Matthew Sperling reviews: Ghosts by John Fuller

The key terms for John Fuller's work are adjectives like 'skillful', 'accomplished', 'stylish', 'graceful', and nouns like 'ease', 'elegance', 'mastery', 'fluency', 'facility'. It might not be unreasonable to bring all these terms under a single heading: 'Oxford'. Fuller is in a succession (some would call it a 'mainstream') of Oxford-educated poets who have shared and promoted these values, running from Auden and his satellites (including Fuller's father, Roy) through Betjeman, Larkin and his pals, down to James Fenton (Fuller's student), Andrew Motion, and so on.

The critic Andrew Duncan has recently characterized this tradition less favourably: 'narcissistic, theatrical, aware of style and of holding an audience, anti-political, preoccupied by surfaces, precocious but failing to develop'. This is going a little far; to write off Auden, say, in these terms, is surely to throw the baby out with the bathwater. But it's important to acknowledge dissenting voices like Duncan's, and to consider whether they might have a point.

It's the last item on Duncan's charge-sheet which is the most telling; and it's related to the last terms in my list of adjectives. The precocity comes with early fluency - the self-confidence, the ready eloquence, the sense of secure, unchanging values that an Oxford education can help to give some people. But fluency, facility - finding things easy to do, and being praised for them at a young age - can easily stop you from trying anything more difficult, or anything new. It's easy for a writer of great facility to produce a sort of poem which quickly becomes facile.

Ghosts is John Fuller's fifteenth collection. It is, at all times, fluent and accomplished. There are no bum-notes, no howlers, no solecisms. The whole texture is smoothly masterful. Anyone who's ever been talked at in a too-hot lecture theatre or an oak-panelled book-lined study will recognize the EngLit suavity:

Take the example of
Virginia Woolf, who
In 1941
Walked into the Ouse on
The 28th of March,
Thus forever putting
From her like a locked door
The fear of going mad.

Before we fall for this, with its seductive hints of Nicole Kidman in a wet dress, and Phillip Glass tastefully droning in the background, we might consider how the parody of scruple presented by the cautious dating, the scholarly mannerisms ('Take… thus…') fails to cover up the absolute cliché of the phrasing ('like a locked door') and the banality and glibness of the thought. This second poem in the book, 'Prescience', starts by telling us that Death 'will arrive when it / Decides to, and will not / Be denied' (Hold the front page!) then jog-trots us through 88 lines of limp trimeter.

This trope of over-extension runs almost throughout; we get poems of 32 stanzas, of 29, of 20, of 19, of 18… It adds up to about 1,500 lines altogether, but the number that can raise the pulses, or excite, or amuse, is in the high dozens, not the hundreds; not a great hit-rate. Too much of the book is footling, deliberately trivial. 'Dates' spends eight stanzas toying with the sort of high-table trivia even Larkin wrote off in a few choice phrases ('regicide and rabbit-pie'). 'Final Moves' spends eighteen lines thinly versifying a correspondence chess match: 'Your Kg8… Your Ng5' (Fuller is routed here, incidentally, by Beckett's more thorough and witty presentation of a chess match in Murphy). That both these poems are also about death, like most of the poems in the book, does not make them any more serious.

This isn't to say that there are no good things in the book; just that they are drowned out by fillers, by lines that sound bored, and are boring. It's no coincidence that some of the best moments come in the sonnet-sequence 'Happy': the exigencies of rhyme, and compact form, spark Fuller into life, and also bring us the one moment of real joy, as a baby walks and topples over: 'Viva the vertical! Hey, horizontal!' This living and excitable language, alert from moment to moment, is echoed later: 'That route between Now and Now / Which is a continued delight'. But it is, we are told, for 'the future man', for the young, not for the poet. Elsewhere the poems seem strongly aware of their attenuation and lack, of their failings; and it is these moments which are captivating:

These pedantic evasions
Are symbols of real guilt
At our terrible failings,

Of our retreat to podiums
Of self-esteem, to pillows
Of sobbing disgust.

This is a moment of genuine insight. We might point out, however, that there's nothing more evasive than recognizing an evasion, then proceeding to carry on the same way as before.

It's difficult not to read lines as lax and boring as these -

What has always been said is also
True: you can't take it with you.
[…]
Thank God for Nature when supplies
Fail us. I can write by sunlight
Though it will not bring me Handel.

- without the hackles, and the heckles, rising: Why am I being addressed like this? What do you want from me? Am I allowed to refuse to 'thank God'? The poems are full of uses of 'we', 'you', and 'us', whose gestures of inclusion are evasive as well as coercive.

There's a question of tact here. Fuller is, by all accounts, a generous, meticulous and inspiring teacher, and he has written at least one brilliant book, Flying to Nowhere. Does he really deserve a drubbing from some kid who's never played chess, or even listened to Handel? I want to suggest that, yes, he does. There's something wrong with a literary culture which rewards a writer who, despite his obvious and genuine talents, produces ever-less energetic and vigorous work in a style established forty years ago. Perhaps Fuller, and the people who give him his laurels, should take more seriously his warning: 'Of our retreat to podiums / Of self-esteem'.

Ghosts (London: Chatto and Windus, 2004), £8.99

The views expressed by contributors to the reviews section of Poetry Matters are not those of Tower Poetry, or of Christ Church, Oxford, and are solely those of the reviewers.