Under the War and other poems

Arthur Sale

Under the War and other poems

London, Hutchinson and Co, 1975.

ISBN: 0091231701

No Wikipedia entry, a brief obituary in The Guardian, two books of poetry, one single piece of scholarly prose – an introduction written for the poems of George Crabbe – an out-of-print collection of personal letters published by his college, some other letters archived at the Imperial War Museum, not much more than this… It is strange journey sometimes to peer into the origins of random poetry purchases and glimpse at the authors who lay behind the verse…

Arthur Sale is still well remembered as a teacher in the ‘don’ tradition of Oxbridge. He was born in 1912, appointed tutor at Magdalene College, Cambridge in 1957 and held fast to that job for the rest of his working life. He died in 2000.

Traces of who he was are not easy to find. He is spoken of as a subtle man, a modest but exceedingly erudite one, a conscientious objector, and one whose pedagogical talents had a deep impact on a handful of students who subsequently rose to national prominence from under his influence. Can we say then, as the years rush past and so much is forgot, that this is it. That this is a life. That this is all we need to know. But is it? A close reading his poetry tells us a little more.

The single obituary notes that his poetry was rejected by Faber for being too obscure. This may be more family myth than reality. I have struggled through much more obscure poetry than what is found in Under the War (his first book, 1975). These poems are not obscure, they just ask the reader to bring an amount of care with them for their reading. They ask for the application of some insightfulness. Look at the title - it suggests there will be war poetry here, which is to say, anti-war poetry – some amount of verse that girds up the ethical strands of a man who refused to fight and put form in these pages to the justification of that courageous refusal. But this book is not that. Not at first glance anyway. And me – who am so interested in conchies - you think I would be disappointed that this book is not more explicit about the author’s pacifism and his personal philosophy… But I am, instead, delighted with these works because the language here is strange, immersive, and personal without seeking to be personal. Sale is an author who works on an amount of shyness. Is it? Or reticence? He points to things, and as you turn your eyes to look where he looks, you almost see what he sees, but by then he has changed his gaze. This poet has that ability to seem precise in his imagery, yet it then turns elusive, grander themes are hinted at and yet really all you have are poems about houses, or cracks, or afternoon naps or trees… Nevertheless, these poems still provide you with a joy - the feeling of how this ‘all’ which the poet presents slowly fades about you. There is a strange, almost sad delight in what fades away.

The book is divided into three sections: ‘Under the War’, ‘Afternoon Into Duty’ and ‘Transformations’ and to better explain my little theory of the ‘delight in the fading’ let me examine more closely than the rest, his first section.

It starts with a quote by Dickinson

Existence seemed a mighty crack

To make me visible.

This is important because the theme of ‘crack’ threads through most of the poems of this section – as though they are a meditation on Dickinson’s line.

The first poem is ‘Renovation’ and tells the short story of a building put up by ‘Amateurs’ (the first word of the collection). Everything is out of alignment and shored up later by professionals with ‘plumblines and diagonals.’ Now, although I have no proof of when Sale wrote this verse, the building easily becomes a metaphor for post Great War Britain – a period when the whole country had to be either dramatically renovated, or fully rebuilt. The building serves, as one goes deeper into this thought, as an England of the 1930s – it shuffled by on a rigorous amateur spirit – all of it slightly out of whack.

Today I connive to renovate

masks that level lack and surfeit,

an amateur to decorate

venal attempts to put to right

what amateurs did wrong slipshod

in many a delicate pastel shade.

This word of pastel shades (past shades?) is now contrasted to the new martial professionalism of

whited or tinted sepulchres

reeled from the brush…

this spruced-up whiteness brought in equal measure to Britain further victory, urban devastation, and the urgency to rebuild. So, in this poem it seems that I’m reading about a building, but Sale has got me thinking about all the hopes of the general election of ‘45, and the socialists and rationalist like Clement Atlee (not Churchill) who made glorious renovations of the UK as prime minister, and of Aneurin Bevan and other dedicated ministers, and all the outcomes that the new sciences of economics, nationalisation, and state care would offer this ruined, relieved, triumphal but beggared nation.

But, of course, the poem explicitly mentions none of this. It is simply a poem about a building’s renovation. But of course, it is about life as well – how we start off out of alignment and slowly make ourselves straight in the world, over-correcting on early flaws as we go. Sale seeks to carefully insert himself into this duality of times and structures

But tradesman’s craft and mine differ,

his nonchalance is my fear

of general reckoning and review.

“Yet why? The renovation does you

credit, I like that ceiling cream,

and all looks solid, solid as a rock.”

We want our world, our domestic spaces to be solid - so they may bear up our lives, or perhaps, the inference is, will we be fine if it just ‘looks’ solid enough? When the poet suggests ‘solid as a rock’ we wonder if this is too much, too solid, too cold? Here the confusion between the amateur building and its professional make-over (and a person’s life, and the poet’s life, and Britain itself) is drawn, at last, to its source when, in the final stanza, we are reminded of the abiding flaw in everything – that Dickinsonian crack:

Behind your back in every room,

clean through the clean sheet of every room,

look where the black cancelling crack

upstarts erect the deep foundation crime.

Which is to say the whole thing (life, nation, building) was started wrong in the first place and it is this ‘deep foundation crime’ that we must always deal with… The poem suddenly seems all Christian in one sense – getting back to original sin as that crack that shudders up and through this postlapsarian world. ‘Crime’ here is a very strong word. And I cannot not think that, beyond an Edenic reference, this dramatic choice of ‘crime’ forces us to consider the poem as a reference also to the full horror of the twentieth century. Yet all we read about in this poem are some rooms and the poet’s unsure quest to fix them. What other ghosts come and go in our minds as we read this verse is on our own account. The possibilities of metaphor here rise and fall as we are left with the image of a black crack surging up from the foundations – the foundations of a house but probably also - the foundation of all things.

The next poem, ‘The Snag’ continues the theme – a perfect modern house that has one insatiable crack, filled with plaster, it still needs filling with the conclusion being:

The more I survey cracks the less their ways

make sense, yet pour

my all in them despite despair

of consolidants that make worse

distention expending their power with ours.

Here the crack sucks up plaster and self in its uncanny insatiability. When we come to the next poem, ‘The Mist’ the crack is now in the ‘twi-casemented’ window. It allows the mist to come inside. It divides the house, those that live in it, and the poet’s heart…

And in this tranquil

O so freshly mopped clean discharge of guilt a house

inveterately divided against itself, settled

down into comfortable halves, into a separation

mutual and unrancorous, is a solution

as acceptable and unremarkable as a halved cake, while

the mist holds soft possession and the strong impression no

crack can grind its edges on my heart.

This cake is wedding cake? Probably, and this is emphasised later when we read that “…the crack sides keep the general peace/(while mist persists and vacuum holds) not cheek by jowl/but by the defile and abyss between them.” So far, the crack has passed from ‘crime’ to unfillable and uncanny presence to now in ‘The Mist’ a stabilising point around a dysfunctional marriage.

Sale insists on developing this theme – and establishing others. In the fourth poem ‘The Tree’, we again meet a house cut like a cake – this time because of the great tree that grows around it. It threatens the house and yet its roots work also as additional foundations. Roots both support it and yet could snap the building ‘clean as a clay pipe stem.’ And it is this snap that comes in at the end as yet another possible crack:

…I mean

look at my house with low safe precautions

leaded and shelled and underpinned and cracked

neat as an egg on a basin rim, spilt gold,

and irrecoverable as Humpty Dumpty.

The ‘leaded and shelled’ line could refer to work done on the house, or it could refer to the fact that it had been hit by war, but the line prepares us also for the egg analogy – when we see the crack open as an egg and empty both house and poem into spilt gold of some hidden yolk.

All of these themes then lead to the central poem of this section ‘The Tell-Tale Crack’ which I give in full:

The face is fair enough to outward view

with long eyes, despite jowl

underslung and nose askew,

straight, but too like a girl

lashed, hair a rose gall

above brow high broad beautifully modelled:

after a walk or wash

the long face is unstaled

from sedentary ash.

What more could a man wish

of moderate hope? What flawmarks of the lash

on uncleft chin and smooth

soft skin, heart’s flagellat-

ions’ wounds and wales? What none? – Nor truth

from the loose wealed and breached mouth.

And here it seems the previous themes come to rest (a point emphasised when in the next poem ‘In Nature Too’ the motif of ‘crack’ and theme of house are abandoned). If we start from the last line, do we have here the intimation of a kiss? Is this why it is ‘breached’ and ‘wealed’ (again martial terms) – wealed perhaps from the smudge of lipstick? Leading up to this event we have a very ambiguous blazon, and we note that the ‘crack’ in the title is not referenced in the verses. Should we assume then, that this crack is between the poet and the one whose ‘face is fair enough’? I think if the crack reveals itself most it is the great gap between ‘What more could a man wish…’ suggesting the other is of extreme value only to have this moderated by what seems the disappointing conclusion ‘…of moderate hope?’ There is then a ‘this will have to do-ness’ to the poem stressed by the ‘uns’ we confront. The jowl is ‘underslung’ the chin is ‘uncleft’ and the long face cannot be seen as fresh but, rather, ‘unstaled.’ It is a cold reading of a face – one that tends to the misogynist (the mouth is under attack) – yet, in the ambiguous space of his verse we find the insides of the poet marked off by a strange construction of possessives and an eye-halting line break:

heart’s flagellat-

ion’s wounds and wales?

The ‘What, none?’ that follows seems to fully cancel passion – just as the kissed mouth gives forth no truth. Any potential desire is thus raised only to be so severely denied.

And here endeth this play on themes that the first five poems of this collection draw us into. It is good poetry not because it gives us inherently good themes, but good because nothing here is shallow: surfaces give way to cracks and poems about houses mutate into the foreshadowing of minor apocalypses, intimations of war, devastation and attempts at rebuilding. And then there is Sale’s very deliberate line breaking. He occasionally gives half a word on one line end, and the rest later on. This is done by talented control for potent emphasis. And Sale has a great mastery of rhythm. In the seventh poem ‘Noah Stylites’ we have his morning walk rendered thus, and sometimes it is enough to simply enjoy the walk with him:

The gear laid out and kettle on the fire,

I filled my free half hour up with freedom

on empty road and path, while the lithe bitch,

distaining scents the dew had snuffed out first,

untrodden yet by new, broke the trail for me,

her long poised tail swaying like a censer

between the live pillars of that intact Eden,

to where the old man, stub arms along the

iron bridge rail, leaned across sewage smells,

the only flavours of the naked ditch,

to the green other slope, in hopes of seeing

some old drake tread an accommodating fowl –

“I seen ‘em oft, me and this little maid”

(several rails down but staring just as hard).

The first section then ends with two more poems ‘The Challenges’ – which I’ll come back to, and ‘Neither Fear nor Courage Saves Us.’

This last poem seems to get as close as Sale can to the currency of fear and bravery that surrounds the life of a conscientious objector it starts with the line

Is it enough to say that

I am a coward and the

harsh voice from the road the

gate rocking the rubber footsteps on the concrete

the dead knock on the shaking door are but

the casual visitor the baker’s boy and I need

have no fear of ?

In this piece anxiety mixes with a certain paranoia that is ultimately unresolved. What is certified by the ending, however, is the pending arrival of a telegram – one that may require enlistment, or one that may inform the house of a death from war service.

It is not enough to declare these

facts these fancies

for I have heard

inside the fears and the uniformed voices a minute question

rocking our foundations splintering our entrances the

held out

telegram by the wind or the messenger boy requiring

an answer or ?

no answer

I enjoyed the next section ‘Afternoon into Duty’ for the almost hypnotic state the author induces riffing on the line between afternoon sleep and the need to get back to life. The last section ‘Transformations’ is littered with bulbs and bowls and containment, birds, and shifting of selves and categories. They are of equal quality to the first section and as evocative, but to limit my analysis, I remain set on concentrating only on the first third of this book. Which brings me back to ‘The Challenges’ – the second last poem of the first section. Here Sale lays out his concerns about being a poet and references the story where Odin stole the brew of inspiration in his mouth in the form of a bird:

And I lack Odin’s spittle, may-

be, to organise my ashes;

and admit my

reactions arouse no flood fashes,

have, good or vicious,

no futures. As they do not count

nor does your verse, you say,

and so, recant

your symbol. Mine I can, yes, I

do, your world’s I can’t.

Here the poet agreeably recants what he has offered but cannot take responsibility for the worlds of the reader – worlds that may make this poetry, as Faber may have put it ‘obscure.’ But isn’t poetry meant to have some level of obscurity and ambiguity? It is in this ‘obscurity’ that he gives us his argument for turning against war – it is tied up in that deep crack that splits through the foundation of all things we find in the first poem. A crack that like the tree root in ‘The Tree’ is part of the support of life and also the reason for its condemnation. We might say then that there is a deep Christianity in these poems, and the language here does refer occasionally to Biblical (mostly Old Testament) referents – but if these poems are Christian then this is a Christianity that forms a deep layer in the poet’s worldview more than being a matter of active, daily faith. Ambiguity must stand above faith (and its certainties) here because these poems are written as poems. In this collection, Sale is constantly choosing words that lead to other worlds, back through emotion and image to return to ambiguity. They speak of little things, common things and yet point so very often to great themes of existence and, as I suggested, may feed potently off national context. Even the line where Sale says he lacks Odin’s spittle is open to some interpretation. In the received version of this myth (from the Poetic Edda) Odin was able to dish out a pure form of his brew to true skalds – poets of a high register. But the brew was spilled as Odin thieved it and the writers of doggerel got this lesser stuff – so is Sale saying here he is no skald, or is he saying he is no writer of doggerel?

As I said above, in this collection, the poet gazes, he points, and his meaning comes, lingers, and then cracks out into diffusing vagueness. There is a joy for me here in watching how he carries themes along in this work. Another poet, being more careless than Sale, could make this repetition a sign of unoriginality. Sale, however, uses his precisely calibrated repetitions to take us on a beautiful, threatening, and also disappointing journey (and how English this is …). He is no doggerel-maker, this version of Odin’s spittle he did not get. But of all the things we might not know of him, this delicate, intriguing book shows that skald he is.