Zoo
Louis MacNeice [Faber]
‘Faber Finds’ resuscitates major works that have fallen out-of-print – or, in this case, a minor prose work by a major poet: Louis MacNeice’s 1938 portrait of London Zoo. In the belles-lettres tradition, and beautifully illustrated by MacNeice’s then mistress, Nancy Sharpe, Zoo is less the ‘guide’ that Michael Joseph, its commissioner, envisaged than a love-lilt to London at large: to ‘the lights at night on the Thames of Battersea Power House’, to ‘cars sweeping their shadows from lamp-post to lamp-post down Haverstock Hill’, to ‘Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937’.
Poets, said Hazlitt, are ‘winged animals’, and ‘light upon the ground of prose’ to find they have no ‘use of their feet’. While Zoo’s distracted aesthetic is arresting, MacNeice’s social commentary is more gravely scattershot. Out of kilter with his argument that zoo-going is for everyone is MacNeice’s specific attribution of its lower-class appeal to a primal affinity. The mannerism also jars. Cricket metaphors become relentless, and the Classical references are overwrought: Aristotle in praise of nakedness, Virgil on bathing, Plato on scratching…
Yet, for precisely these reasons, Zoo enlarges our sense of MacNeice’s poetic character. Like Autumn Journal, it bears the tooth-marks of history. ‘The Nazis may yet give us a nation of men sleeping with their sandals on’: MacNeice senses the encroaching insomnia of wartime, of a world ill-disposed to cultivate the trivial, of people no longer queuing ‘to be photographed embracing young chimps’. Zoo has the feel of a carnival about to turn cold and dark. – Joanne O’Leary
A Place in the Country
W.G. Sebald (trans. Jo Catling) [Hamish Hamilton]
For a writer who often vanishes in to his influences, W.G. Sebald’s A Place in the Country would be a fitting place for his publishers and translators to let him end. This collection of essays seeks to pay tribute to those ‘colleagues who have gone before […] before it is too late’. His objects are those writers whose works he carried with him from Switzerland to Manchester in 1966 – and whose work he would take ‘if [he] had to move again’. It’s an uncanny proclamation, as if he sees his death coming and looks down on his work as he did on history: from the altitude of the hot-air balloon in which he leaves Robert Walser in this volume.
Written in the wake of his mighty quartet of novels, this book feels like his bid for a dignified exit: not with lengthy grandstanding, but with a nod to his fellow ghosts in the pageant. His thesis on Rousseau may serve to refresh a figure often dismissed as stodgy, and he makes intriguing use of hyperrealist Jan Peter Tripp to advance arguments on the distortion-work of history and capital, but these are not provocative essays: they are quiet offerings. One hopes his publishers will accord the rest of his archives the time they need to become as strange and revelatory as the obscure corners of literature which were his own territory, freeing Sebald from the ‘vice’ of publication in the same way his writers could not free themselves from the condition of literature. Let the first great dead writer of this century set off in to nowhere with his bags packed and nobody clutching after him. – Tim Smyth
All Dogs Are Blue
Rodrigo de Souza Leão [And Other Stories]
What is most immediately striking about All Dogs Are Blue, this antic and intensely literary novel about life in a Rio mental institution, is the imagery of war and state employed to portray the asylum and its own economy of power. Psychiatrists do not simply inject needles here; they ‘bayonet’ them. Chemicals do not enter the body as doses, but as ‘bombs’, ‘mushroom clouds’, even ‘warheads’. The asylum is no asylum, then, but an intensified continuation of the society from which the patients became ill, by which they were pathologised and from which they are now excluded.
In 2008, Souza Leão died in a mental institution at the age of just 43. His writing is genuinely thrilling at times, pushing realism to the modernist limits of hallucination with unexpected turns-of-phrase and darkly drawn images undercut by punchlines that seem to materialise out of nowhere, like a foot through a telephone line.
There are moments, however, when the text lapses into certain clichés about literature and mental illness. The hallucinated portraits of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, though obviously affectionate, often amount to little more than cartoonish extensions of ideas long ago received, mythologised and to some extent commoditised. To hallucinate a cliché in this way confirms mental illness in its social context. Madness comes to seem not just socially caused, but socially conditioned and controlled. Finally, madness itself is mythologised.
It is almost forty years since Susan Sontag described mental illness as ‘our secular myth of self-transcendence’. And so it is disconcerting to find such a thoroughly modern narrative drawing on that very myth. ‘I was possessed by the fertile spirit of modern madness,’ says the narrator, ‘one that had helped twentieth-century poetry many times and had put contemporary literature in its rightful place.’ The twentieth-century was a fucked-up place: to perceive it properly drove many to madness. But when Souza Leão and others invert this statement, we are left with a principle of dubious veracity with highly problematic implications. Romantic though the image might be, in the end the ‘fertile spirit of modern madness’ is just another arm in the artillery of power. – Kevin Breathnach
