A Fortnightly Review.

Stephen Romer
Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism

Legenda 2024 | Hb, £85.00 | 384pp.

By Chris Miller.

◊

In the magnifying glass of the poetic word, Modernism is the history of the twentieth century; it was, you may remember a turbulent history—utopian hopes, political polarisation, prejudice, wars, and genocide. Its central practitioners were virulent enough: Eliot, author of anti-Semitic poems, who was reluctant to admit ‘any large number of free-thinking Jews’ into a community underpinning a literary tradition, and Pound spewing out anti-Semitic filth on Fascist Italian radio. The nineteenth-century Baudelaire, with whom Romer begins this occasional history of literary Modernism, is associated with the Inferno of the modern city and a morality in which sexual pleasure begins with the certainty of doing evil. The subjects of two further essays are Nerval, whose life was disfigured by madness, and Verlaine, possessed of a murderous passion for Rimbaud. Apollinaire, who appears here primarily as the bard of First World War erotico-military pyrotechnics, was declared ‘une canaille’ by a police officer investigating the theft of the Mona Lisa. ‘Chaos’ aplenty, then.

But there is no denying that the Modernist ‘clean line’ has its pleasures. In an essay that combines a reading of Lyndall Gordon’s The Hyacinth Girl, which she wrote after the archive of Eliot’s Emily Hale letters had been opened, with consideration of a ‘cluster’ of essays about the relation of The Waste Land to the #MeToo movement, Romer carefully assesses the evidence against Eliot the person, and then turns back to the page.

I . . . re-read the opening section of ‘Burnt Norton’, and, almost instantly, as though caught in a force field, I felt the poet’s incantations starting to work, . . . And, lo and behold—miserable as it may be to have to admit—Emily Hale starts to disappear. This is the iron law of art.

We need to know of our author’s moral failings, and to pick out the way in which their prejudices surface in their work, but this is best done by reading them.

And he cites Baudelaire on Poe, condemning any confusion of poetry with epistemology or morality. This goes to the heart of Modernism and its political baggage. Romer cites one of the contributors to the #MeToo symposium in Modernism / Modernity: ‘In literary criticism, cancelling would mean withholding attention from the works of people deemed terrible and giving it to underrepresented writers instead.’ Cancelling would, in short, either fail to consider the literary merits of a text or view them as subservient to the writer’s moral or political failings. There is a danger that such criticism will become Zhdanovite. We need to know of our author’s moral failings, and to pick out the way in which their prejudices surface in their work, but this is best done by reading them. As to cancelling, we also need to be able to read Mein Kampf if we are to understand twentieth-century history and accurately register Eliot’s political sins.

The antithesis of pleasure and suffering to which I point is beautifully articulated in Romer’s review of the Pléiade Nerval:

Both letters [to Dumas and Janin respectively] are models of wounded courtesy, a characteristic blend of humour, fantasy, and self-deprecation finely orchestrated by an intelligence entirely in command of its resources. And yet much of the work here is haunted by death and madness.

Much of the fascination of Modernism lies in its ‘tentacular roots’ and connection with the morbidities of its times.

Much of the fascination of Modernism lies in its ‘tentacular roots’ and connection with the morbidities of its times. Nerval is among Romer’s particular predilections; Les Filles du Feu feature in one of his poems and ‘Sylvie’ from that collection is obviously a favourite. He quotes Nerval at the latter’s most frankly symptomatic: ‘Vue de près, la femme réelle révoltait notre ingénuité; il fallait qu’elle apparût reine ou déesse, et surtout n’en pas approcher’. Nerval courteously rehearses Baudelaire’s more brutal statement to Mme Sabatier, ‘Et enfin, enfin, il y a quelques jours, tu étais une divinité, ce qui est si commode, ce qui est si beau, si inviolable. Te voilà femme maintenant’. (Apollonie Sabatier’s ‘divine’ form is known to us through Clesinger’s Femme piquée par un serpent, cast directly from her skin; even so, she appears, somewhat in the spirit of Nerval, and like almost every Venus in art history, without a vulva.) Was there ever a more beautiful account of madness than Nerval’s Aurélia?

Now here is Verlaine in Renard’s description (and Romer’s translation): ‘The frightful Verlaine: a cross between Socrates and some filthy Diogenes; between a dog and a hyena’. Verlaine and Rimbaud appear in Fantin-Latour’s group portrait, from which one Albert Mérat asked to be painted out, lest his reputation be tarnished; his reputation now survives only as the flower and pot that replaced him. (This volume is full of such quirky obiter dicta.) And now we find Jules Laforgue nervously dressing to give his evening reading in French to the German Empress Augusta—Laforgue whose influence was indispensable to Eliot as the latter sought his own voice, and who took more than one volume to find his own. In The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Eliot offered retrospective advice about the malentendu entre les sexes to his predecessor—‘What he wants, you see, is . . . a Vita Nuova to justify, dignify and integrate his sentiments toward the jeune fille in a system of the universe’ (this is one of Romer’s epigraphs—and Laforgue needed this advice, it would seem; in keeping with the tone of misogynistic revulsion that prevails among the Symbolists and Modernists, he addresses Woman as ‘O femme, mammifère à chignon’).

Henri Fantin-Latour, The Corner of the Table (1872). Musée d’Orsay, Paris. From left to right, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Léon Valade, Ernest d’Hervilly, and Camille Pelletan. Standing, from left to right, Pierre Elzéar, Émile Blémont, and Jean Aicard. The vase of flowers, foreground right, replaces the ‘self-effacing’ poet Albert Mérat.

This volume consists mainly of reviews from the TLS or contributions to collective volumes and the essays cited so far are from Part I, ‘Baudelaire and His Legacy’. Reverdy and Apollinaire have a part to themselves, and Part III, about the First World War and its literary echoes, leads on to the authors who are perhaps most central to Romer’s interests: Proust and Valéry (IV), Eliot (V), Pound (VI), and Geoffrey Hill and Yves Bonnefoy (VII). Valéry died in 1945, Eliot in 1965, and Pound in 1972, when Romer was only fifteen, but he has been lucky enough to know two of his heroes, Hill and Bonnefoy, in person, and to translate Bonnefoy (he is one of the three editors of the extensive collections of Bonnefoy’s prose and poetry published by Carcanet and has translated a number of other texts, notably L’Arrière-Pays, for Seagull Books) and Jacques Dupin. These acquaintances are owed not least to his own status as poet; he is the author of five collections. The overlap is clear. In his first collection, Idols (1986), the poem ‘Resolve’ begins

With the problem of the jeune fille 
the cosmos and my life to reconcile

while in Yellow Studio (2008), the poem ‘Ascension Day’ describes one such day

glued to the earth
hunched against a radiator

reading La fugitive
like a fugue, where death
is the theme, elle ne revint jamais.

In Part IV, there are three essays on Proust, one of which mentions that quotation, while a second takes it as title. In both, Romer refers to the ‘syndrome of enchanted intoxication’ and the reader ‘endlessly held up by a particular passage, whose riches, apparently endless, make reading beyond them a disenchantment’. ‘By multiplying the self, and viewing it through the prism of time as a succession of selves, Proust gets a distance on suffering’, Romer tells us; ‘in the great sweep of his prose, he manages to substitute for sorrows, ideas, which can console’.

It is, perhaps, emerging from this review that Romer’s primary reaction to the affres of Modernism is precisely the pleasure that it and they afford.

It is, perhaps, emerging from this review that Romer’s primary reaction to the affres of Modernism is precisely the pleasure that it and they afford. Valéry’s multifarious oeuvre is grist to his mill, and he takes particular pleasure in ‘Poèmes et Petits poèmes abstraits’ with their deft and immediate registration of thought and sensation, though Valéry visiting George Meredith, ‘a small masterpiece of comedy and tact’, also takes his eye.

The Eliot section is, perhaps, the centre of this book. Certainly, Romer’s essay on ‘Eliot and French poetry’ is a beautifully well-informed rehearsal of TseTse’s debts to Laforgue, Corbière and Valéry; Romer’s capacity to bring a wide swathe of scholarship into the compass of an essay is clear. His clear-eyed assessment of Eliot’s notebook of verse from 1909 to 1917 (Inventions of the March Hare) can be profitably be read alongside the more recent publication of Ricks and McCue’s The Poems of T.S. Eliot. Indeed, with the publication of the MUSE edition of the Collected Prose, the ongoing publication of the letters (currently at vol. 9 and 1941), and Eliot’s letters to Emily Hale available online, we now know more about Eliot than ever. Perhaps the star essay here is on ‘Untranslated Quotation in Pound and Eliot’, not least because it is the work of a practitioner, who can begin by citing his own use of the Vulgate in his moving poems on his mother’s death.

The section on Pound is entitled ‘Pound and Paradise’, and begins with an essay in which Romer, wearing his academic hat, looks forward to visiting Rapallo for a conference (not all conferences are so received): it is “‘the promise of happiness”, to apply Stendhal on beauty’. Romer even knows where to park. This circumstantiality continues into ‘Venus at Terracina’, which surveys the neighbouring Ligurian coast, and dwells on the kind of ‘Mediterranean sanity’ beloved of Pound, in which the ‘hell-breeding belief’ that the body is evil is, apparently, absent, as it is in the Troubadours; EP observed ‘Only in basicly [sic] pagan Italy has Christianity escaped becoming a nuisance’. Romer is not unaware of the contradictions here: ‘as I write this in relation to Pound, its complex (tragic?) irony is unignorable’. Pound was saved from a death-sentence by claiming insanity, and gets off fairly lightly here, I would say. These are wide-ranging essays and Romer’s erudition is worn effortlessly.

If I began by emphasising the ‘horrors’ of Modernism, it is partly because Romer’s essays state the other side of the coin—

His penultimate section is even closer to his heart, with an essay on Hill’s trilogy (The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon) and an adapted version of his introduction to the Prose of Yves Bonnefoy. Romer ends with an essay on the translation of poetry, a subject on which he can speak with authority. If I began by emphasising the ‘horrors’ of Modernism, it is partly because Romer’s essays state the other side of the coin—the sheer exaltation that many of the Modernist texts, constructed in the shadows of Fascism and madness and read in the shadow of cancellation, can provide. The heroes of Modernism may be exemplary in their achievements rather than their political choices but I would happily lose the entire works of the relatively blameless Tennyson to conserve the much briefer poetic corpus of the ‘unpleasant’ Mr Eliot. Bunting’s declaration rings in our ears: ‘There are the Alps, fools!’ And Romer is their spry mountaineer, offering considerable pleasure in his own right.

♦

CHRIS MILLER, co-founder of the Oxford Amnesty Lectures, is a widely published critic and translator. He edited Freedom and Interpretation (OAL 1992) and ‘War on Terror’ (OAL 2006) and is the author of Forms of Transcendence: The Art of Roger Wagner (2009). His website can be found here.

Top image: Portrait of Gérard de Nerval. Picryl. Public Domain.