John Barnie

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John Barnie

‘It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing…’

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One distinction between prose and poetry is that poetry expresses much of its meaning through rhythm. In this it is closely related to music. Listening to a recording by Thelonious Monk, say, or John Coltrane the mind is drawn automatically to the frontline instruments so that you hardly register the rhythmic underlay of the drums and double bass. Sometimes, though, the mind flips and you find yourself concentrating on the rhythm section, while the saxophone or trumpet becomes the background. I like doing this. You are hearing the deep structure of the music, the snags and ripples of the drums as they keep the beat yet vary it; the bass, too, playing in and out of the rhythm, enriching it without disturbing its onward drive.

So it is with rhythm in poetry. Take T.S. Eliot’s line ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ from The Waste Land. The words reverberate with cultural reference to Genesis and The Book of Common Prayer but it is the undertow of rhythm, which gives the line its power. Flip your concentration and listen to the beat:

Í will shów you féar in a hándful of dúst

Superficially, the stressed syllables may seem to have the same value. In fact they do not. ‘I’, ‘show’, ‘handful’ lay down the rhythm, but they are preliminaries, as it were, to ‘fear’ and ‘dust’ which have a slightly weightier stress, the equivalent to a drummer’s discreet emphasis. In this way ‘fear’ and ‘dust’ are coupled, forcing us to stare into the depths of our mortality with a subtlety which barely registers with the conscious mind as we read.

To take one other example, from Louis Simpson’s poem ‘In California’:

There once was an epical clatter—

Voices and banjos, Tennessee, Ohio,

Rising like incense in the sight of heaven…

The poem is about ‘manifest destiny’, the nineteenth-century American belief in its God-given right to conquer a continent, ‘pioneers’ heading ever West, until they came up against the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

From the standpoint of the rhythmic meaning of poetry, it is the first line quoted that is of interest: ‘There once was an epical clatter’. ‘There once was’ is ordinary, a story-teller’s opening; but it is followed by a cluster of clipped syllables that rush into one another: ‘an épical clátter’. The repetition of the hard ‘c’, and the inverted ‘al’/lá’ coming up against the thin, tinny ‘tt’, create in sound the clopping of hoofs, the sharp tones of a banjo played clawhammer-style. They act out the bustle, the vigour, the excitement of the waggon trains as they crossed the Great Plains. The meaning of the poem here is expressed as much through the sound of the words as through the meaning of the words.

I have made a basic distinction between poetry and prose, but there are rare writers whose prose fiction is in fact poetry, the most interesting example to me being Katherine Mansfield. She wrote poems as well as short stories, but the posthumous collection of her poems is disappointing—pedestrian verse, in fact. It is in the short stories that her poetry is to be found.

Take this string of sentences from At the Bay:

The tide was out; the beach was deserted; lazily flopped the warm sea.

‘The tide was out; the beach was deserted’, these are simple declarative sentences, descriptive in purpose. Anyone could have written them. But then you get ‘lazily flopped the warm sea’. A writer of conventional prose fiction would have written ‘the warm sea flopped lazily’ and this would have been adequate. Such a writer would not have thought of the inversion in Katherine Mansfield’s sentence, and would not have dared it even if he or she had considered it.

The inversion, however, is exactly right, and it is the rhythm that makes it so:

‘lázily flópped the wárm séa’

The stress on ‘láz’ followed by the tripping unstressed ‘ily’ which descends onto the more heavily stressed ‘flópped’, followed by the stressed but flattened ‘wárm séa’ expresses exactly the endlessly repeated dreamy collapse of wavelets on a sandy beach. The meaning of the words is clear, certainly, but the real meaning, the depth of meaning, is expressed through the rhythm. Katherine Mansfield was writing a line of poetry, and there are many of them in At the Bay, which is a great short story, but an even greater poem.

I think this is part of what T.S. Eliot meant in his essay on Dante when he wrote that ‘…genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood’. Or, to put it another way, genuine poetry, even when understood, communicates through layers of rhythm that are subliminal in their effect, yet central to the way in which poetry creates itself from the resources of language.

Listen to the rhythm section.

My Uncle

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My uncle, Don Barnie, volunteered in the First World War and joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers. Deployed to Gallipoli, he had with him a cheap pocket diary for 1916 in which he made sporadic notes: ‘10 yds from the Turks trench. Bomb dodging.’ He got out of that fiasco alive and was re-assigned to Mesopotamia, sailing through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to Basra where he bought a small leather wallet, embossed ‘Basrah 1916’ in gold. Also stamped directly into the leather, and just visible, is a number, ‘13280’, his identity number, and beneath it ‘8.th. R.W.Fus.’.

On the 17th of February he was promoted to sergeant, and his unit set out as part of the relief force sent to raise the siege of Kut-al-Amara. Don wasn’t a big writer and the diary entries are few and far between: ‘Sheikh Saad’. ‘HOSTILE. ARABS.’ ‘Pouring with rain (mud)’. And then on Wednesday, the 5th of April, ‘We charge Big Battle. Wounded Bullet [word illegible] bandage’. And that was the end of combat for Don. He was transported on a hospital ship to India: ‘Arrive at Bombay, Fine Place. Colaba Hospital.’

The Basra wallet saved Don’s life. Kept in the left-hand pocket of his combat jacket it diverted a Turkish bullet an inch away from his heart. I have the wallet, torn at the lower left corner where the bullet passed through.

Don didn’t leave much when he died, but among his effects which I eventually inherited there is an anonymous poem, ‘Farewell’, on a sheet of A4 card. At first glance it appears to be handwritten in an elegant script on a crudely painted sandy yellow background, but in fact it is printed. Don certainly would not have written the poem. He must have bought it—in India, perhaps—because it expressed what he felt about his experience. The poem ends:

Farewell, ye land of heatstroke
Farewell, O Basrah Rash
Farewell, O Barren desert
Farewell, ye treacherous clime
Farewell, ye land of pestilence
Farewell, to Shatt-al-Arab
    Euphrates, Tigress too
    and I hope O Mesopotamia
    that I’ve seen the last of you

A little over a hundred years and British troops were back, supporting America in one of its neo-colonial wars. The names on the map had changed—Mesopotamia was now Iraq, Basrah had dropped its ‘h’. No doubt the army of occupation assigned to hold the Basra Governorate in 2003 had better conditions than Don’s Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1916, but as the occupation faltered and the Brits found themselves bogged down in a guerilla war they were losing, many soldiers must have echoed the sentiments in ‘Farewell’.

England has never got over its two World Wars. The First was the last time it fought as a major imperial power. It claimed to do so again in 1939-45 and has lived off legendary interpretations of Dunkirk, ‘standing alone’, and D-Day, ever since, winning the war single handedly, with a little help from the Americans. The truth of course is that Soviet Russia won the war on the Eastern Front at great cost to itself, while the second front in Normandy could never have been launched without overwhelming American manpower and matériel.

Britain’s days as a world power ended there. The trouble is, too many are unable to accept that we inhabit an island with a moderately strong economy off the coast of continental Europe, and that our history has followed the trajectory of other European empires—the Dutch, the Spanish, the Portuguese—from a period of great wealth and dominance based on colonial conquest, to sharp decline once those colonies were lost.
The fiasco of Brexit owes much to people clinging to this myth of British greatness. Only free ourselves from the shackles of the European Union and we’ll put the ‘Great’ back in Britain. We will trade with the world, ‘punch above our weight’, ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’ with our American ‘cousins’, with whom we have a ‘special relationship’.

All of this is delusion. During the referendum campaign a TV news vox pop interviewed an old man who said trade after Brexit would be no problem because everyone in the world ‘loves us’. Don’s son, my cousin Geoff, saw this too. He was a merchant seaman from 1944-48 and had sailed around the world. ‘No they don’t,’ he said, ‘they bloody hate us.’

The puffed up sense of the UK’s importance in the world was encouraged by Boris Johnson who fancied himself as a Churchill, destined to lead the people of ‘Great’ Britain into a new dawn. But Johnson is a glove-puppet Churchill and Britain a glove-puppet ‘great power’. The RAF is still good to bomb the citizens of countries we invade, but the Army lost two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the Royal Navy is a shadow of what it was. The recent threat to send our latest aircraft carrier to the South China Sea to ‘show the flag’ and deter the Chinese was a joke.

So here we are, cut loose from Europe, our main trading partner, scurrying in search of favourable trade agreements, placing our hopes on a deal with the USA, unmindful of the fact that America holds all the cards—expect cheap chlorinated chicken in the supermarkets soon.

You can wave St George flags and chant ‘Ingerlund! Ingerlund!’ as much as you like, but the rest of the world sees ‘Great’ Britain for what it is.

18-19 April

The world’s leaders are waking from their slumber to acknowledge that the climate is veering out of control and that if steps are not taken now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we will very soon reach a tipping point.

But what if this is impossible? What if the human brain has not evolved to cope with a crisis of such complexity and on such a scale?

It is already clear that nothing can be the same again. Refugees and economic migrants from Africa and the Middle East are changing society in Europe, as refugees and migrants from South and Central America are changing the USA. It is only a beginning. As conditions deteriorate, the now prosperous West will experience an overwhelming surge of displaced people. Patrol boats and walls will be to no avail. Society will have to adapt and change, and culture will change with it. What we think of as the great inheritance of European art, literature, music, thought, will be largely irrelevant because it cannot address the new world in which we will have to live.
The idea of reducing carbon emissions to zero has behind it the assumption that, if successful, we will be able to continue our lives as before—with adjustments. Perhaps we will all have to drive electric cars, for example, but cars there will nonetheless still be. This cannot be, however, because we are in the process of crossing one of the great Rubicons in the 3.8-billion-year history of life on Earth, deep in a self-created mass extinction which may approach the one at the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary 65 million years ago. The Earth is so overpopulated with humans (7.5 billion to date) that even if all nations reached zero carbon emission by 2030 or 2040 our demands on the Earth’s resources would still cause ecological collapse.

The world’s governments should therefore be planning for the worst case scenario, deciding which low-lying coastal areas to abandon, which to try to save with substantial sea defences. The coasts of Bangladesh, Florida, Louisiana would have to be systematically evacuated. Much nearer home, Aberystwyth could probably be saved with strengthened and heightened sea walls, but the village of Borth to the north, much of which is at or below current sea level, would have to be let go and large tracts of reclaimed pasture land in the Dyfi estuary allowed to revert to salt marsh. Perhaps tropical forests could be regenerated in some way, though probably not. And what to do about desertification, the steady advance of the Sahara into the Sahel? Nothing perhaps because it may be unstoppable. Freshwater supplies will be a huge problem and money should be poured into research in desalination technology to make it less costly and more energy efficient.

Chaos is what is most likely to happen, however, with savage wars between states for land and resources, and to prevent themselves from being overrun. There will be attempts at global co-operation but they are likely to fall apart as the Earth’s ecosystems collapse. We are entering Judge Dredd territory not a world where the lion lies down with the lamb.

The problem with humanity en masse is that we do not understand what we are

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The problem with humanity en masse is that we do not understand what we are. We think we do, but confuse the surface details of life with the deep structure shaped by the evolutionary history of our genus over three-and-a-half million years.

There are many around the world who say we are not animals. We were created by God in a unique act, distinguished from all other creatures by the possession of an immortal soul. I have met otherwise intelligent people who believe humans have always existed on Earth and can never die out—a spin-off perhaps from the biblical claim that Man was created fully-formed on the sixth day. There is no point in disputing such convictions because no evidence to the contrary will persuade believers that they are wrong.

Thanks to technological advance in the past two hundred years, we have created ever greater complexity and artificiality in the world around us, and the pace of that complexity grows exponentially as new technology opens doors on room after room filled with seeming opportunity.

Among other consequences, this has led to a global flight from the land, with small-scale agriculture increasingly replaced by agribusiness—giant plantations, giant fields serviced by a small contingent of technofarmers high in the cabins of over-sized tractors or combine harvesters. The flight from the land has created megacities which increase in size and number as the global human population continues to expand. Until the Covid-19 pandemic, I had never heard of Wuhan, yet it is a city of 10,000,000 people, and recently I heard of another city in China, whose name, even, I cannot remember, with a population of 18,000,000. Urban environments are, you might say, our ant hills or termite mounds, but on such a scale and of such ingenious artificiality that they conceal from us their origin in humanity’s deeply animal nature.

Humans and chimpanzees diverged from a common ancestor between 12 and 6 million years ago. After that, the genus Homo and the genus Pan evolved along separate evolutionary pathways. We nonetheless share 96 percent of our genes with chimpanzees. That 4 percent difference led to the megacities and humanity’s current global dominance, while the two species of chimpanzees are restricted to shrinking equatorial forests and are threatened with extinction.

We gaze at each other across a ravine of time and circumstance. I don’t like going to zoos, but I have been several times to the Ape House at Copenhagen Zoo to watch a family of chimpanzees housed in a large enclosure, with concrete walls on three sides, the fourth being of glass where visitors like me can gaze at the inmates and sometimes they gaze back.

We are of course the only member of our genus, Homo, left on Earth, though fifty or sixty thousand years ago this was not the case. At that time, we shared it with at least two, and perhaps four, other human species—H. neanderthalensis and H. floresiensis, and possibly H. erectus and H. altaensis (if the latter is indeed a separate species).

Had any of them survived into modern times, how would we have responded? In the heyday of European colonialism in the nineteenth century they would probably have been driven to extinction like the Tasmanian aborigines, or perhaps enslaved.

Homo floresiensis, though, was tiny—three feet six inches tall which is the same height as ‘Lucy’, the famous specimen of Australopithecus afarensis who lived some 3.2 million years ago. Its brain was proportionately small—426cc, only slightly larger than Lucy’s or that of a chimpanzee. By comparison, the brain of a modern human averages 1400cc. Existing only on the island of Flores in present-day Indonesia, might this hominin, so strange, so different to modern eyes, have been kept in zoos alongside chimpanzees?

We gaze through the plate glass in the Ape House across that ravine, and what do we see? In The Chimpanzees of Gombe Jane Goodall has described how chimpanzees are organised in extended families, taking in females from other groups for the purposes of breeding. When a group becomes too large, there is a split which is not always peaceful. In one incident, the larger, more powerful group stalked the smaller breakaway group, attacking and killing the males and capturing the females. It was war-in-embryo. In another, a female and her adult daughter wantonly killed the babies of others. Chimpanzees are mainly vegetarian, but when opportunity arises they hunt monkeys through the trees in organised bands, tearing the unfortunate monkey apart if the hunt is successful, with subordinates begging for pieces of meat from the dominant members of the group. Cannibalism also occurs, especially after a battle.

What we are looking at is the bedrock of much human behaviour. We are not chimpanzees and chimpanzees are not us, but we share these deep traits which appear again and again in hypertrophied form across human societies.

Our large brains, relative to body weight, make us far more intelligent than chimpanzees and the argument can be made that intelligence, combined with human sympathy, can counter and even overcome the deep structure of our nature. The feminist movement has substantially altered the position of women in the western democracies and how men think of themselves in relation to women, for example, though the process is incomplete and fragmentary, and is non-existent in many parts of the world. Other things do not change—the struggle for power, for wealth, and for the influence that wealth brings, socially and politically.

We have not been successful in eradicating war either. It remains often the first, not merely the last, resort in international and internecine disputes, as the war in Ukraine demonstrates.

In so many ways we say one thing—even believe one thing—yet act contrary to reason and compassion. COP26 will be followed by COP27, COP27 by COP28, but global humanity needs to unite now if we are to avert the catastrophe we have set in motion which is likely to result in the extinction of up to 60 percent of species, including quite possibly our own. Climate change is important but it is an outrider to a far deeper problem, human overpopulation.

In 1960, when I went to university at the age of 19, the global human population was 3 billion. Today it is 7.9 billion and climbing. That is just under a three-fold increase in my lifetime and the scariest statistic I know. It is the source of all the Earth’s problems, and if we cannot solve the issue of human overpopulation, we solve nothing, and our extraordinary success will be our downfall.

Can we access the deep structure of the human mind in such a way as to override its imperatives which not only impede, but in many ways prohibit, radical change in our behaviour? That is the question.

There are two kinds of literary criticism

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There are two kinds of literary criticism: reviews in magazines like the TLS and the LRB which inform the reader about newly published books and provide a critical opinion on them; and academic criticism published in learned journals and monographs from university presses.

The former might be termed useful criticism. It is for the most part ephemeral but a valuable guide to what is new. I often buy a book on the strength of a review especially if it is by a reviewer whose work I know and trust.

Academic criticism is different. Driven by whatever theory of literature is in fashion, it is academics talking among themselves. One of its main functions is to further careers by fulfilling publication quotas. It is very difficult to get published unless you subscribe to the dominant theory and utilise its jargon. Criticism of this kind is therefore generally esoteric, often unreadable, and of no interest to the general reader.

For a brief period between the 1930s and 1960s there was another kind of criticism, exemplified by F.R. Leavis and A. Alvarez. This was well written in an accessible style. Works like Leavis’s D.H. Lawrence: Novelist and New Bearings on English Poetry were part of a literary debate that went well beyond academia. In a similar vein, Alvarez used his position as poetry editor and critic for The Observer to create a taste for poets who were emerging in the early 1960s, above all through his anthology The New Poetry (Penguin, 1962) with its influential introductory essay ‘The New Poetry, or Beyond the Gentility Principle’, which was widely read. Criticism of this kind inevitably becomes historical, but New Bearings and ‘The New Poetry’ can still be read with pleasure for their style and their literary insights.

There is also a form of writing which is not criticism as such, but which has a bearing on it. This might be called poets explaining how they work. The locus classicus is Wordsworth’s ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads, followed by Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry and the letters of Keats. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ is a twentieth-century example, as is Ezra Pound’s ‘A Retrospect’. They provide insight into the creative mind and the processes that bring forth poetry.

Then there is literary history and biography. As time passes, an introduction to the world in which a poet or novelist wrote can deepen the reader’s understanding. Biography, which is a specialised kind of history, does this too, though in some academic circles this is denied: the author, it is claimed, is ‘dead’; there is only the ‘text’ and the penetrating mind of the academic theorist. Interpreting a work through the writer’s life, or seeking to identify the author’s intention, is anathema. The shallowness and arrogance of these claims are self-evident.

When I was an undergraduate, I read a great deal of criticism. The degree course in English Literature at Birmingham University was very demanding. Students were expected to read hundreds of pages a week. I am a slow reader, and at the time felt very insecure in my own judgement. So I fell back on criticism to help me out. The trouble was I came to see Pope, or Swift, or Wordsworth, through the eyes of the critic. My experience was mediated, it was not my own.

When I taught at Copenhagen University I continued to read criticism, but after I left academia I gave it up. I read reviews, as I say, but the thought of an academic paper or monograph makes me groan. I don’t believe I could muster the effort. Relying on my own judgement means, no doubt, I miss nuances, but I gain the pleasure of immersion in the worlds of, say, Katherine Mansfield, or R.S. Thomas, and in the play of language which makes those worlds dance.