INTRODUCTION TO THE FORTHCOMING COLLECTED POEMS OF TERENCE TILLER FROM EYEWEAR - ON THE POET'S CENTENARY
AN INTRODUCTION TO HIS COLLECTED POEMS
Terence Tiller died in 1987, in December; 29 years later this autumn his Collected Poems is to appear, on his centenary. His poems, often explorations of love and desire, and often set in Egypt during
World War II, are almost the poetic equivalent of the Bogart-Bergman film Casablanca. Tiller, who is more or less
a forgotten figure now, published three volumes with the New Hogarth Library in
the Forties. Poems was the first of
these, from 1941; his second was The
Inward Animal, from 1943. His Third, Unarm,
Eros, from 1947, completes a trilogy of wartime poetry arguably unequalled
for its extravagant lyric modernism.
One
of the few contemporary critics to write on Tiller is Andrew Duncan, who emphasizes
the sensitivity and sensuousness of mid-century poetry, especially Tiller’s.
Tiller ‘seems to have devoted much time to writing poetry which was sexy and
romantic’.[1]
Duncan also notes his importance for future poetry: ‘surely he points ahead to
a whole strand of 1960s poetry which was reflexive and self-critical and
preferred the fine to the gross’. Tiller also anticipates ‘the concern with
light’ that ‘appears in poets like David Chaloner and Denise Riley’.[2]
Speaking
of sexy: Tiller, like Keith Douglas, insofar as he brought the twin tensions of
mortal combat and Eros together – though with a far less murderous precision –
might be said to be an influence on Thom Gunn, whose early poetry also
explored, fruitfully, images of men at arms and love. This is a Renaissance
trope, originally – one thinks of Fulke Greville’s poems, such as ‘Sonnet 78’,
with its martial imagery.
This
is Tiller, but could be Gunn: ‘All night they have been wounded on each other,
/ the waves that fall like armour from their poise’ – not least because the
tropes are ones we think of as quintessentially Gunn’s – armour, wounds and
‘poise’.[3]
Even the ending of ‘The Child’ has a characteristically dark, even nihilistic
attitude recalling Gunn’s early collections: ‘The world in which we made you is
not kind.’[4]
If
Gunn was influenced even slightly by Tiller, and the many echoes are striking,
this is yet another instance of a Forties connection to a Fifties Movement
poet. However, rather more even than Gunn, it seems that Geoffrey Hill had been
reading his Tiller by the time he came to write his first major published poem,
the prize-winning ‘Genesis’ of 1952. The opening poem in Unarm, Eros, ‘With the Gift of this Book’, ends with a couplet
whose diction (‘no myth will’, ‘blood’) clearly echoes Hill’s poem: ‘No myth
will ever come to any good: / but biting the wasp’s apple; being blood.’ The
next poem in the collection opens with an image, ‘the world / rolls’ that again
Hill seems to have borrowed for ‘Genesis’.[5]
The
point is not to score points here at the expense of Hill, a poet ripe with
allusion, but to observe several things at once about Tiller’s writing. It was
very much a part of its moment, and embedded itself with many references to the
key moderns – and aspects of this high modern lyric style, at its ripest
fruition in Tiller, were borrowed and continued by poets as different as Gunn,
Ashbery and Hill; and therefore it is plausible to suggest that the style has
never, indeed, been entirely retired.
‘Spring
Letter’, for instance, the second poem in the collection we have been
discussing, is studded with echoes of other poets, some a little too near the
surface to be completely absorbed.[6]
I suspect Tiller did not think in those terms himself, and that, indeed,
following the way that Eliot managed allusion in many of his poems, was aiming
for a more intertextual effect. Some examples in this poem are ‘the washed and
choirboy afternoon’ with its Dylan Thomas feel; stanza four includes the words
‘body’ and ‘image’, which were popular with Yeats, especially in his Byzantium
and Apocalyptic poems. The same poem gives us the very Yeatsian ‘awful beauty’;
and a ‘tigerish whirlwind’, that feels an awful lot like Eliot to me.
All
Tiller’s early collections are, it might be thought, just a little marred by
this fledgling tone whose imitative qualities are often very near the surface,
where influence bleeds into homage or pastiche; but this can be read too as a
poetic device. Gusts of Yeats (‘sensual imaginings’) and Eliot move in and
across the poems, like sand across the Sahara. At the time, this likely made
them at one within the modern lyric tradition and, perhaps to some readers,
unoriginal-sounding apprentice work. However, after more than sixty-five years,
a clutch of the best of Tiller’s poems exemplifies the great end times of the
modernist lyric.
Terence
Tiller’s work of the Forties was written during a time of personal and career
crisis, when the young writer, wishing to have an academic and literary career
in England, instead found himself (for a time literally) trapped in Egypt.
There, he formed associations with the Personal
Landscape poets (associated with the expat magazine of the same name),
including Bernard Spencer and Lawrence Durrell. Tiller was a teacher, not a
soldier. Indeed, before his time in Egypt, he had been Research Scholar,
Director of Studies, and University Lecturer in Medieval History at Cambridge.[7]
Like F.T. Prince, another great war poet of this period, he had to ‘work twice
as hard’ as poet and scholar. He was to find the fruits of his labours
disappointing. When his funding fell through, he was unable to travel to
Florence to study the research materials for his PhD thesis on late-medieval
Pisa (the link to Prince’s Italianate interests is noteworthy).[8]
Cambridge
could only find him a position at Cairo, after his scholarship failed to be
renewed. Tiller was not a public school boy. As such, he always felt somewhat
socially alienated from those Personal
Landscape poets like Durrell, who were so educated. This idea of alienation
runs throughout critical readings of his work; indeed, his Egyptian poetry
collections are quite Freudian in their sense of being unheimlich. The two key studies of this period and place’s poetry, Many Histories Deep: The Personal Landscape
Poets in Egypt, 1940–45 by Roger Bowen, and Personal Landscape: British Poetry in Egypt During the Second World War
by Jonathan Bolton, reflect the way in which Tiller and his poetry have tended
to be considered posthumously.
Bowen’s
chapter on Tiller, ‘Terrence Tiller and the “Customary Self’’’, tends to the
negative. Tiller (like many of the poets that came to notice in the 1940s) is
held critically accountable for a lack of maturity, or even any later
development. According to Bowen, Tiller, who lived in Egypt from September 1939
to September 1946, ‘betrays little or no sense of change or adjustment’.
Further, his poetry remains ‘frozen, in an antechamber of experience’.[9]
Perhaps even worse, Bowen regards him as the classic British snob, ‘unimpressed
by the cultural possibilities of Egypt’s capital’ – especially its bookshops –
who never learned to read or write classical or colloquial Arabic though he
spoke street Arabic fairly well.[10]
This seems unduly harsh. I would rather read Tiller’s acquisition of demotic
Arabic to a competent degree as a sign of positive local engagement, rather
than a turning away from local culture.
As
Jonathan Bolton argues in Personal
Landscapes:
British Poets in Egypt During the Second World War, which reads the Personal
Landscape poets from the perspective of Edward Said’s Orientalism, it was not Tiller especially, but the British poets in
general who tended to ‘orientalise’ the Arabs they met. Bolton notes how Keith
Douglas found them to be ‘unsavoury people’ and observes that the Other, for
Tiller, was not the native population of Egypt, but his own buried self, which
his poetry explores the painful birth or rebirth of.[11]
In this way, Tiller can be located within the personalism of the Apocalyptic
movement, with its interest in private and mythic states and identities.
My
own reading of Tiller does not dwell on his ‘orientalist reaction’ to Egypt as
alienating, to his ‘colonial disdain’ or how he ‘dispenses with locality’. I
would like to note that, if Tiller is to be read as a lyrical modernist, and a
precursor to abstract lyricism, then his tendency to base his poetry on a
‘level of abstraction’ is not entirely surprising, or uninteresting.[12]
While Bowen may be right to observe that Terence Tiller was not a totally
sympathetic visitor to Egypt, such an interpretation seems slightly
over-determined; in expecting a direct empirical response from Tiller, relating
his poems to the ‘exterior’ factuality of Arabic/Islamic culture, Bowen is de
facto asking for a style that was not the poet’s own. Tiller was not a Thirties
poet (in the sense of being journalistic or openly political).
Tiller,
a young and sensitive scholar confronting financial struggles as the world
battered itself to death, unable to leave a strange and remote city, might be
excused for being a little overwhelmed. It would be nice to think that such a
young man would have arrived in Cairo with the sensibilities of thirty or forty
years later, but he did not – and his relative aloofness could be blamed on
rather more private reasons than an ideology of cultural superiority; in fact,
we know that Tiller felt socially insecure among his Western peers.
Bowen
notes that one of his colleagues, Robin Fedden, considered Tiller the most
formally astute of the poets writing for Personal
Landscape, the one with the most metaphysical bent, the poet most dedicated
to strict prosody and with a ‘curious tensity of style’.[13]
It is a style that, in many ways, exemplifies an ideal of ‘stylishness’, a
‘hybrid, joining Auden with Eliot’ (as Bowen calls it).
Tolley
is another critic of Tiller’s that has little good to say about his style,
which he feels is borrowed from Empson: ‘Tiller often proceeds as Empson did
with a series of sententious phrases.’[14]
Tolley feels Tiller emphasises the image too much, so that ‘the imagery often
takes over the poem’. It is hard to see how a poem can be both too sententious
and image-based at once (they are different forms of poetic argument).[15]
Tolley has problems with Tiller’s syntax, too, and his general tone: ‘The
weakness of Tiller’s less good poetry is its excessive obliqueness. There is an
overelaboration of sensitive observation and the appearance of subtlety of
distinction that is not sustained by further acquaintance. This goes along with
a syntactical elusiveness.’[16]
I
am not sure what Tolley means precisely by ‘further acquaintance’. How long
does one have to live with a Tiller poem to discover that its ‘subtlety of
distinction’ is only a sham, I wonder? The ‘overelaboration of sensitive
observation’ is another way of saying, as Duncan did, that Tiller is very
sensitive and sensuous in his attention to his own self and to the world around
him; it is exactly this passionate intensity that distinguishes the Forties
Style, as I have elsewhere called it, and that I welcome.
As
for syntactical elusiveness, this is another aspect of Tiller’s style that is
attractive – his lines are able to weave their arguments through rather complex
contortions – as in ‘Egyptian Dancer’, to superb performative effect. Tiller’s
style – much like the great American poet, John Ashbery’s – employs and enjoys
the artifice of poetic rhetoric and expression to explore and display the
meanderings of a sensitive, even dandyish elegance of intellection.
Tolley
also quotes Alan Ross as observing in a review that Tiller is ‘charming, full
of grace’ and like Donne. It is hard to imagine a poet so damned for his gifts.
Tolley himself also notes the ‘brilliance and coldness’ of Tiller’s work, and
that it is ‘impressively memorable’.[17]
Tolley ultimately concludes that Tiller is a sort of figurehead for all that
goes wrong at the end stages of full-blown high modernism, confirming my own
sense that his poetry is, in fact, poetic modernism at its ripest apex: ‘We
seem to encounter one of the elements of modernism carried to the point of
self-defeat: the life of the surface is over-developed, with the consequence
that feeling is less effectively brought into focus.’ Still, there is ‘a parade
of sensitivity’.[18]
John
Press, poet and critic, in his Rule and
Energy, also has ambiguously positive problems with Tiller. His poems are
‘bafflingly difficult, because of their elaborate texture, the subtlety of
Tiller’s emotional perceptions, the darting, elusive quality of his thought,
and the wealth of scholarship with which he loads his verse’.[19]
This almost sounds like Eliot.
His
best poems are those ‘uncluttered by ornate trills, the argument not smothered
beneath a profusion of glittering images’. Again, we see that the problem some
critics have had with Tiller is related to his excessively ornate gifts. He is
‘most successful when he keeps his eye on the object, and restrains his fancy
from adventuring into recondite fields of speculation or into labyrinths of
brilliant imagery’.[20]
When he rules his energies, then.
Though
unable ‘to enjoy or even grasp the drift of much that Tiller has written’,
Press does concede that the poet has ‘a formidable talent’. It may be that
Tiller is not fully English: ‘the poetic learning and the rhythmical complexity
derive from the Italian and French elements in our culture and in our language’
– making him sound, intriguingly, a lot like F.T. Prince, with his own ‘Italian
element’.[21]
It
is hard to think all this profusion of style and intellect could be blamed on
one man – brilliant and cold, a parade of sensitivity, sententious, image-rich,
scholarly, darting, baffling, glittering, ornate, charming, full of grace – and
one begins to wonder if what we have here is a failure of criticism itself at
the period – a moment Tolley, Ross, and others could not conceive of a
different style, another modern way, which was both emotive and aesthetic,
engaged with depth and surface. In short, that this Forties Style of daring,
glaring opposites, essentially fused in Tiller’s work, rather than being
praised for its originality and extension of previous modern modes simply blows
all critical fuses – and does not compute.
For me, Tiller’s
1940s collections almost form one continuous and developing work, and, far from
being frozen, develop across the books, while maintaining an unusual
consistency of theme and concern. As is perhaps the most remarked upon aspect
of his work, Tiller was interested in the ‘inner animal’ growing within the
body of the common, smiling public man – in many ways, a personalized, Freudian
myth borrowed from the rough beast slouching to Bethlehem to be born; in
Tiller, it will be born in Cairo, close by, and the birth pangs are in tune
with the world at war; in short, the neurotic conflicts in the personality of
the poet result in the breaking through of a less ordered chaotic sense of
self, or sensuousness. In the third collection of this wartime moment, this
spiritual/erotic rebirthing is paralleled by the birth of a daughter, a
striking emergence of an apparently biographical detail that also manages to
imitate Yeats’s daughter poetry.
Tiller
is much taken with images of gestation and nascence – and his sense of the
fertility within (and the struggle it engenders) is markedly influenced by, not
only Yeats, or Eliot’s reflections on sterility, but Dylan Thomas, whose
‘narcissistic’ reflections on womb and tomb so bothered Holbrook. Tiller is
peculiarly taken with this subject, and his best-known poems tend to feature
mirrors and doubled selves reminiscent of their expressionist (and symbolic)
use in the 1940s films of Orson Welles (notably, Citizen Kane and The Lady
from Shanghai). That Tiller saw films, and enjoyed film noir, seems evident
from his longer poem, ‘Detective Story’, starring a heroine who looks like Veronica
Lake.
Poems, published in 1941, is the most arch-lyrical of the
three collections that form his Forties trilogy. A brief consideration of
opening lines shows the diction and register: ‘In the unloosed fantastic summer
weather’; ‘the instant splendor, the swung bells that speak’; ‘they rode ahead
of death on the strong turning’; ‘Salt waters was the oval fish, and flash’;
‘Crouched in the womb I learned this fear’; ‘Running to you, as the sad beast
runs home’; ‘Lovers have wept and been afraid’; ‘All were lovely and with vivid
souls’; ‘Consider, metaphysical my heart’; ‘The Grecian tulip and the gothic
rose’; and, in the collection’s final poem, ‘Now the night finds us; the bright
worlds advance.’[22]
It
is not hard to detect the Yeatsian diction (beast, vivid); or the tropes of
Eliot and Thomas (‘wept and been afraid’; ‘in the womb’). Tiller is very much
under the sway, here, of the modern poets of the 1920s and 1930s, as a young
poet of the time would have been. What marks him out is, of course, that he is
actually in the desert that Yeats had only imagined the rough beast slouching
in, and his fear, though arguably metaphysical, has a historical cast to it –
he was surrounded in a war-torn part of North Africa.
Even
given his rhetorical precursors, his own rhetoric is always inflected with an urgency
that ends up making his final collection of the Forties particularly
impressive. Also of note is that Tiller’s poems are – in rather contemporary
fashion – not capitalised at the start of each line, but only at every new
sentence (unlike, for instance, the work of Nicholas Moore). This allows for
the elegant fluidity of the work to be displayed more effectively, and in this
way he was ahead of his time, stylistically. Of the 1941 poems, one stands out,
‘XX’.
The
argument of this poem seems to be the following – lovers, confronted with the
burial of a beautiful love object (death) have cried and been afraid; in the
‘heraldic air’ paradoxically the fictional beast the unicorn ‘rages’ very much
immortal, as on the Grecian urn of Keats; beauty singes us in this ceremonial
and artificial realm seemingly untouched by mortality.
Following
the familiar myth of the unicorn, and as all poets of courtly love knew (and
many weavers of tapestries), only a virgin maiden could gentle the fabulous
beast and allow it to be captured, even slain. And so, either the virgin dies
in pursuit of the tamed beautiful ideal (is deflowered) or the legend dies
(chaste, ideal love); in the final stanza, we have the Yeatsian sense of the interpenetration
of forces and things – the dancer and the dance are intermingled – and so too
are the unicorn and the hunter-virgin – both are immortal – are, like the
chevron of a ‘sudden bird’, a kind of phoenix event, perhaps (the unicorn was a
symbol of the Incarnation). Chevrons were a key part of heraldic design; and
used by the Spartans, those most warlike of ancient Greeks.
Tiller is fascinated by the tension
between the actual, the body with its sexual force, its rage, its blood and
desire, and the cultivated achievements of art and religious poise – or war and
peace; or war, and states of truce, or amnesty. His Cairo was one such false
oasis of Edenic calm, just before the arrival of total war; and so too, was his
outsider’s Englishness a veil that drew him apart from the Egyptians he saw and
met. His life, in study, work and poetry, as well as personal passion, was such
a balanced tension between passion’s sorrows and the consolations of aesthetic
display; one thinks here of the Freudian apercu that all art is born of
suppressed libido.
The
two immortalities are those of being painted (art) and dreamt (desired,
imagined) – so that, again, this erotic, mythological relationship exists in
several temporal dimensions beyond the daily. Art and dreams are not one, but
two. We see, in reading this poem, the intricacy of Tiller’s craft, and the
thought behind the poems – where lyricism is put to complex and ambiguous work,
employing expert knowledge of various fields. This is poetry at home with the
heart and the mind, the passions and the intellect.
Tiller’s second
collection, published two years later in 1943, is a further elaboration on
these themes, and more. It opens with a brief foreword:
The first and the
last of these poems present (in a social and a religious mode respectively) the
pattern of a personal experience that must now have been shared by many. The
rest of the book is my own mode of this experience. Now that the war has taken
millions from their familiar environment and associates, its impact and the
impact of strangeness must have shaken, and perhaps destroyed, many a customary
self. There will have been a shocked and defensive rebellion; reconciliation
must follow; the birth of some mutual thing in which the old and the new, the
self and the alien, are combined after war. This childbirth is not easy; the
pain is sure to be there.
For myself, and
for many in the same or a worse position, I have tried to express the three
parts of this pattern: the first distress; rebellion against place and
circumstance; slow mutual absorption ending in the birth of something at once
myself and a new self and Egypt. The ‘inward animal’ is this child, so
unwillingly conceived and carried, so hardly brought forth.[23]
This is a useful
passage; it reminds us of aspects of the Forties that are in some ways strange
to us now: the idea of a displacement of millions, so that a ‘social mode’ can
address a personal yet universal experience of uprootedness; the religious mode;
and the need to justify the recourse to ‘personal experience’ through
contextualising it, historically.
The
personal mode is still with us, and though it may be somewhat hackneyed now to
use a trope of gestation to explore self-discovery, personal growth, and even
more radical challenges to the inner self, the method and aims are clear. Taken
in the context of postcolonial criticism of Tiller, this statement seems to
excuse his apparent discomfort in Egypt. He admits to feelings of ‘distress’,
then ‘rebellion against place and circumstance’ and finally ‘slow mutual
absorption’.
Tiller
did not choose to be stranded in Egypt, strange to him and new, and it clearly,
coinciding as it did with the war, overwhelmed him with its various sights and
sounds. What seems admirable, at least to me, is how he sought to take these
experiences and locate some order, some aesthetic synthesis, in them – not
least because they were ‘shared by many’.
At
the heart of the collection lies a sequence of poems, ‘XIV’ to ‘XVIII’. These
five poems, given the stated aims of the book, explore dualities of image,
reflection and self in terms expressly erotic and Egyptian (restaurants,
belly-dancers) and also religious (Coptic Church) They form the midway of
Tiller’s Forties trilogy and warrant further exploration. One of the best known
of his poems is ‘Egyptian Restaurant’:[24]
This
poem opens up a rather surprising dichotomy, or union of disunified subjects –
for the poem begins in the image-conscious, visually fragmented and multiple
mind of the poetic speaker, but turns its grounding to find ‘one’ who has the
‘knowledge that he is’ unlike the ‘we’ dining party the ‘I’ is part of. Both
the I and the One are ‘lost in a mist of mirrors as in tears’ – but only the
one knows the way out; the I is ‘fleeting, plural’ – lost in a ‘crowd of
jeweled ghostly Us’. Or maybe they – the we, I, us and one – are all equally
lost in the trope of endless infinite mirrors.
This seems to me the best poem on
multiplicity of self in relation to ideas of indeterminacy and observation
(ideas brought forth by Freud, modern physics and Picasso, among others) that
we have from the period – and it reminds me of the epistemological poem about
the ‘variousness of things’ that we get in Louis MacNeice’s ‘Snow’ with its ‘drunkenness
of things being various’. I also think, of course, of cinema, and especially
Welles, who made divided selves and mirrors something of a specialty, though it
may be Shakespeare in discussion with Banquo’s Ghost that offers the textual
basis for such thought.
This
is not just a slice of life poem – a poem occasioned by a trip to a restaurant
– and the diction veers between the precise and the precious, wonderfully:
‘edges of acute refraction’ sounds scientific; ‘toss of beams’ is more
lascivious and gay. There is a desire, as we have seen, in some critics of
Forties poetry, to always locate the moment the poet becomes ever more lucid
and empiricist; this poem by Tiller is certainly concerned with observational
data, but is not anecdotally simplistic.
It
is followed by ‘Street Scene’ – the poetic speaker has escaped the seemingly
infinite confines of the mirrored dining world of El Hati, and is now on ‘Rue
Soliman Pasha, Cairo’.[25]
Tiller does want the reader to appreciate the specificity of location, here –
these poems are extended in space as well as time. The opening lines again show
the concern with seeing and self: ‘Down glittering rows the windows run /
displaying you in shoes or books’ – the ‘you’ being a woman whose ‘silk and
linen’ is draped on ‘a thousand simpering yous in wax’.
There
is something disturbingly fragmented and reified about the female you that the
poetic speaker sees, on this shopping street – for she is identified with parts
of commodities – shoes and books, silk and linen. And she is cut up and divided
into the suitably melodramatic ‘thousand’ pieces. At least, we might reflect,
this you is at least partly made of books, a nice counterpoint to the
potentially sexist ‘shoes’.
In
the last stanza, the poet becomes ‘a maker-image too’ as ‘the passing images of
you / along my busy street’ affect him. In this sense, Tiller brings to bear
the idea, in physics, that the observer alters the experiment. By observing the
female love object, Tiller has himself reflected back in the myriad windowpanes,
himself become an image-maker, making images of himself. And also, textually,
his poem is a repeated image of the poem before, only now the we is an I, and
they have escaped the interior mirrors, and found themselves lost without each
other’s real presences.
In
the next poem, ‘Elegy II’, subtitled ‘Shop
Window’ [Tiller’s italics], the theme is explored further. ‘In the confused
magnificence of love / is no community, but unsharing crowds / of shuttered
faces where no secrets move.’[26]
Though set in Cairo, the poem also mentions the great London shopping street,
Regent Street, and ends on a balcony above the bustle of the city described:
‘[…] For he loves you still / who leans and weeps upon the window-sill.’ We are
a long way from Eliot’s bored men leaning out of their windows. Tiller’s
emotionality is cinematic in its setting and its expressiveness.
The
poem is odd for breaking into a rant halfway through – ‘Never believe us; poets
tell you lies: / the burglar breaks the window, and the door / blows inwards,
and pictures tatter loose.’ The argument here is a bit unclear, but it seems as
if the poet is somehow being compared to the burglar, whose robbery has
unexpected consequences even after having gone, leaving a windy house behind, that
damages the art inside (art not worth stealing). It is trite to say that poets
lie, and one wonders what it means in a poem that ostensibly ends with a poet
weeping over a lost love.
This
returns us to the muddled magnificence of the opening. Awkward syntax tells us
that there is no community in the confused magnificence of love – only
unsharing crowds. This is a paradoxical claim, and one worth trying to tease
out. Love is not a public good, but selfish and crowded – it is, in short,
neither exclusive nor caring. We are in the midst of a love triangle. But also
one thinks of the shuttered faces (of Muslim women?) on the Cairo streets.
In
the second stanza, Tiller writes: ‘Behind the dreaming shutters of our faces /
the spider fingers thoughts, and we dissect / with sharp artistic hands our
gains and losses.’ One detects here echoes of Eliot’s ‘automatic hand’ that
puts on the gramophone. The faces, then, are the faces of the houses on the
street, windows shuttered, but also those who walk those streets, as if closed
to visitors or strangers. In this sense, the exterior and the interior again
change places, mirroring each other in imagery, as Tiller is wont to do.
In
the final stanza Tiller notes – and not without drama or complaint – that ‘our
delight will never be alone’. In this he is observing what Sartre said of hell
– it is other people. Love, too, requires more than one person; but in such
crowded places expect a mad bustle, not disciplined order; ardour is confused,
but also magnificent. Or so the lying poet has found, weeping out over the
public air.
In
‘Coptic Church’ that follows, ‘magnificence’ again is found, but now the
duplicity is with the priests, not the poets, as Tiller discerns how ‘the
blazoned myth of Horus lies / within these faded images / where glowed Mithraic
pigment in / the Thracian monks’ symbolic line’ – a splendid four lines. The
image reveals images below, doubled up across time – religion is a series of
identities interleaved, a palimpsest – ‘the dust of worship in the wall, / the
worship of ourselves in God’. Again, Tiller notes how the exterior – the wall –
is within also (in God, ourselves) – or rather, how exteriorized forces and
aspects (art, poetic words, performance) – reveal the inner depths they both
seek to contain but ineluctably release.[27]
Release
of the inner through outer performance culminates in Tiller’s crowd-pleaser:
‘Egyptian Dancer’. This topic was something of a shared pleasure among Tiller’s
crowd, as Bernard Spencer has a similar poem with the same title. Tiller’s poem
has not aged well, at least on the surface – a straightforward male gaze
appreciating the exotic, erotic charms – the body in motion and display – of a
foreign woman, being paid, as a quasi-sex worker, to entertain men – is
arguably a little sexist. One wants to subtitle this poem ‘Girls! Girls!
Girls!’ It is astonishingly explicit and erotic, for its time; one searches in
any of Larkin (who presumably enjoyed such things) for any sensuous description
of female sexual performance (or pleasure) as visceral; this is empiricism with
gusto, well ahead of the Movement in some ways. Formally, too, it breaks
refreshingly with more orthodox modes of syntax, dropping commas in rushed
lines like ‘and sweat breaks out she is bright as metal while the skirt’. Of
course, we cannot help but think of Frank Kermode’s work on the image of the
dancer in this context.[28]
The
dancer is, also, the poet, and the poet’s poem. We have been warned that the
poet lies. The poet also performs. The opening line slowly, with intention to
tempt, sidles out, just as the line says the subject does. The drum-rhythm is
the rhythm of poetry, and the ecstatic pulse that sees the dancer end in the
darkness of ‘past love’, orgasmically drained, is also the text. Subject and
text are one. But, as we know, it is also a poem of watching, and of lust, and
of frank appreciation, so there is an onanistic, narcissistic sense of
self-regard in the text – the text is turning itself on with its jouissance.
There are a number of striking
phrases and images in the poem, disarmingly erotic: ‘silver across the
breasts’; ‘coils on her own loins’; ‘breasts are alive / and writhing’; ‘the
emphatic sex’. Her navel that ‘winks like a wound’ manages to combine a rather
violent allusion to a vagina, and an eye – apt, since again, this is a poem
about exterior and interior birth, the birth, in this case, of desire enacted,
and desire fulfilled.
The second half of the poem gives us
the ‘half-naked body’ – for indeed, the poem is half over. In the penultimate
stanza, the opening word is ‘Wilder’ and then the colon indicates that that is
also an order the poem is bound to obey.
I now turn to a
few key poems from his final book of the Forties trilogy, Unarm, Eros. This collection of thirty poems is introduced on the
title page with a quote from the Yeats poem, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’: ‘The
unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; Night
resonance recedes …’[29]
Tiller’s
typographical use of ellipsis here is a way of emphasising how both day and
night recede after the evening revelry – how images of day, and night
resonances, terminate. But not for Tiller, whose book, in titular fashion
concerned with a martial figuration of erotic love – the love of soldiers, the
battle of love – seeks to express and explore both the images and the
resonances of days and nights in Egypt during wartime. As such, the poems
occupy temporal occasions of blazing sunlight, or shade and darkness.
This
preoccupation with the dual meaning, and implications, of the image – both as
ocular, empirically-observed thing, and as romantic symbol (pace Yeats) –
drives Tiller. In ‘Substitutes’ the ‘private sadness’ is squeezed ‘until words
/ pearl; round it, and all images become / the private sadness and the life;
and a name / blood’.[30]
The self’s identity in language, the name, is made flesh and blood in a
creative act that is half Mass, and half cleansing of a wound; the image of the
words pearled around the squeezed sadness is almost physically gross in its
implications, but also reminds us how the oyster dies when cut open to retrieve
the pearl. The main point for Tiller is how the private myth, the self-story,
generates, now, the poem – as it also did for Yeats, if not as explicitly.
Tiller advocates ‘going in and not around’ – ‘sucking the earth as wheat;
become a field’. There is no substitute for being in the thing one writes of,
for being that thing (much as Berkeley felt God put the heat into fire, the
cold into ice) – the poet transcends myth by entering the mythic world, as an
actuality: ‘being blood’.
This
idea is more flamboyantly expressed in ‘Spring Letter’,[31]
which makes clear the division between the poetic speaker (‘me’) and ‘the
world’; the world is not the ‘more inward thing’ of ‘calm acres’ and ‘Mozartean
air’, or ‘spring’ – just as ‘a wet garment on the body shows / the curl of limb
and muscle, this day / droops in the shape of secret images’. The epistemology
of this poem is a little unclear, but I think that the argument is as follows –
the world presses like wet clothing on to a deeper (and stronger thing) –
paradoxically, a muscular body, an ironic trope for an inner self, especially
as that inner self is compared to air and spring – elemental aspects of calm;
calm the world and its wartime violence (‘the cold / indecency of outward
violence’) threatens.
In
the poem’s fifth stanza, Tiller explores this paradox of outer and inner
connexion, these tissues of violence and order, of world and self, in terms of
love:
Love, and the
lovely clothing of its play,
its thinking film
upon the flesh; the stride
and ache of
afterthought to our long woe
our tenderness,
the hangman of the blood:
here in your
flowered scarf of Egypt, deep
as seasons under
water, blooms our good.
This poem is
Shakespearian in style – iambic, rhetorical and verbally playful – and, again,
one sees here the Elizabethan impact often thought to emanate from Gunn by way
of Yvor Winters. Perhaps, though, we are closest to Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s
Clothes’. Tiller sets up a series of binary oppositions that align with his
earlier list of what is of the world, and what of the self, or soul – a
properly theological catalogue to be made in the desert: love/lovely clothing
of its play; flesh/thinking film – so that the body corresponds to the Platonic
ideal (love), with its flesh contrasted with the artifice above – the clothing,
the thinking film, that plays like spume upon the surface. It is this artifice,
this tenderness that hangs the blood – that holds the body at bay with its
desires, another paradox. The rainy seasons, deep under water, bloom – the
surface is sand.
Tiller’s complex metaphysical
conceits develop in ‘Hands’, which continues his use of tropes of love and
vision, of language and what lies beneath. In it, we can begin to discern his
poetics of sensuous rhetoric – that is, his equivocation of rhetorical forms,
in speech and poetry, with shapes of desire in the world, and the inner self.
Readers
of Tiller will be familiar with his counter-intuitive statements (‘only the
hands can love’) that play with metaphysical wit. Here the argument seems to
be, again, an inversion of the physical and interior planes of experience that
borders on a Gnostic heresy – the transcendent world, the True, as it were, can
only be located in the fallen world. In this instance, the claim is that,
during erotic courtship, ‘foreplay’ and love-making, darkness shuts off the
power of the eyes, and ‘the lovely shapes of rhetoric’, the visible signs of
persuasive passion, the eyes, ‘speak’. In short, the seductive powers of
looking, and even kissing – emphasised for their verbal tropes of rhetoric and
tongues – are failed orators, or courtiers, once the night comes and lovers are
abed. Only the hands can locate and express ‘love’ – despite darkness being ‘a
girl-eater’ that devours the sexual object – and pull desire from the abyss of
pure carnality, into the firelight of ‘learning and thinking’ – for hands
‘carry everything’ – even bearing the girl up out of the darkness of sex, to
somewhere altogether calmer (not ‘the shouting of blood’). I am not sure this
is a convincing argument, but it is certainly an ornate and clever one.
It introduces the secret image of
these poems – a high lyricism turning – like a twisting, convulsed lover – on
the bed of its own metaphysical making, fluently enjoying the paradoxes
unleashed when poetry is both modern and romantic, as much Forties poetry
sought to be – that is, personal, and mythic, in the Yeatsian sense, but also
in a sense closer to an ideal of private myth. These are poems about rhetoric,
using rhetoric to question and, indeed, enact the limits of rhetoric. They are
performative. They perform their problematic poetics. One cannot accuse these
poems of merely being stylish, even sentimentally so – for they are supremely
stylish. They bracket style and seek to bleed it of meaning; the blood being
ink.
This reaches its crescendo in a
strange poem near the end of Unarm, Eros,
‘The Phoenix Hour’. The Thebaid hours are likely those of desert monks in
fifth-century Egypt in the Thebaid region – but also, in a brilliant ambiguity,
the epic work of Statius (Seven Against
Thebes), which was significant during the Middle Ages (Chaucer, Dante,
Spenser and others borrowed from it). Statius’ Virgil-inspired style was also,
along with its martial themes of war, rhetorically sophisticated.
Here, Tiller fuses monastic austere
devotion (Love with a capital L) with the rhetoric of epic poetry, and courtly
love – in such cases, the rhetorical is the spiritual, artificial and devoted,
neo-Platonic – the possession utterly, without ‘ceremonies of sex’. There is a
passionate verbal art, then, that poetry allows access to, which has the
ceremonial grandeur of noble war and religious devotion, yet is unblooded by
physical touch – ‘wedded like rays’ that are ‘clever and bodiless’.
Tiller is on a search for a
sun-cleansed ontology for love – one beyond a ‘brittle fury’ (one recalls in
this the second stanza of ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, and also the
‘uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor’ from ‘The Magi’[32]).
Love might be like the phoenix. The phoenix, an Egyptian mythological creature,
was based in Heliopolis, home of the Sun-God, Ra. The burning away after
centuries, of this beautiful firebird, to release a new version of its
exquisite song, promises a resurrection.[33]
In the First Letter of the
Corinthians, Paul writes of Caritas (charity) as being one of the three
greatest gifts, after faith and hope.[34]
Caritas is a pure love, generous and without guile. ‘Hysterica caritas mounting
towards the voice’ – an extraordinary line – seems to be an oxymoron much like
‘terrible beauty’ – in this case, an excessively emotional, panic-stricken love
(belying Paul’s claims for its serenity), about to emit as a scream, or cry of orgasmic
exultation. The problem for readers of this poem is in identifying the
addressee – is the poetic speaker on the verge of hysterical charity addressing
a phoenix, a Yeats, a lover, himself as poet, or indeed, the poetic act or text
itself? All seem likely, or equally unlikely. There is a sense of futility here
– and I feel the argument underlying the poem (personal and mythic) fails to
fully establish an ‘objective correlative’, as if the ‘nothing else to do’ –
the dying fall of the poem – is both post-coital and post-scriptum. The poet
cannot go on; the voice can do no more.
This is the paradoxical failure of
Tiller’s Forties Style – its ‘marvelous’ ‘magnificence’ is often clever and
bodiless – a lyric abstraction whose brilliance is one step away from the
dandyish irony of The New York School, in its excessively opaque diction. Yet
Tiller is no poster-boy for apocalypse. Indeed, when critics or anthologists
have tended to favour his work they have hit upon his lucid Egyptian poems, of
which there are several. Perhaps ‘Camels’ and ‘Lecturing to Troops’ are the
best examples of a ‘Movement style’ born in the desert in the 1940s, far away
from its ostensible origins in post-war 1950s Britain. As I seek to do
throughout this dissertation, I want to problematise styles and stylistic
periods, because the poets themselves did this – were various in the Forties,
with their ‘anthology style’. For, no less than Prince, Tiller enjoyed a
multitude of rhetorical styles and approaches (as many young poets do). Let us
start with ‘Camels’.
This
poem, in diction and syntax, anticipates Larkin’s style (‘baffled a little, a
little unsure’), but also contains Tiller’s blend of tropes (bodily parts,
faces, masks) and slightly ornate diction (‘strange’, ‘supercilious’, ‘deliberating’).
It is the acceptable face of Forties verse, perhaps – but again, not much like
the war poetry of Keith Douglas.
One notes immediately the rhetorical
repetition in both the first and last stanzas in lines one and two – geese
twice, blind twice. There is no doubt a clever reference to blinds used to spot
birds in this, but also the fact that the opening stanza opens with unlimited
sky vision ‘I see’ and the last ends with a blind, or limited gaze. What this
poem chiefly is, though, is a clear ‘empirical poem’ of the 1950s variety,
using a regular stanza, rhyme and metre (more or less) to describe a subject,
camels, with witty simile and metaphor, drawing a conclusion at the end.
‘Lecturing to Troops’ is one of
Tiller’s common anthology pieces, and is even more in the Movement ambit, with
the troops ‘wanting girls and beer’ – and Tiller as a poetic speaker (he
lectured to troops) feeling ‘neat and shy’. One thinks of Larkin’s awkward
Church-goer here. The poetic speaker decides it is ‘useless to be friendly and
precise’. Further on, we get that reference to smut we know from Larkin: ‘The
strangeness holds them: a new planet’s uniform, / grasped like the frilly
pin-ups in their tent’.
I
wish to end my discussion of 40s Tiller by noting his last poem of this trilogy
of the Forties – his final poem in Unarm,
Eros, ‘Detective Story’.[35]
It is a strange, complex, mid-length poem in three sections; it seems too good
to be true, but here is the quintessential Forties poem, in blocks of forties,
times three, echoing his trilogy of Forties books. This is not entirely
fanciful – the poem ends ‘All this I read’. And the text itself is a cornucopia
(no other word will do) of images, tropes, references, and merged and confused
identities and confessions, as killers and victims each speak, taking on each
other’s voices. Indebted to the multivocal The
Waste Land, but far more chockablock with references to mass or popular
culture than Eliot ever was (except perhaps in ‘Macavity the Mystery Cat’) –
‘Detective Story’ is more Audenesque. It is the ur-Tiller poem.
I
also say it is the quintessential Forties poem, if a critic wanted to locate
one, because it effortlessly blends high and low diction, flamboyant themes and
registers, is melodramatic, but also witty, romantically personal but also
classical in form, and utterly forgotten now. I find it hard to imagine such a
delightful, rich and clever poem – especially one about that most English of
subjects, detective fiction – so overlooked now. There is no poem of the 1950s
(save perhaps by Larkin) written in English that is any better, or more fun.
There is a line in this poem, ‘the final wonder of my disappearing’ that we
must surely be able to apply to Tiller himself. His own disappearance as a
figure of poetic interest is a mystery, indeed.
What remains, for a contemporary
reader, though, is Tiller’s exemplary fusion of emotionality and erudition, of
personal expression, and a fearless interest in the ornate artifice of poetry,
with a love of glittering image, the thrills and dangers of surface pleasures,
and alertness to textual and psychic depths. Linguistically and intellectually
daring, yet, indeed, sexy and romantic, Tiller is the sort of poet more poets
might want to consider emulating, as they search for their own high styles at a
time of political and personal challenge in the twenty-first century.
It is for this reason that I am so
grateful to the Tiller Estate, and especially Matthew Tiller, his grandson, for
assiting me in compiling what will surely, for the foreseeable decades, be the
first and chief source of Tiller poetry
for contemporary readers. That this book includes all the poems Tiller, wrote,
and had published, including from his many later books, is all to the good,
though I have, in this essay, and up until now, tended to value his Cairo
poems, rather more than his London ones. This bias is to be corrected in a
later essay I hope to write on his later poems. Suffice it to say, for now,
that my own emphasis is based on a love of the 1940s period, and is not a
comment on the later poems’ inherent qualities. Tiller was never a dull, and
rarely if ever an inelegant poet.
In
some ways his later career mirrored that of Louis MacNeice (another poet
influenced by Yeats and Auden). Both poets worked as radio producers at the
BBC; and both apparently struggled with the effects of too much alcohol
consumption, taken too often. Here the comparison needs to end, because whereas
MacNeice has become taken up as a critical darling of many later poets (Heaney,
and Muldoon, to name two), few if any poets of note have yet to fully endorse
Terence Tiller. His work is an
undiscovered country.
There was a time, when I was younger
and hopelessly naïve, when such lack of recognition for poets I loved or
admired stirred me to rage. Oblivion?! I was unsure what world this
could be where such poems could exist without many, if any, admirers. Now, as I
have turned 50, I recognize a more somber fact of literary existence: almost
all poems, almost all poets, remain mainly unread, unrecognized, and unstudied,
not only in their own times, but in those that come later. The myth of time as
the great critical sifter is surely false. Time merely throws more poems and
poets away every hour, every year.
Terence Tiller’s greatest claim to
fame now might be his work on the first adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. Tiller, born in 1916 in Cornwall, would not have found
2016 a less stony ground on which to throw his witty, complex, stylish and
often baroque poems of rich intellection and heterosexual eroticism. Arguably
elitist in terms of tone, purpose and design even in 1946, 70 years later his
poems, for all their glittering beauty, are in some ways as remote as the lurid
gemstones of a bizarre planet we may never reach. As one obituary noted, Tiller was an expert on chess, astrophysics, and even pubic lice... he seemed to know everything, and his meticulous sense of time, and emotiveness, evidenced the dual aspects of his excitable, yet highly-intelligent, character.
This radiant eccentricity, however,
is the poems’ true value. If we now try to read poems for what they give to our
own sense of what we want the world to be, we will miss precisely the
strangeness of other minds, other styles, and other visons, that by their very
definition seek not to guarantee solidarity or confirm our solid judgements;
but astonish, astound, and challenge us with their difficult otherness. New forms
of critical study might want to begin to celebrate any poetics, any poetic
style, that aims not to be at one with its society; but is alien, flamboyant,
and self-remarkable. Tiller’s current canonical irrelevance (he has been out of
print for half a century and is rarely anthologized) can in this way be read as
an observable fact to be overcome with delight. There is arguably no better
lesser-known English poet of the 20th century. What you have before
you is quite simply a book of brilliant, different, things.
TODD SWIFT, BA, MA, PHD
MAIDA VALE, AUGUST 21, 2016
[3] Terence Tiller, Unarm, Eros (London: Hogarth Press, 1947), p. 48.
[4] Tiller, p. 48.
[5] ‘Genesis’ is collected
in Geoffrey Hill, For the Unfallen: Poems
1952–1958 (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959) but had appeared
as early as 1952 in a Fantasy Press anthology from Oxford.
[6] Tiller, Unarm, Eros, pp. 11–13.
[7] Roger Bowen, Many
Histories Deep: The Personal Landscape Poets in Egypt, 1940–45 (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1995), p. 95.
[8] Bowen, p. 96.
[9] Bowen, p. 95.
[10] Bowen, p. 97.
[11] Jonathan Bolton, Personal Landscapes: British Poets in Egypt
During the Second World War (New York: Saint Martin’s Press, 1997), pp.
53–58.
[12] Bowen, p. 102.
[13] Bowen, p. 113.
[14] Tolley, Poetry of the Forties, p. 50.
[15] Tolley, p. 50.
[16] Tolley, p. 50.
[17] Tolley, p. 51.
[18] Tolley, p. 52.
[19] John Press, Rule and Energy:
Trends in British Poetry Since the Second World War (London: Oxford
University Press, 1963), p. 216.
[20] Press, p. 217.
[21] Press, p. 220.
[22] Terence Tiller, Poems
(London: Hogarth Press, 1941), p. 40.
[23] Terence Tiller, The Inward Animal (London: Hogarth Press, 1943), p. 8.
[24] Bernard Spencer has a
poem of the same title; and one also titled ‘Egyptian Dancer’ – suggesting
mutual influence and discussion among the Personal
Landscape group.
[25] Tiller, The Inward Animal, p. 28.
[26] Tiller, The Inward Animal, pp. 29–30.
[27] Tiller, The Inward Animal, pp. 30–31.
[28] See Frank Kermode, The
Romantic Image.
[29] Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 267.
[30] Terence Tiller, Unarm, Eros, p. 10.
[31] Tiller, p.11.
[32] Yeats, p. 181.
[33] Wilhelm Max Müller, Egyptian Mythology
(Whitefish: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), p. 31.
[34] I Corinthians 13.
[35] Tiller, pp. 51–55.
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