G. S. F R AS ER
Trapped in his intentional fallacy, Alvarez is betting everything on
the artist's sincerity: even if the artist hasn' t been actually scarified
by the perception of some external event, he will possess, it is
hoped, the internal equipment to justify the pretence that he has.
But pretend or not, the material prese nted needs to
be
judged with
some view towards the external world and away from its creator's
supposed mental condition. It's possible to gesture too blithely,
whatever the motivation. Here, for example, is Lowell, in a recent
sonnet about Sylvia Plath. The immediate occasion for this poem
seems to have been an article on Lowell in
The R eview
24 by John
Bayley, who favoured Plath with an epithet Lowell found objec–
tionable.
A miniature mad talent?
Sylvia Plath,
who'll wipe off the spit
0/
your integrity,
rising
in
th e saddle
to
slash at Auschw itz,
life tearing
thiJ
and that,
I am a woman?
Hannah Arendt once said that finally these matters can be under–
stood only by the poets, but when you scan a piece of journey-work
like this you start wondering if she was right. A lot of rhetoric had
to go o\'er the dalll before all the concentration camps in the Reich
and the occupied territories go t whittled down to that one word
'Auschwitz' - hundreds of journalists and television anchor-men
had to do their stuff. And at last, after the whole infinitely ramified
nightmare had been trimmed to that one stub and the stub itself
had been crushed to powder, it was time for Lowell to come along
and toss off a line suggesting that in Sylvia Plath the
Endlosung
finally met its implacable opponent. Carrying a sword. Riding a
horse.
On such moments of rarified bathos from his key poet Alvarez is
confronted with the limitations of his critical position.... Lowell's
internal condition presumably being one of routine agony, the
material has undoubtedly surfaced with all the correct credentials.
Nor does the technical control seem much lower than average.
What is wrong is the sheer, shrieking inadequacy of the event
as
cited to the event as it happened... .
I quote Clive James at some length for two reasons. This is an
argument which
an~body
who, like myself, considers Lowell as at his
best a great poet will have to answer. And James's passage is a first-rate
piece of polemica1 prose, and first-rate polemical prose is a much rarer
commodity than, in our bad-tempered age, one might expect it to
be.
I sometimes try to write polemical prose myself, but find that 1 get
fl ushed, excitable, hot under the collar: one must be cool when one is
going for a cool kill. Earlier in his article, James had said this: "I have
never been able to accept unquestioned the rightness of Sylvia Plath
assimiuting such infinities of torture to her own problems."
