Thomas McCarthy 'Pandemonium' and Jane Draycott 'The Occupant'

Pandemonium by Thomas McCarthy (Carcanet, 2016)

The Occupant by Jane Draycott (Carcanet, 2016)

Pandemonium is the mythical capital of Hell, created by the poet John Milton in his epic Paradise Lost.  Pandemonium is where the maker of chaos resides, an unhinged anarchist, an artist smearing Heaven with his dirty protest.  More than this Pandemonium is a Hell made in Ireland by venture capitalists, bankers, hedge fund managers.  John Martin’s Pandemonium (1825) is a visual recreation of the stump outlined in Milton’s vision but it is not a place of human habitation.  It is an obviously infernal region complete with fiery cracks that delve deeply into the swirling lava and fire below and Satan (presumably) stands before his headquarters, arms, shield and spear aloft, hailing the misery of his destructiveness and the minor demons that abound within the halls of his palace. 

John Martin (1784-1854) was an artist of the north-west of Britain, an outsider figure rejected by the Establishment of his day but whose embrace of populism made him a necessary part of the Victorian era.  Martin was popular and his work was sought after most avidly by members of high society like Prince Albert.  The reference to Martin and Milton is clearly linked to the recent economic world-wide economic meltdown but also to outsider art, unpopular in times of plenty when the good times roll, but perhaps a necessary antidote to the times we are now living through.

The subject of McCarthy’s collection Pandemonium is the recent and historical economic crisis to hit Ireland after the Celtic Tiger phenomenon had pushed the country into modernity.  This enabled the south of Ireland to be the norths able and willing competitor while previously it had been identified with economic and other forms of stagnation (an economy that consisted of “Guinness and Chapel”, as they say in Dublin).  McCarthy is an able interrogator of his country’s recent past and his innately conversational yet rhythmical verse can be intimate, educated, erudite and a great many other things too.  Yet McCarthy’s Modernist trajectory, making the reader look up a word or historical or personal reference every couple of lines, for instance, makes his book a laborious read.  However, McCarthy probably reckons that he deserves a modicum of respect given the weight of his previous publications.  By contrast Jane Draycott has eschewed Modernism but not modernity, her work is much more tentative.  Draycott’s book can be read right through without much pause for the abstruse although there are a few erudite references which intrigue rather than bore.  McCarthy’s Modernist project seems naïve by contrast, an echo from the past rather than the reverberation of possible futures.  McCarthy, however, always lapses towards being interesting even when he intends to impress.  By contrast Draycott has not learned to dare but instead cautiously maintains a reserved distance from her subject matter.

McCarthy refers to Ireland’s recent crises in terms of the language of the famine era underscored by “All the signals we received from Berlin.”

The land is not yet settled

After our years of pandemonium.

This time it is almost too late

To sing with full heart a parting hymn,

Or indulge in the usual fickle

Humour of things. It is too late

                             The Land is Not Settled

Germany is the European location that matters not Britain and London or even Frankfurt am Main for that matter but Berlin, the cultural, governmental capital of Germany.  McCarthy clearly implies the Berlin of David Bowie, Lou Reed and U2 but also a country that has maintained an interest in Ireland albeit as a possible trouble spot for ‘perfidious Albion’ whose troubles could also be exploited by continental foes.  The relationship between Berlin and Dublin is also maintained in W.B.Yeats poem, Seven Dead Men, written in the aftermath of the Easter Rising:

You say that we should still the land

Till Germany’s overcome;

But who is there to argue that

Now Pearse is deaf and dumb?

And is their logic to outweigh

MacDonagh’s bony thumb?

The thousand or so German agents in Ireland in 1915 testifies to this remarkable continental influence just as the armies of Napoleon had earlier dismayed Westminster.  Today the interlocking effect of European politics is similarly striking given present talk about a hard Brexit and a hard or soft border in Ireland.  What happens in Ireland is also of European consequence and the waves of crisis are felt far beyond Dublin.  It was no coincidence that the King of France sent his cavalry to fight with James against William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, a date we are not allowed to forget in Ireland.

It sounds as if the poet’s lament is overtaking itself as it stretches from almost too late to too late and yet Ireland persists even if their poets require evidence of it.  McCarthy is an able political commentator like Yeats although his recollections sometimes seem prosaic by contrast.

Jane Draycott’s collection The Occupant lacks the centralising dynamic that McCarthy’s work readily generates.  At times its ivory tower detachment lapses into prose banality:

It’s dark in here and forest green: Britannica,

Sixteen oak trees in a London living room,

The little girl, my mother, in the bookcase glass.

Italy, Ithaca, Izmail, Japan, each page a mainsail

Turning, HMS Discovery – none of the rivers

Of southern Italy is of any great importance.

Italy to Lord

This is true for the great Italian rivers are in the north, in the Pre-Alpine regions where the Po begins and near Belluno the Piave begins its course through the foothills of the Dolomites, winding lazily across the plain of the Veneto.  But what does it matter for the Liffey is also very boring but the bones of great Ulysses were pulled out of it.  The poet might be implying, none of these poems is of any great importance, and be right.  There is more to experience than reading things in encyclopaedias something that the poet seems to privately acknowledge as she depicts her mother’s interest in such lively stuff yet by the end of the collection seems to be no further on in discovering the world rather than the encyclopaedia.  There is so much else that it is theoretically true yet lacks a practitioner’s grasp of the things that lie beyond erudition.  Jane Draycott might visit some of the places she mentions although she also balances the difference between curious reading and later hard experiences when the banality of actuality replaces potent images in books.  Peering out of her ivory tower the world must appear a place of pandemonium where Draycott’s poetic ideals never match up with actuality.

McCarthy is more convincing when he talks about Italy for he seems to have been there indicated in his poem Frantic Venice:

                                                          Here is a Lord

On a pilgrimage of sorts, captured in water,

His countess in the canal, drowning.  St Marks is wet

With a determined and deflected Brenta. 

McCarthy’s cherished location is Venice but his depiction fails to rise above touristic banality predictably referencing the books and films we know and love (Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now).  However, Venice’s history and the literature, music and art conceived there are very much more intricate and compelling than McCarthy admits through his rose-tinted views of the Grand Canal.  Ruskin, for instance, re-envisioned the city through his meditation on its art and architecture Stones of Venice.  Venice seems a lot closer and more like dirty old Dublin than McCarthy himself seems to understand.  It might have been better if he, as his mentor James Joyce did, had stayed there in spirit even if his physical movements gravitated towards the Adriatic Riviera and Trieste.

One of the abstruse references Draycott countenances is Martinus Nijhoff’s 1934 poem ‘Awater’ which is not a name or a work that trips off the tongue today yet at the time the poem was praised by none other than T.S.Eliot.  I would be more interested to hear what Draycott is all about rather than the writings of a lost Dutch master because that is the point of writing a poetry collection. 

Draycott is most successful when realising her own words through the distant past of the poetry of The Exeter Book and Beowulf:

Right now I’m at my lake and you’re

At yours.  Everyone knows

About lakes with villages in them

Church and all.  If I dived

Like Beowulf into the mere, down

Through the cellars and ice-houses

Beneath stalactites called the cathedral,

The crypt, the green chapel, could I

Surface in your lake and see you there

It is as if the poet is discovering the word hoard as glittering and alluring as Saxon treasure and, for a people whose appellation may refer to a knife they used they also contributed much more through language and literature including the oldest English poem.  Somehow the ice-cold depth of the mere contains the words Draycott conjures with, holding them up to glitter in the sunlight.   Her work is most successful when she binds her own present to the past that means most to her.

Paul Murphy, March 2017