English and Creative Writing

Thoughts on Enright, Academic Travelling and Critical Distance

Robert Fraser, Emeritus Professor of English

One afternoon in October 1974, I was standing in a somewhat Spartan corridor in the University of Leeds in desultory conversation with a tall, lean, slightly stooping gentleman in his mid-fifties. He wore a suit, held a thin-stemmed pipe between his teeth, and was delivering diffident remarks between successive puffs of smoke. There was a slightly gloomy air to his conversation, gloomy but also droll, as if a little dejected and at the same time laughing at his own dejection. On this occasion, however, he had a subdued gleam in his eye, because I had just brought up a subject that interested him. In effect, I had become a participant in his wry despondency, since at this moment in time we had two things in common. Broadly speaking, we possessed a common invitation and a common problem, which could be summed up in the words “What Do We Do Now?”

The pipe-smoking gentleman was the poet D. J. Enright, not long returned to Blighty after a peripatetic lecturing career in, successively Egypt, Japan, Berlin, Thailand and most famously Singapore, writing all the while. His nick-name was “the mendicant professor” and that had been the title of his memoirs, published five years previously. I was not quite as mendicant as he was, but had myself just returned from a lengthy and enjoyable spell lecturing in Africa. Both of us had been invited to spend some time in Leeds, teaching and taking our bearings. The topic of our conversation that afternoon was this: how do you approach the challenge of teaching English Literature in England when all your experience is of teaching it just about everywhere else?

Two qualities, I believe, are necessary to the successful teaching of literature to any student audience: intimacy and distance. When the teacher originates from the same environment as the text, but the students do not, the lecturer must exercise all of his or her imagination and resourcefulness to bring the text alive by translating it into terms the students will appreciate and understand. You begin with a distance that you then attempt to cross, so that by the end of the process the text is as intimately known to the students as to yourself, but in a different way. When the students and the text have a common background, the same factors do not occur, at least to the same extent. But, of course, there are different sorts of distance. There is the kind of distance that is achieved by time, when an historic text has to be made accessible to modern students (which is why a play by Marlowe or Paradise Lost is more challenging to teach anywhere than a modern text, and often a lot more fun). There is the distance achieved by theory, which I usually find unsatisfactory since it sometimes amounts to erecting a barrier of jargon between text and reader. In any case, some students find it alienating, and since the object of the exercise is to remove obstacles, the question arises, why erect this particular barrier in the first place, except to mystify? And then there is the sort of distance posed by some postcolonial books where the element of cultural alienation re-asserts itself, but as it were the other way round.

So when in 2015 I became an Emeritus, and the question posed itself once more – “What do we do now?” – the answer seemed to be to return to my academic roots and re-establish that geographical distance between audience and text which I have always found so stimulating. The first chance came towards the end of that year when Dr Nourdin Bejjit, whose doctoral thesis I had co-supervised at the OU, invited me to Morocco on a lecture tour. I flew in to Casablanca, which did not live up to its cinematic reputation, and then journeyed on to Rabat and Fez. I ended with four days in Tetouan, former capital of Spanish Morocco. As in the other locations my primary assignment was to talk about the reception of Eng. Lit abroad, as it is in the present piece. But on the last evening mine host Dr Jamaleddine Benhayoun asked over coffee, “The quatercentenary of Shakespeare’s death is coming up soon. Tomorrow, why not just slip in a talk on the Bard?”

I thought this an excellent idea. The only problem was that, though at Leeds I had spent most of my teaching week on Renaissance Literature and Shakespeare, since moving to London in 1978 I had hardly touched the subject. There was nothing to do except wing it. So at eight-thirty the following morning I was standing on the stage in the largest lecture hall in the university armed with my Kindle and no notes. Before me was an audience of about 500, with some people standing at the back. I had already made up my mind that I would focus my talk on King Lear, drawing inter alia on James Shapiro’s book 1606: William Shakespeare and The Year of Lear, which had recently appeared, but I would obviously have to talk about much else besides, and to set Shakespeare and his theatre in historical context. I started talking as, as I did so, all my buried and neglected knowledge came flooding back.  Nobody moved. There are certain moments in one’s life when one loses sense of time, as when writing something, or painting a picture or composing music. When I thought I had finished, I asked Jamal the time. It was half-past eleven, and I had been talking extempore for three hours. That should have been it, but we had already agreed that we would have time for questions. Did anybody have one, I asked. Someone stuck up their hand in the front row and asked if Shakespeare’s plays had anything to tell us about Shakespeare the man. Not the plays, I answered, but the poems were a different matter. As an example I started reciting Sonnet 116: “Let me not to the marriage of true minds/ Admit impediments”. As I started on the second line, I became aware of a slight but growing susurrus in the hall. Gradually, row by row, they were joining in. By I time I reached the concluding couplet the whole hall was involved as the entire student body shouted out the lines: “If this be error, and upon me prov’d,/ I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.”

We often hear of the incompatibility of Western liberal and traditional Islamic values in North Africa and the Middle East, and the impediment that this places between certain audiences and Western secular literature. What nobody tells us is that the deeply embedded religious culture of these lands allows them continuing access to the rapt expression of ethical truths that the secular West has almost lost sight of. The sanctity of marriage is one of them. How many large roomfuls of British university students know Sonnet 116 by heart?  Answers on a very small postcard, please.

Thoughts on Enright, Academic Travelling and Critical Distance

Robert Fraser, Emeritus Professor of English

Continuing from Part 1 …

I returned to Tetouan in 2016 and 2017, and will go back there again this coming October. In the meantime, a fresh opening arrived from quite a different direction. Our son works in the amusingly and inclusively entitled “Department of the Universe” at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, where he has a postdoc in String Theory. Coincidentally, this is the very university where Enright worked as a lecturer between 1957-9, and so I was very glad when, on one of my paternal visits, the English Department approached me with a peculiar assignment. The Brexit referendum had already happened, and nobody in Thailand could quite understand it. Why should the British nation take such a stupid step? They had invited the British ambassador to explain it all; he had accepted, and then on second thoughts ducked out. Could I step in? I am quite sure that my views on the British withdrawal from the EU were and are the very opposite of those that the ambassador in question might have felt obliged to defend in public, whatever his private misgivings about the matter. I agreed, provided I could go back in time and show how English insularity and English expansiveness have run alongside one another for centuries, and how both are evidenced in the literature. So, John of Gaunt’s “This sceptred isle speech” from Richard II against Defoe’s “The True-Born Englishman”, Hardy alongside Kipling, etc.. The modern parallels were not hard to draw, and de-colonization, I speculated, had brought this identity crisis to a flash-point:

As a result, the British people have been driven into two camps, each of which suffers from a different variety of postcolonial stress disorder. One half of the population has renounced imperialism and the jingoistic patriotism or nationalism that went with it. The other half still espouses a vestigial and sentimental form of  patriotic affiliation, a shadowy sense of entitlement without an empire to support  it. They clung to this myth or paradigm with increasing desperation as employment opportunities shrank, while in the meantime their globalized compatriots appeared to flourish as never before. In 2016, the tables turned. It was the second group, from which the Brexit campaign had drawn so much of its support, that Theresa May addressed last October in her conference speech, calling them simply the “public”. 

In the ensuing question and answer session I was left in little doubt as to relevance of what I’d been saying, not simply to Britain, but also to Thailand. Most countries when you come down to it have their own variety of identity crisis, and Thailand is no exception (nor is Morocco). To address this question in the lecture itself would, of course, have been miles beyond my brief. Neither Enright nor myself were exactly friends to cultural nationalism, but I was not going to fall into his trap when, in delivering his inaugural lecture on “Robert Graves and the Decline of Modernism” at the University of Singapore in November, 1960, he opened with an assault on the government’s policy of nurturing “sarong culture”. Singapore should be open to all influences, he had said, but the following day he found himself hauled before the Ministry of Labour and asked to account for his statements. He was brusquely informed that foreigners should keep their noses out of local affairs, which were none of his business as a mere “mendicant professor”, etc., etc.. Upon which he turned into a Penitent Professor and issued a letter of apology.

There was no need for me to weigh in thus clumsily in 2016 because, almost as soon as I had finished talking, the conversation backwards and forwards across the room took off in a most satisfactory and vigorous way. Just about everybody had an opinion as to the coherence or incoherence, integrity and need for openness of the nation. In Thailand there is a very lively tradition of public debate and dissent, not least among the students. Every year, in February, a football match is played between Bangkok’s two leading universities, complete with cheerleaders and shouting crowds. For the last few seasons this has culminated in a demonstration against the military authorities, pilloried on satirical floats. The latest fixture had just happened, and the authorities had shown no inclination to intervene. The principal comment in the English-language newspapers (of which there are two) was that this year’s offering had been disappointingly low-key and tame.

But it is not just nations that are afflicted with identity crises; authors and texts experience them too. The following year I was asked to return to talk about T.S. Eliot and, seeing as a book of mine on cosmopolitanism and cultural migration had just come out, I chose to concentrate on his polyglot and polymathic affiliations. It is no secret that many of these are Eastern since, on registering as a doctoral student at Harvard in 1911, Eliot had chosen to take a whole range of elective courses in Pali and Sanskrit. The result is that, even as late as 1941, coded references to the sacred books of the East pepper his writings. When I sought to demonstrate this, the result was a remarkable and rewarding instance of reverse instruction. I had no difficulty finding people to read out extracts from Buddha’s Fire Sermon or the Baghavad Gita in the original tongues. I supplied translations, but afterwards one member of the audience (admittedly a Russian) took me aside and told me that these had not strictly been necessary. In this context, and with these students, the poems by Eliot that I had been discussing, mostly The Waste Land and Dry Salvages, had stood on their heads. What had seemed supreme expressions of, in one case post-war disillusion, and in the other, of revived Christian spirituality, had become Asian landscapes with incidental glimpses of a crumbling Western world beyond. As a result, the distance and the intimacy had reversed themselves. What was familiar to the students was unfamiliar to me: it was their job to bring me closer to the source. It is my pious hope that the experience had been mutually beneficial. In any case, I had learned a lot.

Teaching, as many of its practitioners will concede, is largely a process of learning. Especially if you are talking to diverse audiences, one of your most valuable pieces of equipment is ignorance, and preparation is often a matter of clearing the mind. As for ignorance, I flatter myself that I am unusually well qualified in that respect. It is a quality not to be scorned by any mendicant professor as he or she next opens up an Atlas, turns to the sunnier pages and inquires “What do we do now?”

One answer is to return to Morocco next February to organize a weekend creative writing workshop in the lovely hill town of Chefchaouen. Would anybody care to join us?

Richard Danson Brown, Professor of English Literature

Four anonymous poems in Middle English: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Created: c. 1400, North-West Midlands, Creator, Anonymous. Held by: British Library

One of the things that can be the hardest to explain to people who haven’t worked at the OU is how we teach. I’m not in this post going to get into the debates about teaching media (the pros and cons of digital and print have been energetically debated here and elsewhere recently) but rather want to focus on the pleasurable process of writing material for a new module, since I’ve just finished a first draft – in OU parlance, a D1 – on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

This will be part of a new level 2 module, The Novel and Beyond, due for first presentation in 2019.  (Level 2 is what the rest of the sector calls level 5, and again I’m going to resist the allure of a longer discussion of the manifold weirdnesses of OU nomenclature. If the OU were a religion, you’d see the success of its evangelical strategies in the readiness with which its staff adopt these slight but distinct deviations from normal registers: we work in codes which are just aslant of everyone else’s usages).

I mentioned the pleasurable process of drafting material. In the twenty years I’ve worked at the OU, I’ve always found this part of the job uniquely creative and enjoyable because that process is undertaken in a team environment which is typically energetic, questing and supportive. Added to this, the materials we devise will be studied by thousands of students: unlike conventional classroom teaching, OU modules are less ephemeral, being typically taught for around eight to ten years. That means your work – your enthusiasms and sometimes inevitably your errors of emphasis and judgement – will be shared by a large and shifting audience of students. At its best, working on a new module feels like you get the chance to say something perhaps you wouldn’t say elsewhere, about topics which you otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to engage with, to students and colleagues who are highly receptive to your efforts. That means that your register as a writer needs to be more sprightly – more demotic, less buttoned-up – than it would be in a monograph or book chapter.

This brings me to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. As a specialist in Renaissance poetry, I often work with medieval texts and writers – Chaucer, Henryson, the Reynard the Fox stories are often on my desk; if pressed, Dante’s Inferno would probably be my Desert Island Book. But I’m not a medievalist, and I hadn’t anticipated getting a Middle English poem onto our curriculum. There are a range of reasons for this. In the dark backward abysm of OU time, a decision was taken that the Literature Department (as it was then) would focus chiefly on texts from the modern and early modern periods, with a smattering of works studied in translation; to all intents and purposes, Literature began with Shakespeare. Much of this was pragmatic: teaching Middle English at a distance was felt to be a step too far, and the staff and practices of the Department developed accordingly.

But new modules promote new ways of thinking. When the team designing The Novel and Beyond started work, we were sure that although we wanted our primary focus to be on prose fiction, we didn’t want that to exclude other genres, other ways of telling stories. After a protracted and increasingly nervous dalliance with Paradise Lost, I thought of Sir Gawain, and in particular Simon Armitage’s scintillating translation – could this be worth a try? It readily fitted into the module’s themes, and everyone was enthusiastic – much more enthusiastic than they were about poor old Milton. In the past couple of months, I have been working on this poem, which students will read in Armitage’s translation, with a smattering of Middle English terms introduced as needed. To adapt a line of Bertilak’s, when Gawain first arrives at the castle, if students listen, they ‘will learn the merits of language’ (l.918).

One of the perennial challenges of this process is integrating written materials with audio and video. When I consider the language and culture of Gawain, I do this through an interview with Professor Helen Barr, who is a specialist on alliterative poetry, and who taught me when I was an undergraduate. This interview outlines both what we know about the poem’s linguistic and cultural contexts, and most importantly, explains the poem’s stylistic recipe – how its alliterative verse form works. During recent months, Gawain has retuned my ear to the charming, distinctive idiom of Middle English alliterative poetry. I chose Armitage’s translation both because he’s a superb poet, and because his version tries to replicate the original poem’s alliterative patterns, which he neatly calls ‘the warp and the weft of the poem’ (p.viii).

Here’s an example from the stanza which Helen reads in our interview. In this passage, the poet describes the hardships of Gawain’s midwinter journey:

Nere slayne with the slete   he slepte in his yrnes
Mo nightes than inogh,   in nakede rokkes.

Armitage’s version isn’t a literal translation, and he finds some wonderful equivalents here:

With nerves frozen numb he napped in his armour,
bivouacked in the blackness amongst bare rocks (ll.729-30).

In the interview, Helen pointed out that one of the difficulties of alliterative poetry is the premium it sets on synonyms. The Gawain poet has a multitude of terms for man: burn, gome, rynk, tulk, wye – and, funniest of all to the modern eye, freke, a term which has survived, but with connotations which make it unusable in translation. The Gawain poet thought in synonyms to make his verse form work line after line. What a passage like this shows is that the alliterative pattern can generate evocative new phrases in modern English – ‘with nerves frozen numb’ is a nice periphrasis for ‘Nere slayne with the slete’, while ‘bivouacked in the blackness’ presents a new metaphor for Gawain’s grim journey.

What I particularly enjoyed about this aspect of our conversation was the way that it chimed with aspects of my own research. In my forthcoming monograph, The Art of The Faerie Queene, I argue that it is the limitations of a difficult form – in Spenser’s case, the intricate interwoven pattern of the Spenserian stanza – which enfranchise poetic experiment and new ways of writing. The Gawain poet and Armitage illustrate the same phenomenon. For all these poets, difficult forms lead not to the perhaps overpraised virtues of poetic concision but rather to an increased fullness of expression.

That’s what I hear in Armitage’s rendition of Gawain’s camping trip – a deliberate laying on of it thick, which, while it isn’t conventionally rhetorical, has a zip and a zest which mirrors the north midlands dialect of the original poem. That led me to thinking that there should be more experiment with these old, alliterative forms, and to read a different poem by the Gawain poet, also miraculously preserved in the single Cotton Nero A.x manuscript, Cleanness. Here’s a brief snippet from that poem – a couple of lines I found resonant in this summer of bright sun and elusive shade – when God appears to Abraham to warn him of the destruction of Soddom and Gomorrah:

He was schunt to the schadow   under shyre leaves.
Then was he ware on the way   of wlonk wyes thrynne (ll.605-06)

And here’s my own attempt at a poetic paraphrase:

He had shifted to the shadows under the shining leaves,
then he noticed on the bridleway three brilliant beings.

I’m not sure whether I’ll continue with this experiment, but the feel of this poetry, with its emphasis on a more elastic, variable sense of stress than the iambic pentameter of Spenser or Shakespeare is exciting and liberating. In brief, working closely with Gawain has made me newly aware of the oddness of English meters and the chances which have lead to the dominance of some forms rather than others.

Gawain is of course a quest poem. Gawain takes up the Green Knight’s challenge of the ‘lethal’ beheading ‘game’ (l.489), and has to undergo a series of tests which in his own reckoning diminish his self-esteem as he fails to be quite as honest, or as chaste, or as truthful (one of the poem’s key terms) as he would like to think of himself. Writing on this brilliant poem hasn’t been an ordeal to me, but it has reminded me of some of the things I love about working for the OU, which are in themselves related to the idea of a quest: the challenge of writing teaching material on something I am unlikely otherwise to research; the chance to blend different teaching media in what I hope will be an illuminating whole. And, as always, the desire to explain why this particular work might be interesting and worthy of study – how such a fantastical, unrealistic yarn may have some purchase on the way we live our lives today. I don’t yet know how students will react to the poem or my material, nor what my colleagues will think. But I am looking forwards to these encounters in a more optimistic frame of mind than Gawain when he sets off towards the Green Chapel in the last section of the poem:

‘So I’ll trek to the chapel and take my chances,
have it out with that ogre, speak openly to him,
whether fairness of foulness follows, however fate
                    behaves.’ (ll.2132-35)

Works cited

Simon Armitage, trans. (2009) Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: Faber and Faber.

Ad Putter and Myra Stokes, eds (2014) The Works of the Gawain Poet: Pearl, Cleanness, Patience, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. London: Penguin ebook.