sheenaghpugh | Entries tagged with matthew francis

The city has not known real darkness since the beginning of the century; the gaslamps in every street give a purplish glow to the night sky that seems part of the texture of the air. Now this purple has turned to black and it is as if the man has been plunged into the depths of space.

Hastings Wimbury, would-be actor, is working as a “gas-boy” responsible for the lighting effects in a London theatre – which are more elaborate, and a lot more dangerous, than one might have thought. In fact, in 1883, we are just on the cusp of when gas began to give place to electricity, as Hastings notices on a nocturnal stroll:

“It was as if London itself had been turned into a theatre, with the Embankment its auditorium and the Thames the stage, with its scenery of moored boats and barges, and the steps arranged along it as entrances to that impossible space. He sat on a bench and looked at the reflected lights, a show like those he had helped to put on at the Villiers. These were not gaslamps but electric lights, Yablochkov candles as they were called, that used the same mysterious power as Mr D’Oyly Carte’s electric fairies at the Savoy. He looked at the nearest of them; above the base with its coiled black dolphins rose a tall iron post with a globe on top giving off an intense white light. The whole structure crackled and hissed and seemed to shake slightly; he was sure that if he were to go up and touch it, he would feel those vibrations flowing through his own body. One night soon, Hastings thought, there will be enough of these celestial candles to eliminate the shadows altogether. Then there will be only day, the yellow day of the sun alternating with the pure white day of electricity.”

Light and dark, both literally and in the mind, are at the heart of this novel; Hastings has, in the best tradition of Victorian Gothic mysteries, fallen in with a well-spoken titled foreigner who, as any alert reader can guess, is Not What He Seems. Who and what he actually is, however, is less easy to guess. There are many conscious literary echoes, from Sherlock Holmes’s emphasis on observation: “Dr Farthing always warned her never to judge a man by his appearance (which struck her as odd since he was always lecturing her on how much could be deduced from it)” to the Reverend Pilkins with his fleeting resemblances to certain Austen clergymen in embarrassing situations. Arthur Machen, too, feels as if he might at any moment turn up in the dark London streets that he liked to depict. But it is RLS and his fascination with “doubleness” who is the most persistent ghost.

Appropriately for this theme of doubleness, the novel has two heroines, Flora, the country lady to whom Hastings is unofficially engaged and Cassie, the town girl in the new profession of stenographer, who falls for him. Though rivals from different backgrounds, they form common cause to solve the mystery when he disappears, and since each in her own way is enterprising, sharp-witted and with a keen sense of humour, their quest is an entertaining one for the reader. Indeed there is a deal of humour in the novel, evidence of how much the author himself is enjoying the genre (“’Unhand me,’ Flora said, finding an opportunity to use the expression at last”). Mr Gilbert at the Savoy would probably call it rollicking. It is pacy, and switches expertly between its various point-of-view characters. It also gives us the joy of being ahead of our protagonist: we know, long before he does, that he is being fooled; what we don’t know is by whom, and when we find out, there is one of those “how didn’t I see that sooner?” moments. I read it in one afternoon, slowing down only when I needed a magnifying glass to read the letters between Hastings and Flora which have been printed in a cursive font. I can see why the author did this; it does add to the period feel, but I could have done with a font that was easier to read. I doubt, though, that this would bother younger eyes.

The characters – Hastings, doggedly continuing to convince himself of the increasingly impossible, Flora dealing with her intoxicated suitor, Cassie making her way in a man’s world – are not just convincing but engaging, and the atmosphere of nocturnal Victorian London really comes alive. It shouldn’t be regarded as a parody of Victorian Gothic, for that implies a slightly superior, even mocking, attitude to the genre, and this shows nothing but delight in it. I found it a hugely enjoyable read.

They’ve made a morning of their own, called Matins
(“Clock”)
It is humans who give things names. All Francis’s collections delight in words; this one specifically exults in names. It is a collection focused on nature, on landscape, creatures, plant life from roses to fungi, but seeing them all through the eyes, microscopes and imagination of humans. An early poem, “Mere”, sets the tone when its landscape is figured in images drawn from human activity: the windblown water “shivers in its sequins”, the heron, ironically, “mimes a pond ornament”, while a mallard “takes off from its runway of splashes”.

The names we give things are taken from what we see around us, or at least from how we interpret what we see. Hence they are images in their own right, and bring with them a wealth of associations among which Francis’s imagination can happily range – “while the liberty caps rioted on the verge by the police station” (“Liberty Caps”). Nowhere is this more evident than in “Pomona”, a celebration of apples through the seasons, and of the names people have given them. From the names of the winter apple trees, winter emerges:

The air has a bite to it now, White Must, a Hoary Morning.
A Winter Coleman holds out grey arms in the orchard.
A |Pigeon plumps itself in the cold, and mistletoe makes its nests
on the rough battlements of the Tower of Glamis.

In the last verse, apples and those who have named them become one:

When the last Gloria Mundi has fallen, where is our Seek No Further?
The ancient Ribstone Pippin tree slumps on its crutches
while the Ribstone Pippins sleep out the winter in newspaper,
old Ribstone Pippins mulling their spices and parsnippy sugars.

That “parsnippy” is typical of Francis’s uncanny accuracy of observation and word choice. The “seedcake fragrance of aunts” (“Pomona”), the late sky that is “custard curdled with rhubarb” (“Rose Absolute”), the seemingly dead ant that “rose to all its feet” (“Ant”). This is not the desperate search for novelty that causes some poets to scrabble for incongruous words and far-fetched comparisons: it is the freshness that comes of observing closely and describing exactly.

An interest in technical challenges has also always been part of his poetry and surfaces here in the trochaic syllabics of “A Charm for Earwigs” and the single vowel of “Monomoon”, which would be a wonderful one to read aloud:

go soft
on woods, wolds,
moors, rocks,

nod
to crops, cows,
shorn flocks,

throw off
spools of floss, whorls
of cottonwood blossom.

There has always been an exuberant delight in the beauty and variety of the world in Francis’s poems; indeed I sometimes wonder if it has led him to be underrated by those who seem to think serious poetry’s job is to depress the general public. It is very much in evidence here, perhaps more than in any of his other collections, yet behind the upbeat note is a darker one. The end of “Pomona”, with its richness of fruit, is winter, old age and death; the fascinating creatures under Robert Hooke’s microscope are being literally studied to death, and you don’t want to know the recipe for oil of swallows, even if it would cause your aches to “wheel off on long wings”. Other wings in this collection include those of the flies under the microscope, the end-of-summer butterflies in “Wingscape”, beautiful but doomed, and the fatally failing parachute of “Freefall”. The end of this poem,

Sleep on the wing, the way swallows are said to,
sleep on the wing

is a little reminiscent of so many plays of Euripides in which some despairing character cries out a wish to be winged, to fly away from earth and grief. Only they can’t, of course, any more than swallows can actually sleep in flight, and it is this unspoken consciousness of being anchored that shadows the brightness and throws it into deeper relief.

Everything seemed to have been torn from its roots,
so that it tumbled over the mind
as in a dream: pigs, seaweed,
birds, people, flowers.

Perhaps that's what he meant by Unland,
a country where things break loose
from their own being.

The storyteller goes on,
as if to himself.

In his introduction to this poetic re-imagining of the Four Branches of the Mabinogi, Matthew Francis remarks that the nearest thing to a hero in the original is Pryderi, which is true. But in this version, a far more important character is Gwydion, the magician who is described (again in the original) as the world's greatest storyteller, and whom Francis casts as the narrator of the Fourth Branch. For above anything, what Francis has done here is to recreate the immediacy these tales must have had before they were pinned down in writing, when they were spoken by a storyteller who might at any moment shift an emphasis, drop or add material, or see a character in a new way and make the audience do so. It isn't often that a collection of poems is, literally, a page-turner, where the lure of "what happens next" will not let you stop reading, but it is so here, and I know the actual stories well. But knowing them doesn't mean you know what happens next, because every storyteller puts his own slant on the material, highlighting bits that others leave in darkness. How it actually feels to be a giant like Bran:

the wind in his ears

that his friends must shout to compete with,
a life lived in the weather –
no house will hold him.

He is closer to the birds
than his family.

Or the way something seen from a distance becomes all manner of things before resolving into what it actually is:

a horse with a lick of sunlight on its back,
a horse with a knight in gilt armour,
a horse with a splash of silk
horsewoman riding,

not so much moving as sharpening.

It is, as much as anything, Francis's unusually "sharp" vision, and his eye and ear for a telling image, that give these poems the clarity and colour of a mediaeval manuscript, an effect heightened by the happy device of including the kind of marginal notes you might find in a Bible. These also give some play to his humour, a quality in evidence throughout the collection, as in his description of pigs:

a herd of animals
with small eyes, harrumphing speech
and babyish smiles.

The magic, the constant transitions between the real world and the Otherworld (Unworld, as Francis calls it) come over particularly strongly. It is true, as he says in the Introduction, that "poetry has never had much of a problem with magic. Poets spend their lives transforming things into other things". But it is true too that not all poets could take alternative realities as much in their playful stride as he does, and that part of the reason the magic works is that he treats giant baby-snatching claws, necromancers' wives masquerading as mice, and horses made of mushrooms as perfectly normal, something you might well come across when wandering in so elemental and history-haunted a place as Dyfed. At least, you might if you were as open to possibilities as this writer.

Like all the best storytellers, Francis has love and respect for his source material without feeling bound by previous versions of it. He has shaped, re-ordered, sometimes altered, as the early oral storytellers must surely have done, regarding their material as alive and full of potential rather than a dead, immutable text on a page. Nothing kills a story like treating it with reverence, and his refusal to do so is why his version feels live, fresh, new. I would love to hear these poems read aloud, and I doubt any audience would willingly let the teller stop until the tale was done.

Every so often, I've asserted that if some Francis collection doesn't win an award, the judges must be idiots, and every time, it turns out they are. I've begun to wonder if his work is perhaps not miserable enough to please judges. He is certainly a "serious" poet in that he writes of serious matters, but he does it with humour and a constant delight in the variety and wonder of the world. It is this delight which comes over most strongly from these poems, and which will tempt most readers back into them.

There are some cloths, said Mr Jones (snipping), where this difference is manifest, as satin where one face shines and the other is plain, or a twilled cloth like worsted where the weave shows and feels differently in the two faces, but there are others where the front and the back are identical in warp and woof and pattern and colour, in all their properties, and yet, Arise, to you as a tailor they can never be the same. For the front of the cloth is that which will appear to the world; it will be fair and smooth, or else embellished and embroidered, but the back will hold the raw workings of your stitches or a lining, and the moment the cloth lies upon your lap you must and will know which is which, for unless they are first different in your own mind they will never be so in reality. Such doubleness is a property of everything in the world, and of every person. We are not meant to see the threads and thrums of another’s soul, nor the plainness of their lining, but our own we feel familiarly rubbing against us whenever we move. In this a garment is like a man or a woman; how should it not be, made as it is in our image? Therefore when I teach you to sew, I am teaching you to ape your creator…

For all Mr Jones’s best efforts, young Arise Evans, his apprentice some time in the 1620s, never did become a master tailor. What he did learn from his master was this concept of “doubleness”. It appears in his fascination with etymology, with what Mr Jones used to call the words behind and beneath other words (Mr Jones was the master of false etymology, until his pupil surpassed him, and mistakenly seeing the word “Arise” behind his own given name of Rhys has a huge effect on Arise’s life). It appears also in Arise’s way of seeing the potential for imagery in everything around him, very much in the manner of his time, so that he cannot sew a seam nor consummate his marriage without reflecting on the cosmic significance of his actions. Above all, it is what underlies his practice as an author.

During the hectic period of the Civil War and Commonwealth, Arise had been a successful author of books of prophecy. Rather ungratefully, given that it was the upside-down nature of society at that time which had enabled a tailor to become respected as an author, Arise is an ardent royalist who foretells doom to the nation unless the monarchy is restored. When this comes about, of course, he finds himself at a loose end for what to write next – the future has happened and there is nothing left to prophesy. Hence The Book of The Needle, which starts out to be a tailoring manual but soon digresses into Arise’s personal memoirs.

What makes Arise's story engaging is partly the intrinsic fascination of the times and partly his own personality, reflected in his writing style. He can be very funny, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not - though very much a man of his own time, he also comes very close to us in his tendency to hapless incompetence in the face of minor but irritating tasks like threading a needle or re-folding a map. There is endless amusement to be had from the domestic by-play between Arise, his amateur herbalist wife Maud and their son Owen (a Puritan version of Lupin Pooter). But Arise’s life also has a serious side; he met the mighty of his day, including two kings and a Lord Protector, and there is nothing funny about his second encounter with the Earl of Essex, a man who once craved glory but is now haunted by his experiences of battle:

The bowels, he said, belong in the body, do they not? They were never intended by God to be seen. But I have seen them many times, at Newbury and other places. […] Several of the men fall over; they always look as if they are doing it on purpose. And only then do you notice that some of the other men are wearing the bowels of these fallen ones across their faces. They look like pieces of rag, Evans, bloody and befouled pieces of rag.

In one of the most powerful chapters, ”Remember”, Arise recalls the execution of the Presbyterian Christopher Love, which he witnessed, and, in the margins, reflects on that of Charles I, which he did not see. His son Owen, who also has ambitions to be an author, objects to this method and is discovered cutting the page:

You see, father, where I was cutting. I was trying to cut the narrative of the King away from that of Mr Love, and keep them separate.
    Why, Owen, they are intertwined.
    He frowns at the page in front of him, and his fingers move as if they were still wielding the scissors.
    They are intertwined, Owen, because the one story makes me think of the other, for thoughts do not pass through the mind singly but grow round each other like ivy round the trunk of an oak, and thus I wrote it as I thought it, interconnectedly. […]
    When I am an author, Owen says, looking with longing at the scissors lying on the desk next to his hand, I shall write only one thing at a time.

Owen is wrong, of course. Arise can no more tell a story in a straight line than Tristram Shandy can, but then neither life nor narrative goes in uncomplicated straight lines, and the interconnectedness, the doubleness, which Owen fails to appreciate is what gives this narrative its depth and lasting interest. The one thing I wish is that my paperback had rather stiffer covers, because I foresee that they will very soon be bent with much reading….

Like his previous collections, this one contains much journeying and much fascination with the way words work when arranged in patterns. It also reminds me of an earlier collection, Dragons, in that you can see the influence of Welsh topography and history becoming stronger in it. Above all it is notable, like all his work, for two characteristics that are not found together all that often, but that work together very well: accurate observation and creative speculation. He is very good, in other words, at both pinpointing in words exactly what he sees and imagining what he has never seen. The first quality brings a mountain to life in "Walker": sheep on its steep slopes

canted to one side,
trotting on their adjustable legs
till my upright seemed askew

and its wetness:

my feet pressed
a black oil from the spongy surface.
The hollows bristled with reeds.
One might drown there, high above the earth

- true, and quite disconcerting when one comes to think about it. The other side of him is at work in "The Man in the Moon", based on Francis Godwin's 17th-century prose fantasy of lunar exploration (the work Cyrano de Bergerac parodied). When the poem's protagonist invents goose-powered flight and tests it out with a lamb aboard, we not only see the lamb:

I tied him to the frame. The geese flapped.
the rag-doll face showed nothing.
A bleat blew away,

and for the space of two fields
he treadled the air

but also feel his own later ascent beyond weather and gravity and see earth from a new angle, the "pear with a bite out of one side" that is Africa. The same curiosity about the different enables him, in "Familiar Spirit", to inhabit the ghost that is now uncomfortable with thoughts of the humanity from which it has loosed itself:

that sugar-mouse flesh I had once,
and its hangers-on of arms and legs,
hair, toenails, parents, siblings

The title sequence, "Muscovy", chronicles another journey that must have felt fantastic in its day, the embassy to Moscow on which Andrew Marvell served in 1663-4. Again it is the observational and imaginative detail that brings it alive: the cold that "finds you in your sleep", the sauna where you bake "till your hair hurts". Its unnamed narrator (not Marvell) is by turns bemused and amused, and the humour which has always featured in Francis's poetry also surfaces in the word-games of this collection, like "Enigma Variations", an alphabet whose every verse analyses a letter by omitting it, and "Poem in Sea", whose lines each consist of three words or part-words beginning with s, e and a. Somewhat on the same plan is "Was", a poem less about the past and memory than about the way these ideas are constructed, the way smells, tastes, habits become iconic for an era:

Cabbage was cooked everywhere at once.
Curry was pacified in its circle of rice.
Wine was a sweet gold opened at Christmas.

The TV was afloat on a sea of fuzz.
It was switched on early to let it breathe.
The end of it was a diminishing star.

It's possible that those who never watched TV in the 50s and early 60s will miss just how accurate and evocative this is, which would be a pity. But this poet's curiosity, keen eye and verbal exuberance should entertain and absorb most readers.