The damned and the marginal find their voices in the 1980s

Happily for historians, the 1980s have been annotated by the poet Edward Dorn, in a chronicle entitled Abhorrences. In the “Proclamation” of May 15, 1988, he caught the spirit that prevailed through what he called “The Rawhide Era” in Thatcher’s Britain, Reagan’s America and even more now and here in Scotland, in the UK, in Brittania, in the Brutish Kingdom, in Colonialania-Internationalia, Subjugatistan, wherever you might be. It all sounds terribly familiar:

“Where there is wealth

let us create excess ...

Where there is need,

Let us create hardship,

Where there is poverty,

Let us create downright misery.”

A popular poster had Reagan and Thatcher superimposed on Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in the movie hoarding for the epic film Gone With The Wind. Instead of the burning of Atlanta in the American Civil War, a nuclear mushroom blossomed in the background. As I remember, the caption read: “She promised she’d follow him to the end of the Earth. He promised he’d arrange it.”

But Ed Dorn’s razory poems are even more scathing. He writes of the budget with that economy of poetry only poetry can manage, being both precisely applicable to a specific place, then and there, but also having such universal significance that it applies even more agonisingly here and now:

when you spend more

on defending the thing

that you spend

on the thing you’re defending.

Still, there is “Something we can all agree on”:

Suppose there were a new

acronym for an old disease –

very awful and very incurable,

Let’s call it HELPS for

Heritable Endemic Long-range

Poverty Syndrome

Now here’s the question:

do you think there would be

much tea and sympathy for this plague?

Neither do I.

In a global context, when I first went to New Zealand in 1986, the country I was going to had a prime minister named David Lange. He was standing up against the world’s nuclear empire and the New Zealanders, who recognised the insanity of nuclear authority, were behind him, in a great majority. No nuclear ships to venture into the New Zealand ports! NONE AT ALL! Never mind nuclear power, or the poisons of long-lasting nuclear legacy. What a toxic infiltration it is – and remains.

New Zealand was at that point exemplary. Part of the success of Keri Hulme’s Booker Prize-winning novel The Bone People was due to its political moment, as well as its literary merit. After it took the Booker Prize, it became an international livre de cachet like JD Salinger’s Catcher In The Rye or Iain Banks’s The Wasp Factory.

A worldwide readership turned towards New Zealand with eager senses. Both she and her nation had rejected the imperial, linear authority of power, greed and empire. Emphasising her mixed ancestry of Maori and Scots, Hulme represented New Zealandness itself as a definite thing made up of many things. The patriarchal ideal of unitary identity endorsed by the Thatcherite and Reaganite ideologies was healthily subverted.

The inheritance of the imperial legacy is all around us. But The Bone People made a long-lasting and deeply traditional cultural point that, in John Berger’s words, “reality is always in need, even of us, damned and marginal as we may be.”

The damned and marginal were certainly finding literary voices in the 1980s. Alasdair Gray’s monumental novel Lanark appeared in 1981 and was soon followed by James Kelman’s brilliantly insistent fictions written entirely from within the experience of the north European working class.

The endlessly gamesome, sometimes gruesome, imagination of Banks was also launched in the 1980s, in a Britain where there were more people unemployed than there were people in New Zealand.

Along with the rest of the population, the three million “between jobs” witnessed what seemed like the last stand of traditional trade unionism in the miners’ strike, breathed the fallout air from the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl, and saw the re-assertion of imperial propaganda in the Malvinas/Falklands War. A successful British hit on Argentine forces sparked the tabloid headline “GOTCHA!”

That violence was literary as well as physical.

The artist Jack Yeats, brother of WB, once remarked: “War has its charm. It feeds something that all men and women long for – excitement. Indeed I have thought that if the range of guns could have been limited by the League of Nations ... the tourist cruising companies could have continued to cater for their customers. ‘Travel the world and see the wards from a swivel chair’.”

And every morning and every night, millions of us do.

The world needed praying for. Prayer stops you, or at least slows you down. You get a chance to think about what’s going on and what you’re doing wrong. Composers of various persuasions crossed the boundary between “classical” and “popular” to deliver such necessary prayer. Arvo Part, and Henryk Gorecki, achieved phenomenal popularity. And consider Krzysztof Penderecki’s Cherubic Hymn and how it moves you and leads you through to its deeply moving conclusion. A musical geist in tune with the era is surely present there.

Its literary equivalent was manifest in the profound opposition between two writers whose collected works had begun to be more widely recognised in the 1980s – Philip Larkin and Hugh MacDiarmid. In 1985, the monumental edition of MacDiarmid’s 1400-page Complete Poems was published by Penguin in two hefty paperback volumes. And, in the same year, Larkin died.

Perhaps those two big books were just too much for him. Here’s hoping. Larkin’s dreary little Englandism, his famous xenophobia and self-proclaimed inadequacies, despite his love of jazz (or, for some, compounded by it), seemed to define one essential aspect of his literary identity.

He made deft verse out of the dullest suburban circumstances, rainy days, grey evenings, muddy fields, boarding rooms, railway stations and empty cinemas. It’s been suggested his poem about the miserable effects parents have on their children became notorious as the result of a misprint. It should have read: “They tuck you up, your mum and dad ...”

There’s a famous photograph of Larkin smiling smugly, sitting on a road sign labelled “England”, right on the edge of the Border. Allegedly, he’d just crossed that Border and copiously urinated behind it.

Of course, he hated MacDiarmid,

whose appetite, scale, and willingness to embrace extremes which could only cause embarrassment to persons of Larkin’s disposition, was anathema to more closeted imaginations. In a poem entitled “England’s Double Knavery”, MacDiarmid castigates the fascist poet Roy Campbell and caricatures his “typical reader”:

– A stout man, walking with a waddle, with a face

Creased and puffed into a score

Of unhealthy rolls and crevices

And a red and bulbous nose ...

...a man whose fat finger

Ticks off the feet in Campbell’s lines

“Left, right! Left, right!”

But even here, MacDiarmid turns from denigration to an assertion of value. Having debunked Campbell as “The hero of a penny novelette / With the brain of a boy scout” – and bluntly dismissed his warrior code – “All soldiers are fools. / That’s why they kill each other” – he then sets the “deterioration of life under the regime / Of the Soldier” against the idea of cultural diversity:

The effort of culture is towards greater differentiation

Of perceptions and desires and values and ends,

Holding them from moment to moment

In a perpetually changing but stable equilibrium ...

Let’s see you carry that sword, Penny. For MacDiarmid, this was a life’s work, and his ambitious programme to write an epic poem about language, poetry and imperialism, embodies an inclusive and zestful optimism, perpetually opposed to the narrow spirit of Larkin’s England.

MacDiarmid refers to his own epic poem “In Memoriam James Joyce” as a “hapax legomenon”, “a divertissement philologique”, a collection of “fonds de tiroir”, a Loch Ness Monster, a “rag-bag”. It’s an attempt to accommodate the sheer variousness of the world, and it allows a much more deeply optimistic openness than the frustrated protest poetry of the Beats or their English inheritor in the 1980s, Tony Harrison, whose longish poem “V” was much hyped at the time as the poetic expression of political opposition to the prevailing Tory hegemony.

But the central literary text of the 1980s was neither poetry nor prose fiction but a television script. A six-part series first broadcast in 1985 and immediately repeated and televised internationally, Edge Of Darkness by Troy Kennedy Martin, is quintessential. Beginning as a slow, dark, morbid detective thriller, the series opened up larger and deeper questions about personal and public morality and the ethics of the nuclear state.

With a strong narrative and unforgettable characters, it won numerous awards and critical acclaim. Repeated broadcasts inevitably dull its impact but when it was first shown it was the only television I’ve ever watched that literally had me on the edge of my seat.

A Yorkshire policeman, Ronnie Craven, carrying out a private investigation into the murder of his daughter, Emma, is drawn into an international network of government, business and nuclear power. In the end, he’s faced with a global confrontation between human authority and the sustainable balance of the Earth itself.

The exchange between Craven and the Falstaffian CIA agent Darius Jedburgh in the Tiberio restaurant, London, before they venture into the literal and metaphoric underworld in the final episodes, begins like this:

A pianist is playing in the corner. Jedburgh sits alone at a fairly low-lit table. He looks up as Craven approaches.

Jedburgh: Still in one piece, I see. (Craven sits down.)

Craven: What’s that supposed to mean?

Jedburgh: People have a habit of disappearing into their constituent parts these days. The political climate does not favour homogeneity … How much less does our own political climate favour homogeneity, nearly 40 years later? Divide and rule. Rule without being seen.

Divide everything into constituent parts and judge carefully how the constituent parts can be kept just happy enough to sustain themselves but continuously oppressed, without them knowing too much about it, so that they’re indifferent to the fact that their lives are being drained off for the benefit of a small elite.

Scottish Unionists are an important and pathetic example of such zoological specimens. It happens all the time, all over the world – but it isn’t going to last in perpetuity. It changes through time and in different places because all living things do.

You start with marketable things, then the things become units of money, no longer the material goods, the made things, themselves, but the markers of exchange, and people, the workers, are commodities, all along the way, and usually women as much as or more than men, until you get to the biggest commodity of all, the planet, Earth.

And what do you do? Just what you’ve always done. You exploit its resources as if there were no tomorrow. And you follow this course, swept up in this dynamic (knowingly or ignorant, it won’t make any difference), and sometime foreseeably, there won’t be any tomorrow at all.

And here’s the closing conversation between Craven and Jedburgh, after they’ve been through the underworld and come out the other side. They’ve learned what they need to know. It comes at a terrible cost. But there is still a question to answer:

Craven: On my way here, I had a weird conversation with Emma. She warned me about a black flower which, she said, would spread across the Northern hemisphere and melt the polar ice cap.

Jedburgh: Grogan would zap it.

Craven: She said that the planet will turn against mankind and destroy him.

Jedburgh: (Jedburgh hears another noise). Have you ever been in Afghanistan, Craven?

Craven: Is this relevant?

Jedburgh: I was out there last year, studying the drinking habits of the Russian soldiers. Now, they’ll drink anything as long as it’s alcohol-based: glycol, antifreeze, brake fluid ... but the black flowers are out there, Craven. On the mountains. The Afghans eat them.

Craven: I think you’re taking the piss, Jedburgh.

Jedburgh: I am merely confirming the existence of the black flower. And if Grogan don’t zap them, the Afghans will. (They hear a noise. Both stop and listen.) Shit. (He looks at his automatic).

Craven: I think you’re wrong. If there is a battle between the planet and mankind, the planet will win.

Jedburgh: Where’s that going to leave you?

Craven: On the side of the planet.

Perhaps it is not too late to learn how to be “on the side of the planet”. Change happens. It can happen. It happens anyway. Thinking about it, talking about it, writing about it, is some kind of resistance, some place where traction might happen, hooks can go in, and catch. Change can be made or at least helped. Which means questioning.

Another text, literally from the other side of the planet, tells the story in another way. The New Zealand poet Kendrick Smithyman in the depths of the Waitomo caves, identifies and wonders at the curious questing urge in human nature, and leaves us with another unanswered question.

Guides ask for silence, and have

no difficulty...getting their parties

to go quiet. At a dollar a head, nations

file underground...

Go deep, go down to silence…

A boat at a landing stage idles,

another will carry us, silently

animated through the grotto

where cannibal worms hunt, breed, age,

consume their partners, are consumed…

I have been here before, without words.

After their climax of love people lie thus,

as though drifting dark waters, caverned.

If you speak, all the lights will go out.

Say nothing. She reaches for his hand,

he presses her finger. The boat slides

curving back to its landing.

A guide at the stage sweeps his lamp

over a pool. What is he looking for?