John Barnie

author

Observations

On Cruelty

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Humans are a unique species in many ways but one unpleasant aspect of that uniqueness is our tendency—one might say addiction—to cruelty. A cat can seem cruel when it toys with a mouse and a lion when it claws down a gazelle and proceeds to eat it alive. The lion, however, is obeying an evolutionary imperative, it must kill to eat and it does so using the means at its disposal, its claws and teeth. You cannot say a lion is ‘pitiless’, its actions are a product of instinct. The cat may seem more problematical as it plays with a mouse, tossing it up in the air, letting it run a while before pouncing again. We cannot see very well into the mind of a cat, but since all cats hunt and act in the same way, it is fair to assume their behaviour is instinctual, too. To say that cats ‘play’ with their prey, therefore, is a resort to metaphor.

In humans it is otherwise. Our species is the only one having a brain and a mind capable of articulating moral categories of right and wrong, of behaviour that is acceptable to society and behaviour that is not. It assumes we are responsible for our actions, which is why we have laws, and why individuals can be arraigned before a court of law when they transgress them. To put a cat on trial for torture would be absurd. The concept of cruelty implies free will and intention. The cat’s lawyer would plead ‘instinct’ and the case would be dismissed.

The one possible exception here is the chimpanzee, with whom we share 96 percent of our genetic make-up. In The Chimpanzees of Gombe, Jane Goodall describes behaviour, including assault and battery, killing, and proto-war between different bands, which is remarkably similar to human behaviour and which seems, from external observation, to have a strong element of intentionality. Even though taxonomists have assigned us to different genera, Pan and Homo, the affinity of our respective genomes suggests at least that that aspects of human and chimpanzee behaviour evolved from the same root stock.

However, when we speak of cruelty it is humans we mean, and it has existed as a trait in our species as far back as there is a record of our history. It can take a myriad forms, from emotional and physical cruelty between individuals, to the indiscriminate mass cruelty of dictatorships like those of Stalin and Hitler.

Always there is the question of intentionality. Humans can be cruel out of anger or malice, or simply because they enjoy hurting others. That is why state actors never have a problem recruiting torturers. Cruelty reaches intolerable peaks in mobs, and on a larger scale in armies, when the individual abandons personal responsibility, absorbed into the anger and violence of the crowd.

Shakespeare understood this very well. In Julius Caesar, the poet Cinna is on his way to Caesar’s funeral when he is overtaken by a mob looking to take revenge on Caesar’s assassins. They question him aggressively: ‘What is your name?’ ‘Whither are you going’, ‘Where do you dwell?’ ‘Answer every man directly’, ‘Ay, and briefly’, ‘Ay and wisely’. Cinna tells them he is on his way to the funeral. Then one of the mob again asks his name. ‘Truly, my name is Cinna.’ The admission is fatal. ‘Tear him to pieces! He’s a conspirator.’ ‘I am Cinna the poet, I am Cinna the poet.’ The mob is out for blood, anyone’s blood, and this is where it becomes cruel. One says ‘Tear him for his bad verses, tear him for his bad verses.’ Cinna tries to defend himself, tries to explain. ‘I am not Cinna the conspirator.’ ‘It is no matter, his name’s Cinna; pluck his name out of his heart, and turn him going.’ The mob’s righteous fury reaches a crescendo, only blood, only violence will do: ‘Tear him, tear him! Come, brands, ho! Firebrands! To Brutus’, to Cassius’; burn all! Some to Decius’ house, and some to Casca’s; some to Ligarius’. Away! go!’ The scene ends: ‘Exeunt, all the Plebians, dragging off Cinna’. We are left to guess at Cinna’s fate, though that is not difficult.

Individuals in armies are often cruel in other ways and on a far larger scale. When you have been fighting an enemy who has been trying to kill you, the gates of mercy are easily closed. Unarmed prisoners of war are supposed to be treated humanely, but often they are not. Often they are simply shot. If they are taken to a prisoner-of-war camp they are frequently maltreated, even starved to death, especially when the victorious regime is a brutal dictatorship like Nazi Germany. Yet ‘civilised’ nations (among whom we naturally include ourselves) can also be guilty of cruelty on a grand scale. Torture was widespread in the British Empire. It was widespread, too, during the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq in prisons like Bagram and Guantánamo, and in so-called ‘black’ sites in Poland, Egypt, Myanmar, and no doubt other locations we have never learned about.

When the Wehrmacht invaded Russia, it murdered, raped and burned its way across vast swathes of the country. When the tide of war turned, German women in the path of the Red Army advance knew what was in store—rape and revenge on a horrific scale, human suffering begetting more suffering in its wake.

There must have been Russian soldiers who had pity on these defenceless women, who tried to shield and protect them, even though they were enemies; and there are instances of soldiers giving aid to wounded enemy, as if they were their own comrades. Such pity and compassion are among the noblest aspects of our nature.

Yet pity and compassion are unstable attributes which can at times lead by degrees to their opposites. Ian Garner gives an instructive example in his book Z Generation: Into the Heart of Russia’s Fascist Youth. Russian state media assert again and again that Ukrainian forces are using women, children, and babies as human shields, that they hunt down and kill Russian-speaking children. This is not true, but very many people in Putin’s Russia believe it because few have access to other sources of information. Ian Garner gives an example of a primary school teacher in Moscow who tells her class what she (presumably) saw on state television:

[The Ukrainians] ran toward the Russians. Then what do you think happened? One of the nationalists shot the mom from inside the building. The little boy stood up next to his mom—he was about four years old [the teacher starts to cry]. They shot him right in the head. I’ll never understand it.

The teacher believes this story and it touches her humanity. Social media are flooded with responses to similar propaganda lies, because they are believed: ‘What a tragedy [prayer emoji] God save you!’, ‘God protect you now, my children!’ But as Ian Garner shows, expressions of sympathy and compassion quickly segue into desire for vengeance, to do to the ‘child-killers’ what they are supposed to have done to innocent Russian children: ‘Nazi bastards’, ‘We don’t need to beat an enemy like this. We have to KILL them! Guys, don’t spare the prisoners.’ As Ian Garner notes: ‘Calls to save children descend into rhetoric of extreme violence and aggression that justifies—at least in the posters’ minds—a war with no limits.’ It feeds as well into the many atrocities committed by Russian soldiers, from unlimited looting to massacres like the one at Bucha.

This leads to consideration of a deep paradox in human nature. If you ask most people, what they think of cruelty, they will say it is awful. They may well say it is inhuman. This is interesting. It assumes that negative aspects of human behaviour are an aberration, we say they are in–human. To be human is to be humane, to do right by others to the best of one’s ability, and indeed most decent people try to live a right-minded life. It is, however, a falsification to suggest that the inhuman is somehow alien to our species, a breaking-in of something other, a ‘not human’ element into our psyche that distorts our behaviour. It is not. It is twinned with our better selves like a double helix that can suddenly unwind, releasing cruelties small and great. The trait is so deep in the fabric of our nature that we must accept its reality as part of us. Not to do so, is to blind ourselves to what we are. Two-faced Janus is the profoundest symbol of human nature and we can never tear one face from its opposite and partner. We must live with them both, for good and, as often, ill.

Grades of Reality

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It is easy to think of the ancient historians as traditionalists, but Herodotus, for example, had a highly intelligent, enquiring mind. Book II of The Persian Wars gives an account of the history and culture of Egypt, a land which he had evidently visited. Keen to learn as much as he could, he questioned priests, the learned men who told him much about the succession of kings, about the building of the great temples and pyramid-tombs, and about the customs of the people. But he took nothing for granted, sifting through various legends and myths as told to him, accepting some but rejecting others as implausible. Wherever possible, he visited sites, made observations, and drew his own conclusions.

In this you could say he had a modern mentality; he was a man with whom you could have interesting discussions. He was, however, writing 2,400 years ago and in other ways his intelligence was framed by beliefs which, while seeming self-evident truths to him, appear to the modern mind as a curtain of delusions drawn across the world-as-it-is.

Herodotus had no doubt there was a pantheon of gods and he easily found the Greek gods under different names in Egypt. He had no doubt, either, that the gods intervened in human affairs; or that oracles foretold the future and it would be wise to consult them before making important decisions. The efficacy of animal sacrifice to the gods was likewise taken for granted, as was the significance of dreams when properly interpreted. His world was full of interpenetrating realms where humans trod carefully.

I am sure that if Herodotus lived today, he would make himself familiar with Darwinian evolution by natural selection, with Einstein’s theories of relativity, the latest developments in microbiology, nuclear physics, and cosmology. He would close the door on oracular prediction and dream-truths, and see reality as we see it: a material universe, infinitely complex, the understanding of which is ever open to revision as advances in science force adjustments to accepted theories, or even cause them to be abandoned in the face of compelling new evidence. Herodotus would be one of us, and perhaps with his historical bent a leading historian in our day too.

If you yourself were transported back to the fifth century B.C., however, it would be a different matter—unless you happened to bump into Democritus of Abdera, who was formulating his theory of atoms, at roughly the same time as Herodotus was exploring the penetralia of Egypt’s gods.

The universe painstakingly revealed by science through experiment and observation gets us far closer to reality than the teachings of religion based on myth, legend, miracles, and divine intervention, yet there is a problem. The universe simply exists, without knowing itself. Life on Earth, too, has existed for 3.8 billion years, unknowing, unreflective, until Homo sapiens evolved some 200,000 years ago. Even then, it is only in the last 4,000 years that we have begun to examine our surroundings empirically, a process that accelerated during the last 200 years, and is ongoing as science penetrates ever deeper into the structure of matter, out into the vastness of the universe, and into its remotest past a few seconds after the Big Bang. The universe does not need our interpretation. It is humans who need it, because our unusually large brain in ratio to body weight has produced a mind which seeks to interpret reality, to understand who and what we are. (I realise that some have postulated that humanity is the acme of the universe seeking to understand itself, but this seems to me mere arrogance.)

I am convinced that the universe revealed by science is an extraordinary achievement, a colossal advance, in fact, on thousands of years of human rummaging around in explanations based on gods and spirit worlds. I therefore believe that Herodotus, highly intelligent as he was, was inherently wrong. Yet I can’t help wondering how reality will appear in another 2,400 years, assuming that advanced civilisation still exists. Reality, as described by science, is eminently clear to me, but reality defined by gods and oracles seemed so to Herodotus.

There is another factor to consider. I base my belief on what I have learned from science, but this is very much a minority view among the 8 billion current inhabitants of Earth for whom religion trumps science. Religious belief may be declining in materialist Britain but it is on the rise elsewhere, and far more people believe in the gods of Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism, and in animism and spiritualism, than credit the discoveries of Darwin and Einstein. Even in the USA, on the surface one of the most scientifically based societies on Earth, 68 percent of Americans believe in angels, while 33 percent deny that evolution takes place, according to a Pew Research survey.

Although the gods of Ancient Greece and Egypt have long since disappeared, Herodotus would understand the mindset that produced God, or Allah, or the Hindu pantheon. Perhaps, in that future 2,400 years hence, gods will make an all-embracing return. Science may underpin a hi-technology material base for a culture that in reality will belong to the gods.

Perhaps, too, all interpretations are chimera, emanations of the mind of an unusual species of ape which seeks to place itself in a universe that does not know itself, which is not the great I am but the great is.

‘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.

Good Poetry/Bad Poetry

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How do you know when a poem is good? Or when a poem is bad? In these relativistic times many would argue there is no such distinction, there is only what you like. This is not unrelated to the consumerist measure of worth by volume of sales, though worth here is interchangeable with success. If you have a million followers for your online poetry you are more successful, and therefore better, than a poet who sells a hundred copies of a book. This is a very powerful argument in capitalist-consumerist culture where many are alert to what is ‘trending’ and, not wishing to be left out, embrace the trend, thus strengthening and confirming it. Value in this context tends to be ephemeral—consumers are surfers anxious to catch the next big wave. Then the next one. Then the one after that.

Such people might claim to be serious about poetry but in reality they are not. They do not read widely and are mostly ignorant about the poetry of the past.

Consequently, they have no perspective on the verse they do read. Being well read won’t turn anyone into a good poet but it is a precondition; I cannot think of any major poet who created him- or herself ab ovo.

A particular source of bad poetry today is the mistaken belief that poetry is a form of self-expression. The poet has an experience which is significant and memorable to him- or herself and seizes upon it as the basis for a poem, the assumption being that a vivid experience expressed in verse (usually free verse) will be of equal interest to the reader. T.S. Eliot famously warned against this a hundred years ago in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’: ‘Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality’—adding mischievously, ‘But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.’

The Australian poet Les Murray used to say that the poet needs to know everything. Nobody can know everything, of course, and he most certainly did not mean the poet should stuff his poems with arcane knowledge. What he meant was that the poet must be on the alert, an absorber of sensations, an eavesdropper, as it were, on the world, because he or she can never predict what will be the tiny seed that produces a poem. The big things in one’s life are rarely the direct inspiration or subject of a good poem but mediocre poets too often fail to understand this, writing about events in their lives which are of no interest to anyone but themselves. In their minds they have transmuted the lead of experience into the gold of poetry, but the words on the page remain lead.

Poetry is in fact a form of fiction and the truth it contains is independent of the poet’s personal truth. Once it is there on the page, a poem should be a surprise to the poet, something he or she could never have thought of with the conscious mind. This bears on another aspect of bad verse, the would-be poet’s failure to understand that the genesis of a poem is not the product of consciousness; it emerges from the mind’s deeps and is not in the poet’s control. This is why, when a poet sits down to write, he or she does not know what will emerge. The creation of a poem is a kind of attentive listening; it cannot be forced, and is likely to appear unexpectedly. It may begin as a single line, or an image, which must be written down immediately otherwise the moment is lost. Bad poetry is a product of the conscious mind, it is willed into being, images fitted together like Lego bricks, but no matter how ingenious they are—or the poet thinks they are—they will not have within them the glow that makes them mysterious, alive, and exactly right.

In a good poem there is an electromagnetic force which binds the words in a unique and indissoluble way:

A slumber did my spirit seal;
    I had no human fears:
She seemed a thing that could not feel
   The touch of earthly years.

No motion has she now, no force;
   She neither hears nor sees;
Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course,
   With rocks, and stones, and trees.

Change one word here, and Wordsworth’s great poem falls apart. You realise this when you try to translate a poem from another language. The forcefield of the original cannot be replicated, and although the apparent meaning of a poem may be there, the deeper, rhythmic meaning almost always eludes the translator. The rare instance in which a translation succeeds, proves the rule. It is what people mean when they say poetry is untranslatable.

Much bad poetry derives from the fact that the poet has nothing to say, by which I mean that he or she is unable to access the deeper fathoms of the mind in which poems are gestated. Apart from personal experience, the temptation then is to write in support of a cause. The environmental crisis is the cause of the moment which has prompted a vast outpouring of ‘eco-poetry’—along with its academic support system ‘eco-criticism’. The cause is good, but most of the poetry is bad because it is willed into existence. This may be popular with eco-activists who, for the most part, are not interested in poetry but who naively believe that poetry can be harnessed to the cause. If a poem supports the cause, it is a good poem. The distinction is rarely made between verse which may be written in this way, and poetry which in and of itself supports nothing. A poem simply is; it is an artefact; but one which pulsates and unfolds wherever it engages with a reader’s mind.

The question today is how to access the good poetry that is being written; how to find it in the vast scrubland of bad verse. Because we live with a paradox: there are more people writing poetry than ever before, thanks to the phenomenon of ‘creative writing’, while there are fewer and fewer readers. Organisers of poetry readings often insert an ‘open mic’ element into their programme because it is the best way of ensuring an audience. At many readings it is a good bet that a majority will consist of poets waiting for their five minutes at the microphone.

With the poetry of the past it is different. Time is the filter, with a general agreement as to the greatness of, say, Keats’s odes, because successive generations have responded to them. Keats’s contemporary, Barry Cornwall, was immensely popular in his day, far more so than Keats, but Cornwall’s verse is forgotten and is unlikely ever to be revived. John Gower’s Confessio Amantis once rivalled Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales but the shine of Gower’s lengthy poem is tarnished, it is barely readable now, while The Canterbury Tales brims over with inexhaustible life.

Tastes change, of course, and some poets will be popular in one generation and neglected in the next. John Donne had to be ‘rediscovered’ in the twentieth century; Milton and Pope are little read at the moment and perhaps the same is true of poets like Browning. Nonetheless, they have been read and validated across generations and are there to be revived and enjoyed again, which is not true of the scribblers excoriated in The Dunciad.

Another feature of bad poetry is that it is imitative. When they set out, most poets imitate, but this is part of a learning process, the sorting out of their relationship to the poetry of the past and the poetry of their contemporaries. It is a process of discovery of what can and cannot be done; the poet reaching out for and refining a distinctive voice. ‘The effect of masterpieces on me,’ wrote Gerard Manly Hopkins, ‘is to make me admire—and do otherwise.’ The mediocre poet never achieves a voice but is content to adopt the style of his contemporaries or of the immediate past. Look at any Victorian anthology with its multiple imitations of Wordsworth, or anthologies of contemporary poetry with their commitment to weak free verse and the first person ‘I’.

Still, the question remains, how do you know when a poem is good? And here indeed there is a problem because poetry is itself protean in form, from the thickly clotted alliterative and assonantal poems of Gerard Manly Hopkins to the reduced simplicity of the early poems of William Carlos Williams. It may well be that the admirer of Manly Hopkins may see nothing at all in the seeming prosaicness of Williams, while another reader will think the opposite. Personal preference inevitably guides one’s response. It is reasonable to say, however, that sufficient numbers of readers have affirmed, and reaffirmed, the value of Williams and Manly Hopkins so that their poetry lives on among the generations. Individual taste may guide you in one direction or another, just as in visiting a great art museum you may be drawn to a particular gallery without your choice invalidating the worth of those you choose not visit.

Lastly, the question of good and bad has to be considered within the broader context of poetry’s position in Anglophone culture today. As far back as Classical Greece, poetry was awarded the highest status among the arts, a tradition continued through the European Middle Ages and Renaissance, well into the nineteenth century. This, however, is no longer the case and it is interesting to speculate as to the reasons. I think there are at least three.

One is—or may be—the rise of science in the Victorian period whose discoveries penetrated culture generally and changed forever how we look at the world, elevating the rational, analytical faculty of the mind which is very different from the absorptive, fusional faculty that produces poetry.

Second is the advent of Modernism. Modernism is a slippery concept, or so it seems to me. William Carlos Williams, for example, is often considered a Modernist whose poetry is open and welcoming, but the poetry of what might be called the classical Modernists, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, is not. It was a bomb flung on the village life of Georgian verse, and its revolutionary aesthetic made poetry seem daunting and fearsomely obscure to many readers. It marked the end of the general reader of poetry for whom buying and reading books of poems was a natural part of reading life. Instead, poetry was captured by academia, with academics forging careers out of explicating The Waste Land and The Cantos to generations of students. Ordinary readers increasingly felt left out. I have frequently been told, ‘Oh, poetry’s not for me’, it being too difficult, too obscure. The result is that readers have got out of the habit of reading poetry. In consequence, they do not know how to approach it. Poetry’s pre-eminence has been overturned and it survives in a ghetto.

This relates to my third reason for poetry’s decline in status—we live in an age of prose. This in itself takes two forms, one being the life-annihilating prose of government reports, grant applications, academic papers, advertising, corporate logos, which are the antithesis of good prose, let alone poetry, while at the literary end of the scale, pre-eminence has been awarded to the novel.

Our world is prosy and prosaic, with poetry invisible to the majority. There is, though, one interesting exception which is that a surprising number of people turn to verse as a means of coping with grief, either by writing it themselves, or by recalling from some distant schoolroom lesson, a poem which says what they cannot say. This is sometimes a good poem, though more often it is bad verse in an outmoded form. Could it, though, be the untilled ground out of which, given the right circumstances, poetry might emerge to flower in society once again?

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.