Sydney WHO??
Exactly.
How is it that a
poet whom J M Coetzee himself called the “purest poetic talent" of his
generation has become quite comprehensively forgotten? Some of you might have
encountered in your school anthology one or two of his more accessible poems
like “Dawn Hippo” or the beautiful love-poem “The Sleeper”. Otherwise, even in university literary
circles the poetry of Sydney Clouts is almost completely ignored.
Is this fair? Maybe
he deserves to be lost. After all, he
is dead – rather a disadvantage in our age of obsessing with the new and the
instantaneous. He was also white – which these days can be a serious
disqualification for being taken, well, seriously. Add to that being male –
bad, bad, original sin – and he’s done for. There’s more: Clouts was Jewish,
which threatens to condemn him to a minority interest; and he lived and wrote
in an insignificant coastal dorp named Cape Town. Who would be interested?
One anonymous publishers’ reader seemed positively offended that
I should even attempt a book-length study of Clouts's poetry, informing the publisher that it would be
“politically and intellectually” inappropriate and inadvisable to publish it.
(They didn’t.) This of course just spurred me on, and I’ve adopted the comment
as my main advertising slogan. After all, isn’t that what we academics are for:
to ferret out the unusual, stand up for the neglected, challenge the
orthodoxies of the day, open readers’ minds up to the strange and unfamiliar?
In our current phase
of intensive decolonisation and the steady Africanisation of our literature
syllabus, it’s now teaching Dickens, Eliot (whether George or T S) or Sydney
Clouts that can appear most strange, culturally challenging, and unorthodox
(not to say ‘conservative’ or even ‘retrograde’). The politics of all this is
generally ugly, opportunistic and intellectually shallow, apparently calculated
to demolish individualistic appreciation of literature itself. I wrote a
critical study of Clouts simply because I loved his poetry from the first time
I read it. Writing about it has been the most intellectually challenging and
personally satisfying extended project I have ever done. It’s hard to say
exactly why I loved it – only that it
scintillated and intrigued, and if I felt poetically stuck myself, just reading
some Clouts would get me going again.
Sydney Clouts was
born in Cape Town in 1926, went to SACS and UCT, and married Marge Leftwich (who still lives in England and has
been wonderfully supportive of this whim of mine). 'Work' was never central to his being, though he trained and was employed as a librarian in London, because all he wanted to do was
write poetry. He was a poet’s poet, devoted to the craft in a rigorously
unself-centred way. Despite this dedication, or because of it, he published
astonishingly little – just one slender volume, entitled One Life. (It did win both the Olive Schreiner and Ingrid Jonker
poetry prizes.) Deeply unhappy with the unfolding of apartheid, despite a relatively
cosy suburban existence, Sydney, Marge and their three sons left for England in
1961. The move eviscerated Sydney’s poetic confidence, and though he produced
literally hundreds of pages of drafts, he published very little more before he
died of cancer, aged just 56. Even his Collected
Poems, posthumously compiled by Marge and his twin brother Cyril in 1984,
amounts to a mere 120 pages.
Not that either a
slender oeuvre or neglect in one’s lifetime necessarily condemns one to
obscurity forever. In our era of instant self-publishing, internet access and
blogging, it’s easy to forget that John Donne’s poetry circulated only amongst
his friends in handwritten copies; William Blake was considered a nutter who
had to etch and print his own works; and were it not for Rupert Brookes’ rescue
job the world would never have seen the mind-bending poems of Gerard Manley
Hopkins – all poets who eventually had incalculable influence on global
literatures in English. And T S Eliot’s Collected
Poems is only a couple of dozen pages longer than Clouts’s, also enjoying
massive influence despite their ferocious level of difficulty.
Politics, awkward
timing and personal reticence all contributed to Clouts’s marginalisation, but
just as responsible was the perceived difficulty of his poetry. Like Eliot – and like many other contemporaneous
Modernists whom Clouts read and loved – Pablo Neruda, Eugenio Montale, Osip
Mandelstam, Roy Campbell, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens – the poems
make stern demands on the reader’s imagination. There are few obvious narrative
lines, no logical arguments. Lines can leap inexplicably from one image to
another; vivid elements and sensuous tesserae are compressed together as if
under extreme heat. Take these lines from “The Feeding of the Doves”:
 |
| Clouts visiting rural Transkei, 1956 |
Doves beleaguered me,
turtledoves,
ringdoves.
Nuts and
breadcrumbs I had,
and a
thought taking wings,
of the
pensive diet
digested on
eaves
of the city,
on windowsills
glancing seaward.
An ordinary scene develops
increasing compaction and interconnection, until doves and food and poet’s
thoughts all seem to become part of each other – an ecology. But whatever this
might ‘mean’ is only hinted at, never directly stated. Even Clouts’s best friends and staunchest
supporters admit that they don’t always know what’s ‘going on’ in the poems,
but they sense unspoken richness beneath the surfaces. His mother Feodora,
on receiving her copy of One Life, said
it as well as anyone: “I know that One
Life is something good, honest and deep in meaning. Of course this implies
that I shall have to read many of the poems again & again until I begin to
have glimmerings of their ‘intimate lightning’.”
Despite his modernist
techniques, Clouts was often regarded as a Romantic nature-poet – a label he
vigorously rebutted. Nevertheless, it was partly Clouts’s repeated invocation
of trees, birds, rock, mountain, weather that – being a peripatetic mountain-forest
dweller myself – attracted me to him. Cape Town city itself might as well have
been a beachfront dorp for all that it’s mentioned; it was the surrounding coastlines
and weathers that energised the poetry. This opened Clouts up to accusations of
promoting some sort of primitivist Noble Savage state, and of ignoring the
tortured contemporary politics of the intensifying apartheid regime. Though
understandable, neither accusation is entirely accurate or fair. It’s a mistake
to assume that a writer thrusts every aspect of life and thought into poems, or
that a person can be adequately psycho-analysed through them – especially one
like Clouts who strove to excise
himself from the poetry. Drafts, letters, collections of clippings show that he
was knowledgeable and gravely concerned about those politics and their terrible
impact on the majority and the poor. And
his poem “Professor Gulf” is an acidic allegorical portrayal of Hendrik Verwoerd.
My own impression is that his ‘nature’ poetry was less an escape from than a
conscious riposte to apartheid’s grimy oppressions; he saw humans as enveloped
in far greater and more fundamental ecological systems – indeed, he was ahead
of his time in this increasingly relevant insight. In the midst of distress, he
searched out articles of beauty – a move easy to dismiss as diversionary, but which
is in its own way courageous and dignifying, affirming a humane relation to the
world which is just as important as political
freedoms. Take his intimate observations
of a simple beach walk:
I breathed the first shivers of
daylight
on lowtide lagoonbed grasses,
shallow ledges of slime in the
seawind.
I went between spouting crabholes,
tottering oilgreen spindles that
roved on the waterfilm;
over systems of sharp red,
mauve and brightblue
speckles of aragonite, like blown
seeds:
Shelley’s dome transformed into
fertile splinters.
Life
breaks life and stores the concise fragments.
It’s
nature-appreciative, to be sure, but there is also a hint of violent dynamics: “life
breaks life” into “fragments” – but it also “stores” those shards for our
paradoxical delectation. Pay careful, caring attention to all of life’s
minutiae, is Clouts’s consistent call.
This is not to deny
that, as a person of his race, class and resources, he was no public revolutionary,
was relatively sheltered, and could emigrate when he felt the need, where most
could not. Clouts was, of course, not the only writer to choose or be forced
into exile in the 1960s. I’ve just read our colleague Andrea Thorpe’s new essay
in English in Africa on Peter
Abrahams, who was in London at the same time as Clouts, though I’m not sure
they ever met. Abrahams’s work has been equally neglected by critics and
academics, despite his politically kosher colour and ideological affiliations.
This points to a wider syndrome: the critical neglect of poetry generally in
South Africa. Deeply considered studies and biographies, beyond specialist journal
articles and some unpublished theses, are few and far between. This applies to
poets of every stripe, creed, language and political persuasion, not only DWMs.
Moreover, poetry is generally poorly taught in schools, if at all; the bulk of
our university students, apparently terrified or disdainful, avoid it if they
can; and even postgraduates are much more likely to study fiction or jazzy new
digital forms. So, while some poetic expressions flourish in various quarters,
the traffic between poets and critics, which ought to be vigorous, voluminous
and ultimately beneficial to poetry itself, is lacking.
If so few people
read poetry, and hardly any of those have read Sydney Clouts, I don’t know who
is likely to read a dense and substantial study of him! But I must remain
optimistic, and hope that this book is the beginning of a tsunami of
poetic-critical popularity. Or at least that this one poet can be rescued from
obscurity, revealed once more like the flash of a bolt of “intimate lightning”.
***
Dan Wylie’s book Intimate
Lightning: Sydney Clouts, poet is published by UNISA Press.
*****
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