Art Versus Illusions

The idea of poets going off to war is always counterintuitive, and of all poets the least warlike must have been E E Cummings. From an early age he possessed endless sympathy. In childhood (in Cambridge, Massachusetts) the sight of cattle led to the abattoir left a huge impact on him: ‘And gradually I realise they’re going ‘to the slaughterhouse’, are being driven to their deaths: I stand hushed, almost unbreathing, feeling the helplessness of a pity which is for some whole world.’ As an old man living on the family farm, he hated having to kill the porcupines that would strip his precious Porter apple trees. If only the porcupines could compromise by just eating the apples, he wrote, and not shredding the tree, it would save him from this evil duty (‘I inspected my victim:no,he was not dead;but terribly wounded,unable even to move’… ‘So far as I’m concerned,porcupines could eat apples forever’.)

Cummings enlisted as an ambulance man and left for Europe in April, 1917. He volunteered with numerous Harvard friends but became closest to a man named W Slater Brown. The twosome were near inseparable and carried their artistic temperaments into the warzone. J Alison Rosenblitt writes that ‘Cummings disliked the ‘typical’ and boorish Americans with whom he was posted, and he and Brown socialised mostly with the French… and they spent a portion of their free time at a cafe favoured by French soldiers, the poilus, where they traded gossip and songs.’ One time the French soldiers asked the two Americans to sing ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’; although they only knew the chorus, Cummings simply made up the verses, and they rhymed. When the two men were thrown into military prison in Noyon, they were able to communicate by whistling Petrushka – ‘one of the avant-garde ballets which he and Brown had seen together in Paris… He returned the whistle, and then so did Brown, and so on for half an hour. It was an efficient signal.’ At times the book feels like the war diaries of Frasier and Niles Crane. 

Oh, what a lovely war, then? Not at all. For all the laughter and gallivanting around in Paris (Rosenblitt does her best to rescue Cummings’s formative lover, Marie Louise Lallemand, from the condescension of previous biographers) this story of Cummings and Brown is a bleak story in a bleak part of history. The Blackadder view of WW1 as a pointless slaughter is simplification. And yet. In 1916, Rosenblitt writes, ‘The German offensive at Verdun and the French counterattack lasted from February to November. The Germans sustained casualties of over 300,000 and cost the Allies the same. Meanwhile, on the British section of the front, the offensive at the Somme in the summer of 1916 led to more than 400,000 British casualties and more than 200,000 German casualties.’ 900,000 lives. 

With the war at a deadly stalemate, authorities on both sides focused on civilian and military attitudes. If only soldiers had the right kind of fighting spirit, the belief went, all would be well. Rosenblitt writes that ‘insistence on the importance of morale became all the more attractive as a means of denying the new realities of artillery firepower and clinging to the belief that victory came out of – and therefore also proved – the moral superiority of a nation.’ In this context, Brown’s anarchic spirit proved critical. He was more impulsive and headstrong than Cummings and his letters home, in which he wrote of French atrocities in a wry and detached tone (‘The priest then pulled out 18 ears which he had in his pocket and proved it…. This incident only proves to what a state of bravery and self sacrifice war leads men’) led to his arrest. The unit commander saw an opportunity to get rid of two subversives for the price of one and implicated Cummings as well, so both Americans were packed off to the military prison complex. 

The descriptions of prison life at La Ferté-Macé are horrible even for a Great War history. The guards had been kept out of the war because of physical or mental invalidies; feeling the stigma of not fighting in hyper-patriotic France, they took out their feelings of inadequacies on the prisoners. Cummings recalled a guard, notorious for petty sadism, jumping out at a queue of female prisoners, on the daily slop-out: ‘And I saw once a little girl eleven years old scream in terror and drop her pail of slops,spilling most of it on her feet;and seize it in a clutch of frail child’s fingers,and stagger,sobbing and shaking,past the Fiend… never in my life before had I wanted to kill to thoroughly extinguish and to entirely murder.’

Cummings felt protective of this girl – ‘the helplessness of a pity which is for some whole world’ – but he was not a sentimentalist or a coward. He and Brown bore their imprisonment with fortitude, and seem to have been respected by other inmates. What impressed me also about Cummings was his practicality. After his own release from prison, he immediately set about securing the release of Brown, who had been moved on to a jail in Précigné. By this point Brown’s family in America had kicked off; relatives wrote to the State Department, enlisted the help of lawyers and senators, but Brown’s relatives did not find out the whole story of the case and their letters were muddled. Cummings – at this point an ex convict in Paris – went straight to the secretary of the US embassy in Paris, a man named Wiley, and argued that Brown’s subversive offences were on account of his youth and temperament and should be forgiven. It worked: Brown too was released. Cummings succeeded where the lawyers and senators had failed, because he knew the right person to go to, and what representations to make. Rosenblitt writes: ‘If it had not been for Cummings and Mr Wiley, Brown would clearly have remained in prison until the end of the war and could have died there.’

‘Still others did not find out until after the fighting had ceased that what they had taken for reality was illusion,’ Cummings wrote in his 1927 essay ‘Armistice’. He goes back to this: ‘war calls upon most human beings to sacrifice their happiness in exchange for the most temporary of illusions.’ Illusions. That’s what comes up so often in this history, this tangle of generals and diplomats and bureaucrats that the poets blundered into – the desire of authorities to shape public perception of the war, and strength of feeling about it. Rosenblitt makes the case for Cummings as a populist poet. It is his commitment to plain truth as well as beauty that makes him one.

Michael Mullan Cancer Fund

My story, ‘Aunt Krang’s House’, won the Michael Mullan Cancer Fund award earlier this month. (You can also listen to Mike Higgins’s reading of it on the vimeo award roll, about 15:40 minutes in.)

Michael himself is a brilliant young man from Kildare, who won a scholarship to Harvard Law. Michael was diagnosed with neuroblastoma at sixteen months old, was successfully treated but as a young adult developed renal cell cancer, requiring a partial nephrectomy carried out on his 22nd birthday. Four months after beginning his studies at Harvard, Michael developed mestastasised renal cell cancer. Despite being on chemotherapy, he graduated from Harvard Law in 2017.

In Michael’s own words:

At our first meeting with Dr Choueiri, days before my 24th birthday, I was told I had six months to live. At the age of 24, despite having had cancer twice before, I had never really thought about my mortality.

I was left wondering what I would do for the last six months of my life, should I stay in Boston and try fight the cancer or simply accept the fact that I had limited time and make the most of my last six months on earth?

I quickly decided that I would fight this cancer to the bitter end and not let it beat me. I had beaten it twice before, why not a third time?

—

My treatment has the potential of giving me the chance to have a somewhat normal life and allowing me to generate legal and social change through my academic work.

However, my doctors have advised me that I need to stay in the US in order to keep the cancer at bay. Sadly, there are no options for me in Ireland.

Medical costs in the US are extremely high. While my medical insurance covers part of the cost, there are still substantial fees not covered.

If there is one thing I have learned throughout my cancer experience it is that there should never be a price put on someone’s life, but for me that’s my reality.

My family, friends and community in Kildare are coming together to fundraise these much needed funds. I am forever grateful for all those who have supported me and continue to do so, in particular my girlfriend Mel.

Michael has gone through life experiences that would break most people. If you are able to donate towards his costs, please consider doing so. 

You can get updates on Michael Mullan’s treatment and fundraising on his Facebook page.

The Language of Birds

Modern fantasy has a certain offputting feel. Even George R R Martin’s very accomplished Game of Thrones novels have their moments of false wisdom, pretentious solemnity and arrant silliness. S E Lister‘s Augury at first seems like more of the same. Her world is set on a city at the base of a mountain. On the mountain is the temple of the Augurs, where anyone can go for advice and comfort. One day, the Augur prophesies a cataclysm – flood and fire – that will wash the city away. She tells everybody to run. And the authorities in the city don’t like this at all. 

What makes Augury a fine novel is not just Lister’s atmospherics – you can smell the roasting meat, hear the strange voices, feel under your feet the cold stones of her city – but the strong, subtle plot that gets moving from almost the very first page. At the Emperor’s feast a steward named Lennes, the house accountant, a dull and unimaginative man, suddenly takes it upon himself to repeat the Augur’s prophecy in dramatic tones that grab the whole evening – ‘Then there came from the mouth a starred lizard, a salamander. Its eyes were coal and its breath was fire. The lizard crawled from the mouth and down the mountain towards the city. Its body was aflame, and it carried the flames into the city. The voice said to me, What is decaying must burn.‘ Lennes’s sudden mystical outburst does not go down well with the high priest Athraxus, who in a brutal scene plunges his fist into the steward’s mouth and pulls out a chunk of his teeth. 

Grand Viziers are always complete and utter bastards, Terry Pratchett wrote, and high priests tend to get put into the same category. Athraxus is head of the Dark Temple, a faith quite unlike the gentle wisdom of the Augur. Whereas anyone can go to the Augur’s priestesses, for help, the Dark Temple calls to the city’s one per cent, its aristocrats and magistrates and wealthy merchants, who learn the Temple’s secrets in proportion to the amount of money they give in offering, a Scientology sliding scale of revelation. Lister says – in one of her eerie interludes of straight narration – that ‘your story is not your own. Your story is ours to portion out as we please, to be sold back to you at a price.’ Athraxus himself is a fearsome villain who has the Augur captured and tortured, and sets the machinery of the state against her temple. But for all his fury the person he hates most is his own son, the fair-minded dreamer Myloxenes. ‘Thank the gods your mother has bedded so many,’ he shouts. ‘I comfort myself that you could be a bastard.’ 

Against Athraxus and his dark priests a small resistance movement forms: teenage priestesses Saba and Aemilia, the villain’s son Mylo and Antonus, the emperor’s brother. Antonus’s story is particularly poignant because he was originally meant to be the emperor, rather than his brother Laonatus – until a house fire of dubious origin that has left him limping ever since. Laonatus himself is the ideal figurehead for a Grand Vizier type like Athraxus: he’s a lazy degenerate fool who ‘worries about the dim corners of knowledge; about the mysterious migratory destinations of sacred birds; the pages in his father’s annals where records have been poorly kept, the nature and habits of the giant-men who are said to live in the arid country far over the mountains. Just as his bedside lamp is burning dry, Laonatus will rise and upend some dusty case of charts, then call for more lamps so that he can spend the small hours examining them… His chamber-slaves and closest attendants must learn all kinds of unblinking patience.’ Athraxus runs rings round him, gets his okay on all kinds of atrocities, but Antonus is more level headed and would have been a more resolute and better ruler.

The real insight here is not into the lives of great men but the experience of women in fantasy. Saba and Aemilia, like so many other priestesses, are at the Augur’s temple because they have nowhere else to go: without the Augur and the protective space she provides for women they would have been forced into prostitution. Antonus’s wife Junia was ‘ruined’ – raped – and given to Antonus as a gesture of magnanimity from his imperial brother. How she accepts this fate, even flourishes within it, is one of the strongest storylines in this work. It’s no wonder midwives in Lister’s world greet the delivery of girl babies as a curse. Even the Emperor’s wives, Mandane and Cassandane, have been turned into glorified brood-mares. But the courage of Junia, the priestesses, Hestia the wise fool and the Augur herself hold out hope that whatever comes after the coming catastrophe, won’t be so patriarchal. 

This is a novel about religion, and faith, and habits of faith and thought. Laonatus, Athraxus and the ruling elite take as gospel that their city, as corrupt and dysfunctional as it is, will simply go on forever – they are the classic Atlantis men in the Brecht poem, bellowing for their slaves even as the waves roar in. Athraxus’s temple has forced out the household and kitchen gods – the little deities of lares and pennates that were lost in the great march toward monotheism – but once the great catastrophe really does hit the city he seems completely unmoored, a man without a country and a failed magician. Saba and Aemilia have learned to grasp the future through animal entrails and the patterns of birds as they arc across the sky. For good or bad, people are wired up to see patterns in things, codes in the sky, the meaning of life. As Lister says: ‘We all of us dream in the dark.’

12,000 Rules for Life

It’s said that 2020 is the year of the plague. On a banal level it’s just the year of new rules. We are all used to rules on a local level, rules are a huge part of our culture, rules of manners, rules of service, rules of procedure. Anyone who’s ever dealt with a large organisation will be familiar with The Rules. You will deal with frontline workers who have no discretion but to follow The Rules. Getting stuff done relies on negotiating your way up to a ‘decision maker’ who will be one of the rare people who can disregard or bend The Rules. Benefit agencies are the worst for this but the same problems come up everywhere. 

It’s an everyday experience that can nearly break a person. There are famous Englishmen who became so sick of small rules that they fled the country altogether: Christopher Hitchens wrote in his autobiography that ‘Life in Britain had seemed like one long antechamber to a room that had too many barriers to entry’, and left for America in the early 1980s; around the same time, John Cleese had an American guest bellowing in Fawlty Towers that ‘What the hell’s wrong with this country, you can’t get a drink until three, can’t eat after nine… goddamnit, is the war still on?’ The rules that so infuriated the US visitor in the 1970s were just as inflexible ten years later. Matthew Collin, in his classic social history Altered States, tells us that on New Year’s Eve, 1989, the end of the decade, the year of the Fall of the Wall, the hour of last orders in English pubs was half past ten, no later. Small wonder Collins’s generation took to the fields.

We have come a long way since 1989 but some things remain the same. Politics remains, in large part, an argument over who gets to make the rules and what rules get applied to different groups. Even Brexit, which was supposed to be a revolt against supranational rules and regulations, has been yet another rule generating exercise. Whether we leave with a deal or not (and we are approaching midnight with still nothing on the table) individuals and businesses are being advised to ‘get ready’ for the fun new rules that will make buying, trading and travelling around much more complicated. Revolt in England 2016 was about the freedom to follow new rules. 

Then, of course, came the coronavirus pandemic. There has been much criticism of the government’s handling of this deadly disease. I would say that HMG’s big weakness was to plan our COVID-19 strategy in terms of rules. The pandemic had been foreseen, forewarned, war-gamed: the state could have locked in a decent test and trace system before the virus even hit our shores. Other countries – poorer and less developed than the UK – locked testing in fast, and kept far more of their citizens alive, but oh no, for the UK government that sort of thing’s just too difficult. It had to be about The Rules. So the government introduced a whole new set of virus rules, and then, when people complained that the new rules did not go far enough, imposed a national lockdown.

Don’t get me wrong. A lot of the coronavirus rules are common-sensisms that we can all do. I’m fine with hand washing and social distancing, I’m fine with masks (although many people, forgotten by the rule makers, have respiratory or anxiety issues that make mask wearing problematic). I even accept there are good arguments for national lockdowns, my arguments against them are really just about spreading awareness of the nasty unforeseen social consequences that lockdowns cause.

My point is that HMG got carried away with The Rules. We had a summer lull during which the government could have finally sorted out a test and trace system that worked, but no, again, that’s too difficult. Again it had to be about The Rules, albeit in a new form. HMG lifted national lockdown but introduced a whole new set of rules depending on what area of the country you lived in, including a 1989-style curfew at ten o’clock. The optics of closing down Manchester but keeping Westminster open were not great (how inept do you have to be, politically, to make Andy Burnham look good?) and the public health benefits of these rules were not immediately apparent so public compliance, strong for months by this point, weakened. Meanwhile the virus toll rose. The thing about HMG, they’re great at making new rules for people, it’s just results they can’t do

And of course public confidence was lost long before that, with the Cummings affair. Everyone says Cummings acted improperly, Cummings and HMG said he didn’t. Who was right is not the issue. Plenty of people broke lockdown for the sake of family commitments. Cummings was crucial because he illustrated the problem of the rule makers, a problem that causes, among the rulebound English, periodic eruptions of fury. More revealing was a story that hit a few weeks later, when more of the Vote Leave clique were revealed to have broken lockdown rules at a barbecue on the Isle of Wight. Among the guests was deputy Spectator editor Freddy Gray. He told the Guardian that

You’ve busted me. I did invite Bob over to discuss the app – since we had had a falling out over the article I had written. I did not, however, tell him that it would be a massive rave in the garden involving children flagrantly eating barbecue food, champagne and a baby being flung around.

Bob didn’t stay long. I apologised for having caused him distress with my app article and he said no hard feelings. We talked about a follow-up piece on how the app was performing, as I moved on to white wine. Bob didn’t drink – though I believe he may have eaten one or possibly two sausages.

It’s worth quoting Gray, in his clubbable irony, for what he doesn’t say: lockdowns are for the little people. Rules are for the smallfolk to follow. The incident also illustrates why, although they believe strongly in The Rules, elites aren’t crazy about actual laws, which are always written down and which apply to everyone. That’s why Tories talk forever about repealing the Human Rights Act. That’s why the Home Office is constantly going on about ‘activist lawyers’ preventing it from deporting our way into prosperity. 

I’m a middle class liberal and my people are fond of The Rules. We are wary of rule-breakers in politics because we remember that the hard right weaponised that kind of transgressiveness to tear up working conditions, health and safety laws, food standards, and E&D protections. But again, politics has moved on, the 2016 populist rule-breakers have taken rule-making further than we PC liberals ever dreamed of. It’s time for liberals to rediscover our cynicism and hostility towards authority.

To paraphrase the Roman Tacitus, ‘The more corrupt the state, the more numerous The Rules!’