Craig Raine's smart yet waspish essays straddle the divide between high and low culture, while the Romanian-born Herta Müller deftly describes the horrors of Ceausescu's rule
Keats or Dylan? A key aspect of the mid-20th century was the quarrel between popular and serious culture. In his 1941 essay England Your England, George Orwell sought to define Englishness through a scrutiny of seaside picture postcards. Years later, the French essayist Roland Barthes applied literary judgment to ephemera in much the same way.
Some of the best essayists have been American: only a loquacious journal such as the New Yorker could accommodate the long stroll as perfected by EB White or James Thurber. Craig Raine comes close to their waspish tone at times. No subject is too lowly or vulgar for his long-drawn-out analysis; the literary and cultural essays in More Dynamite contain allusions to Darth Vader, Edward Scissorhands , Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Koons, among others.
As a poet and a novelist, Raine is much interested in the mortifications and lavatorial functions of the human body. In donnish tones, he dilates loftily on the consistency of menstrual blood ("a brown viscous discharge"), Damien Hirst's "prepuce" and Rimbaud's poetic homage to his lover Paul Verlaine's arsehole. "Good writing is bound to give offence," Raine told us in his recent novel The Divine Comedy ; these essays do not disappoint. Swipes are taken at Samuel Beckett ("a very uneven writer"), Geoffrey Hill ("But is this great poetry?") and the children's author Michael Rosen ("The trouble is, he isn't a writer"). Other authors are arraigned on charges of plagiarism, more or less. Derek Walcott lifts from Robert Lowell; Beckett lifts from Marcel Proust. ("Krapp's Last Tape is a kind of dwarf À la recherche, shrunk in the wash.") Any writer whom Raine considers overrated is smartly tossed and gored. Don Paterson, the Scottish poet, is subjected to such a drubbing that I wondered if Raine was not a writer after all, but a super-brilliant hack who gluts himself on causing injury to others.
For all their cleverness, the essays verge at times on the smarty-pants. Franz Kafka's hero is likened to a breakfast cereal ("K would like to be special K"), while John Updike's prose radiates something of "the beloved dinginess of Duraglit", whatever that may mean. By contrast, Raine's appreciations of Philip Larkin, Kipling and Elizabeth Bishop are models of lucid exegesis and sympathy. Eliot's Inferno, a bravura performance, seeks to exonerate the author of The Wasteland from accusations of antisemitism. Raine's chief target is Anthony Julius, former lawyer to Diana, Princess of Wales, whose TS Eliot, Anti-Semitism and Literary Form charged the poet with Jew-hatred as well as misogyny. Julius had made these charges with scant evidential rigour or regard for verification, according to Raine, and it is certainly true that Julius can be slipshod (in a Times book review not long ago he mis-spelled my name a total of 15 times).
Though Raine may love the sound of his own opinionated voice, as an essayist he is excited by pretty well anything of human concern, interest and puzzlement. Inevitably, many of his friends are here (Martin Amis, Tom Stoppard). So the impression is of a charmed circle, but the writing is nonetheless enjoyable for that. To judge by this collection, anyway, the essay as an art form looks in fine fettle.
Herta Müller, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 2009, is the daughter of a German-Romanian SS veteran. She was born in Romania's German-speaking Banat region, where Nazi misrule was superseded in the postwar years by communist misrule. Her essay collection, Cristina and Her Double , chronicles life in the totalitarian darkness of Nicolae Ceausescu. In a dictatorship that eroded all humanity, resistance was hopeless. As a casualty of the Securitate's psychological violence, Müller lost her job as a teacher in the 80s and was afterwards banished to a tractor factory, where her job was to translate instructions for hydraulic machinery.
Müller's essays provide a gloss on her extraordinary novel The Land of Green Plums as well as her love-hate relationship with her Führer-doting father. (An alcoholic, he is seen to lament a lost Romanian idyll of plum brandy, strudel pastry and beer-swilling Herrenvolk.) Nazi Romania had much in common with Stalinist Romania, not least a dewy-eyed nationalism. In an especially chilling essay, Always the Same Snow, Müller relates how even snow could betray the whereabouts of a runaway dissident. In January 1945, the Soviet authorities press-ganged thousands of Transylvanian Saxons resident in Romania and sent them to slave labour camps in the Siberian ice fields. Muller's mother was caught up in the arrests and deported as a "counter-revolutionary". Müller meanwhile, burdened by her German heredity, reflects bitterly on her parents' political allegiances and her own wretched fate under Ceausescu. These angry, raw essays tell of political oppression with a sombre eye and a deft economy of words.
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