The Fire of Joy by Clive James

Author:Clive James [James, Clive]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

Back there in the late 1950s I went crazy about several modern poets – about Ezra Pound I went almost as crazy as he was – but the one who really got into my bloodstream was E. E. Cummings (still spelling his name in lower case in those days) to the extent that I tried to convince myself he was a genius in all departments. Several of my fellow inhabitants of Sydney University’s artistic netherworld shared the same admiration and one of them, a budding theatrical producer, staged a production of Cummings’s play him, whose insanely eccentric verbal pyrotechnics might have been designed to send the audience screaming back into the street even before the leading actor had to be sedated in his dressing room, his blood-vessels bursting from the strain of remembering speeches a block long.

A sure-fire flop anywhere in the world that it was put on, the play was a branch of Cummings’s satirical poetry, which added up to a glowing example of the level of scorn for capitalism that could be attained by someone living on a trust fund. In the cover portrait of his 1954 Collected Poems (I had an imported American copy, obtained God knows how) you could see anti-capitalist defiance in the tilt of his nostrils, although his open-necked shirt looked expensive.

In his shorter satirical poems Cummings was usually reined in by his sense of form and his gift for rhythm (the two qualities are nearly always closely connected, whoever the poet): and his blazing radical remarks, aided by a knack for comic timing, got into your head even when he was praising the Communists, who, had he been in Russia, would have instantly locked him up merely because of his incurable habit of questioning authority.

Some of Cummings’s satirical poems have stayed good, but the true paradox of his artistic personality is that some of the passion-soaked romantic arias have lasted even better. The one cited has every possible semantic extravagance right down to the would-be clincher of a final line. But going mad for the loved one is the whole idea of the poem, so every sign of nutty extravagance takes the argument forward, with such an impetus that ‘the snow carefully everywhere descending’ (a line I loved even though I had never yet seen snow) counts plausibly as a moment of rest. This is the moment to admit, or indeed insist, that Cummings, when he wasn’t wasting his time and ours by spreading shattered words all over the page like a burst bag of Alphabetti spaghetti, had a bewitching touch with his rhythms, to the extent that he could advance or retard them at will. The tricks look weak only when the words fall into place too easily from the neck of his cliché-bag.

It must be remembered, however – aspiring oratorical poets are advised to remember this message in letters of fire – that when the volume of pronouncement is raised the reader’s acuteness of perception is sharpened. So you really can’t say, for example, that you don’t know what it is about your beloved that opens and closes.

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