SUMMER REQUIEM By Vikram Seth, Aleph, Rs 399
A few years ago, at a dinner party during a literary festival somewhere in the Himalayas, I heard Vikram Seth sing. A fetching young novelist from Lahore, disciple of Farida Khanum, had been singing ghazals, one after another. In that air of preening melancholy, at once mellifluous and jagged with rehearsed emotion, people had begun letting their hair down and putting their feet up. Somebody asked Seth to sing after a while. Without a moment's hesitation, and with a look of quizzically frowning intensity not focused on anyone in particular, he started to sing.
The song was Schubert's "Der Leiermann". It was about an old hurdy-gurdy man standing with his empty begging bowl at the edge of the village. The dogs growl at him and nobody listens to his music. But he still keeps cranking his instrument with frozen fingers. The hurdy-gurdy man has a strange pull on the singer, who wonders if he might go away with the old man and ask him to accompany his songs. "Der Leiermann" is the last song in Schubert's great song-cycle of 1828, Winter's Journey, about romantic desolation, departure and dread, which had set to music for the piano a number of poems by another German poet. As a song, it is possibly the bleakest affirmation - though of the utmost beauty - of the resilience and unity of poetry and music in the face of mortality and the heart's darkest impulses. Seth sang in German that evening, without the piano of course, and without bothering to translate for those who didn't know German. And, suddenly, as he sang, another tradition of sadness - a stark and northern Other to the ghazals' self-addictive arabesques of longing - chilled, and stilled, the room with an effortlessly alien formalism.
"Pain is the ransom of formalism," Louise Bourgeois had stitched into one of her works in fabric. Reminded at once of this sentence and of that evening of ghazals-followed-by-Schubert while pondering the shape of Seth's new volume of poems, it occurs to me that moving from Farida Khanum to Louise Bourgeois both is, and is not, a leap. It is the sort of leap, of the intelligence and the emotions, that Seth's collections of poems continually expect us to make with a dolphin-like effortlessness. This effortlessness is the chief charm of Seth's poetry - 'charm' being the seemingly innocuous word that people inevitably fall back on when talking of Seth, the poet as well as the person. It usually stands for a transcendence of the labour and difficulty of writing through a seldom-less-than-consummate mastery of the forms and skills of versification. At its best, it produces a combination of wisdom, felicity and lightness that plays a delicate hit-and-miss game with the banal, the facile and the trivial, which hover at the edges of happiness and heartbreak - the heartbreak of happiness as well as the happiness of heartbreak.
Summer Requiem is deeply conscious of placing itself in a tradition of verse - an 'inhabitation' of literary history that had begun with Seth buying, and beginning to live and write in, the Old Rectory in Salisbury, England, which used to be the home of the poet and priest, George Herbert, in the 17th century. This event in Seth's life, together with the end of his relationship with the violinist, Philippe Honoré (who was to be his companion at the Old Rectory), is at the heart of his previous book of poems, The Rivered Earth (2011). Looming above and around this English home, these volumes of poetry and these novelistically intertwined life-changing events is the Gothic shape of a yet-to-be-completed novel, the sequel to A Suitable Boy, with the world's not-too-kind eye on what might look like, to some, its protracted and luxurious imminence. Summer Requiem begins, therefore, with a long and sombre poem, an elegy to the "hour of rust", out of which opens a corridor not only of diurnal and seasonal, but also of literary, especially poetical, Time. It stretches from Seth's inexorably darkening present to the very origins of an essentially Anglo-Saxon tradition in the splendidly lugubrious Old English laments spoken by wanderers, seafarers and exiles. Between this present and that past, there are the great crepuscular landscapes of Hardy and Tennyson, for instance, or of Keats's odes and sonnets, Gray's Elegy, Thomson's Seasons, Milton's Il Penseroso and, ultimately, moving from the Anglo-Saxon to the Continental and the Classical, Dante, Horace and Virgil. There is a pictorial counterpart to this literary history as well, frequently evoked in the poems: a tradition of painting and landscape, of the picturesque and the sublime, from Poussin, Lorraine and Watteau to Capability Brown, Constable, Turner and Friedrich, perhaps even that crazy vortex of a sunset that forms the backdrop to Munch's Scream.
These tactfully presiding geniuses are dispersed across, and inform, the entire volume, in the spirit of its opening poem's buried refrain: "Gathered and scattered, gathered and scattered". Gathering and scattering, as poets have always known, are eternally symbolic or allegorical activities that have to do with 'cultivation' in all its senses - poetic, agricultural, pastoral and existential. They are actions that make up the First and Last Things, and a great deal that comes in-between. "[G]athering swallows twitter in the skies" at the end of Keats's "To Autumn", and "in a wailful choir small gnats mourn/ Among the river sallows, borne aloft/ Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies". That contrary motion - coming home to a stillness while ranging restlessly - animates the best of the poems in Summer Requiem, keeping them uncertainly poised between serenity and unease: "In a brief while the sun will go,/ And grand unnerving bats will fly/ Westward in clumped formations, slow/ And dark across a darkened sky." But woven into these overlapping histories, are other, just as vital, strands of reading and influence - an exquisite tribute to Pushkin ("He gave me me") in blank verse and set in Venice, and the revelation of a more complicated, but end-stopped, genealogy in another sonnet: "We are the last generations; Surdas, Bach,/ Rembrandt, Du Fu, all life, love, work and worth/ Will end in the particular rain" ("the particular rain" is pure Auden though).
Since The Rivered Earth and its peculiar biographical context, Seth's poetry has also been about the 'abandonment' of poetry by, and to, the powers of its estranged, elusive and therefore longed-for companion, music, richly using the double sense, happy and sad, of 'abandon': being left and letting go, letting oneself go and letting somebody else go. And in that giving and ungiving game played with, and by, music, it is both English vocal and chamber music, sacred and profane (think of the musical and mortal implications of "requiem", though Mozart might come to mind here, prompted by a poem like "Adagio" in All You Who Sleep Tonight), and the German traditions of Lieder and symphonic song (as much Strauss's Four Last Songs and Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde as Schubert's Winterreise) that make themselves heard in this music-bereft, and thus music-haunted, book.
So, it is to England, and especially to Oxford, that we must return in order to savour the wit, the lightness, the rue and the tender, erudite self-mockery of Seth's poetry at their most delightful and unchanging since The Golden Gate, "that sad and happy thing,/ Child of my youth, my first wild fictive fling". The genial ghosts of Lewis Carroll, Wystan Auden and, not least, Sebastian Flyte ("Hot-water bottle, God and teddy bear") come together, where else but in the eponymous Fellows' Garden at Christ Church. "Despite the blights and doubts of love", the poet finds himself in this garden, feeding peas to the college tortoise, "snivelling on my grieving knees" (Auden's "[h]uman on my faithless arm" comes immediately to my mind, more like a musical memory than a literary allusion). And as he snivels and kneels and feeds the "torpid glutton", this ageless beast pours balm on the poet's "afflicted soul": "And from my unrequited heart/ All Angst and Weltschmerz would depart/ As spiteful mallets clicked away/ A Christ Church twilight of croquet.// O mighty loves and griefs long gone,/ Why won't your details linger on?/ Why should it be that I recall/ Beech, beast, mallet - and that's all?"
