T. S. Eliot once described poetry as “a superior amusement”; and though he immediately went on to qualify the statement, it remains one of the most endearing definitions of a notoriously indefinable art. Eliot doesn’t deny that that’s not all there is to it, nor that a poem “has something to do with morals, and with religion, and even with politics perhaps”; but he offers up the epithet as the best of a bad lot, since any other is going to “call it something still more false”.
On similar grounds, it is a perfectly workable description of John Fuller’s poetry, gathered in almost its entirety in this Collected Poems, published in the month of the poet’s sixtieth birthday. For Fuller’s wit and range, both in form and genre, are truly remarkable; so much so that the remarking of them has become a reviewer’s cliché, and sometimes a dismissive one. It needs to be remembered, therefore, not “how difficult” such technical achievement is – for Fuller’s apparent facility is not necessarily an illusion – but how rare; and it does say something about the poetic climate in which Fuller has been writing over the past five decades not only that such a gift is seen as unusual, but also that this rarity is only praised en passant.
Fuller’s arrangement of his poems by chronology, rather than by the volumes in which they were originally ordered and released, allows for a view of his progress which differs from that afforded by the Selected Poems of 1985. To read through it, from the anti-Romantic “Fairy Tale” with its bathetic readjustment of fantasy (“But worse than all the sniggers of the wood, / The waiting prince was ugly, pale and good”), through the landscapes and pastiches of the 1960s, to the assured, elegant verse epistles and the Byronesque caprice of The Illusionists and beyond, is to notice not so much a development of purpose as an accumulation of styles; and while, on the one hand, a reader appreciates the voracious adoption of older forms and voices – there are echoes of Eliot, Auden and MacNeice, as well as the Metaphysicals and Augustans – one should also note, not unhappily, the paths not taken: the nakedly confessional, the overtly political, the howling visionary.
One of the most resilient and potentially serious accusations levelled at Fuller’s poetry is that style becomes a substitute for feeling rather than a way of mediating it impersonally; another is that despite the discursive tone, especially in longer pieces, and a frequent air of earnest enquiry, punctuated by rhetorical questions and marvelling apostrophes, the poems fail to deliver striking or original thought. Phrases like “civilized obliquity” and “too comfortably smiling”, eager assaults on apparently self-referential titles such as “The Beautiful Inventions” and “The Mechanical Body”, and observations of “a curious hesitancy, as if the poet is not sure which is the real John Fuller who should stand up”, all indicate a critical consensus which cannot be ignored. When so many otherwise appreciative readers, including friends such as Ian Hamilton, admit to such reservations, the poems surely have a case to answer.
The problem is not – or rather, it should not be – that Fuller can write jaunty or haunting light verse with enviable fluency. Some of these pieces are pure whimsy, entirely successful on their own terms; a few, playful celebrations on marginal topics, do look trivial and silly in this mammoth gathering (“Bonzo & Co”, for example, or the pointless and lengthy exercise of “The Shires”), but need not distract from the weightier material surrounding them. The verse Epistles to Several Persons, written in the Burns stanza, have an undercurrent of satire and seriousness which is the more potent for coming in disguise. The problem, perhaps, is that some readers sense energy being deliberately diverted away from an overwhelming question; that the levity is an attempt to fly from danger.
Fuller remarked, in an interview in Poetry Review in 1983: “I subscribe to the view that if a poet’s caprice succeeds where his imposing moralities fall with a dismal thud, then that’s the luck of the game.” Yet, surely, those two approaches “fail” or “succeed” on very different terms, poetically, and the nonchalance of Fuller’s phrasing adds to an unease that both are examples of jeu d’esprit rather than serious purpose. In The Illusionists, Fuller offers in the guise of generalization the self-descriptive statement that “Poets adore a divertissement, / They are the hooligans of wit”, and, genteel though the hooliganism is, each fresh assault on a genre, form or voice has fuelled the suspicion that there is more divertissement in Fuller’s work than simply the odd foray into light verse, that the entertaining diversions might be evasions of a darkness and seriousness only hinted at on their peripheries.
Yet Fuller’s work is not devoid of serious enquiry; indeed, it is full of it. Questions arise continuously, whether abstractly presented or in the thoughts and voices of his various characters and personae. In “Purposes”, Fuller observes, in warm and magical detail, the amusing single-minded progress of sheep, before shifting perspective dramatically back in Martian flirtation:
It may be that we too have
Such singleness of intent
Viewed from the right perspective,
Some alien lofty observer
Who would find us touching and comic.
Perhaps the knowledge would salve
Our own dim sense of confusion,
Sublime hauntings, pure puzzle.
Perhaps. How thankful we are
That we don’t, and never shall, have it.
This is one of several poems that encapsulate the questions riddling Fuller’s other work. Ignoring the over-generous “we” of the (over-comfortable?) conclusion which instantly effaces the fussy “perhaps”, it is worth focusing on “pure puzzle” – the puzzle which, the more recent poem “Interrogations” makes clear, can never be answered by the living – and “sublime hauntings”. It is arguable that Fuller’s discursive modes, couched in philosophizing or scientific terms, are less an attempt to find answers and more a subtle and compassionate dramatization of why and how we ask questions.
Reading the Collected, one sees how many of the poems flinch from revelation. Despite the style of many – with their cautious, elaborate series of propositions, vividly observed examples, cadenced conclusions – they are far more often reassertions of mystery. “In The Corridor” is a dialogue with a dead friend – or would be, if the ghost spoke. Instead, though “eager and simple for a startling truth”, Fuller notes that “of course the darkness shielded you from inquisition” (the “of course”, presumably, intentionally confesses the impossibility). Although the illusion is maintained – “You will forgive, I am sure, / that craven breaking of the spell / Though you may have wished to tell / Secrets that only silence and respect of fear / Ever allow us to hear” – the conclusion moves away from the dangled promise of secrets to a generalized statement of grief, of which such a desire for revelation is a symptom.
This is far from an isolated case. In one of Fuller’s more recent elegies, the late Angus McIntyre is addressed thus: “There are things I want to tell you, but the occasion / Forbids it”; and in the devastating elegy Star Gazing, the words of the ghost of Fuller’s father are raised and erased: “But what he said, or what I made / Him say, was lost. Was I afraid / To hear, or even make the attempt?” In another poem of spectral visitation, “The College Ghost”, the revenant is less a symbol of grief and yearning than of self-accusation, and is concomitantly more articulate, albeit about Fuller’s own, stylishly achieved, inarticulacy: “You reckon you can shortly make your escape, / Say more next time. That is your manner.” That poem contains a sense of personal failure (“Whatever you teach will make no difference at all”), whether chosen or unavoidable, which underwrites Fuller’s equally pervasive and self-aware notion of “retreat”. Divertissement is not solely a matter of performance in Fuller’s work; it is often his subject.
The idea of “retreat”, both verb and noun, of an escape from a larger world and the “pure puzzle” of why and how we live, or just from Oxford where he teaches English literature, saturates Fuller’s poetry. Indeed, “Retreat” is the title of one of his most hauntingly realized pieces, sketching the broken lives of men in seaside boarding houses, hoarding their excuses (“the last remembered failure at once abandoned / And insistent, like a card on the mantlepiece”), and tellingly offers its various alibis at various removes, in inverted commas within inverted commas. Retreat is evoked in various tones and textures in many of the poems about Wales, where Fuller owns a cottage. It is a topic in the verse epistle “To Angus McIntyre”: “though it lies in wait / With terrible reproaches, fate / May yet forgive / Our scared retreats, both small and great / And let us live”.
“Our scared retreats”: Fuller, for all his apparent comfort and indulgence, evokes despair, fear and self-accusation so often in the poetry that one is forced to revise the earlier impression of superficiality and evasion. Especially in his pastoral poetry, the pleasant Georgics on the Welsh landscape, there is an indefinable sense of threat and a fearful expectation of incipient reckoning. In “The Cry” – a typical evocation of noises off and ineffable apprehension – Fuller writes “we know / That there will always be some cry / To break our cherished self-esteem / And every civil dream”.
The fierce control – that famous technique – with which Fuller presents his fear and despair (and the compensatory paeans to the civil and the pleasurable and the decent) can muffle their subject, but it rises with grim persistence. It is at its strongest in the sequence Waiting for the Music, as poem after poem renders paralysis and despair with almost no prospect of redemption. It is a despair arising from the potential pointlessness of any achievement, and is iterated repeatedly, in the epistle to James Fenton (“It isn’t easy not to feel effete / This side of anguish”), in the chess master Staunton’s confession of emptiness:
Once proud of my pride in what I had achieved,
Now I only have the abject achievement.
Once in love with the harmony of our orbits,
Now I feel the fierce lack at the centre.
It is also possible to look at “Topkapi” (among other poems in The Beautiful Inventions) and wonder whether its sense of disappointment among lavish ornamentation (“Tomorrow I will throw myself into the Bosphorous”, the fantastically wealthy sultan concludes) is shared by Fuller.
Such despair is only one aspect of Fuller’s approach to the big questions, but it is a dominant note which places him in a tradition of English pessimism, humanist scepticism, and gentle nihilism in which small decencies become significant consolations. Desire is also discussed, albeit mostly obliquely and abstractly, and often in terms of its frustration, and taps into Fuller’s committed arguments with himself over purpose and determinism. (For instance, Caliban’s question to artful Ariel in an early poem: “Have you no feelings which you cannot tame?”, or a line from the darkling “Floodbox”, “No one is right /… The brain rehearses out of sight / The tender habits of the heart”; the cunningly dispersed and defused questions about character and destiny in the Shandyesque non-narrative of The Illusionists; and, gloomily, in “To Each Other”, “It is late / To establish reasons for preferring / The things we prefer / When now it seems grotesque to imagine / That they might occur”.)
Fuller’s Whitbread Prize-winning novel, Flying To Nowhere, concerned a monk’s search for the physical seat of the soul, in a dark tale of human vivisection which ended in a grotesque epiphany as a library sprouted vegetable matter in overwhelmingly speedy growth. The theme of desire as a wild card, or of unruly nature encroaching fearfully on that “cherished self-esteem [and] civil dream”, is observable from some of the earliest work, in which Fuller shows a surreal imaginative power and a taste for the Gothic. The adjacent poems “Alive and Dead” and “Green Fingers” ache with repressions and fearful stirrings, conjuring illness, aimlessness, and the threat of being overwhelmed: “Man shudders from ungovernable nature / His greatest deceit”. It is a horror which becomes a motif, as in “Ghost Village” with its revulsion at “the success of matter / Keeping its own activities a deadly secret”.
Fuller’s formal control could itself be regarded as a metaphor for the civilized gardening of an unruly wilderness, and the metaphor could plausibly extend to the political, moral and emotional. The idea is explored thoroughly by Fuller himself in “The Grey and the Green”, which, with polite leisure and pretty similes, gradually earns its quietistic acceptance of the poet’s insignificance in the face of thoughtlessly thriving nature; of how intelligence and civility require the wilderness, and require their battle with it; and of how meaning is found in simply living, in choices and mistakes. It is an acceptance also offered, delicately, in “Hauntings”, which concludes that we ourselves are “the excuse for our failures” and refers to “our quiet retreat from life / And that abundant love bred out / Of loneliness which merely puzzles / Its busy, sensual, happy victims”. Even the chess player Staunton, with the poised phrase “we move in free compulsion”, nervously fingers such consolations at the end of “The Most Difficult Position”.
As these examples suggest, Fuller’s work treats the unanswerable existential questions of a sceptical, intelligent humanity in terms of their emotional urgency; the despair or the comfort afforded by such questioning. There is an almost articulate yearning, despite his carefully closed forms and conclusive statements, for rough edges – “a picture should extend beyond its frame”. But these feelings and ideas are more often than not delivered in a calm, intellectualized voice; one not so far from the Prufrockian delivery which Fuller pastiches so well in “Scenario for a Walk-on Part” or Staunton’s monologue, but more confident. It could be argued that there are aspects of technique – risky ones – which have dealt with those messy emotions, and those tangled questions, in an appropriately fraught form or tone; a technique which, however carefully achieved, grants its ungovernable subjects an equally dramatic or disruptive execution; and that Fuller has rarely attempted this. As he remarks in “Star Gazing”, “It takes no time for the grotesque, / To normalise its strange aesthetic: / It constitutes the picturesque”. However true that is, Fuller does rather hurry the process along.
Fuller’s cultivation of impersonality – which different poets handle in different ways – has often led him towards Audenesque generalizations. His tendency to say “we” can be viewed, with equal validity, either as a failure to address subjectivity (and wider questions of gender, class and politics; we can compare Blake Morrison’s comments on this tendency in the Movement poets), or as a “gracious movement outwards from the ego”, as a sympathetic commentator recently and plausibly suggested. And though a faint hint of superiority hangs unself-critically over some of the poems, one can equally well turn to Fuller’s blazing surprises; unique poems such as “Her Morning Dreams”, with its expressionist intensity, the fantastical and haunting “Annie Upside Down”, or “The Most Difficult Position” with its acutely sympathetic rendering of the protagonists’ minds.
This side of Fuller is most consistently available in the final poems of the Collected, from his most recent volume, Stones and Fires, which with its unusually autobiographical and concretely detailed elegies contains his most moving and accessible work. Its bravery provides a satisfying sense of tonal completion to this Collected, so vigorous in its formal range; and makes one look forward with heightened interest to whatever superior amusements John Fuller might turn to next.