One of the students whom Geoffrey Hill taught at Cambridge (1981–8) used to quote his tutor in letters to friends. This, for example, was Hill announcing the next term’s reading list (the ellipses indicating lugubrious pauses): “And English Literature . . . in the Sixteenth Century . . . (Excluding Drama) . . . by C. S. Lewis . . . with whose . . . The Lion . . . the Witch . . . and the Wardrobe . . . you may be more happily familiar.”
Reading Geoffrey Hill can itself feel like receiving a reading list—one is frequently referred to texts and events with which one is unhappily unfamiliar—but the matter of Hill’s “difficulty” (his pun in The Triumph of Love, that he is “charged with erudition”, did little to allay criticism of his range of references) has surely been adequately dealt with, not least by the poet himself, whose response, in a recent interview, was “that genuinely difficult art is truly democratic. And that tyranny requires simplification.” One might add that Hill does employ allusion to due purpose; indeed, his references often carry a weight of homage and humility, and in all cases gesture at hinterlands of contexture that could not be invoked more economically.
The flipside of the question of difficulty is that reviews and readings of Hill, even the appreciative ones, can end up treating his work as if he were presenting a thesis in code, and that all one had to do was translate it into more intelligible language. This approach wholly ignores the dramatic aspect of Hill; and his recent work is so consciously and vitally theatrical that it is worth attending briefly to its effects. Speech! Speech!, his latest volume, is concerned, centrally, with different forms of address, and their mediation, and with different relationships to audience; and before one can engage with it, one has to experience it. The cover, for instance, is a Daumier lithograph sarcastically titled “On dit que les parisiens sont difficiles à satisfaire”—it shows a slack-faced, complacent audience raptly and smugly applauding. The epigraphs are in Latin and German respectively, the first by Ennius (“but the tuba sounded with its terrible taratantara”) and the second by Günter Grass (“lower the curtain before you understand why they’re applauding”). The reader might already feel a little challenged.
If so, it will be a while before he feels any more at ease. The poem consists of 120 stanzas of twelve lines each—“blocks”, as Hill calls them (“He voids each twelve-line block a head / solemnly breaking water”)—and one is reminded of the punishing schedule of The Triumph of Love, where we were warned that “You will have to / go forward block by block”. In Hill we must always be alert to puns, and “block” manages to evoke obstructions to progress, the mould for woodcuts (invoked, as devices of Lutheran propaganda, in the fourth stanza), and the support for execution by beheading. We will learn that, where The Triumph of Love offered 150 stanzas (mirroring the number of the biblical Psalms), the 120 stanzas of Speech! Speech! are for the 120 days of Sodom (and this, surely, relates to Sade and Pasolini as much as to the city of Lot).
In the “long haul” that follows, there will be a number of obstacles for the reader. Its viewpoint soars and swoops like an aeroplane or Prospero’s Ariel, then falls flat on its face as if in music-hall pratfall. Sometimes it offers the theatre of vaudeville; sometimes of war, or surgery. There is polyphony, and the different voices—demotic, parodic, erudite, hectoring, heckling, lecturing, soliloquizing, punning—are run so close together that the reader will constantly be required to discriminate and adjudicate; a lesson in attention that will be less of a surprise to readers of Hill’s scrupulous criticism. There are baffling accent marks: Hopkinsian stresses over syllables, which often force us to read perversely against the natural stress, though also throw up ambiguities we might have missed; and vertical slashes, which do not strictly mark caesuras, but more often register a dramatic pause, or an ellipsis or pun, or a change of speaker or direction—again, the reader is required to attend to context. The marks will be a shock to readers who preferred Hill’s perfect formal measures in his earlier work; and such readers may not be amused or enlightened by a passage late in the book which affects to explain the typography and is in fact a lie. There are also crossword clues that are not crossword clues; and there are questions that seem more aggressive and rhetorical than enquiring. This is, in many ways, a hostile address.
However, the poem is also passionate, comical and even tender in places, utterly committed to what it sees as the public good. It enacts the pressures against which it labours, and absorbs them into the texture of the poem. These pressures include a debased public language, an amnesiac public, a culture given over solely to commerce and sensation, a contemptuous lack of seriousness and attention. Years ago, in a discussion of Yeats’s “The Circus Animals’ Desertion”, Hill asked: “How is it possible, though, to revoke ‘masterful images’ in images that are themselves masterful? How can one renounce ‘completion’ with epithets and rhyme patterns that in themselves retain a certain repleteness?” And elsewhere, discussing Pound, he observed that
one of the discoveries of “modernist” poetry has been the technique of transposing the hapless “irritation of the jostled”, “the gross silence of the hired concealers”, into the kind of rapid juxtapositions and violent lacunae that one finds in the third and fourth sections of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley—phrase callously jostling phrase, implication merging into implication . . . sententiae curtly abandoned. These become the key instruments of “the intelligence at bay”.
These remarks were published a decade ago; Hill’s late style has been coming for a long time.
Although neither Pound nor Eliot is named directly, Speech! Speech! further advances Hill’s arguments with both those modernist fathers. Pound’s failure to marshal the materials of the Cantos (“I cannot make it cohere”) is echoed in Hill’s own interjections (“If I could once focus . . . on a single factor, / self-centre of anomie”; “coherence / though not at any price”; “your incoherence / the volatility of a dead age”). “My God, he can pack it in”, Hill mockingly writes at one point, in a line overlaid by various innuendos; and Hill does, indeed, conjure an extraordinary interplay of politics, art, history, theology, elegy, eulogy, satire and comedy. Through apparent disintegration, the poem establishes its own integrities:
Shambles of peripeteia to discover
history if not to make it. Loud laughter
track | poór compensation for the bád shów.
This needs working on but then who needs it?
AMICUS, his own worst enemy? Make a good
ending, as they used to say. So give me
yoúr prescription for the good life and I
will teár through it. Dissever sensual
from sensuous, licence from freedom: choose
between real status and real authority.
With this surrender—or ostensible surrender—of mastery, come some moments of personal abjection that can be as hard to bear as the apparent aggressions of the text; illness, impotence, grief, pain. Sometimes it reads as if written against the clock by a dying man. Just as Hill’s earlier style was criticized for its careful impersonality (an approach based on—he says—a misplaced literalism in his reading of Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent”), so his later work has been criticized for its disturbingly personal material; leaving Hill either accused of being chilly and aloof, or of being self-obsessed and neurotic. “Would I have spoken so freely if not / under constraint? EITHER WAY THEY GET YOU”, Hill writes here. On a careful reading of the whole length of Speech! Speech!, those critics might find that the issues they raise have been considered in greater depth, and from more angles, by Hill himself; but in choosing the stylistic path he has, Hill is prone to exactly the sort of misunderstandings his poem is worrying over.
As the title suggests, Speech! Speech! is vitally concerned with communication; with words and messages received, unreceived, understood and misunderstood: “Strengthen your signal I AM LOSING YOU. That / always gets to them”, he puns at one point. Hill once wrote beautifully and movingly of Dietrich Bonhoeffer that “Against wild reasons of the State / his words are quiet, but not too quiet. / We hear too late, or not too late”: here Hill writes of “clues received from sputtering agents of Marconi; from Imre Nagy . . .”, not the last reference to broadcasts in a book that thoroughly explores media and mediation, whether in fax, email, theatre, law courts, the Internet, prayer, speech, newspapers, poetry, cinema, sculpture, or painting. (Imre Nagy’s final broadcast was an appeal for help from the West as the Soviet Union invaded his native Hungary; the plea was ignored, and Nagy was executed.) Broadcasters crop up, named and unnamed, throughout: “Try Hilversum . . . . Give / Luxembourg a miss for old times’ sake.” (Axis Sally broadcast from Hilversum; Lord Haw Haw from Luxembourg.) “Daventry and Droitwich / are still transmitting—cries of disbelief, / recognizance evasions that return / with a comet’s faithfulness of assignation” (suggesting the failure to save Jewish lives, despite widespread knowledge of their fate). The writers Chinua Achebe and Christopher Okigbo, variously alluded to, both worked for Nigerian radio before the Biafran conflict, sinister and exemplary details of which are found throughout Speech! Speech! Absent, except by implication, is Pound’s pro-Mussolini broadcasting from Rome; an episode which Hill treated judiciously and sensitively in his essay “My Word Is My Bond”.
That essay formed part of a sustained critical engagement by Hill with the ethical employment of language. Speech! Speech! presents a remarkable range of proper and improper uses of language and media; it is “a galaxy / of voices, leaping static”, “a theatre of voices”; and against a Babel of heckling and harassment (“STOP WRITING. HANDS ON HEADS”), it evokes time and time again the obstacles against which Hill must push to speak.
Some of those heckles are prurient or vicious, others financial (“YOU OWE US MONEY”); the contrasting of economic language with a lost religious language of gift and covenant is woven through the text. “Mediation means business”, Hill writes, in a passage summoning presidential jets, financial corruption and abuses of authority. Elsewhere, puns on mediation like “Between us / is the Pope to be trusted?” return us to Hill’s religious concerns, and their intimate connection with issues of government and authority in English history; his dissenting, Puritan voice still agonizes over the corruption of the leaders of Church and State, while despising, conversely, the anarchic individualism represented by, among others, Emerson (as a scathing passage on Brook Farm suggests). So the question of authority, arbitration and proper judgment recurs (“contestant juries / dealing out faith for faith”; “anomie is as good a word as any; / so pick any; who on earth will protest?”), and refuses resolution; the lyrical pastoral passages, for which Hill is most widely admired, periodically offer and withdraw “a Paradiso / not accounted for—unaccountable— / eternally in prospect . . .”. Perhaps his next book, The Orchards of Syon, will see Hill reach his destination.
Hill is a religious poet, first and foremost, and this (as it should) poses problems for secular readers; but his interest in “intrinsic virtue”, leading to his creation of a new pantheon of heroic individuals who stood out against the pressures of their time, is instructive in any case. Speech! Speech! contains several of these “praise-songs”, as well as invoking artists exemplary for their failures—political complicity, populist manipulation, theological error, amoral sensationalism. Likewise, his consideration of the state of England, which, since Canaan (1996), has become increasingly contemporary in its reference, should speak to anyone; there are even some moving and surprising considerations of the death and funeral of Princess Diana.
Speech! Speech! is an acutely intelligent work of extraordinary passion and abundance; it is, for all its apparent difficulties, an earnest and open invitation to its readers not merely (or not even) to enjoy or admire, but to join with the poet in considering the questions raised. Whether it will be understood as such is, of course, part of its predicament.