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Poet Essayist Lecturer
'Le Moulin Mystique' Moses and Paul of the Old and New Testaments Romanesque stone capital Nave of Basilique Ste-Madeléine (1120-1215) Vézelay, Burgundy, France
Le poème, "moulin mystique": Entretien avec Geoffrey Hill (1) by Anne Mounic
The day after the conférence that he gave at the Collège de France in March 2008, I had the joy and honour of being able to meet Geoffrey Hill for an interview on the correlation between poetry, existence and spirituality, the first in the context of this project. It is Dany and Michael Edwards — to whom I must infinitely thank — who gave me the pleasure of this two-hour conversation with the great English poet, in a café situated not far from a residence belonging to the Collège de France ("a hotel particularly dignified during the time of Proust" Michael confided to me that evening while giving me the address). I admired, particularly, on that beautiful day in March 2008, the cut-out shadows of the trees on the great white wall of the interior of the courtyard, and the reflection of the sky, intensely blue, on some high windows. Furthermore, the camellias were in bloom. And what completed the atmosphere of this exceptional moment, was the name of the café, which Geoffrey Hill appreciated as much as myself for its just value: 'L'espérance'.
Once we were seated in this meeting place, and calm, at least at the beginning of our interview, I outlined precisely my project to Geoffrey Hill and invited him to begin by defining, according to him, the key words. I placed some useful references in brackets. I transcribed our interview into French, which was effectively in English, and scattered Geoffrey Hill's French expressions and phrases, which I have indicated, when that seemed to me to add a certain "piquant" charm to the conversation.
After reading the interview, Geoffrey Hill wished to introduce some precise supplements which he addressed to me in a letter of March 31, 2008, and which I translate below. He also asked me about clarifying certain moments of the interview, he hopes to return the reading by post. He signs and returns the following:
Geoffrey Hill: Existence is what we are, by necessity, held by endurance. Spirituality constitutes, for some individuals only, a supplementary dimension. If you imagine your existence in the world as a horizontal line, the vertical of spirituality cuts this horizontal of our inescapable existence. One can only think of five or six known examples that appear in history of this intersection by the spiritual vertical with the horizontal of our mortal existence: the Annunciation, the Birth of Christ, or the Nativity, the Transfiguration, the Ascension and the Pentecost, this day when the Holy Spirit descends vertically on our horizontal existence. Another example, perhaps, is the Ascension of the Virgin Mary, or the Assumption. Paradoxically, the crucifixion, also strange that this may appear, does not constitute such a centre. This was a cataclysm. The veil of the Temple rent. [Matthew 27,51]. At each instance during which we believe the vertical of grace, we find ourselves facing a cross. For me, the question of the existence of spirituality can not be truthfully envisaged except in the form of the theological drama. The vague sentiments of spirituality which for me have only a little significance. The points where the two straight lines are, for us, the points of crucifixion — moments of uncertainty, or sin. Our anguish, facing the truth of Christ, constantly torments us.
Anne Mounic: Yesterday, during your conférence, you mentioned Simone Weil a number of times, saying that the reading of L'enracinement and L'attente de Dieu had confirmed some of your intuitions as a young man. What are these intuitions which, in this manner, were confirmed?
GH: It is rather strange, if one considers that Simone Weil was a writer very involved with the spiritual, with what were the intuitions regarding the relationships between politics and poetry. Yesterday, I cited a passage where she says that the poet, when he writes a poem, must consider his words on multiple planes and that it is the same for the politician in his thought and action. For me, it is a question about one of the most profound observations and one which concerns the link between poetry and politics. I do not see that poetry has, by its function of transmitting, the political platitudes of which I spoke regarding the political poetry of Aragon.
AM: What in French we call "poésie engagée".
GH: Yes, that is it. That always seemed to me suspect. Furthermore, it is the same for poetry that is engaged in the service of Christianity. I think of Pierre-Jean Jouve. His poetry seems to me, very often, to serve the clichés, the platitudes of a certain Communist Freudianism and some others, living with these sacramental Freudians. One could say the ideas float on their spirit comme un canard sur un lac*. (***)
AM: Dogma overwhelms the poem. Preconceived ideas become the vertical instant, as it were.
GH: Poetry can take root in dogma, but must not float on it. The poem is a struggle between truth and metre. It must not only give an account of the complexity of things, but of the collusion between a number of elements, which justify what many people call the poetic "message". It is a meeting between message, rhythm and syntax, particularly the syntax of enjambment, and it is very rare that this combat leads to a triumph for the poet.
AM: A sort of struggle with the angel... Is the poet also a philosopher? What are the relationships between poetry and philosophy?
GH: Controlled. A link exists, but it is held in check. When I was young, I was very impressed by the poetry of an American poet, Richard Eberhart [1904-2005], who used, in one or two of his poems, some phrases taken directly from the spiritual journal of Kierkgaard. I found these poems absolutely successful. In the same way, the poetry of Robert Lowell's youth borrows images taken from the Scriptures and it was a lesson which I found terribly powerful and at the same time magnificent. But I did not find satisfactory the specifically Anglican spirituality which opens the Four Quartets of Eliot.
AM: For what reason?
GH: This incessant repetition of the poverty of the verbal equipment [1] tires me. Eliot floats on the surface of the language and serves us spiritual platitudes from the credo of the Church of England. And this explains for me the enormous popularity of this poem by Anglican commentators, who have written a number of books on the subject, while treating this work as a simple annex of their sermons. The pious commentaries irritate me profoundly and I do not think that they posses an iota of the genuine dignity of the poems and the poetry when it meets its objective.
AM: It is the future which poses a problem in Eliot at the beginning of The Waste Land ("April is the cruellest month") or in the Four Quartets, where the present moment is placed between "what might have been and what has been", which leaves little place for the future.
GH: It is nostalgia decorated with a spiritual lexicon.
AM: You often make references to D. H. Lawrence in your poems.
GH: Lawrence has an immense power of writing.
AM: He refers incessantly to the Bible.
GH: As he says in Apocalypse, he knows the Scriptures by heart, but feels a certain repulsion at their consideration. This is not a Christian poet.
AM: Yesterday, at the beginning of your conférence, I was struck by the fact that you immediately made an allusion to the Second World War. This was not a surprise for me, knowing what I know of your work, Then you related two notions — making reference to this reaction by Willy Brandt in front of the Shoah Memorial in Warsaw in December 1970 (he fell to his knees and then said: "I did what men do when words fail". (***), the notion of the powerlessness of words and that of their integrity, speaking of "intrinsic value", an expression of John Ruskin. It seems to me, in effect, that this "integrity" is the work of the poet, but what will be the criterion? In your book Style and Faith, a very beautiful title, you seem to wish to return to the origins, as if to save the words from certain ethical inconsistency, one would say.
GH: As for what is the criterion, there isn't any. One does his best. I would like to say also that the difference between a major poet and a minor poet lies with their different capabilities to plunge below the surface of the words, those that are imposed by the pressure of contemporary culture. One reaches the integrity of the words while digging through the layers of cultural sediment. It resembles an artesian well.
AM: It is a return to origins, to a sort of prelapsarian state... On considering this, you often cite some elements of the Jewish tradition, the names of some Jewish feasts like Souccoth, the Feast of the Tents or Tabernacles, as well as some Jewish words, if my memory is correct. Do you think that the Christian perspective has remained faithful to its Jewish Biblical origins?
GH: It is a question to which I am unable to respond. I am not a master of the subject. (***)
AM: Your inspiration, all the same, is Biblical. You spoke yesterday about a reconciliation of the metaphysical, the symbolic, and the sensual world citing a verse by Desnos. I would like to add to this remark what you have said on tone, or pitch, the way which the words organize and work on top of one another, opposed to tone, pledged to the ambient culture. These considerations lead us very close to Biblical language, especially if one adds to that your concern about politics.
GH: Yes, but I do not consider myself a spokesperson of Christian values. I am involved with the fundamental substance of Christianity.
AM: Why do you think, as you expressed it yesterday, that there is no public for poetry in our universe?
GH: I do not wish to repeat the opposition between science and poetry. It is not science that is the enemy of poetry, but the fact that our world is secular and governed by this plutocratic anarchy which I talked about yesterday. What produces poetry is the exact opposite of what produces this secular concern. But it is wise to admit that this world of plutocratic anarchy is more powerful than anything.
AM: This resembles a little Blake's "mechanical anarchy" and his "satanic factories".
GH: The current Blake authorities think that these "satanic factories" were not the industrial factories of the eighteenth-century, but the "factories" of eighteenth-century secular philosophy. It is a shame moreover, for that deprives us of a beautiful image.
AM: Overall, your conception of poetry seems to me ethical. Do you think one is able to reconcile ethics and aesthetics?
GH: Yes, a great poet can reconcile what is irreconcilable. (***)
AM: What is the role of the poet in our world?
GH: He has none. In London, when a taxi driver who loves to talk with his passengers, asks me what I do, I tell him I am a retired university professor. It is best to leave that I am a poet to the last. The driver would collapse with total laughter while driving and that would be dangerous. The great poet has no social function. The mediocre, yes, he finds himself delivering fashionable platitudes to the public. The true poet is completely isolated.
AM: In the poem 121 of The Triumph of Love [1998], you speak of faith as an "inescapable endurance" and then you end the poem by evoking Traherne.
GH: The poems of Traherne, Vaughan, Herbert and Donne, those who one calls the "metaphysical" poets affect me greatly. It is Dryden who was the first to call them the "metaphysicals" and in a pejorative sense. He intended to denigrate them for what he considered superfluous complexity. He says that Donne broke the spirit of beautiful sex with elegant philosophical speculations rather than diverting it while evoking the gentleness of love. I wrote an essay on Vaughan in the Collected Writings which is going to appear [February 2008].
AM: Traherne is a poet of joy.
GH: Péguy spoke of hope. I am very pessimistic at this time about genuine art, totally drowned by mediocrity. I am very pessimistic about the kind of world that is coming in fifty years. Considering the climate changes. But one finds oneself in a certain way, forced to discover and proclaim joy facing all the proofs to the contrary. I said yesterday, I am a "desperate optimist".
AM: In the poem 148 of the same volume, you speak of the poem as a "consolation". That is not enough for me. For me, a poem is a proof of life.
GH: Yes, a poem possesses within, an élan vital* which again is dangerous, for this recalls the strategies of the French army before the explosion of the Great War. One spoke then, and that went with the red pants, of the élan vital*. Nevertheless, it is true, élan vital* surpasses consolation. Consolation is a sentiment, but for élan vital*, one attempts to express the profound energy that a great poem possesses, but who is a stranger to a mediocre poem. I understand this energy as a space of mental provocation translated with the syntax, metre, enjambment and with the mysterious interaction between the words, which produce the mysterious significations that these same words, isolated, do not have.
AM: History for you is a fundamental preoccupation, the Great War, but also the Second and notably the Shoah. I think of 'September Song' [King Log, 1968].
GH: This little girl born on the 19 June 1932 and deported the 24 September 1942 actually existed. While visiting an exposition of children's drawings from Theresienstadt, I remarked that the birth date of this young girl was one day after mine. I was born the 18 June 1932. It gave her name below the painting but I forgot it. As I was an only child, it seemed to me then that I had found a sister in this little girl who was deported to a concentration camp in 1942. (***)
AM: Why, you only, these historical catastrophes of the twentieth-century? Does one ascribe to them what one would call a kind of ethical chasm?
GH: The thinking of our day, is pledged to market interests and celebrity culture. C'est dégoutant*. Andy Warhol said one day the time would come when each of us would be famous for less than fifty minutes. There it is, the characteristic of our time. Actually, all that already existed, but the difference resides in the velocity.
AM: I recall that you speak of Foucault in another poem from The Triumph of Love (143).
GH: My intention is pejorative. Many philosophers of violence would be distraught if, in reality, it emerged in front of them. I imagine Foucault pontificating and when suddenly confronted with primordial fear rush on to avoid it. I have scarcely any love for modern French philosophy. Nor, moreover, for modern English philosophy either.
AM: Among the French poets, you cite Pierre Emmanuel and André Frénaud.
GH: Yes, I cite a verse from Pierre Emmanuel: "Le miséricordieux qui nous brûle le sang". [The Orchards of Syon, 2002, poem VI.] From Frenaud, I cite "Comme si l'aubépine était un présage". [Id., poem V]. They are verses which impressed me as did the one by Desnos which I cited last night.
AM: What do they signify for you?
GH: They represent a gift of magnificent verse, for me, like the one of Leopardi: "rara traluce la notturna lampa" [Id., XIV]. It is a question of, all things considered, a magical conjunction of words. It is the resistance of the words in these mysterious ways which speaks to me, more than the philosophy of the poets. I am greatly influenced by the moulin mystique* of these poems. Keep this, here is a good definition of poetry, le moulin mystique*.
AM: You spoke about magic...
GH: The conjunction may or may not be, a happy one. It is magic which makes the great poets. This is not the quantity of ideas which goes to compensate for making the verbal construction appear, like the archangel Gabriel when he makes the announcement to Mary.
AM: And where does this verbal construct come from? Is is a manifestation of being, a sort of ontological pressure?
GH: The poet struggles for days, for weeks and for months to find the last word and then, suddenly, coming from nowhere, this word springs up but from the fact that he wanted it - ex nihilo. One judges a poet for his overture or for his capacity to perceive the miraculous donnée*
AM: Ex nihilo really, from nothing?
GH: From something which remains intangible to reason — from some part with a grande patience*. Before the annunciation, the poet resembles a little, the Virgin who is reading in the room as in the medieval illuminated manuscripts when Gabriel comes to make the annunciation to her. The seraphim of languages says to the poet: "You will conceive". Many people, hearing me, would say that I blaspheme, but I say all this with extreme reverence.
AM: Would you like to add anything else? I have not thought of everything, surely.
GH: From his struggle with language, the poet, finally, leaves completely exhausted. Eliot says something similar on this experience of complete annihilation of the moment which follows the poetic struggle. I talk about this in the first chapter of the collection of essays which is coming out.
AM: Jacob, also, at the end of the night, is exhausted, and limps, but he obtains blessedness.
GH: So they say.
AM: The cover of your Collected Poems of 1985 shows a detail from the painting by Gauguin 'Vision after the Sermon' or 'Jacob Wresting the Angel'.
GH: I chose this cover. This painting takes on great importance for me. I received it like a revelation one day that I found myself at the National Gallery of Edinburgh. One climbs the stairs and it is here that one comes upon this striking painting.
AM: I thank you immensely.
Geoffrey Hill puts his large black hat back on. Moreover, he is completely dressed in black. We leave the café and we continue talking a little on the return route, about the long years of teaching, at Leeds, at Cambridge, then in the United States, fifty-two years in all. "It is too much", he says. "I began at the age of twenty-two and finished at the age of seventy-four".
Paris, Chalifert 19 March 2008
* In French in the conversation (***) Refers to the corrections given in the letter of 31 March 2008, below:
Dear Anne Mounic,
I do not like to "infléchir" an interview once it has been given. Nevertheless, reading the transcript that you have sent me now, I am concerned by a number of things poorly expressed, by the fact that I left some points in abeyance and that showed through in the completed version as impatience, even of intolerance, in my observations on life and literature.
In particular, I am concerned with the abruptness, of the brutality even, of my judgement in regard to Jouve's poetry and of his British friend and translator, the poet David Gascoyne. In fact, I admire the entire work of each of them. Among my most cherished books figures a copy of Hölderlin's Madness (London, 1938) by Gascoyne. This work was inspired, even if, as I thought previously, it is not a translation of Poèmes de la folie de Hölderlin by Jouve and Klossowski (Paris: Fourcade, 1938). I also like profoundly the essays of Jouve on the music of Mozart and Alban Berg.
The work of Pierre Jean Jouve recently published by Roger Scott (London: Enitharmon Press, 2007), Despair Has Wings, translated by David Gascoyne, not only corrects a good number of my misconceptions or my erroneous interpretations, but also confirms one of two of my reservations on what concerns the work of these two powerful writers.
My comparison "comme un canard sur un lac*" which is mediocre and which I regret having made, indicates a reservation, best expressed by Stephen Romer "poetry with an inimitable symbolic charge" (Romer, 20th Century French Poems. London: Faber, 2002). I find Jouve, and also Gascoyne, symbolic to the point of satiation. When a poem is surcharged with symbols, it is not enriched, but immobilized. There is a term "embourbement" which applies to the work of Gascoyne during his worst moments: I have his radiophonic poem Night Thoughts, broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1955. It comes at a time when this type of symbolic "pensée" (Jouve and Gascoyne's together) falls into religiosity (a word which I use pejoratively even if American commentators on religious questions — and the British more and more — use it positively). After reading the extremely useful introduction and notes by Roger Scott to Despair Has Wings, I maintain a certain assurance in that my concerns stand in regard to what I call "freudisme sacramental*". Scott (pp 47-48) cites a similar warning given to Gascoyne by his therapist Blanche Reverchon, wife of Jouve: "Freud n'est pas parole d'Evangile*." I have my doubts regarding the attention that Gascoyne was able to give to the words of Mme. Jouve; I have in the words of Jouve himself, some similar doubts.
My expression "Je n'ai guère d'amour pour la philosophie française morderne*" is also, as one says "malheureuse". I make no excuse for what I said on British philosophy (or American). Modern philosophy devotes itself more and more to styles and fads as does poetry and, when one has seen that for nearly eighty years, it all gives the impression of a never-ending repetition of novelties. It is necessary to say also that Sartre and Derrida, each in his own way, have been a disastrous influence on modern literary criticism. The Platonist Stanley Rosen has done good work, for the most part ignored by dominant American philosophical circles. I have been completely moved by philosophy only twice in my life: by Simone Weil when I was young; more recently by F. H. Bradley. See my critical essays (Collected Critical Writings O. U. P., 2008). I am very influenced by the rebellious witness who resists, like, for example, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Marc Bloch, Hans-Bernd von Haeften.
Two points due to poor expression during the course of the interview:
1. I would not like to suggest that Willy Brandt had pronounced these words while falling to his knees. I believe that he said these words sometime much later, perhaps responding to a hostile question: his noble gesture must have met a mitigated welcome in the Federal Republic
2. When I did not respond to your question on the fidelity of Christianity to its Jewish origins, I forgot to cite and recommend an English book I read some years ago, thanks to which I have a better understanding: Dom Gregory Dix, Jew and Greek.
One or two other "suppléments" with which I am going to end:
1. The little Jewish girl whose name I had forgotten. It has been the case for many years, regrettably, that I no longer remember it. By a bizarre response of the memory, as perhaps happens with age, there, as I was writing this "postface", the name came to me. But, now that I have this name, I realize that I do not wish to divulge it; for a reason which it is impossible for me to explain, I am happy to keep it and cherish it; I do not wish to abuse her vulnerability more than my poem has already done. Certainly this exposition of children's drawings from Theresienstadt was in the public domain and it gave the references of numerous articles and discussion of the period. Without any doubt, an assiduous researcher would find the name without spending much time or zeal.
2. When we say that one tries to reconcile ethics and aesthetics ("ethics and aesthetics are one and the same[2]"), we understand that we are quoting Wittgenstein who did not say it, like us, positively. But I am not very sure of myself in the presence of Wittgenstein. I see now that my observation: "A great poet is able to reconcile what is irreconcilable" is not stated correctly from Wittgenstein's expression. It's a matter concerning a response to a different question not asked.
* In French in the text.
Notes [1] In the letter accompanying the postface to the interview Geoffrey Hill clarifies: "I do not wish to suggest that Eliot's language is characterized by "pauvreté*", but rather he insists on saying that it is and that such repetitions, in addition to being tiresome, ring false, in a tonality of false humility and of a special pleading". [2] "6.421 - Il est clair que l'éthique no se laisse pas enoncer. L'éthique es transcendantale (Ethique et esthétique sont seule et même chose.)" L. Wittgenstein, Tractatus logico-philosophicus (1922), Traductio, préambule et notes de Guilles-Gaston Grangier, Paris: Gallimard, 1993, p. 100.
1. This interview, of Geoffrey Hill by Anne Mounic, took place on March 19th, 2008 at a small Parisian café not a great distance from the Collège de France where, the evening before, Professor Hill had given a conférence. It was published in No. 6, of Temporel on September 28th, 2008. The interview took place, for the most part, in English and was then translated into French by Anne Mounic. This translation was sent to Geoffrey Hill for corrections. He returned the interview, along with a "postface" (which is also translated above), and a covering letter. The latter, in English, can be read at Temporel. The version above is from the French and may regrettably, at times, differ from the exact meaning of the original. Reading this version of the interview will be enhanced if it is done so in conjunction with the podcast of the conférence. A number of references in the interview relate to that occasion. [Translated by S. Paul, 2008]
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