Gifts: Poems 1992-1999 

The Temenos Academy Review, 5, Autumn 2002 (Jack Herbert)
 
William Radice, Bengali scholar and distinguished translator of Rabindranath Tagore, has produced a volume of poems whose title and theme draw on India’s ancient and rich tradition of the giving and receiving of gifts.  This is not to say that there are not other themes and motifs running through the collection, but this particular one is central and organizational, operating at several levels.  Thus in the beautifully limpid poem which closes his book, based on the final scene from Richard Strauss’s opera Arabella, we find these lines: ‘The water runs on,/The gifts never end:/Gifts received and returned’.  This is a generalization from the scene in question, where the apotheosis of love is enacted between the heroine and her lover Mandryka.  This takes the form of a class of water given by Arabella to Mandryka which he drinks then shatters in accordance with local custom in what is a climactic, celebratory act.  Anyone who has witnessed this on stage, together with Strauss’s extraordinary music throughout the finale, will recall its ritualistic overtones, its power to move, its excessive ecstasy.  Appropriately, in choosing this source for his collection’s final poem, William Radice illuminates his choice of title as the giving and receiving of love.  At the same time this is made the kernel of a larger interpretation involving the actual poems themselves: ‘My words are the glass,/The glass is my own,/Yours the spirit it held’, where ‘Yours’ in this case, while glancing back at Arabella’s love, principally refers to the unknowable force creating ‘my words’.  Thus at one level the poems can be seen as gifts to the reader; at another they are viewed as thanks rendered back to the Giver of all gifts, as in the poem with its title from Tagore: ‘Ananda-dhara bahiche bhubane’ (A stream of joy flows through the world), where we find twice over the line: ‘It is your giving that my gifts should honour’.  Again the sentiment is Indian.  However, this by no means excludes the contemporary Western world where these poems are situated.
 
Indeed, this volume is anchored in the lives of nine fictional characters who often speak their own lines, with three English locales to which they relate.  We get the elderly and rickety London couple, Maggie and Joe, who open the book and exude a Beckett-like flavour.  By chance they meet in a London square a lonely young man called Brendan, who is plagued by migraine and a religious upbringing , full of self-hate caused by these, and further complicated by having a father who has deceived and hurt his mother.  It is therefore no surprise that one of the poems given to him is titled Brendan’s notes on ‘The Way of All Flesh’, where he is identified with Ernest Pontifex / Samuel Butler as well as the particular Indian rasa (‘flavour’ or ‘essence’) Bibhatsa, meaning ‘disgust’.  This is one of the affective modes in Indian aesthetics, to which we will return.  His tortured, isolated frame of mind is given direct utterance when he exclaims in a parodic version of The Ancient Mariner:
 
                     Water, water is what I want,
                     For my withered soul to drink:
                     Water of sympathy, love and hope
                     To pull me back from the brink
 
This is the result of having been overheard and, he thinks, wrongly addressed by Maggie and Joe in the London Square: ‘I haven’t come to this park to hear / Two old folks having a spat’.  He then leaves but, ‘with the onset of spring’, Maggie and Joe once more find him sitting in St. George’s Gardens, this time in a more buoyant mood.  Yet unlike Coleridge’s wedding-guest they justify themselves in such a way as to participate in Brendan’s lonely suffering and offer him some real sustenance in the form of active compassion.  In fact, one of the things most visible in this poetry is the necessity for and manifestation of compassion in a world fundamentally vulnerable, where human beings are lonely, harassed from within as without, and surrounded by transience, decay, and death in their relationships with each other and the larger reality outside.  All this emerges as we learn about the various characters’ histories, even more so when they themselves speak out, sometimes to each other – an interweaving of voices that tells us, as the blurb says, that ‘the poem may be performed as well as read’.  This is important since William Radice’s verses are not a poetry of the inner voice, even when articulating his characters’ inmost thoughts.  Rather they are projected situations, messages, and/or states of mind dramatic in nature and often making use of parody, rhyming quatrains, and humorous couplets or the popular song and German Lied structures of the book’s final section.  Hence the note on possible performance; so that they could well be produced on radio.
 
The strength and indeed the subtlety of this collection are therefore to be located not so much in individual poems as in the volume as a whole-in the themes, motifs, and personae interlinking and giving complexity to the more that fifty or so poems and sequences it contains.   Thus what we get is fairly close web whose colours, lines, and patterns are accumulative, and whose effects build up like the interweaving of musical motifs, something, to be expected from an author who, on the evidence of his work alone, is passionately interested in and knowledgeable about classical music and ballet.  However, a few poems do stand out-notably and final poem already discussed, together with the key poem Adam’s gift, but also the three connected  with Adam and Jessica, the couple closet to the writer, and titled  Adam and Jessica, Adam and Jessica ride high, and Jessica and Adam, all of which contain a certain imaginative felicity of image and feeling that the other characters in the book, by virtue of who and what they are, cannot replicate.  This is an area that could be cultivated; for it has enabled the poet to release a vein of familial fantasy that in the first of these poems creates the sense of being happily married in terms of ‘Two cicles, varying in circumference, /Intersection, or apart, or one within the other’s circumference’,  who when as ‘incandescent discs of gold’ are praised as ‘what spinning, luminous planets, what tears, what gold:/What two intermixing spheres of love and colour and gold’.  In the second poem the Russian ‘Firebird of legend’ is invoked in a series of scintillating images that recalls their musical equivalent in Stravinsky’s ballet.  In the third poem ‘a year in the life of a tree’ is compared to a year of marriage, as in ‘The strength and sensitivity of our love,/Which when it bursts into life /Is like an explosion of the tree into leafy life’. The last two lines here from a separate couplet on the page, the verse-from in which nine poems from section one are composed.  But the couples of all these rhyme on the same words, just as if there were no alternatives available, so that the feeling they arose is curiously of a desire on the part of the poet to underline in some way the nature, identity, and stubborn persistence of the phenomena acts, and qualities described. It is as if they were all somehow bulwarks and/or statements made against the inundating welter of things outside, thereby giving an existential feel to the experience narrated. 
 
William Radice has divided his collection into four sections, subtitled Twenty-seven building-blocks; Three places, and One song to many tunes, the use of numbers in all four parts indicating an important line of structure and meaning within the volume. For the twenty-seven building-blocks are the poems themselves which create the initial portraits  of the book’s nine characters.  But they are also genetic building-blocks out of which these people are constructed and which the Oxford student Richard, who reappears in the sequence Oxfordshire from Three places, explores in Richard works it out:
 
                    My parents formed an arch; though who
                    Fixed what in the arch I never knew –
                    Whose brick lay where, who defined the size,
                    Shape, span, spring line and rise.
 
In fact, one of William Radice’s themes is a concern with inheritance of just this kind and, in this opening quatrain, the way it not only determines what and who we are, but also can be used to define and sustain:
 
                    The stresses are gone, for my parents and me.
                    Yet I wouldn’t be what I’ve come to be
                    Without them. I keep on walking through
                    On my memory-screen, finding true
                    Support in the fate-defying construction
                    Of the arch, its dogged defiance of construction.
 
Different from this is the case of ‘Eva the Painter’, close friend and perhaps close relation of Adam and Jessica, who has resolutely rejected all ideas of family and children in order to keep herself free to paint: ‘No one has helped me, I’ve walked alone -/Each step placed on a stepping-stone’.  Nevertheless, stepping stones are her equivalent of building blocks, giving her ‘a firm road to walk on till I die’.  Otherwise, ‘had I rushed / Into sex or children, the blood would have gushed / Wildly over my stepping-stones’; whereas by keeping single she feels she has kept the welter of life at bay.  In her own rasa from the second section, having the Bhayanaka or ‘terror’, we are made to see clearly that ‘Eva the painter and Eva the woman are different’ in the same way that her pictures are totally split between the ‘wild and peculiar’ subject matter that she paints and ‘the recondite titles she puzzlingly gives them’, ‘showing the orderly breadth of her interests’, and which attempt to control ‘the terror she wards off’.
 
Each characters rasa, which is conveyed in the form of rhythmical experiment, provides us with a more deeply subjective portrait of that person’s psyche, whether spoken by him/her or recounted in the third person.  And since the nine characters are depicted as embodying the nine classical Indian rasas of heroism, terror, disgust, sexual love, wonder, anger, pathos, the comic, and calm, with their personal traits already having been built up in section one, this melding of the typical and deep-seated with the personal and individual pushes the poetic explorations of the book’s nine people much farther, as does the ensuing section in respect of place by anchoring them to London, Oxfordshire, and Northumberland.  The final part then lets them function and ‘eventually merge into one voice’, as the blurb says, in the form of One song to many tunes, and as the author himself puts it:
 
                    In my mind I’m many people:
                    Maggie, Eva, Bert and Joe,
                    And the others they have swallowed
                    Whom I now don’t wish to know.
 
The jaunty throwaway humour here is a continual feature but no way implies underlying lack of seriousness.  For instance, the numbers used in the collection’s subtitles to its four sections and already mentioned, though seemingly unobtrusive, have a definite point.  For they chart a quasi-geometrical progression back from the many to the one in a series of threes: twenty-seven, nine, three, and one – as if all the multiples were coming to rest in unity.  Again, following suit, each of the three places relates to three characters, while in the first section the two couples, Maggie and Joe, Adam and Jessica, receive six poems a piece, the others all getting three; so that it seems that William Radice is working to a numerical groundplan of some kind.  I am reminded once more of something essentially and profoundly Indian – namely, the overall prevalence of the theme of multiplicity and oneness.  The philosopher and aesthetician Indra Nath Choudhuri puts the matter thus:
 
While the Indian mind is very much inclined to create diversions or categories that turn the One into Many, conversely it goes to the opposite direction in its search for unity in diversity, leading to the theory of ekarasavada that proves that there is only one rasa.  Even if India loves diversity, the Indian mind ultimately goes in search for the One (advaita).  Searching for the One in Many is India’s main philosophical preoccupation.
 
One small reservation: I think it is somewhat unfortunate to have chosen the large photograph of the author for the book’s front cover.  This would have been much better in small format on the back with some appropriate design on the front.
 

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