OH: I know right. But I still want to go!

WSG: Maybe in a kind of way it is legitimate to let one’s self be added to, to be moved by both at once, by the idea of the person, and the object adrift stationary in its art law. Anyhow I think you must be pretty good by the way you behave.

OH: Hmmm again it seems like one of the qualities of your verse to make me extremely self-conscious about my own way of being in the world. I’ve been saying things so far I think which I know you can answer—the answers prompted the questions. I’ve also, intermittently, been trying to imitate your mannerisms: the pacing of your speech, your way of sitting, the way you place your hands. What do you think about that? You are very distinctly yourself, and that self seems to have taken a lot of work to achieve, so I wonder if my imitation irritates you or if you think it’s OK.

WSG: Where is your pride I said to myself calling myself by my name even pronouncing it freshly I thought but blushed at the lonely idea. I saw myself wearing a clumping taliped disguise I was too shy to take answer from.

OH: I’m thinking of your lines, “Language now you have me / Trying to be myself but changed into / The wildebeest pursued or the leopard / Running at stretch beside the Madron River.”

WSG: It watched the blind unborn copy book after book of sudden elements within the morning of her own manlocked womb.

OH: Before we continue—I have a confession to make.

WSG: And the narrative sprouts from the bone-sweet skull.

OH: This will make you groan . . . For a long time I hated your early poetry. That kind of phrasing and rhetoric—"her own manlocked room” etc.—seems typical of its worst qualities: it seemed to me melodramatic,  and showy, and “straightforwardly derivative of Dylan Thomas.” Yet over the past few years I have, to my surprise, actually found myself preferring the earlier work. I think it’s because your concerns weren’t quite so clearly defined, and your style is still struggling to establish itself, to shake off the unnecessary mannerisms which can only be identified as unnecessary once they’ve been shaken off. The late work, now, seems so fully achieved it’s almost sterile. There’s nowhere for it to go (which I guess is fine?). And your style is so transparent, so solid, the stanzas just seem to be broken off, fully-formed, from the mind that thought of them. That’s stupid. But there’s no struggle, no imperfection, none of the flaws that make the early work so fiddly and frustrating and provocative and generative.

WSG: My early poems are as good as my later poems. They are maybe not as fashionable, but neither are my later poems. The early poems are other objects with their own particular energies. To say I am getting better, or have written myself into a greater clearness, is very much a surface observation.

OH: That’s probably true. But maybe surface observations are valuable too?

WSG: I hope a value is there lurking somewhere. Whether it is words we try to hold on to or some other suggestion of outsideness at least not ourselves, it is a naked state extremely uncomfortable.

OH: Is the “form” of your poems an experience of outsideness?

WSG: And casts me always through who I thought I was. May love not cast us out. Know me by the voice that speaks outside my choice and speaks our double breath into this formal death.

OH: Let me just look at my notes. There’s a monotony (which seems a product of form) to your work that reminds me more of Beckett than of Joyce, who you are so devoted to—

WSG: Are you receiving those clusters I send out travelling? I thought I heard my name whispered on the vine.

OH: I get the feeling you’re not entirely—

WSG: Time takes my hand.

OH: [Pause.] Can we talk about your life? Tell me about your childhood.

WSG: Your name in capitals. Birth place. Your mother. Your father. Sex. What illnesses have you had. Scars. Description. Fair. Dark. Height. Weight. Feet. Member. Moles. Hair. Is your nose long, short, broken, none?

OH: I ask only because it’s everywhere in your work—the addresses to your mother, father, sister, Greenock, the Renfrewshire landscape.

WSG: But now (I ask.) Where do they think what do they think they are now? The dear upstarts.

OH: Is there something you would like to say in response to this question?

WSG: Father and Mother I am not here. They stir me with a wooden spoon. I fell. I seemed to fall. I thought you wanted to speak to me and I turned for a second away from what I was doing. I am frightened of flies. Surely you must maybe want to speak to me.

Do we know / Each other?

Dear Graham,

I would like to make poems out of stuff. We have both tried to forget forgetting, the double-instant of putting what’s already in your mouth. This is what makes it possible for a poet to cough up an oval, real and entire. Out my window here is a Scottish tree; it’s 14 degrees in the middle of February. I wrote a poem the other day: one does not need to imagine it to know that my face changed direction, that soil released its tassel immediately. How easy it is to watch it happen, the ice waltz away from its structure. There is now such a thing as an independent group. Blue is green when there is a volume. We should introduce “garbage,” right? Though I actually quite like that ish. (Stay your hand.) It requires a real and peculiar facility with language to make it operate so unusually that it becomes bland, to express blandness as the root condition from which all particulars develop and towards which they move. Sometimes I think I literally “see” your memories in front of me, as though they were being decrypted from a bioluminescent magic-eye puzzle. Sorry you’re lonely. I too have been thinking about my adolescence lately, specifically this one party where I puked on myself, and experienced a feeling of elation of which your poems are a close correlate. Crocuses are already up all over the Meadows. In Stein, for example, where the effect of blandness seems to be achieved by placing lots of similarly colourful things in close proximity to one another, so that the blandness, difficult or impossible to achieve on a local scale, is achieved on a larger scale as a collapsed texture, a kind of compromise. I read something the other day by a poet you’d like . . .  Can I ask you to go and look at the ocean?! Would that be OK. Like all the novels I’ve read, this morning the earth was anding. Stand-under, under-stand, is all one. See how weak prose is, which is its vitality. The feeling that it all might be the middle of someone else’s testimony. My kids are up. When you are in love there is no real problem. Let me know what you think about patience.

Love, Oli

———

Notes

1. Graham would have been 55.

2. WSG died on 9th January 1986, so this should read less than 12 years.

3. Graham did not have a sister.