Alan Gillis reviews: Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir by David Herd

We learn of other potential titles for this book in a poem called: 'In which the Poet, Trying to Come up with a Title for the book he is Writing, becomes Anecdotal; and his Loyal Companion of Several Years Standing Helps Out by Throwing a Log on the Fire'. Among these other titles, we are given:

Captain Correlli's Mandolin,
Naïve and Sentimental Music,
My Captain, My Captain,
The Peter Mandelson Years,
Sun Rising in the Absence of Trees,
I Alone Escaped to Tell Thee,
My Spirit so High it was all over the Heavens,
Southend, at Dead of Night,
My Spirit so High I nearly Crashed the Car,
On the Road,
On the Buses,
Dial 4 to Change your Personal Options,
We Campaign in Poetry, Govern in Prose …

Suffice to say, this isn't a memoir of Peter Mandelson. Or, if it is, it certainly isn't an authorized version:

For instance, I have colleagues,
Good, sweet colleagues,
Unaware that on vacation
I am the assistant ambassador chief

To the young republic of Kazakhstan;
And friends, friends I have sung and danced with
Friends I have stepped to the brink and back with
In all the years we have known and wept

Have only met one of my wives.

The blurb at the back of the book tells us that, rather than a memoir, this is actually 'a story of life in the age of Mandelson'. Suffice to say, however, we don't really get a story. Instead, we get a dizzy and disorienting chain of teasing, clever, breezy challenging, ingratiating, and infuriating poems.

David Herd has written a book of criticism called John Ashbery and American Poetry. While many other contemporary writers in Britain and Ireland register Ashbery's influence to some degree, few do so with the all-encompassing fervor of Herd. Ashbery's poetry ranges from disjunctive opacity to fulgent lyricism to knockabout comedy. He's known for his verbal games, collages, and for the way his tone constantly shifts, often abruptly veering from parody to elegiac pathos (sometimes its hard to know where one ends and the other begins). Also, his verse notably betrays a sense that each poem is 'the chronicle of the creative act that produces it', as Ashbery has said about the work of his friend, Frank O'Hara.

Herd seems to base his poetry on this latter idea (this also provided the focus for his critical book), so that almost everything in Mandelson! is written in a jaunty, open-minded present tense - sometimes confused, sometimes reflective, sometimes poignant, and often funny -creating a vivid sense of 'live action' and process:

One man, stripped to the waist, tattoos depicting life at sea,
Throws bricks - two at a time - to another man standing on the scaffold.
Often, as the bricks reach the top of their trajectory, they part and this would be
impossible to handle,
If the man receiving, leaning from the scaffold, his bulk dependent, on load - bearing bars
Didn't catch them at the moment of downward momentum, as the weight shifts.
There, he dropped one.

As these quotations hopefully show, the levity of Herd's wit, speed of thought-shift, and deft rhetorical playfulness make his poetry, in full flight, a thing of buoyant ebullience. The book begins with a 'Disclaimer', a remarkable prose piece, which begins: 'The question is: "Are you happy?"', and which pours forth into a tide of further questions, spinning into one another, bouncing off one another, interjecting, side-stepping, self-circling, expanding, and contradicting one another in a happily head-twisting flood.

As such, the book's opening reveals much about what will follow. Its present tense, processual style creates a light, fluid, free-ranging momentum that is capable of jumping registers and switching emphasis in a beat (and it does so, wantonly). This happens within poems, but also between them, so that the collection strives to open us out to a multitudinous unpredictability. This reaches its peak as the book unexpectedly throws up a very funny Noh play called 'Peter! Peter!', and then abruptly launches into a stunning and quite profound prose piece describing the biological process of breathing. However, on the down side, Herd is often too whimsical, at times, and abruptly obscure at others. The sense of flight and fun ultimately falters, or, at least, remains unfortunately slight. I'm quite sure this slightness and aloofness is intentional; but, to my mind, Herd misplays his hand too often.

If we return to the idea of the book as a memoir of Mandelson, we can cut to the heart of the collection. That this isn't a memoir of Mandelson is part of a clever joke - the punch-line being that nobody knows who Mandelson is (or New Labour, or the people running the country and invading others). If Mandelson is the architect of New Labour and the archetypal spin doctor, then it is entirely pertinent that the book's poetic style is all surface and no substance. That Mandy is given wives adds to the joke - the sense in which all language tends to say one thing when the reality is something other. Indeed, the point is, no doubt, that reality and truth have themselves become irretrievably lost, and that there is no such thing as politics, as we conventionally think of them, any more. That the book is not about Mandy or politics at all is, most likely, entirely the point.

John Ashbery and the 'New York' poets developed Herd's kind of style in the late 1940s and early 1950s. We're often told that they're called 'postmodern' rather than 'modern' because they respond to the disempowerments of the twentieth century with wit, irreverence, comedy, and the illusion of accessibility, rather than with po-faced complexity, seriousness, and overt despair. Whether the age of Mandelson has called forth a renaissance of the 'New York' style, or whether Mandy-politics are simply a symptom of wider historical contexts that have been building for decades, and for which something like the 'New York' style is an almost perfect aesthetic, is a moot question (one which Herd's book implicitly asks). But the fact that Herd ultimately lets his clearly considerable talent froth into a seemingly self-satisfied aesthetic is disappointing. As the book proceeds, it falls back upon a narcissistic poetic trickery that goes nowhere, and which thus reflects rather than parodies the world of Mandy. Of course, this is also quite possibly intentional - a fatalistic but serious point rendered as a latent and arch ironic joke.

In conclusion, then, this is a flawed but fresh and welcome book, and David Herd is a poet worth paying close attention to. My gripes mostly stem from the fact that I like my poems a little bit less 'open', a little bit more centripetally magnetized, than these, and that I think such wit, play, invention and irreverence can and should be used as more direct weapons than this book manages. But, for all that, there are many poems here that will put a spring in your step, and make your mind dance, and these are most welcome indeed.

Mandelson! Mandelson! A Memoir. Carcanet Press (£7:95).

 

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