Critical Survey

Dickens was an abolitionist throughout his career. In his non-fictional writings, his outbursts on slavery are fairly unequivocal, and he is given to straightforward pleas in his letters: 'But I want to help the wretched Slave.' His relationship to slavery was, however, more complex than such remonstrations suggest.

At the beginning of the new century (and the new millennium) Victorian revivalism is still a large-scale cultural phenomenon. Instead of abating, the obsession with the past seems to have intensified. Rewritings of the Victorian age have continued to flourish in many cultural domains, while critics have increasingly answered to the appeal for a 'rigorous scholarly analysis' of 'the prominence of the nineteenth century for postmodernism'. On the literary scene, young writers have joined the ranks of the earlier postmodern revivalists. These writers have contributed to keeping alive the interest in the Victorian past, but they have also introduced some thematic and formal innovations which require critical attention.

Richard Ford's Independence Day (1995) was the first novel to win both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. The novel continues the story of Frank Bascombe, begun in Ford's 1986 novel, The Sportswriter. By the time of Independence Day, Bascombe has given up sports-writing for real estate (and a sideline business of running a hot-dog stand, where he employs a Republican by the name of Karl Bemish). While significant portions of the novel involve Bascombe practising his trade, the novel's primary storyline involves his tour of various sports halls of fame with his son, Paul, over the course of the 4th of July weekend in 1988. The aim of the pilgrimage is to connect with Paul – a teenager who has run foul of the law and his stepfather, Charley O'Dell, who has married Bascombe's ex-wife, Ann – but it allows Bascombe to digress on the merits of real estate, 'The Declaration of Independence', marriage/divorce/parenting, and, most important for this paper, the differences between liberalism and conservatism.

Looking back on my first public expression of interest in Peter Porter and his work – an interview published in Westerly in 1982, based on discussions with him in London the previous year – I notice in some of my questions the gestures of a proto-biographer. Yet I had come to Porter entirely through his work – from teaching poems in Alexander Craig's anthology 12 Poets and reading in London The Cost of Seriousness (1978) and the then newly minted volume English Subtitles (1981). It would be another nine years, with visits by me to London and Peter to Perth before Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 1991.

Looking back on my first public expression of interest in Peter Porter and his work – an interview published in Westerly in 1982, based on discussions with him in London the previous year – I notice in some of my questions the gestures of a proto-biographer. Yet I had come to Porter entirely through his work – from teaching poems in Alexander Craig’s anthology 12 Poets and reading in London The Cost of Seriousness (1978) and the then newly minted volume English Subtitles (1981). It would be another nine years, with visits by me to London and Peter to Perth before Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and his Poetry was published by Oxford University Press in 1991.

When I first read him more than forty years ago, I thought Peter Porter was the same age as he is now. Impressed by his evident conviction that the modern world was essentially a Technicolor version of one of those Dürer woodcuts in which the knightly rider was flanked by death and the Devil in his journey through a landscape ravaged by war and plague, I pictured the agonised artist as a gaunt, white-bearded figure hunched under a velvet cap, setting down his long-pondered apocalyptic visions by candlelight. Not that his poems creaked: indeed they hurtled. But, however long their rhythmic breath and legato their line, they still sounded like the last gasps of a sage, and all the sages I had ever heard of had whiskers on them.

'The activity of reading, for Peter, is the battleground of virtue and vice.' Such a view of things may seem archaic indeed in times both as poetically sportive and as programmatically sceptical as our own; but I take it that the notion that reading may be an act of engagement still retains some currency. And although it is a long way from twelfth-century France to twenty-first-century England or Australia, it is not hard to see an investment in such engagement in Peter Porter's poetry – as indeed in his prose, and in his conversation; after all, the twinning of urbanity with militancy is not without precedent.

At the beginning of the 1960s, what might be called the Significance of Being a Gentleman was on three occasions drawn to my attention, all of them connected with the Department of English at Reading University. The first such occasion occurred on a warm afternoon in May 1961. There was to be a seminar on the novels of Walter Scott, led by an Oxford don who had agreed to read us a paper based on a forthcoming book of his. The don arrived, permitted himself an incurious stare at the twelve or so of us who were present, produced the typescript of his book, read from it for what seemed an eternity and then, as the shadows outside lengthened and his audience blinked awake, reluctantly agreed to answer questions. I made some mild objection to his ranking Kenilworth alongside The Charterhouse of Parma. Scott's novel was good, but it surely wasn't on a level with Stendhal's masterpiece? He raised a languid hand. 'The test of a gentleman', he said, 'is his ability to enjoy Scott.'

I should begin with an apologia for my title. An interesting, entertaining and useful paper might be written about the satirical, Swiftian aspect of Peter Porter's poems. This isn't it. Nor am I concerned here with the imaginative and intellectual brilliance of so many Porter titles, though this too would make a fascinating subject. Rather my interest is in the idea of 'modesty' in relation to art and artists as it is articulated in Peter's work.

Woodbines CAROLE COATES

Noctua by Peter Bennet (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2004), ISBN 1-904886-03-5, £5.00

Blue on Blue by Jim Greenhalf (Bradford: Redbeck Press, 2005), ISBN 1-904338-30-5, £7.95

What Moves Moves by Paul McLoughlin (Nottingham: Shoestring Press, 2004), ISBN 1-904886-05-1, £5.00

W.S. Graham: Speaking Towards You edited by Ralph Pite and Hester Jones (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), ISBN 0-853235-69-4, £45.00

Notes on contributors