confronts the Gloom Monster Poetry in the Age of Deportation ‘Magnetic Water’ a] Drew Milne Carol Mavor ‘Andrew Wynn Owen ll NM 43:5 May-June 2017 Tain Bamforth Emily Grosholz oNEE EEE EEEISCYYOZ Two Poems JOHN MucKLE In the Bright Room Everybody comes in wearing a new hat ‘The one they originally wore, their name Stitched around the hatband, a special Nickname they were once known by ‘The one they took on arriving Doing some characteristic thing, not Subject to the deformations of memory In the bright room you make entrance Once and forever pinned, always apart ‘Turning on your heel, stalk off ina long stride ‘Along grey skirt you used to wear back then (Or perhaps you smile shyly, and I Pray over the open notebooks of light These Stories Hallucinating in a hall of mirrors Back then I didn't know you, so glad you came Now, to no harm, sent me this selfie Head cocked, so many teeth, fluffy jumper. Afterall, there is no eventually. I's 60 hard to tell who's going to love you ‘The best, can only say you are lovely to me As you always were, unrecognisably Grown-up woman, flaky baby-girl Your hands tied, blindfolded, tru me ‘To listen to your instructions, be your Husband's ear for musie, your own Held-off desires, girlish cruelties. Till always try baby, cry one more time Against you, always undefended, ‘When you used to go to the gym, the boy From Kurdistan who offered you gifts To pretend to be his girlfriend, impress His rich father, couldn't even say your name; Nor I, Iwill not betray your secrets. A Translator’s Notebook IIL The Performance of Translation EDWIN MORGAN Ow 7 Decewiner 1986, Edwin Morgan was in Bristol to speakto the University Literary Society on ‘The ‘Translation of Poetry’. The event must have been part af a conference onthe work of Alexander Pushin, for he deliberately adresses the Russan’s work in drama and includes @ translation of part of one of his short plays inverse. He had completed ths in june 1956, presumably with the conference invitation n mind Compared with a more theoretical approach nthe talk that he had given earir that year at University College, Keele (ee pve 293), Morgan's intention now seers to eto combine reflection with public performance, using translations from a range of poets to exemplify different problems faced bythe translator. Or we might say that his reflections emerge from the more private process of performing translation, As a Kete, his choice of foreign poets and forms may reveal something of his own inner life. But here we might aso sense a reciprocity in the act of translation, where Morgen appears to give back othe foreign poet something of his own language and inventiveness. JAMES McGONIGAL THE TRANSLATION OF POETRY! ‘The first question we have to answer is, Can poetry be translated at all? There has always been a lot of, scepticism on this point. It's expressed, for example, by Shelley in his The Defence of Poetry: ‘Hence the vanity of translation; it were as wise to cast a violet into a crucible [..] as seek to transfuse from one language to another the creation of a poet. The plant must spring again from its seed, or it will bear no flower ~ and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel. I shall return later to Shelley's phrase about the ‘plant springing again from its seed’; but at the ‘moment itis enough to notice that the whole act of translating poetry is described here as vain and useless. The argument usually runs: ifthe translator presents you with a good poem, it won't be a close translation; and ifit’s a close translation, it won't be good poem. It must be admitted that the voice of ‘experience is speaking in that argument. The man who knows the foreign text best is quite likely to be a scholar and no poet, and the poet who takes up translation is apt to treat his text in a cavalier fashion. ‘A good example of this is a somewhat embittered correspondence which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement a couple of years ago on the subject of Ezra Pound's version of the Old English poem ‘The Seafarer’. The writers who took part seemed eager to force a sort of battle between the scholar and the creative writer, as if these belonged almost to different species of the human race. Pound’s poem ‘was called by one person a piece of ‘nonsense [...] based on careless ignorance and misunderstanding’, and to another it had ‘deplorable marks of the literary fake’; but a defender called it ‘a magnificently effective modern English poem’; and in the end an American advised them all to go and read Professor Kemp Malone's version, which had all the virtues! My purpose is only to point out that Pound's ‘Seafarer’ if itis a good poem, can hardly be defended as a good translation ~ there is a limit to the amount of howlers and misrepresentation that one can stand; and this way of treating the original poem is in keeping with Pound's general contempt for scholars and universities. This in my opinion is a great pity. 1 don't believe that this gap between the scholarly and the creative can never be bridged; I think it can and should be; and much of my effort has been to do this. ‘The attitude of many translators is moving in this. direction. People are becoming less willing to accept the Seafarer type of translation, which acknowledges so little responsibility towards the poet who's being translated. This was shown, I think, when Pound. published not long ago his Chinese translations from the Book of Odes: the reviewers were uneasy, and those who knew any Chinese were very eritical, even when they were sympathetic to Pound. Or again, there was a BRC talk on FitzGerald’s ‘Omar Khayyam’ by A.J. Arberry the Persian scholar, and he arraigned FitzGerald for infidelity to both letter and spirit of the original. “Take for instance, he said, ‘the very famous lines: ‘Abook of verses underneath the bough, ‘A jug of wine, a loaf of bread ~ and thou Beside me singing in the wilderness ~ (wilderness were paradise enow. And (he said) the strictly literal version of that is: I there be available a loaf ofthe heart ofthe wheat, ‘Atwo-pint flagon of wine, and a thigh of lamb, With a litle sweetheart seated ina desolation, ‘That is a pleasure that isnot the attainment of any sultan. FitzGerald invented the book of verse, the bough, the singing, and the comparison of the wilderness with paradise; he rejected (no doubt as unpoetical) the thigh of lamb, which gives a very homely and amusing touch in the original, and jettisoned Omar's subtle contrast between the lovers’ spot of desolation and the sultan’s crowded splendour. [..] Infidelity to the letter and the spirit could hardly be more com: plete. And later he adds: I too love my FitzGerald, But what of the true Omar? He also has the right to be accurately understood and appreciated? ‘That puts the new attitude quite clearly. Keats may 68-69 have said Beauty is Truth, but that doesn't apply to Poems translators; and people now would like to see alittle Muckle more emphasis laid on truth. Features ‘This contemporary demand for faithfulness would Morgan not have arisen if people did not believe that poetry an be translated into poetry. am thinking not only of famous examples like Dryden's translations of Juvenal and Persius and Lucretius, or Chaucer's Song of Troilus from Petrarch, but of the fact that a surprising number ofthe lyrics in our anthologies ‘of English verse are actually translations, though this is not realised by most oftheir readers, who enjoy them as English poems. Wyatt and Surrey, Drummond and Campion, Hertick and Covey ~a large number oftheir poems are translated from French, Italian, Latin or Greek. Sometimes among their best or best-known work ~ Surrey's sonnet ‘Set ‘me whereas the sun doth parch the green’, or Wyatt's “My galley charged with forgetfulness’ (both from Petrarch). I was interested to notice recently that 'W.H. Auden, in his inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry in Oxford, referred to a poem of Wyatt's that he said had greatly moved and haunted him, and he ‘quoted these lines: ‘Wherewith Love to the harts forest he feeth Leaving the enterprise with pain and ery, And there him bideth and not appeareth ‘What may Ido? When my master feareth, ‘But inthe field with him to live and die, For good is the life ending faithfully Now these lines are translated from a sonnet of Petrarch’s. Who wrote this poetry? Here is certainly ‘case where the poetry has come through. It was an Italian poem, it has become an English poem. ‘And its naturalisation papers have been passed by a Professor of Poetry! This, then, isthe situation as I see it. There is a dissatisfaction with the sort of translation that is. represented by ‘Omar Khayyam’ and "The Seafarer’, no ‘matter how fine these may be as poems. The trans- lator nowadays is trying to keep the poetic force of FitzGerald’s poem while remaining much more true to the original, and I think this trend is bound to con- tinue, especially when we take into account the work that is being done on machine translation, where accuracy is the admitted goal. The translator has to be, under the modern conception of his activities, a rather peculiar person, not very common but perhaps ‘one that ought to be encouraged. In an ant society he would probably develop his own characteristic shape. He has to be both critic and poet. His activity must ‘on the one hand be conscious and critical: indeed it includes, if properly done, a fall literary criticism of the poem since it has to decide both what meaning the poem represents and what variations of force and value the poem emits from point to point. But this, in itself so difficult and so laborious, will not be enough. The translator must aim at producing. poem. He must produce something fresh and inter- esting, that looks as if it had just been created, and he won't do so this unless he can draw on an extensive awareness of the resources of his own language;without this he is wasting his time. Therefore he ‘must, at some point of his translation, become a poet; he must switch from the critical to the affirmative, from the humble to the authoritative, from analysis, to synthesis. I know from my experience that this point does exist and this strange switch does take place. Once I've studied a poem I want to translate, once I feel I understand its meaning and grasp its tone and atmosphere, before I begin to translate, there comes a moment when I can see or feel the existence of the poem itself, and at this moment it has slipped out of its words, the foreign language falls away from it; have it as a pattern, but not a pattern of words; it isn't clearly seen, and the process of trying really to see it is not unlike the process of writing an original poem. That is why a translation can be ‘poem. And this moment at the very heart of the translating experience when nothing seems to exist except the non-verbal pattern of poetic impressions, suggests to me that there isa sense in which the poem exists independently of the language of its composition. It should therefore be possible for the plant to spring again from its seed as Shelley desired. It is time now that I gave you some examples of my translations since the proof of the pudding isnt in ‘an account of its cooking. I can’t very well read you the originals of these poems, so it won't be a com- plete test, And I shall have to ask you to accept my word for it that as translations they are all very close to the text; the form and style have been reproduced in each ease, and the meaning so far as I've under- stood it~ so the only thing thats let is the poetry! ‘And I read them therefore as if they are poems. [.] Here Morgan begins his readings from French, Old English, talian and Russian. Most of the poems ‘performed can be found in his 1996 volume Collected ‘Translations (cr), s0 Iwill make only general reference to those, and spend time instead on uncollected or more ‘obscure works that were part of his work at this period, ‘Morgan opened his reading with ‘Cortége’ by Jacques révert, translated as ‘Procession’ (CT, p.272-3), ‘and dated June 1954. There is a darkly comic subtext ‘of martial reference in this poem. The impact of war also haunts another French translation: Guillaume Apollinaire’s “The Pretty Redhead’ (“a Jolie Rousse’, 7, p. 384-2), dealing with his time as a soldier in World War I (he was killed in 1918). Morgan had translated this poem in August 1948, with his own war experience still vivid in memory. His studies at Glasgow University had been interrupted in 1940, midway through Junior Honours (the third year ofthe traditional Scottish {four-year honours degree course}, and he had picked them up again in January 1946, not without problems of readjustment. after war service, for instance, Romantic poetry seemed completely beside the point. But there was a poetry that he had no such problem {n taking up again. In its stoic combination of endurance and elegy, Old English poetry had long been a conso- lation to him. Ie reflected a male world, a homosocial domain of action and reflection in journeys across real ‘and metaphorical seas. It had accompanied the under- ‘graduate turned RAMC orderly on his voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, with a band of brothers on their way to war in the North african desert. He evokes it in “The Unspoken’ (Cr, p.182) ‘When the troopship was pitching round the Cape ing, and there was a lll in the night uproar of seas and winds, and a sudden full moon swvang huge out of the darkness like the world iis, and we all crowed on to the wet deek, leaning on the tail, ‘on each other's shoulders, gzing atthe savage outcrop of great Africa [J] Postwar, however, mast of his pals married, or returned to ordinary lives where he could not follow. Hence feelings of isolation intensified, and defensive strategies that he could share with very ew. W.S. Graham was one of those. They had known each other Defore the war as students and fellow poets (Graham ‘was then a part-time adult-education student) and later continued an epistolary friendship between Cornwall and the West af Scotland. In one verse letter ‘Morgan revealed something of his isolation: Aberration draws on rebuff, rebuke, contempt. Aéthirty one has builea shel, of been beaten. ‘The shell is complex to guard a simplicity Or hard to guard a reproved gentleness. In penalty, sometimes like alive ching Feeling unaccountable or at sight ofa boy's face In acity street stirs in me erying or ‘ying rather to cry and to stretch outward In a gesture twisting and bursting with yearning: ‘And almost then stretch out my own hands ‘To the boy or the goading vision ~ almost speak ‘well, you might almost hea it, ike seas singing.” Inthe late 19408, Morgan had turned to translating Beowulf as a way of giving expression to that wartime experience of ‘conflict and danger, voyaging and displacement, Loyalty and loss’ It was published by ‘The Hand and Flower Press in 1952, and, ten years later, ina long-running edition by the University of California Press. His translation of this epic work had clarified his thinking, and he now returned to it in his talk at Bristol ‘When you go further back into the past you come to one of the biggest stumbling-blocks: how to deal with things that were once familiar and are now changed or vanished how to recreate for readers a vanished society. In translating Beowulf we have to handle customs like gold-giving (which is not ‘exactly common now) and groups of people like the retinue of a prince or lord; the characters live in halls that are not like any present-day use of the ‘word; and they are buried in barrows ~ and how many readers will understand that? Now some of these terms have to be kept. A coat of mail is a coat of mail, and you can't really transform it into a battledress blouse; but on the other hand I don’t think you should call ita byrnie, and corselet (by itself) is dangerous too... Here is how one Beowulf translator, Charles Scott Moncrieff, endeavours to bring the Heroic Age before us: ft Shield ofthe Sheaf from scathing hordes From many meinies their mead:-stools tore! ‘That's based on the belief that one touch of tushery ‘makes the whole world kin, However, although we may laugh it is not so easy to succeed where many have failed, and I know that I have certainly not solved all the Beowulf problems in my own transla- tion. Nowadays one is at least aware of the complex! ty of these problems, and that isa step forward. Here isa short passage which tries to bring out one of the things the Beowulf poet was best at pathos, elegiae pathos - the lament of the father whose son has been hanged (by process of law) nEowoLF ‘Lament of the father ‘Such is the aflietion, such isthe endurance Of the grey-haired man whose own young son ‘Twists on the gallows then may he keen. {In a song of pain, when his boy is hanged For the raven’ jos, and his years and wisdom Are void of power toring him any ald, ‘Moming after morning he is forever recalling His son in the far marches; he has no anxiety To live on in longing for another inhertor Within these courts, where one has met Destiny's blows in embattled death. Anguished he scans in his son's dwelling Desolate wine-hall and wind-vexed resting place Wasted of gladness; heroes and horsemen sleep in the darkness; no harp sings there Or happiness to those walls, as they resounded once. He goes then to his couch; solitary is his elegy ‘Sung forthe solitary; all his castle and country tom too is empry. Beowulf (2002: p. 64, lines 2444-62) ‘This passage seems to have had a particular significance {for Morgan. He returned to icin a second version in Scots on 12 July 2953, re-translated as ‘The Auld Man's Coronach’. It was published in the Glasgow Herald, 8 ‘August 1953, and reprinted with comment by Chris Jones in his Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in ‘Twentieth-Century Poetry (2006). ‘Coranach’ means a funeral lament or dirge. ‘waesome, waesome the hert that Is his, Faither wha sees his only laudie ‘Waive ithe widdie on gallows tree Doss, dowie the sang he maun mak; Corbies’disjune is a son hangit; ‘Thole ithe maun, help him he canna, ‘Auld and wice, help him he canna. He minds him on ilka morn that daws But his son has stravaiged to the morn-comenever, ‘And he winna abide the thocht o waiting For anither boy to eairry his name: Ane swak o daith’seneueh and mait, Sorrow, sorrowfu the een he casts On his laudie's chaumer; toom the wine-haa, a Joyless the bed-neulk; whidders and whidders “The ind; laieds and theie horses ligg ‘Dumb i the mools;reverbs nae harp ‘To gledden the place wia bygane gledness. The auld man gaes to is chaumer, he murns; Anerly coronach murns the anery. And cares for his acres and castle waa ~ ‘Naethin ava, Itis probably difficult for readers unexposed to Scots inthe streets and playgrounds of childhood (when such language was expressly forbidden or mocked in the classroom) to sense the emotional effec of his second version. Compared withthe elevated, sonorous but possibly slightly mannered diction of the Standard English, conveys to he Souish ear more ofan authenticity of re. tend to connect this with Morgan's trum father, distanced from his son by acute deafaes,by profession (he was an accountant) and by ideology, asa Conservative and Prstytrian Freemason Morgan was the only chil, il vngat home, and pursuing career in the teaching and writing of literature that his parents Could nether understand nor wholly approve. hough Comfortably off, Morgan's parents were fairl recent trivas inthe bourgeoisie, and shared ahinterand of Scot language rom their ancestral Lanarkshire, Fife ad Stirlingshire countryside besides a daly exposure to Glaswegian speech inthe public trams and tains that were ther mode of travel. Dislecal usages were part of the Morgan domestic life. Sot seems fing, somehaw, that itis in Scots language tha a father should express his sorry, mourning ee lack ofa future caused y the toss ois son. “This ‘coronach also presents a heightened, no naturalistic and rhetorical Scots, ofcourse, Ives much to Morgan’ attempts to situate himself with respect toa poetic fatherfigure. Hugh MacDiarmia's revival of ‘yr thetic’ or‘plastic' Scots towards the furthering ofa‘renas- ence’ (Morgan's favourite word fori) of independent Scotish writing and culture was the subject of post-war Surnatitc comment. Bue being maint sed in spoken discourse, widely understood aeross socal classe, it Contained within itself elements of performance and iden- tty, Morgan's knowledge of Sots language was wife and alert and he was particularly een to extend the range of MacDiarmid’ rural Scots By icing te diversity ofurban dite, and particularly che wbrant Glasgow Speech that is blended from Ayrshire, Lanarkshire, Irish English and Scottish Gaelic idioms. We can sense Morgan inthe so508 pushing atthe boundaries of Seats language tosce what ican do Just prior tothe ‘Coronach (from 7-9 uly 1953) he “turned inva Scots Macbeth 1.516-55, 8 “The Hells Handel o Leddy Macbeth, More importantly, onthe ast and 2and of the same month ame his ist translations of Mayakovsky int Sots: ‘Mayakonferensly's anctidote' and Anent the Dee erence o Tastes, a discovery ofthe suppleness of Scots {for moderssteranslation which would end eventual to his first Carcane collection, Wi the Halll Voce: 25 Poems by Viadimir Mayakovsky (972. CT p. 05-59) ‘Over against the linguistic shock ofthe modern Scotch Renaacence, Morgan was aio exploring subtler problems in translating from ce original Renaissance His translations of Marino and Tasso would appear in his econd volume from the University of Reading, FiftyRenascence Love-Poems (Whiteknights Press, 1975. Cr, p.179-82). In Bristol, he commented: {As soon as you go back to earlier centuries, different civilizations, (or of course worst ofall dead languages), the problems begin to multiply. One of the smallest ofthese problems is when you have a kind of poem that is no longer current and that involves various conventions of both form and subject. The Italian madrigal ofthe Renaissance, for instance, although one appreciates its quality at once in the original, its lightness of touch, its economy of words, ts ‘music, is hard, very hard, co catch nowadays in translation, Its very delicacy, which is its chief characteristic, eomes up against our fondness for strength or shock in poetry. Well, here is one of my attempts: chis madrigals from Tasso: Silent the forests, che streams, waveless-sheeted the sea, ‘winds in their eaves, unblustering, at peace, sombre the night, and white its moon of deepest and marmoreal quiet: Let us too lie like secrets Tocked in love and its sweetness ~ love have no breath, no voice, ‘no sound a kiss, no voice or sound my sighs! (er,p.36) ‘This madrigal is known by its opening line, “Tacciono i boschi ei flum®, Here Morgan employs assonance, alliteration and para-rhyme to compensate for the ‘more frequent rhyming opportunities ofthe Italian, He had worked on this translation in January 1953. But in 43956 he was mare currently and consistently engaged with the poetry of Eugenio Mantale. There are personal similarities between poet and translator. Both were ‘non-conformist sons of commercial families (chemicals in Montale's case, ship-breaking and metal recycling in Morgan's), wide-ranging in their literary journalism, ‘anti-faseist in their politics, Both subjected their emo- tional life to an intellectual rigour, set against striking natural and marine landscapes. It would not be until the early 1960s, during a much more fulfilling period in his emotionat life, that Morgan felt freed to bring Tove, cityscape and poetic experimentation into happier alignment. In the 19508 it was the reflective stoicism of ‘Montale's poetry that appealed, and also, ina sense, the difficulties of his hermetic style: Montale is unusually difficult to translate: subtle, elusives vivid but often harsh and discordant sense-impressions; alot of ambiguity (even to Italians). His style is appar ently very fee, but uses a great deal of iregular rhyme tnd this has to be reproduced as far as possible. 've been translating alot of his poems recently, fora volume which is going to be published, and although he fs very hard 1 have found him extremely stimulating and sympatheti. He isn't well known in this country yet, so let ‘me introduce him on an English theme, che poem called “Bastbourne' and assonanc ‘Bastbourne’ is accessible in c7, p.18-19. Less available, and rendered distinctly un-English, is this uncollected translation from Ossi di Sepia, dated July 1956. It transposes the European hoopoe (‘upapa’ in Italian) into ‘avery Scottish peeweet (the peewit or lapwing) ~a gift of the lacal language of birdsong, perhaps, to a fellow-poet across the seas. “Upupa, tare uecetto Pooweet,ye're a bithedike birdie! ‘Whit makar has been fair to ye? ‘Yon whigmaleerie oa kaim gangs nid-nod Heich on the hen-hoose-tap and whiles like the cock. Himsel ye swap aboot in the wind; ‘peeweet, Peeweet’ a sang and sign o spring -and O Butye mak time dee to hear ye And the gir and bratte of Feberarie, ‘And aa the alts giea streetch Atthe nod o yr hei, my bird, My spunkie, my ferlie~ and aa this is naething to yirsel!* 1. Edwin Morgan Papers, Special Collections, Glasgow Uni versity Library: MS Morgan, B/2/. 2, Arbertystallehad featured on the BR Third Programme and in The Listener, a4 September 1950. $3. Ewin Morgan: The Midnight Leterbor. Selected Correspon- dence 2950-2010 (Careanet Press, 2015), p. 15, eds James MeGonigal and John Coyle. 4. Preface to the Carcanet Press te-publication of Beounlf (2002), p. ix ‘Upapa, ilar uccell’ is dated 39 July 1956{n MS Morgan £E/1/2. ‘Peeweet was published in Partisan Review 25:2, Spring 1958 (p.273), but not in Morgan's Poems from Eu genio Montale, published by the School of Artin the Uni versity of Reading inthe following year REVIEWS Over even-handed Stefan Collini Common Writing: Essays on Literary Culture and Public Debate (our, 2016) £27 Reviewed by TONY ROBERTS Stefan Collini is a historian of Victorian and modern British thought: good-humoured, stylish and witty, but always with a seriousness of purpose. Common Writing is his latest selection, a page-turning educa- tion in thirteen review-essays, half on literary culture, half on public debate: ‘Mostly, they are about authors, who, while making a mark in a particular literary genre or intellectual discipline, have also figured, however indirectly, in wider publie discussion, or else about some of the media that have enabled such contributions. The focus of these essays is ‘on new biographies or new editions of the writers’ work, and on what he has described elsewhere as ‘the lineaments of sedimented identity’ ‘The book is again built largely of essays from the RB and the TLS and is a companion to Common Reading (2008), the title intended to signal an activity ‘that is both shared and everyday’. Behind. itwe might hear Doctor Johnson rejoicing, in his Lives ofthe English Poets, on ‘the common sense of readers uncorrupted with literary prejudices’ Common Writing has a starry ~ if predominantly deceased ~ cast of poets, literary and cultural erties, professors, journalists and historians: publie intel- lectuals, Some are not as celebrated today, it must be said. For instance, Collini discusses those in the “English tradition of ethically driven progressive social commentary’ like the Hammonds, Tawney, Hoggart and Titmuss. He also considers historians such as Eileen Power {impact overstated) and Herbert Butter- field (biographieally enhanced) in contrast to Hugh ‘Trevor Roper (greatly gifted, insensitive, and lacking the magnum opus). Then there is the sentimental but serious J.B. Priestley, C.S. Lewis ‘at times seeming to use surface depths to mask deeper shallows’) and Maurice Bora. This piece begins ominously: ‘What is the best case that can be made for Maurice Bowra?” In contrast, Collini contextualises his appreciation of the work of the dated Day Lewis and the excellent Graham Greene in terms of their “bloodstock details Poets come off a little better. Collini welcomes ‘A. David Moody's biography of Ezra Pound, as it ‘eschews hindsight, essential in any serious treatment of early Pound's contribution to poetry. With Eliot, Collini is constrained by the fact that volume 1 of, the Letters (2898-1922) had the Modernist sparks, while he is stuck reviewing volumes 2 and 3: domestic unhappiness and editorial correspondence (‘the spirit does not leap at the prospect of so many thousands of pages of elaborate politeness’) Empson and Leavis provide more substance. There isa review of Haffenden’s ‘magnificent’ two-volume biography of the former, and praise for Hilliard’'s ‘excellent’ book on ‘Serutiny’ We learn that Leavis, haa ess impact on American campuses, whereas Empson’s marvellously close readings suited the spirit of the New Criticism. However, Leavis's view of Literature as a vocation was paramount in influencing others: teachers, students (and the Pelican Guide). Collint is admiring of Lionel Trilling, yet circumspect: “There is, for many of us, something vaguely oppres- sive about the thought of having to reread Lionel ‘Tiling now’ Even so, Tiling is the cultural critic in the tradition of Coleridge and Arnold. Collin is very interesting on Raymond Williams's contribution to British intellectual life, valuing Dai Smith's biography of the author ofthe seminal Culeure and Society. You might expect some fun when Collini approach- es Kingsley Amis and David Lodge, afterall he has admitted elsewhere to being drawn to Amis's and Lar kin’s “skeptical, human, funny idiony. That idiom does indeed prove hard for him to resist, but inevitably the portrait of a man debilitating is rather sad to witness. Nevertheless Collini is willing to see the subtle poten- tial of monochrome’ in the writer's work. He is less sanguine about Joyce enthusiast David Lodge, whose later writing — essays and memoir ~is felt to fall short. “An essay on ‘Migrants’ recounts the story of the indefatigable Nikolaus Pevsner, the German historian of English architecture and of Ernest Geliner, the stylish Czech social anthropologist. “The Isaac Deutscher vs Isaiah Berlin conflict takes centre stage here, seguing into a consideration of Berlin's biography. The latter had, to a debatable degree, prevented Marxist historian Deutscher's appointment as Senior Lecturer at Sussex University, and then denied it. The affair was later seized on by Christopher Hitchens in a damning article in the Le Sensibly ~in my view ~ Collini suggests that there is litde point in dismissing Berlin, the brilliant, gossipy establishment figure, as a weak and ‘ealeulating Cold War ideologue’. Instead Collini makes, out ofthe shetorical exuberance of Berlin's leters, a point that {believe applies to all correspondence: the necessity “fora certain interpretative tact from the reader before [it] ean be pressed into service as historical sourees. ‘There isa review of a biography of Roy Jenkins, typically fair-handed, if the imagery is litte fanciful at times (‘a man who, though never crowned as philosopher-king, became for a while the Crown Prince of social democracy’). Collini then moves from one who helped to sink the Labour Party to the Canadian professor (and Berlin biographer) Michael ‘gnatieff, who was to ‘wreck the fortunes of the Canadian Liberal Party ‘An essay on the media reviews books on the Ts, the New Left Review and Radio 4, celebrating their survival skills. Another, on ‘Social Analysis, deals with government reports: the ideological function of propaganda (which destroys the egregious metaphor of the level playing/field’); che dangers inherent in ‘the relentless cultivation of individualism’ by governments for the past thirty years; and the erucial dependence of statistical techniques upon language. Collin’ is almost too engagingly even-handed at times. Qualifications like ‘may, ‘arguably* and ‘such, nn Features Morgan Reviews Roberts