Pinks #21: The Book of My Enemy
When poets attack
the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that feels a flea
Marianne Moore, “Poetry”
“They don’t build statues to critics” — but poets do write sometimes poems about them. Not in the spirit of building a statue, though: the critics in poems are almost always on top of bonfires.
As Graeme Richardson points out in a recent, unimpressed review of Roger McGough’s Collected Poems for the Times Literary Supplement, even the softly-spoken host of BBC radio’s Poetry Please programme apparently keeps an embittered list:
Included here is the poem “Scorpio”, describing a souvenir from New Mexico: a paperweight, a scorpion encased in glass. On the base McGough has inscribed the names of eleven critics of his verse: “though forgiven, / they are not forgotten, their names weighted down / beneath a scorpion”. Forgiven? It’s a revealing poem from someone so often seen as “nice”.
Only one is a woman. A poet whose photograph
never appears on the back cover of her books.
And on meeting her recently for the first time
I could understand why, and it cheered me no end.
But fleetingly, for she is old now, and semi-retired.That number — eleven — is impressive. Few poets get the attention of a negative review these days. But why did the critics carp? In the past McGough has turned on his critics of the 1970s and 1980s: “They weren’t wielding that sort of power because they were the best but because they were well-connected”. McGough, of course, came to fame without connections. Liverpool-based in the era of Beatlemania, he was in a pop group with Paul McCartney’s brother. Would McGough’s breakthrough, The Mersey Sound (1967), have been published without the trail blazed by the Fab Four?
The review is titled: “One for the paperweight”.
A more subtle poetic method for injecting critics with their own venom is ventriloquism. In his long poem “In Memoriam James Joyce” (1955), Hugh MacDiarmid mocks the circular logic of “the professional reviewers”, who are forever comparing one writer to another:
… Christina Rossetti had not
The manly optimism of Robert Browning,
And Browning lacked the religious confidence
Of Christina Rossetti, or the serenity
Of Matthew Arnold. And who was Matthew Arnold?
Anthony Vahni Capildeo, meanwhile, in their book Utter (2013), uses the dramatic monologue to reveal “The Critic in His Natural Habitat”:
Oh, is that your book? I’m afraid I don’t read much contemporary poetry. Will you give me a copy? Only if you have one spare, of course. Sultry photo! I’m never sure about books-with-author-photos. The rail station photobooth? Really? You don’t write for the Times Literary Supplement, do you? Dorina did a brilliant review of Tricia’s edition of Gussie’s translation of Brazilian slum poetry composed in Spanish by a French guy who taught on an art history course here, oh, donkeys’ years ago.
I don’t remember his name.
The secret to ventriloquising pompous critics is puff up their prosaic rhythms to bursting point: long-winded sentences drawn out until they become too-much-rope. Stevie Smith employs this trick mercilessly in her “Souvenir de Monsieur Poop” (1938):
English Literature, as I see it, requires to be defended
By a person of integrity and essential good humour
Against the forces of fanaticism, idiosyncrasy and anarchy.
I perfectly apprehend the perilous nature of my convictions
And I am prepared to go to the stake
For Shakespeare, Milton,
And, coming to our own times,
Of course
Housman.
I cannot say more than that, can I?
And I do not deem it advisable, in the interests of the editor to whom I am spatially contracted,
To say less.
“Spatially contracted” gives the middle-finger of genius to the hack paid to fill pages. As Lucy Tunstall wrote in a post on the same poem earlier this year, “the pacing of his list of admired authors […] is perfection”:
The litany ends with “Housman” on a note of very satisfying bathos — not at all the speaker’s intention.
Arguably the greatest (because the pettiest) literary revenge poem of modern times was written by someone who was predominantly known as a critic: Clive James. The memorable twist of “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered” (1983) is that the pompous, monstrous voice created by the long lines is not that of the enemy — it’s the poet himself, gloating over the fate 1980s authors feared most: the remainder bookshop, which sold off surplus stock at knockdown prices (“unbudgeable turkeys”, James calls them). For a poetry book to appear in such an outlet essentially implied that almost no copies at all had been sold at full price. Here is the first stanza, which goes from 0-60 on the revenge-o-meter as it abandons the initial restraint of rhyme (“pleased / seized”, “aisles / piles”) and lets rip with the righteous, prophetic glee of repetition and elaboration:
The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered.
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy’s much-praised effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life’s vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one’s enemy’s book —
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seemingly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs.
James once said: “I probably had more fun writing this poem than anything else I ever wrote”. You can read the whole thing here: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v05/n10/clive-james/the-book-of-my-enemy-has-been-remaindered
Don Paterson’s poem “You Guys”, from his enjoyably deadpan, long-lined collection Zonal (2020), is, I think, a kind of tribute to “The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered”. It is framed as a reluctant riposte to a possibly-identifiable, possibly-composite enemy, here dubbed “the minor English poet Alan Jacket” (an ice-cold nickname for a minor poet, reducing him to the thinnest part of a book). The nod that I hear to James is in the way the poem’s eloquent malice eventually eats its speaker, who is fully aware of how unwise it may prove to have published it. James’ final stanza begins: “Soon now a book of mine could be remaindered also”. “You Guys” ends:
Alas, the high ground, once relinquished, is lost forever. And more to the point, I suppose,
literally no one wants to read this crap these days, if they ever did. So that was a colossal fucking waste of time, wasn’t it,
a phrase I am confident Alan will be unable to resist deploying as the title of his next review.
Would that poets were reviewed these days to the extent they might make enemies of critics!
Many years ago I bought a copy of The Book of My Enemy from Galloway & Porter (remainder merchants of fond memory), who had stacks of them going for £1.
Bought a lot of poetry there, back in the 90s.