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Sean
O’Brien recently spoke in York about having to ‘face up to living in history’,
something that would be well to bear in mind as Paulin takes us here through
narratives about Auden, Joyce and Eliot and how they behaved in wartime.
He wanted to record the events leading up to the Second World War at a
time when they are vanishing from living memory. If there’s one thing
we can learn from history, as the saying goes, it’s that we don’t learn
from history. At such a catchpoint
in global politics its concerns are uncomfortably familiar; politicians
making, amending and breaking treaties and their effects on the ground.
On first reading one catches the gist of the narrative. Barely punctuated
and in Paulin’s digressional conversational style, the road to war reads
fast. Gradually names stick and things start to make sense.
The received wisdom is that the severity of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles
encouraged Germany to seek extreme solutions, in extreme
leaders, to its dire problems. Decreeing ‘Peace’ in unjust conditions
is like decreeing an abolition of ‘Terror’. We must understand the reasons
behind people’s actions to prevent them occurring otherwise it is impossible
to contain a situation. Domes are a repeated image, shifting, in a subtle
reference to Sylvia Plath’s holocaust imagery, to a bell-jar. After the
injustice of Versailles, the more reasonable Locarno Pact
is merely a parcel within a parcel.
The extremity of the impositions on Germany
is displayed in a list of the figures
of destroyed German arms (‘600,7000 rifles and carbines / 243000 machinegun
tubes / 28000 gun chassis…’) and hints at the scale of the counterbalance
to come. Eventually the discrepancy is written in one line
$1 = 3,760,000,000 marks
Thus Hitler, remedying this inbalance, in a brilliant (and historically-accurate)
image ‘would spoon sugar into vintage wines’. The result is an unnatural
creation, ‘like leathery eggs’. Elsewhere, the horrible image of a bar
of human soap sticks in the mind. One wonders at the sanity of anyone
who could deal with this mentally.
Paulin is the one to write this, being so well read he is able to explain
how this has happened before and concerns us now: ‘I tell you, this
is a Carthaginian peace. We are sewing the earth with salt’. Many poems
are subtitled ‘After…’; he’s read his stuff.
There is a changing ‘I’ throughout the poems. The project is described
as a ‘cento’, a collage of scraps and notes and this ‘meandering journey’
as Paulin calls the road to war, but which serves equally well for the
book, gives the sense of everyone being affected; a Jewish banker in
his house thinking he is surely beyond approach (there in the title
‘An Indefinite Article’), a ‘sense of unsettled space’ that belongs
to ‘almost any Irish play’. ‘Strange how everything comes back / to
poor Coleridge’s caves of ice’ says T.S. Eliot at one point. The various
voices include Latin and French, prose and verse, text and symbol. Verse
passages, posters and, once, newspaper clippings, are slanted and juxtaposed
as in Mark Z. Danielewski’s ‘House of Leaves’. Characters include numerous
politicians and poets Wilde, Joyce and Verlaine.
The poems fall into two groups. First, the politician poems; vivid characterisations
of Clemenceau and Churchill, fascinating and at times difficult to penetrate,
structured around various treaties. Second is a physical representation
of the predicament, an incarnation of events. These are gripping. When
German freedoms are scrutinised following the war (‘What need one?’):
Lipp was concerned at a puddle that was found in the ex-King’s bathroom,
because the king could spend hours playing at toy boats.
As German forces enter the Rhineland,
a ‘dodgy field telephone … keeps trying Locarno’. ‘Imago 1919’, one
of the strongest poems, creates an urban cityscape of double-meaning
and opposites like those computer-graphics of streets where every window
is a word saying ‘WINDOW’, the street made of the word ‘STREET’. At
the close, the narrator admits he had deliberately been heading to the
quartier rouge, not avoiding it as he had claimed. Is one attracted
to war like one is attracted to vice?
The divided layout of the poem, lines broken in the middle like a spine,
demonstrates the dislocation of parity. Words are often defined by their
opposites and the many ‘un-’ words – ungrow, unhope - demonstrate that
as far as the pendulum swings in one way it will swing back. Paulin’s
main theme could be said to be balance. The man who travels back in
time must beware of altering too much, as things can come to have great
import in the future. So in the present. Paulin sees the Locarno peace
treaty as ‘two pails of water / balanced … on a plank’.
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The changing times and modernist approach to objects is everywhere;
as apartments become ‘residence machine(s)’, there is ‘the look of
buildings / that are hiding something / buildings whose windows /
somehow never meet your eye’. As cross-dressing becomes popular and
Schwitter practices cut and paste art, in
Geneva
- it’s abstract too
a student tosses a
bomb at Plehve
who becomes blood and
brains
steaming on a snowy
street
Motifs dot the text, wood appearing in Britain’s timber leg, Mussolini’s
shaved head – ‘a fencepost’, his bodyguards ‘fenceposts in suits’,
and the taste of smoked Swiss cheese. Unspoken joinings of dots are
tangible in a whisp of burnt hair. Paulin asks the reader in rhyme,
‘Can you think what it is?’ (The answer is Auschwitz).
With hypnotising inevitability we are led to the climactic 12-page
poem ‘Battle of Britain’ which is as breathlessly exciting and shocking
as any action adventure comic. There is a sense of pride, after that
long chronological list – The Night of the Long Knives, Kristallnacht,
- when Britain’s ultimatum takes Hitler aback. We see Churchill’s
re-appointment as prime minister from inside his mind and come to
understand the gravity of decisions – ‘Bomb Berlin! Churchill orders’ - and tactics:
- Goering he promised
the defence of Southern
England
would last exactly
four days
and the Royal Air Force
four weeks
-we can for the Fuhrer
guarantee invasion
within a month
but Stuffy Dowding
he’d studied
their tactics in Spain
and he pulled us back
wisely from Dunkirk
now in Sir John Soane’s
Bentley Priory
his mind moves over
maps
One must mention Paulin’s fantastic language in these poems. He twists Shakespeare to describe a student double-agent
with burst eardrums:
he runs back into the
night
and wanders through
pure storm
a silent night
like a tale told by
an idiot
signifying nothing
only spectacle
An allied soldier escapes,
down like Aeneas
among the living shades
among twentypacks of
Players
floating on the tide
Throughout, Paulin considers other writers, including Sun Tzu’s ‘Art
of War’. He is mocked in ‘Male Poet Enlists’ which considers the poet
as soldier, and yet in the poem ‘In the Blackout’, a poster which
urges you to pause before leaving the lightened subway and entering
the dark, has ‘its own civic poetry / and will survive … our passing’.
In a final image, he describes the pen as a balancing pole. By digging
for root causes to explain events and inspiring interest in its subject
The Invasion Handbook is worth every penny of the grant that brought
it about.
©
Matt Bryden 2002
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