Staying in Suffolk in early July, I came across ‘East Anglia: A Literary Pilgrimage’ by Peter Tolhurst. It’s full of the sort of literary anecdotes I tell myself I won’t waste time on, and then do. The key is the area’s close proximity to London for anyone who has business with magazines and publishers, yet with the possibility of cheap rural isolation if you’re lucky or choose carefully. The preface refers to Kent, not East Anglia, but it’s rather arresting:
‘I began to assimilate my mother’s delight in the countryside. Brought up in a cottage on the downs near Canterbury, she found herself between two very different worlds. Behind were the grounds of the mental hospital where, as a master tailor, my grandfather made straitjackets for the more violent inmates. In front the land dropped away steeply, exhilarating views of woods and hop fields stretched away..’
Had it been a contemporary book, it might have included W.G.Sebald, Lavinia Greenlaw’s accounts of teenage years in Essex, Blake Morrison’s Shingle Street or even Ilya Kaminsky’s poems about Orford Ness in ‘I see a silence’. But this is 1996 and the reach is more historical. So there’s George Crabbe and William Cowper, Swinburne visiting the village of Dunwich which was falling into the sea, and Edward Fitzgerald, author of ‘The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayam’. Then there are the twentieth century poets; Stephen Spender growing up in Sheringham, Edward Thomas living for two months in a coastguard’s cottage at Dunwich, Alun Lewis’s wartime poem ‘Dawn on the East Coast’. Several are, as you might expect, London escapees: George Macbeth, Anthony Thwaite at the Mill House, and George Barker in north Norfolk.
There are a couple of pages on Barker in the book, with a photo of Bintry House, his home from the late 60s until his death in 1991. Tolhurst quotes from his daughter Rafaella Barker’s account of her childhood there: ‘most of the time the chaos was warm and familiar and comforting’, though after one of Barker’s drinking evenings ‘the house smouldered angrily’. The psychodrama of Barker’s life is an old story now (read Elisabeth Smart’s ‘By Grand Central Station I sat down and wept’ ) and his treatment of the various women in his life and 13 children (some of whom didn’t know of each others existence) is difficult to excuse. Certainly his son Christopher Barker gives him a hard time in his book ‘The Arms of the Infinite’. But the story seems to matter less now because his poetry matters much less; his reputation has suffered a major collapse. In the mid-thirties, in his early twenties he was already published in the Faber Book of Modern Verse. At his height in the 40s and early 50s he was regarded by many as an equal to Dylan Thomas. There were also ambivalent voices, to be fair. In 1939 Edwin Muir described ‘a pouring out of all sorts of material, good and bad, deep and shallow’. In 1950 Kenneth Allott wrote that ‘few modern poets have written so well and so badly inside the covers of one volume, sometimes inside a single poem’. Subsequently, as Claire Harman writes in her LRB review of his biography ‘The fact that Barker fell completely from public esteem long before his death in 1991 begs the question whether he was any good in the first place’. Michael Schmidt wrote that ‘As the 1950s progressed… he came to represent what new movements and the Movement were set against’.
So was he any good? I’ve been re-reading the poems in the anthologies, and the 1995 Selected Poems edited by his biographer Robert Fraser. I did once find a signed copy of 1944’s ‘Eros in Dogma’ in a bargain bin on Charing Cross Road, but I don’t know what happened to it. Perhaps I didn’t think it worth keeping. The early poetry has lost the aura it once had for at least some of his contemporaries. The high romantic/abstract rhetoric, over-fluent, has lost its credibility. Claire Harman says ‘His style is rhapsodic, intoxicated, heavily reliant on aural effects and off-the-cuff puns. Energy is always more in evidence than meaning…. line-filling repetition, empty, ornate vocabulary..’. Examples don’t quite convey it; the sheer volume of empty bombast is what makes the eyes glaze over, but these lines from ‘Letter to a Young Poet’ might indicate the tone.
’I speak of the whispering gallery
Of all Dionysian poetry
Within whose precincts I have heard
An apotheosis of the word
As down those echoing corridors
The Logos rode on a white horse;
Till every No that sense could express
Turned to a transcendental Yes.’
He had the features, and the faults of the war-time Apocalyptic moment, now enjoying a revival of sorts. Some of the same accusations could be levelled at Dylan Thomas, but somehow his rhetoric has mostly kept its force while Barker’s hasn’t.
I would make an exception for the much-anthologised poem ‘To My Mother’, which still deserves a place in the history of Second World War poetry. The concluding six lines have retained their charge:
’She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.’
Several critics rate the late poem ‘Anno Domini’ (1983) very highly. I don’t, because although it starts off with drive and energy, and has impressive sections at various points, it’s far too long, repetitive, a sort of cluttered diatribe. Passion and sweep are expected to substitute for thought.
Having argued that Barker is, for the most part justly neglected, I want to make the case for some of his other late poetry, written in and about Norfolk. There are a number of poems from the 70s where the verbal excess, the swagger dies down and Barker achieves a plain simplicity, something calmer and clearer. ‘In Memory of David Archer’ (1973) has stanzas like this (sounding a little like his friend W.S.Graham):
’The words are always as
strange and dead as those
fragments and oddments that
the wave casts up on the shore:
I stand in the sea mist
gazing down at the white
words and old bits of wood
and wonder what they were for.’
Or there is ‘Morning in Norfolk’ which begins with these lines:
’As it has for so long
come wind and all weather
the house glimmers among
the mists of a little
river that splinters, it
seems, a landscape of
winter dreams…’
The best poem from this period is ‘At Thurgarton Church’. That’s a photo of Barker outside the church at the top of this post. I’m tempted to say the poem is built in solid, stone-like blocks, 29 of them, 5 lines each. Each stanza rhymes ABABC, and C is always the same sound; know, go, below, ago, low, snow etc. You’d think it would be monotonous. Not so. It’s plain, austere, mostly monosyllabic, beautifully modulated:
’The sky is red and cold
overhead, and three small
sturdy trees keep a hold
on the world and the stone wall
that encloses the dead below.
I enter and find I stand
in a great barn, bleak and bare.
Like ice the winter ghosts and
the white walls gleam and flare
and flame as the sun drops low.’
The poem is subtitled ‘To the memory of my father’. Barker’s Catholicism or rejection of Catholicism (and of his father) was complicated. I’m not sure of the poem’s theology. Sometimes it seems like an address to an R.S.Thomas sort of God, who answers prayers with silence.
’As I stand by the porch
I believe that no one has heard
here in Thurgarton Church
a single veritable word
save the unspoken No.
The godfathered negative
that responds to our mistaken
incredulous and heartbroken
desire above all to live
as though things were not so.’
In other sections the voice sounds more straightforwardly atheist. But if this is atheism I’ve seldom heard it sound so magnificently bleak (except in Swinburne, but that’s for another time). The ghost of the old rhetoric is lurking, but is held muted by the formal structure and by the simplicity of the words chosen.
’And there in the livid dust
and bones of death we search
until we find as we must
outside Thurgarton Church
only wild grasses blow.
I hear the old bone in me cry
and the dying spirit call:
I have forfeited all
and once and for all must die
and this is all that I know.’
Why spend time on George Barker? He’s not the poet he thought he was, and his period of eminence was not long. There were always doubters. But I think it’s worth searching in his work from the 1970s for what he could do when he found his late style, and ‘At Thurgarton Church’ is rightly placed first (against all chronology) in his Selected Poems.
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the word-road home 