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PN Review 275
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This item is taken from PN Review 53, Volume 13 Number 3, January - February 1987.

Letters
DEAR EDITORS, While Michael Schmidt and Nicholas Tredell are concerned to have us know that their hearts are in the right place (PNR 52), I hear a dicky beat or two.

Nicholas Tredell says that Sarah Maguire 'exaggerates the exclusion of feminist concerns from PNR'. It is nevertheless clear that enough feminist interest for Nicholas Tredell, presented on his terms, is not enough, or on the right terms, for Sarah Maguire.

It is the implication that enough for Nicholas Tredell ought to be enough for anyone which betrays precisely the ideological stance that the editors are so anxious to deny.

Well, we are all caught up in one ideology or other (or more), but those of us who don't recognise this about ourselves are the most dangerously ensnared. Michael Schmidt assures us of PNR's openness to debate, but he and Nicholas Tredell write somewhat glibly of the stress on 'good' work, work of 'quality', as if this were something objective and undebateable, and implying that such vigilance on their part will inevitably result in the desired democratic 'republic of letters'. It is surely not 'forbidding discrimination' - on the contrary - to acknowledge that the judgement of any critic or editor as to what is apt, significant, acute, moving or telling (i.e. 'well-written') - or otherwise - will be coloured by his or her ideological stance.

I for one am mystifed by Michael Schmidt's lack of interest in the work of Dale Spender, whose Man Made Language has been deeply influential on British feminist creative and critical writing. Perhaps he has written about her work in an issue I didn't see, but the inexplicit and dismissive reference here to her 'approach' conveys a lack of serious consideration of her contribution which to most British feminists will seem singularly inappropriate in a journal avowing Catholicism. It behoves Michael Schmidt, since he has drawn attention to it, to explain the lack of attraction for him of a writer so influential in so 'important a critical movement' - particularly as it seems he would be sorry if that movement marginalised PNR to the 'impalpable dark prison of neglect' of Wyndham Lewis he quotes. While he fails to do so, then for all we know it is he who is exercising propriety and decorum rather than taste or judgement, and should this be so, then the absence of PNR as a forum for feminist literary debate would be as little a matter of concern for feminists as is the absence of serious consideration of Dale Spender at present for Michael Schmidt.

Unlike Sarah Maguire, however, I have reacted optimistically to PNR's declared intention to broaden its scope and agreed to be part of the process by reviewing. Nevertheless, I am very aware of the seriousness of her point: Whatever you say can be altered by the context in which you say it, and it is hard to examine anything authoritatively from any point of view if that point of view is being subsumed, however unwittingly.
Elizabeth Baines

SIR: I am sorry to gather from his review of my Propaganda (PNR 51) that C.B. McCully is afflicted with both a small vocabulary and a Collins dictionary. I remember hearing of an Oxford English Dictionary; maybe this would be a help to C.B. McCully? If that is too much like work, the better one-volume dictionaries (the Concise Oxford, or Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary) contain the hard words that are apparently not in C.B. McCully's vocabulary.

If C.B. McCully would care to come to my classes, I could undertake to further his grasp both of English and of poetry; meanwhile, here is a gloss on the five words he specifically complains of. (1) anoetic: my Chambers defines anoesis as 'sensation or emotion not accompanied by understanding of it', and anoetic is the adjective. In my own experience, this phenomenon is so common that, when I first came across the word, I could not imagine how I had managed without it. Maybe others will feel differently about it. But to me the word no longer seems at all unusual. (2) acataleptic: the excellent Chambers helps here too, defining acatalepsy as 'the unknowableness to a certainty of all things', and again acataleptic is the adjective. The term was originally associated with the Sceptics, I believe, but I think C.B. McCully will stumble upon it very soon in any commentary on (say) the Cartesian turning-point in the history of thought. The vaporettos in my poem 'ply' - literally to and fro - because their function as water-taxis in Venice provides a living for their owners; I describe them as acataleptic because the love poem in question is primarily concerned with the unknowableness of all and everything about us (at any given moment) - the vaporettos are merely an example. 3) apsides: since the word is familiar enough, I assume C.B. McCully is stuck over my use of it. This, I believe, is known as a metaphor. (4) morphallactic: again, an undergraduate primer in rhetorical modes might help C.B. McCully to grasp my use of the word to describe silence. If he will look up synaesthesia (in the rhetorician's rather than the linguist's sense) he will be shoved a little further along the relevant path, I suspect. The rest is his affair, not mine; as Dr Johnson remarked, 'I am not obliged to furnish him with an understanding.' (5) anadyomene: the most rudimentary reading in art history will provide this word pretty quickly - any commentary on (say) Botticelli's Birth of Venus is sure to use it (the word means only that she is coming out of the sea). My use of it to describe Ursula Andress, in her famous first appearance walking out of the sea in the film Dr No, was intended humorously, but (heigh ho) I suppose the joke was lost on C.B. McCully. So it goes. You can't please everyone.

Since I have never before taken the trouble to reply publicly to any review of a book of mine, may I take this opportunity to say how much I regret (1) that the British poetry reading public insists so heavily on a discontinuity between the 'abstract' and 'concrete' parts of the imagination, and will not concede that to certain sensibilities (such as mine) an 'abstract' can be as vitally and even sensually present as (say) wine, women and song (without either side suffering); and (2) that a writer who perhaps knows a touch more in this or that area than his reviewer must needs be branded as 'clever' or 'knowing' and dragged down, when (I feel) the better response in a reader who genuinely cares to understand would be to ask how the words or references in question serve the poem as a whole. (In my 'Cockfight', for example, the mimetic language C.B. McCully quotes underpins the relish for violence which is the mainspring of militarism, and the macho-militarist cast of mind is the poem's subject.) It is tedious to explain myself, and necessarily will make it appear that I feel some kind of superiority. I don't really; others will have material in their skulls that is different from what I have stored in mine (and when I read their poems I do not always expect to take in everything immediately). I notice that, writing on the splendid William Scammell, C.B. McCully complains that Kyd, Beowulf and an IUD carry notes. The notes presumably help certain readers; it seems to me that C.B. McCully is in need of one or two notes himself, and maybe an O Level in English.
Yours

Michael Hulse

SIR: Since Michael Hulse accuses me in effect of ignorance and laziness, I hope he won't mind my sub-O-level sensibility replying to his extraordinary letter.

The point I was trying to make in my review of Propaganda was essentially that his lexical ingenuity could sometimes be discomfiting. I illustrated my remark by reference to the excellent Collins dictionary because (perhaps wrongly) I took that to be the kind of standard reference that would be available in most readers' bookshelves. Michael Hulse bids me - and that means bids us, if any other readers share my discomfiture - make reference to the OED, 'any commentary on . . . the Cartesian turning-point in the history of thought', 'an undergraduate primer in rhetorical modes', and 'any commentary on . . . Botticelli's Birth of Venus'. He is too sanguine, I think - but then it is up to his readers to determine whether his verse is worth the arm-wrestling with the primers and commentaries he recommends.

It is misleading to imply that my own researches were merely a question of skimming through Collins. Faced with a set of books for review, I try to answer the questions of structure each poem asks me. With regard to diction, I am lucky enough to be able to consult the OED (and Supplements); Hulse should note I report that the items in question here 'only hit the mark where there is plenty of contextual support'. It is inconceivable that I would write this without some further reference of the type Hulse so splenetically recommends. Matters of diction, after all, divide into matters of tone and matters of structural congruence. In my review (precisely because I 'genuinely cared to understand') I quite gently queried both. No more.

I didn't set up a distinction (sorry, Hulse's term is a 'discontinuity') between 'abstract' and 'concrete' parts of the imagination. If Hulse reads carefully he will see that I wrote 'there is a very thin line between the cerebral and the merely "clever"'; this is a very different type of distinction. Neither is it true - although this is perhaps the nub of Hulse's problem - to imply that I 'dragged down' his work. On the contrary: if Hulse reads carefully he will come across phrases such as 'Parts . . . are splendid'; 'I also liked . . . , 'Hulse writes well'. I'm sorry these comments are not to his taste. What I did - and do - suggest is that parts of his verse 'are merely clever, and smack of a rather distasteful knowingness'. It is a pity that his prose seems to exhibit the same characteristics.
Christopher B. McCully

This item is taken from PN Review 53, Volume 13 Number 3, January - February 1987.



Readers are asked to send a note of any misprints or mistakes that they spot in this item to editor@pnreview.co.uk
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