Some welcome feedback for Michael Sharkey’s anthology, Many Such as She….
“I’ve just been having another and deeper look into those women ‘war’ poets you’ve so
assiduously collected and wonderfully written up, and up till now I’ve found their
treatment of war, loss, patriotism, etc — by which I mean their favourite ‘positions’ to
couple up in thought with their absent men — quite troubling and, here and there,
alarming.That is, until I suddenly began to ‘hear’ it all quite differently — not as a
contemporary reader, but as a witness to their times. In fact, ‘times’ is the snuggly
fitting key, and you have to almost become a time-traveller to get back there. It’s not so
much a different world I find that they are living and thinking in — which would have to
be a nonsense, unless they were all mad — rather, they are using a language where
the words have different weights and values from our own. You have to make an effort
to free, or disencumber, their words from the interrogations that the language we at first
think they are using has subsequently been loaded with. Some of it, even making this
allowance, remains, however interesting as examples, affected, crude and even silly.
But a lot more becomes, in dramatic contrast, affecting and some seems to catch at
stunned moments of a genuine distress with flair and to be heart-breaking. Fine job
digger — or perhaps delver’s the truer word.”
¶¶
Michael’s response was to find the remarks pretty spot-on, regarding the way we read
the language of writers of another era. ‘It’s something that fascinated me all my reading
& teaching life —the way in which we get to enter another world’ — ‘time travelling’, as
he put it.— ‘so we can relive the thoughts & emotions of characters we encounter
there. We do that without resort to theory or any worry about ‘how’ we should read
such work from a bygone time. People who pick up a copy of some novel from the past
— say, Pride and Prejudice, or Gulliver’s Travels — don’t go into a fret about how to go
about it; they just open the book and engage with the language without any great
concern that some words may be a bit strange or that the punctuation’s not exactly
2019 style… they go at it in the same way that someone reads a newspaper online or
in print, or like people on a bus or plane or train read a contemporary detective story,
romance or biography. We’re not all conscious scholars of linguistics or historical
anthropology…. So the comments on the way we can read such people as those early
twentieth century women poets’ work are helpful. Their language does have certain
different values or weights embedded in it — words they took for granted as having
connotations as well as denotations according to the time they inhabited. We might put
a different weight on some words, but we still seem to effortlessly know what they were
getting at, and we unconsciously enter into their world view, even if we have different
attitudes to the meaning of a word like ‘duty’ or ‘peace’ or ‘love’ or ‘family’ nowadays.
We can understand the writers’ anxiety, fear and other passions. It’s why we can relate
to the love-poems of Lesbia Harford, or the cool outrage of Fullerton’s poem ‘The
Targets’, which another friend wrote to say that a reading aloud, by a woman who
teaches theatre, had a profound effect on an audience recently.’