Poetic licence
Tom Paulin is an amazing person. Don’t take my word for it. That is the phrase the new National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) is hanging around the necks of the 13 “fellows” whose names it will announce today. Each of them will be paid to think – in Paulin’s case £75,000 over three years. It sounds almost too good to be true and is the antithesis of the Thatcherite notion that all cultural activity should have an economic pay-off.
“Fellowships are designed to help people pursue ideas and fulfil their potential, particularly individuals whose best work still lies ahead of them,” says Nesta. It has an endowment of £200m, courtesy of the lottery, and will use the interest to shell out £10m a year to artists, writers, scientists, engineers, film-makers, inventors, anyone who can make a good case for needing cash to help them to develop their ideas.
The way fellows are chosen is shadowy: 100 “independent” (and unnamed) nominators put forward candidates who are then invited to apply via the Nesta website. Paulin has no idea who nominated him, or how they knew he was struggling to combine writing an epic poem based on the second world war with his work as an English lecturer at Oxford. But know they did, and the grant will enable him to reduce his teaching commitments and devote some serious time to the poem.
Nesta, perhaps wary of what the Daily Mail might make of its largesse (£200m is, after all, a lot of nurses or school textbooks), is keen to play up the practical side of the Pauline vision: “He will undertake an intense period of research and experimentation to develop the new project, which Tom describes as ‘affirming the struggle and memory of the generation – my parents’ generation – that fought in the second world war, and to do so before the doors of living memory are closed on it.’ Tom will draw on photography, film and music to create radical new poetic forms and styles aimed at extending the boundaries of our current notions of poetry.”
Paulin has a less concrete conception of the project, and would never be so immodest as to claim that he was extending the boundaries of poetry. “It’s an almost Jamesian idea,” says Paulin. “Go and be Lambert Strether [Paulin hopes and expects you will have read The Ambassadors]; get out of the managerial bureaucracy you’re stuck in and go to Paris, hang about, look at some paintings. Part of trying to write is what Hazlitt calls indolence, hanging about waiting for something.”
When I met Paulin in his cosy, book-strewn room at Hertford College he had just delivered two one-hour lectures (one on a theme close to his heart – political readings of Keats’s “To Autumn”). And we had to stop after an hour and a half because there were three undergraduates skulking in the stairwell waiting for his thoughts on Blake.
An hour and a half is no time at all with Paulin because his method of exegesis, like his poetry, is highly associative and extremely demanding; his wonderful, cawing voice is also prone to high-pitched hesitation; he is an impressionist’s dream. Nesta may have got a succinct summation of his war poem, but I didn’t. “I want to write a long poem about the second world war, from the beginning, which is the Versailles peace conference in 1919. I’m nervous about talking about it – partly out of superstition, partly because you worry about taking yourself too seriously – and I’m worried about it because it sounds a monstrous project.”
Reading between the lines, and the pauses, I think Paulin – a Northern Irish Protestant who supports republicanism and thinks it inevitable that the north will leave the UK – intends to do something quite fascinating: write a poem in praise of the collective effort of the British people in the second world war, a people who for six years were united in their will to protect freedom and defeat fascism. As Britain bickers over devolution, argues over the EU, frets about identity, he will celebrate a moment of national unity. “I’m worried that in British culture there’s a fixation on the first world war, which is to do with a sense of loss, whereas if the British were to talk about the second world war more, maybe a sort of triumphalism would enter. British culture is resistant to that.”
It is odd that someone who looks forward to Northern Ireland leaving the union wants to encourage triumphalism, but his point is a subtle one: countries must have a sense of nationhood, so let it be a generous patriotism – “the patriotism you see in Blake and Cobbett, Hazlitt and Orwell, which is a very strong part of this country’s culture” – rather than a narrow-minded, bigoted, destructive insularity. “I have thought a lot about the new English nationalism as the old idea of Britain starts to break up, which is what I grew up with in the north of Ireland,” he says. “I’m worried about the new English identity. If it isn’t inclusive, if it’s like the Countryside Alliance, that worries me.”
There is a tension in Paulin’s attitude that bodes well for his poem: he wants to celebrate the second world war as “the peak of British history” while recognising that it was also the beginning of the end for Britain as a world power and as a country with a sure sense of itself as a nation. Now it is a collection of regions which may face a federal future. “Things have to change with the north of Ireland moving out of the union and maybe Scotland,” says Paulin, “but I have a lot of sympathy with John Major’s speech where he said that Scotland’s independence would impoverish the overall culture.”
Paulin, who is 51, has described himself as a failed historian – “growing up in Ireland, you’re imbued with history” – and this new poem will call on his historical, as well as his literary, sensitivity. His historically and politically charged readings of texts (notably his view of Ulysses as an attack on colonialism) are powerful, and in everything he writes – poetry, criticism, essays, literary biography – an urgency and engagement shine through. He is the opposite of the ivory towers don: he is down there in the grimy basement, scratching vital messages on the walls.
Paulin, like all poets, is in love with words, but also in love with their power – to dazzle, damage and demand change. Milton was his beginning. “Milton is this extraordinary combination of great artist and great polemicist, whereas the two activities have since been split, often by literary critics with an axe to grind which they are concealing under the idea of art as being above politics.”
Paulin’s engagement takes him in many directions: a fine book on Hazlitt that took him six years and has helped to reclaim his hero for a new generation; poetry that has never ducked the politics of Northern Ireland, even when its absentee writer has been told he no longer has the right to comment; and those rottweiler-like appearances on the BBC’s tokenistic arts-crit shows (currently Review – the periodic name changes suggest deep cultural insecurity over at White City).
In the course of our one and a half hours this most benign and charming of men (he had bought me a baguette – slightly squashed – in anticipation of my being hungry) managed three sudden outbursts, when the voice rose another couple of octaves and the spirit of Swift, who thought it his duty to be vexatious, possessed him.
One: apropos of working on Review. “It’s great fun working with people younger than yourself, and sometimes you are left alone with Jackson Pollock’s paintings or Monet’s Water Lilies – that’s amazing. Though you also have to sit through the most terrible things, like that Frank Skinner play with the tortoise – that’s the worst night in the theatre I’ve ever had.”
Two: apropos of Kingsley Amis. “Jesus Christ, what an overrated talent Kingsley Amis was. I have just been dipping into his letters, which are absolutely awful. There are wonderful passages in Larkin’s letters; they are real letters, whereas Amis’s are just like watching some drunkard hit his head against a gas fire.”
Three: apropos of my suggesting that his attack on Anthony Thwaite – “a little balsawood minor man of letters” – was over the top. “I was very, very, very, very angry at the way he edited Larkin’s letters; I was extremely angry at the reception of the letters. Larkin’s racism was tolerated, just as Eliot’s anti-semitism has been tolerated. The point I was trying to make was what even filthier racist remarks has Thwaite cut, and I was very angry. My children are mixed race [he is married to a woman of Indian descent], and more or less every day I hear some story. I’m very angry about that sort of institutional tolerance of racism.”
Paulin is very angry (often to the power of four) and anxious about a lot of things. “He is one of the great disagree-ers,” said the poet Christopher Reid, his former editor at Faber. “Going against the grain seems to give him a kind of energy.” Yet, in person, it is his passion, not his anger, that stands out; vexatiousness, not bitterness, that drives his feuds. He lives for his writing – and for the writers he loves. They are living presences, there to be reclaimed. He opposes canonical literature, celebrates the vernacular, is committed to democracy in politics and literature. He is the most engaged and engaging of men. Truly, an amazing person.
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