By CLIVE BUSH.
Read by Allen Fisher on 12th March 2022 at the Performed Poetics event, in celebration of Eric Mottram and Jerome Rothenberg, at King’s College London and edited for publication.
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That we today live in dark times is increasingly obvious to anyone who pays any attention to the news. We are all too familiar with the bleak narratives of our time…
This is a very informal short memoir of the work of Eric Mottram almost three decades after his death. That we today live in dark times is increasingly obvious to anyone who pays any attention to the news. We are all too familiar with the bleak narratives of our time: climate change, pandemics, a right-wing quasi-populist shift in almost every country in the world, democracy in the United States under very serious siege, the last century’s social democratic consensus in Europe crumbling, a restarting of Cold War and an autocratic China becoming the world’s most powerful country. Progressives of every kind are under attack by the new masters of the world: known and unknown billionaires, who control media and social media.
Then let us consider the world in which Eric Mottram lived. It was a life begun shortly after the First World War which rewrote the map of Europe, continued through economic depression and into World War Two in which he served in the Navy. The following half-century was a period of unprecedented peace in Europe though the United States managed ruthlessly and brutally to upset the peace of the world everywhere: from virtually every South American country, to Vietnam and the Middle East. Most Americans still don’t know this.
Mottram was faced then with a love of American literature, much of it from Melville to Burroughs, highly critical of the hypocrisies of the moral assertion and de facto behaviour of the United States. He also understood that official English poetry was dead compared with the vibrancy of American poetry: Pound, Eliot, Williams, Hart Crane, Olson, Muriel Rukeyser and the lively scene in California with poets like Rexroth.
Politically, he had a very European sense of living between two super-powers one of which was led by Stalin with his totalitarian parody of a socialist state, and the other, the United States, embracing a vibrant yet libertarian capitalism whose moderating Rooseveltian moment in the thirties was fast disappearing. Mottram’s abiding love of the poetry of the French poet, René Char, also gave him a sense of how the Second World War had transformed the world, a sense close to Orwell’s 1984. I should also mention how, in addition, the work of Jean Paul Sartre gave him a much more complex view of history and politics than that held by most American writers he encountered. Sartre was not popular among the American intelligentsia: ‘too pessimistic’.
From the start, Mottram was ambiguous and necessarily contradictory about European views of the States and American views of Europe. He wanted a clear-eyed view of American politics, a pluralistic view of actual American society, an honest view of its history, while remaining skeptical of any nationalistic claim to be the last best hope of the world, and very critical of what Eisenhower had called the emerging ‘military industrial complex’. In his inaugural lecture at the University of Groningen in 1955, he quotes Pavese contrasting the despair of Italians at the failure of the prospects of socialism in their own country with America where ‘men talk, get together, improve their lot’ – ‘the moon’s for everyone’ but you suffer ‘a fury at being a nobody.’1 American individualist ideology had its limitations.
The darkness of hard times was something to which Mottram was particularly sensitive. Those of us who know the poetry can find it overwhelming, for example in the bleak pessimism of Interrogation Rooms. Ginsberg’s Howl, and the work of William S. Burroughs are influences here. However, the aim of this paper is to show something different and countervailing in Mottram’s work.
Mottram’s own despair of dark times called up an opposing vision. It is well known he was a militant atheist — a throwback to the atheist Marxism of the Oxbridge thirties as well as post-Cambridge experiences with his study of Calvin in Switzerland and a brief encounter with monastic life. Anything vaguely spiritual was for him a load of junk. He was allergic to the word spiritual. Yet there was another side of Mottram which sought a kind of spiritual alternative: he was fascinated by non-Christian beliefs, alternative ways of life, small communities, older civilizations, both in England and abroad. He was interested in American utopian experiments, though he was always skeptical of how they related to the wider community from the New England Brook Farm depicted in Hawthorne’s critical The Blithedale Romance (1852) to contemporary alternative hippy communities. The best was perhaps Black Mountain which had a European phase from refugees from Hitler’s Germany and an American one under the poet Charles Olson.
The utopian impulse for an alternative society is there in his fascination with early Irish Christian Celtic culture–hostile to Rome’s Holy Roman Empire and integrating pre-Christian beliefs —rather romanticized in Mottram’s day, because we have somewhat more complex views of it now. It is there too in his tracing the iconography of the Green Man in English Churches, or in other countries with Angkor Wat, the masterpiece of Cambodian Buddhism.
This need — to dream of a better world and alternative ways of living, historical and contemporary — goes right through Mottram’s work. It includes his discovery of American counterculture in 1960 and 1965 where he was almost overwhelmed by a vibrant quasi-community of brilliant American radical writers and artists. He met almost everyone of importance from Robert Creeley, to Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, and, probably least-known, Muriel Rukeyser, whose radical politics and poetry especially appealed to him because of its clear-eyed non-Stalinist, socialist tradition. His meeting with Basil Bunting in America connected the most alive forces of the two cultures. They became an imagined community to see him through his job at the deadly conservative King’s College English department. That was how it was to be. Moments of happiness with visiting Americans and friends of that period, and moments of happiness which he would always celebrate in his nostalgic recollections afterward. These moments of happiness were often accompanied with humour: ‘Allen Ginsberg is reading his poems in some wet field in Hitchin — Gawd knows why he’s doing that.’
He would also celebrate people who had seemed to have made a mode of happy living, a way of life counter to deadly consumerism and material ambitions. Here he is in New England in May 1966 from his diary:
The first visit to stay with Ulla and John Dydo on Shelter Island–a marvellous house with huge plate glass sliding window-doors overlooking Montauk Sound, with ospreys flying and diving all day, and their curious, loose nests in the woods behind the house. Ulla and John were building their harpsichord from a kit. They invited me back for June 17 -19 and this time John tuned the finished instrument, and with Ulla and a neighbour played violin and keyboard music by Corelli, Vivaldi and Beethoven.2
For some reason or other making your own harpsichord from a kit carried with it some radical alternative cultural vision in the 1960s. One recalls Ginsberg’s line from Howl: ‘who sat in boxes breathing in the darkness under the bridge, and rose up to build harpsichords in their lofts.’3
From the Shelter Island experience came one of his first books of poetry. Here is a moment of life affirming utopia:
Barnacled white over sandstone baked apricot a single rock
off Ram Island in the male peacock breasted sea
white lines of sand
sand under surf
scallops in sand‘no variety of death‘ the sea not ‘the silence
of a single note‘ but variety
of sounds
a series of sound groups a local thrush
chicadees at the red plastic spinning bins
active for dark brown striped white sunflower seeds
gull’s white craa and cree low over wrinkling shore planes
wrinkling gulf sea between arms of Montauk Point Orient Point
a page turns in the grass blades
a harpsichord is pumiced on the short cliff top in a long house[…]
Variety of completeness xxxxeye and ear carried through
completion xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxsalt flung in steady wind on
shining stones
yellow pink bricked coal pale washed
spirals
white weed spaghetti far from home
not the purple sea but within arms to the north-east
horizons as real boundaries our eyes hold
from Ram Island out xxunder dense blue out
paling towards limiting shores islands4
In ‘The Remaining world’ which followed this poem, Mottram, oddly under the influence of Buddhist thought, argued way before his time for a kind of rewilding to let the endangered species of North American sustain themselves, and contrasted that with the recent landing on the moon as promoted by a kind of Cannibal God with the ‘sterile moon a model land/for men without rain/of earth conscience.‘ Alternative beliefs, sustainable ways of life whether by Hopi Indians or Eskimos, are dreamt of and used to create a narrative contrary to the culture of materialist capitalism with its wars, consumerism, and lack of shared community in the dull destructiveness of contemporary America and England. In his pioneering essay on William Carlos Williams’s Paterson he says the last six pages are a structure of faith in life. The one knowledge he is certain of says Mottram is the shaping poetic measure, the new the dance, that energy within form which is associated with the Native Americans who first occupied Paterson, ‘rather than a spurious religious myth of eternal return.’5
In the end, it is the ‘little universe‘ that Williams makes of his life of poetry, a personal sustainable utopian ground where the discipline of the dance enables the self to defend itself against a wasted life in the clutches of Western materialism.
It says much that Mottram reads it that way. For there is a deep spiritual hunger in Mottram for a way to make sense of dark times, for some narrative of the care of the self in a destructive world. Christianity was rejected by him, he had to rebuild from the fragments of other cultures and times a plausible narrative to answer the great existential questions, brutally offered by Sartre and his followers against an absolute absurdity, and a twentieth century history of War with its vision of atomic destruction. His vision in the end wasn’t actually communal or even socialist in the utopian sense, but very personal; a drive in poetry somehow to make sense of it all. He was strangely inattentive to the utopian dreams within working class culture and its traditions of communal solidarity, or in the Victorian non-conformist churches push towards political and social reform, including the fight against slavery and for the rights of women, as recalled in the work of his contemporary Christopher Hill. E.P. Thompson who neglected the radicalism of the non-conformist tradition of political radicalism in his The Making of the Working Class was however admired by him, though he never used very much historical detail.
Mottram didn’t have the resource of historical, philosophical, or ethical thinking but rather myth, alternative moments of historical anthropological memory, and varying non-western beliefs, brought together in poetry itself. It was oddly American in the sense that every cultural experience seemed available for a personal synthesis in that country made up of everybody from somewhere else. It also had more than a touch of Victorian anthropological, comparative religion and myth scholarship. At the end of A Book of Herne, he cites Wittgenstein on Frazer’s Golden Bough.
Yet Mottram was passionate about his own country. Nothing more delighted him than the Pembrokeshire coast, the Green Man of Medieval churches, the mystery of the abundant remains of Neolithic culture scattered over the British Isles. The most serious and sustained achievement in this direction is A Book of Herne of 1981.
It is a poem far too complex to summarize here. Dark times and glimpses of utopian light are juxtaposed with the complexity of Blake’s innocence and experience. Every kind of available myth is drawn in Mottram’s extensive reading: Greek, Celtic, German, Native American, Welsh, Italian, Hungarian and Spanish. The poem uses these to make a personal poetic synthesis of poetic narrative, but the dominant images are those of the green man and Herne the hunter himself. The green man is a figure, not conforming with any kind of official narrative of power, deeply connected with an ecological vision of a sustainable connection of human beings living in harmony with the natural world. The figure of Herne the Hunter continues the same theme adding connections with masked, alternative, politically rebellious figures of Dionysiac ambiguity, but in the end standing for a vision of the poet finding contradictory hope in the darkness of the world.
There is one utopian moment in A Book of Herne where Mottram recalls the figure of Hans Sachs from Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger. In real life, Hans Sachs was a working man cobbler who became a meistersinger, writing many songs, and was suppressed for his advocation of Luther’s reforms, though his advocacy was always moderate. Naturally, Mottram doesn’t touch that. Sachs was most famously taken up as a character in Wagner’s opera as a modest and authentic musical master, winning against those of official mediocre musical performance. So he becomes like Herne, a figure of authenticity against official power and banality. It translates easily into an analogy for Mottram’s battle to find an alternative poetic world against English official poetry.
Here is a moment from A Book of Herne where Mottram recalls Hans Sachs. He is associated with the oak leaves of the image of the green man, of voyages out, of shelter islands, of the various and multiple forms of nature. Mottram’s image of the triangular voile latine, also signaled here, was a huge technical advance in sails for early Mediterranean exploration enabling a boat to take the wind from both sides and tack into the wind. Mottram also knew that Pythagoras associated the three points of the triangle with the Greek god Apollo. Mottram’s abiding interest in technological advance and his experiences of the sea and the navy, contributed to a more poetic sense of the free, open-ended, exploratory voyage as a stance towards life. It was a utopian dream to set against the constraints of dark times. It is fitting to end with the poet’s own celebration of just these themes:
but we can turn to you
take off masks of performance
ask indulgence for freedom
to end solitude on some musical island
increasingly barren
rays leaves tendrils from his head
out of his lips a heart of named flowers
blaze currents without centre
Unbounded Creation
inheritance an ocean with tried islands
return to Shelter Island
archipelagos in Indian seas
mist weathered slope in China seas
Invitation in lateen sails
Loose hatches
Latin sails in Middle Sea
voile latine a useful triangle
laureate to Apollo still
a voyage maker imagines melodies
counterpointed in all occasions
orchard guardian Bach song maker
without season rays from his apple heart’6
♦
CLIVE BUSH has published six books of poetry, mainly with Five Seasons Press with art work by Allen Fisher. He was a student of Eric Mottram’s from 1961 to 1970 at King’s College, London, and, having written many books and articles on American literature and culture, is Emeritus Professor of American Literature at King’s College London. At Warwick University, he organised poetry readings of many poets of the British poetry revival and American poets, including Muriel Rukeyser, Robert Creeley, Jonathan Williams, Jerome Rothenberg and Allen Ginsberg, and wrote the first major studies of Thomas A. Clark, Allen Fisher, Bill Griffiths, Barry MacSweeney, and Eric Mottram in Out of Dissent (London: Talus, 1997).
NOTES.
- E.N.W. Mottram, ‘American Studies in Europe: inaugural lecture’, J.B. Walters, Groningen, Djakarta, 1955, p.9.
- Eric Mottram, ‘Live all you can: American experience 1960 and 1965-6,’ in Live all you can. Interview and Essay, ed. Peterjon Skelt, Solaris, Twickenham, 1992, p. 41.
- Allen Ginsberg, ‘Howl’, Collected Poems, Viking, New York, 1985, p. 129.
- Eric Mottram, Shelter Island & The Remaining World, Turret Books, London, 1971, pp. 1-2
- Eric Mottram, ‘The Making of Paterson,’ in Stand, 7 no.3 (Leeds, c.1965) eds Jon Silkin and Ken Smith.
- Eric Mottram, A Book of Herne, Arrowpsire Press, Colne, 1981, pp. 24-5.
