Unicorns, Almost

Reciter 2. Keith Douglas's 'Aristocrats'

This is the second in a new series of audio recordings and short essays (max. 500 words, excluding the text of the poems) from my reciter.

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Bertie Wooster, as portrayed by Hugh Laurie in the TV series Jeeves and Wooster.

In one of the essays in his strange, beautiful book Cultural Amnesia, Clive James paraphrases the German musicologist Alfred Einstein:

The question isn’t about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Beethoven. The question is about what Schubert would have done if he had lived as long as Mozart.

Keith Douglas, whose great poem ‘Canoe’ I wrote about last month, was only 24 when he was killed in Normandy: had he lived as long as Schubert, he would have had another seven years; as Mozart, eleven. He could even be alive now: the oldest living man in the world today was born eight years before he was.

Though Douglas was published during his lifetime, most of what reputation he has now came posthumously, based primarily on the poems of his that came out of World War II, and helped by those poets and critics (such as Ted Hughes) who celebrated him.

Those poets and critics all knew—just as Douglas’s many readers today know—what masterpieces he would have produced if he had lived longer: we ‘know’ that in the same way that we ‘know’ that the last words of the other Einstein, spoken in German and not understood by his American nurse, contained the profoundest insight in human history.

The death of a great man or woman, especially if it is an early death, often brings with it legends like that. The death described in Douglas’s poem ‘Aristocrats’ (below) brings legends with it, too; as is not the case with ‘Canoe’—whose wistful sentiments are barely analysed, let alone ironised—‘Aristocrats’ speaks with scepticism about those legends, though that scepticism is as ‘gentle’, in its way, as its dead protagonist.

That protagonist, Peter—‘the noble horse with courage in his eye’—is an individual and not a legend: he has a name, after all; he speaks. At the same time, he is also a type, one instance of that ‘obsolescent breed of heroes’ otherwise known as the English aristocracy: heroic, foolhardy, ridiculous. Like the others of his class, he is falling, as he dies, into the legends of ‘stupidity and chivalry’, as indeed is the poet writing about him, who recognises that they are legends and yet invokes them all the same.

Even in the best of cases, like this one, the second legend, chivalry, means some combination of ‘courage’ and ‘unconcern’; in the worst of cases (i.e. in most cases), it means—as one of Schopenhauer’s eidolons dismissively puts it—brutality and foppishness.

If the chivalry is a lie, though, it is not only a lie, just as the first legend—the buffoonery of the Woosters—is not the only truth. Peter is a buffoon, but he is also noble and brave; his fight takes place on the playing fields of Eton, but so does his death. It seems, in one light, so much sillier than dying for Utopia or for Human Brotherhood. Then again, at least the playing fields of Eton actually exist.

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Aristocrats

The noble horse with courage in his eye,
clean in the bone, looks up at a shellburst:
away fly the images of the shires
but he puts the pipe back in his mouth.

Peter was unfortunately killed by an 88:
it took his leg away, he died in the ambulance.
I saw him crawling on the sand, he said
It’s most unfair, they’ve shot my foot off.

How can I live among this gentle
obsolescent breed of heroes and not weep?
Unicorns, almost,
for they are falling into two legends
in which their stupidity and chivalry
are celebrated. Each, fool and hero, will be an immortal.

The plains were their cricket pitch
and in the mountains the tremendous drop fences
brought down some of the runners. Here then
under the stones and earth they dispose themselves,
I think with their famous unconcern.
It is not gunfire I hear but a hunting horn.

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