'NOTHING DREAMIER THAN BARRACKS!' Julian Stannard
MICHAEL HOFFMAN, Acrimony (Faber) £8.99
MICHAEL HOFFMAN, Behind the Lines (Faber) £20
ROBERT LOWELL, Poems Selected by Michael Hofmann (Faber) £5.99 The novelist Aldo Busi once declared that any selfrespecting writer needs to jettison la tenerezza. It seems that Michael Hofmann had hacked away at easy emotion by the time Nights in the Iron Hotel came out in 1983. It was a good beginning. The prescribed splinter of ice makes its inward journey as effectively as the 'kleine aster' stitched into the corpse by a medical student in Gottfried Benn's macabre poem. Benn's bleak aesthetic, the aesthetic of the operating table, a 'prankish rearrangements of corpses' is dealt with in a brilliant piece in Behind the Lines. Hofmann's little 'Diablerie' turns out to be one of the more jocular pieces in Nights in the Iron Hotel. 'In Your arms/is someone else's child, a black-eyed baby girl/ dressed like His Satanic Majesty in a red romper suit; /a gleeful crustacean, executing pincer movements.' 'Diablerie' would seem to prefigure the equally concise 'Vagary' from Hofmann's latest book, Approximately Nowhere (1999): 'I can really only feign disapproval/of my youngest/dibbling his semolina'd fingers/in the satiny lining of her red coat.' In Behind the Lines Hofmann writes that the short poem, 'that daunting form', can look like 'a few bricks falling over one another.' Both these poems are tiny edifices. Nights in the Iron Hotel is not, in fact, without its own particular brand of gleefulness - 'You move the fifty seven muscles it takes to smile' - as it leads us into never remote, dysfunctional worlds. Sex is always tense, like the Cold War, and subject to negotiations, unless you're the speaker from 'A Western Pastoral': "'I married a woman I found in New Orleans./ ... /Under the stars, after a business reversal/she puts her head in my lap and empties me.'" Often, though, the reader is a voyeur behind a parrying smoke screen, as in the politically knowing title-poem, where 'our inability to function' is the main source of fascination. Acrimony - the second book first published in 1986 and now re-launched by Faber in its slightly queasy lemony jacket ('the yellow of unlove?') - makes a fuller study of monsters of the deep, tyrannising bedrooms with their salami breath. The book's severe title is a statement of Hofmann's poetic, his carefully cultivated esthétique du mal. We suspect things are going to be bad, but as we're reminded in 'Ancient Evenings', the opening poem, gravity is also an important kind of humour. The poems in Acrimony both smile and scowl in cunning ways. It's tempting to go straight to Part Two, My Father's House, the scorched heartlands of Acrimony, with its accusatory, 'confessional' account of the poet's German father, the novelist Gert Hofmann, now 'gone to seed' like a Third World dictator. But many of the book's first twenty- five poems are so adept at creating an atmosphere of dandified brutality that they're worth considering on that score alone. Acrimonious states are various; sometimes the air itself is a miasma. The organisation of the book demarcates Hofmann's Anglo-German cultural background. His points of reference include, for example, the Official Raving Loony Monster candidate and the iconic Berlin zoo. Born in Freiburg in 1957, Hofmann came to England in 1961 and was educated in this country ('all my life/has been in education, higher and higher education...') Whereas the poems about the German father are cultural as well as psychoanalytical enquiries (shades of Robert Lowell), the poems in the first section show Hofmann taking stock of 1980s London, the Thatcherite metropolis. Critics at the time were quick to see the book as a useful contemporary document. 'Impotence' shows the poet in 'this London faubourg of service flats, gigolos, blackmail' where 'Gymnasial grunts echo from the Lego barracks:/the Voice of America, and a flag to brighten the dullest day'. The last verse of 'Nighthawks', in turn, wonders how long the threatened branch-line will survive even as it rattles and screeches 'between the hospital/lit like a toy, and the castellated factory - /a folie de grandeur of late capitalism.' But 'Nighthawks' isn't merely chronicle. Though unmistakably anchored in our time, with its nocturnal, infernal 'hamburger heaven', the poem seems to invoke the 1920s of Otto Dix, one of Hofmann's subjects in Behind the Lines. Reviewing the 1992 retrospective of Dix at the Tate, Hofmann acknowledges the painter's talent for expressing 'social dislocation, impatience, submission, false glitter and the inadequate healing powers of capitalism.' Hence plenty of room for Dix in the 1980s. Hofmann draws our attention to Dix's portraits of prostitutes, his set pieces To Beauty and The Metropolis. What interested Dix (and, palpably, what also interests Dix's late-twentieth-century reviewer) 'was ugliness, which seems [to Dix] almost like a creed'. The ambience of Hofmann's 'Nighthawks' with its street-lighting, its hint of Eliotic fog, its reference to gas, is likewise modernistic, entre les deux guerres.
The derelicts queue twice round the tearoom. Outside, the controlled prostitutes move smoothly through the shoals of men laughing off their fear. The street-lamps are a dull coral, snakes' heads. Earlier, I watched a couple over your shoulder. She was thin, bone-chested, dressed in black lace, her best features vines of hair. Blatant, ravenous, post-coital, they greased their fingers as they ate. I met a dim acquaintance, a man with the manner of a laughing-gas victim, rich, frightened and jovial. Why doesn't everyone wear pink, he squeaked. Only a couple of blocks are safe in his world.
'Albion Market', whose title alerts us to the poem's later drift, gives us a medley of contemporary slogans: Arsenal Rules the World, Goodbye, Kilburn, Everything Must Go. The phone booth assiduously caters for the specialist: '"rubber", and "correction" for the incorrigible'. Yet, as night falls over Bayswater, where women dangle their 'most things considered' from the kerb, it's not so difficult to switch louche London for the 'yeasty, nervy' quickenings of 1920s Berlin. Bayswater is suddenly informed by Weimar; sadomasochism is perfected by fascists in British hats; Albion is left bristling in its own corporate bondage!
A man came down the street with the meth-pink eyes of a white rat, his gait a mortal shuffle. A British bulldog bowler hat clung to his melting skull. ... Game spirits, tat and service industries, an economy stripped to the skin trade. Sex and security, Arsenal boot boys, white slaves and the SAS.
We might think of the young Bunting - 'Secret, solitary, a spy' - being shaken along Tottenham Court Road, mating beauty with squalor. In Nights in the Iron Hotel Hofmann calls one of his poems 'De-militarised Zone', a useful trope on that occasion. But Hofmann is a poet-critic always conscious of borders and military perspectives. His piece on Gottfried Benn moves from the early Morgue poems (1912) to the time Benn was working as an army doctor near the end of the Second World War. Hofmann cites Benn's own account of that period, the strange peace-in-war, that 'behind-the-lines existence', where behind the dreamy barracks was a secret world of seclusion, 'a kind of béguinage'. The army, for Benn, was an 'aristocratic form of emigration'. In Acrimony, Hofmann plays at the role of poetspy, picnicking above the parade ground, flicking ash and wincing at his pips 'going lickety-split,/hitting the deck fifty feet down, among the sentries... ' Hofmann knows (as if he still had the special vision of the exile) that behind the lines is where the best lines are to be found. The Spider's Web, Hofmann reminds us in his piece on Joseph Roth (some of whose lines 'bleed' across the father's desk in Hofmann's 'Fine Adjustments') 'is set among the bigots, spies, and terrorist militias of Weimar'. Poets in the 1980s - under the watchful eyes of Sinclair's style cowboys had their own lines to police. 'From Kensal Rise to Heaven' shows this one eyeing the Chinese calendar girl - 'naked, chaste and varnished' - at the local takeaway; noting 'blood trails down the street/from the night before'; observing how the dogs 'vet the garbage before the refuse collectors'; how the pigeons 'inhabit a ruined chiropodist's, coming and going freely/through broken windows into their cosy excremental hollow'. If Hofmann frequently cultivates a frisson of danger, he also knows that bathos is a useful get-out clause. Hofmann is good at crazy, mismanaged lives, good at slipping us into Lowell's 'kingdom of the mad'. The opening of 'Against Nature' is spectacular: 'Des Esseintes himself would have admired/her fastidiousness - anorexia, years in hospital - /as he gloated over his own peptone enemas...' 'Against Nature' takes us near to that point where writing and cruelty are practically the same art (little risk of la tenerezza here). Yet the sick woman who 'walks fast to lose weight' is strangely ennobled by the poem's minutiae: 'In a gesture of self-betrayal, she goes shopping:/powdered milk, Gitanes, cans of cat food/to placate Sappho, her black panther of a cat...' Her judgement of men is woefully poor: a one time Japanese lodger 'drank as much beer/in an evening as a special Kobe beef cow' and 'He never cleaned the bath, and left rich stains/in the lavatory bowl, like a dirty protest...' The boyfriend, 'weird, well-spoken,/Jesusbearded', is 'an anonymous depressive', something 'out of Dostoevsky', who is often denied access.
Then his notes bristle on the doormat like fakirs, her name on them in big block capitals, widely spaced on the paranoid envelope...
The boyfriend's missives are literary transactions of sorts. Which takes us to My Father's House, the second part of Acrimony, where the poems of bile and betrayal are so poised one wonders whether Hofmann might have reached this high point a little early. Discussing Robert Lowell's prose in Behind the Lines, Hofmann dwells on the American's autobiographical writing, including '91 Revere Street' whose material was refashioned and condensed to make several of the poems in Life Studies. Lowell on the home front, according to Hofmann, is Lowell at his sardonic best. And it seems right to mention Lowell in the same breath as Hofmann's elegantly neurotic poems about his father. Philip Larkin's indictment of parenthood seems particularly germane. Yet being 'fucked up', as we always knew, provides its own creative dividends. From Nights in the Iron Hotel through to the elegiac sequence in Approximately Nowhere, [The] Father's House has leant against the writing of the son with as much weight as the facilitating poetic of Robert Lowell. The voice of one qualifies the querulous blood-bond of the other. Lowell (who knew everything to know about hierarchy) even supplied, in large part, the laconic, turbo-driven means by which the 'English' poet could stake out his independence from the German father and engineer '[his] own birth in the new country' ('The Machine that Cried'). There's a heady criss-crossing of borders going on in all of that! In the foreword to the selected poems (Faber's poet-on-poet series), Hofmann speaks about the 'inexhaustible amplitude' of Lowell's writing which has kept him going back to the American since he first read him as an undergraduate in 1976 (by which time, paradoxically, 'The Age of Lowell' was drawing to a close). It's instructive to observe how often Lowell in Behind the Lines becomes a point of reference, a touchstone, a supplier of terms for Hofmann's variegated readings of other - typically European - writers. A discussion of Montale, for example, quickly dovetails into reflections on Lowell's translations in Imitations ('At this moment I would guess that Imitations is more influential than any other aspect of Lowell's poetic practice.'). A reading of Ian Hamilton's 'The Visit' discovers, likewise, something of Lowell's 'Waking in the Blue'. Ian Hamilton, a poet whose every poem 'is pruned back to an austere and beautiful knot of pain' - and, incidentally, a biographer of Lowell - is a rare English presence in Hofmann's collection of reviews. Lowell has left his finger prints all over Hofmann's poetry. Not only does Hofmann's writing enjoy that laidback, prosy solidity, the very notations of his punctuation - lapidary hyphens, elliptical withdrawal - not to mention the adjectival clusters, the tell-tale triads, all speak of Hofmann's familiarity with the American poet. Hofmann gives us a Europeanised version of Lowell's idiomatic drawl (almost clumsy), but always knowing exactly when to cut through the fat with surgical speed. Sometimes, too, Lowell's very lines are re-worked or co-opted for Hofmann's own purposes. 'And the Teeth of the Children Are Set on Edge', from Acrimony, begins 'It's the twenty-fifth and I'm twenty five' immediately recalling 'These are the tranquillised Fifties, and I am forty' from 'Memories of West Street and Lepke'. Confessionalism is the 'C-word' in Hofmann's introduction to Lowell, and that 'nasty little label' in the piece on Hamilton from Behind the Lines. Like Lowell's writing, like Hamilton's, Hofmann's father-son poems have little to do with psychic conflagration. Lowell's poems about his father in Life Studies are actually cool, melancholic, almost kindly pieces. My Father's House, on the basis of title alone, works against mere solipsism to suggest a range of Biblical, Freudian and mythical possibilities. Hofmann on Hofmann - or the poet's 'reading' of the novelist, where the ink may be thicker than the blood, where in 'The Means of Production', the father places novels between himself and his pursuers like 'a man pleading for his life' - is part of a wider set of cultural negotiations. My Father's House, in this tradition, might evoke writers as varied as Turgenev and Edmund Gosse. Yet Hofmann's poems transcend their own novelistic precisions - Gert Hofmann, travelling in Yugoslavia in a silver Audi 100... - to insinuate the wider tragedy of Europe. Behind the Lines (dedicated to the memory of the father) enables us to go back to the poetry of Hofmann, a poetry of citations, allusions, German fragments, re-armed with a high-velocity glossary. It's impossible, for example, not to place Hofmann's review of his father's novel Our Conquest alongside 'Author, Author', the longest poem in Acrimony The review (also from 1986) is sometimes a little hesitant in its address, unlike Hofmann's criticism in general, as if the subject itself were testing the nerves of the reviewer. Our Conquest, set in Germany in May 1945, during the first twenty-four hours of peace, provides a title which coalesces the ending of another dark European epoch with the father's Pyrrhic victories (the silent skirmishes!) as revealed to us in Acrimony. 'Author, Author' enmeshes public with private:
To come upon by chance, while emptying the dustbin, the ripped, glittery foil-wrapping of his heart-medicines, multiplication times-tables of empty capsules, dosages like police ammunition in a civil disturbance,
or:
If sex is nostalgia for sex, and food nostalgia for food, his can't be - what did a child of the War get to eat that he would want to go on eating, and to share? Standing in the road as the American trucks rolled by: chewing-gum, cigarettes, canned herrings, a kick in the teeth.
and, by the end:
I ask myself what sort of consummation is available? Fight; talk literature and politics; get drunk together? Kiss him goodnight, as though half my life had never happened?
Lowell's influence would have been much less interesting had Hofmann not also looked across the English Channel towards Europe. His 'dispatches from the review front' remind us that Hofmann is not only a poet-translator, he's also a kind of cultural broker dextrously lining up Benn and Montale with Lowell in his introduction to the selected poems. We might see a poem like 'Author, Author' as a combination of Lowell's laconicism and that German quality of Schonungslosigkeit (unsparingness) which Hofmann recognises in Otto Dix. Hofmann's collection of poets, novelists, artists in Behind the Lines are mostly Americans of the mid-twentieth century and Germans and Europeans from the earlier modernist period. The line up is, frankly, mouth-watering, including among its ranks: Wallace Stevens, John Berryman, Gottfried Benn, Georg Trakl, Bertolt Brecht, Paul Celan, Anna Akhmatova, Joseph Brodsky, Eugenio Montale, Otto Dix, Malcolm Lowry, Paul Bowles, Robert Musil, Joseph Roth, not to mention the Irish trio Heaney, Muldoon and Paulin whose Fivemiletown is treated with such relish. Behind the Lines is rather like having a ring-side seat at a shadowy gallery (whose curator could be Villon) of prisoners, war-poets, survivors, skulkers, suicides, drug addicts, madmen, exiles, émigrés, fugitives, dissidents and persecuted Jews. (Antecedents in some way, perhaps, of Gert Hofmann's own novelistic characters: 'maniacs, compulsive, virtuoso talkers, talkers for dear life,/talkers in soliloquies, notebooks, tape-recordings, last wills...' from 'Author, Author'). Georg Trakl, who once threatened to kill himself when a sweet-shop owner refused him credit and who then did kill himself after the battle of Grodek in 1914, seems the kind of 'German' poet Hofmann would alight on. Hofmann's description of Trakl - namely the 'quiet, monotonous voice, and the evil, metallic, criminal glitter of his eyes' - eclipses Donald Davie's 'reek of the human'. The book reviewing got off the ground when Hofmann's first poems began to appear (1980). Hofmann, in fact, almost as a matter of course, blurs the distinction between his criticism and his poetry. Like the poetry, the criticism is full of bright surfaces and keen sightings. Of Ian Hamilton's narrow poetic focus, his wife's mental illness and the death of the poet's father by cancer, Hofmann concludes that such poetry 'is not craftsmanship or profession, but catastrophe'. To which he adds: 'I can't, in general terms, think of any better way for a poem to be'. And he's not afraid of putdowns either. A Book of Memories, by Péter Nádas, we are told, for example, 'must have been grindingly unpleasant to translate'. The reviews are performances in their own right, aleatory, stylish, sometimes a little brutal. Ultimately they recall Gottfried Benn, that dangerous, exhilarating aesthete, who argued that '[y]ou can learn tight-rope walking, funambulism, high-wire acts, walking on nails, but a fascinating way with words, you either have it or you don't'.