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MS: Well, a good reader of poetry may be very much like an actor working on his part, because he reads the poem aloud to himself again and again, and sometimes he learns it by heart. And it becomes familiar. It, finally, becomes part of him. A poem releases itself, secretes itself, slowly—almost, sometimes, poisonously—into the mind of the reader. It does it with cadence, it does it with combinations that might strike the reader as beautiful. Of course, God knows what the beautiful is. I don’t know. Because the beautiful fifty years from now will be what is seen as the ugly now or what’s insupportable now or barely tolerated now. But, you know, I think if you try too hard to be immediately comprehensible to your audience, if you give too much to the moment, you’re also giving too much to the status quo. The poet’s obligation isn’t to his audience, primarily, but to the language that he hopes he’s perpetuating. And when you think of how long it takes us to understand each other, for example—and how much leeway we give other areas of knowledge in our lives—why can’t we be a little more patient with poetry? The language of a poem is meant to be meditated on. You clear a psychic space for poetry. It’s a space in which words loom large.
Mark Strand
MS: Well, when I say the unknown—death is the great unknown. I mean, most lyric poems lead to some acknowledgment of death. In fact, most poems are dark and dreary affairs that have to do with death and dying, or loss of one sort or another—loss of love, loss of friends, loss of life. Most lyric poems are sad, because if you think deeply at all about your experience, you think about your experience in time—your life—and if you’re thinking about your life, you can’t avoid the fact that it will end in death. In fact, everything about a poem—the meter of the poem, or the measure of the poem—is a reminder of time. Even a line that’s repeated: we’re back again. I think that the popularity of villanelles or poems that use refrains, is caused by the fact that they seem to enact a stay against time, they seem to give us a momentary reprieve from what usually is the subject of the poem, or the matter of the poem. So, although the poem may be about dying or death, we have repeated lines that seem to say we haven’t really gone anywhere, we’re back again. But in the end, that just helps us to hold on to the loss that is in the poem. It helps us to remember it.
Mark Strand
MS: Well, I think a poet’s focus is not quite what a prose writer’s is; it’s not entirely on the world outside. It’s fixed on that area where the inside meets the outside, where the poet’s sensibility meets the weather, meets the street, meets other people, meets what he reads. So a poet describes that point of contact: the self, the edge of the self, and the edge of the world. That shadow land between self and reality. Sometimes the focus is tipped slightly in favor of the self, sometimes, more objectively, in favor of the world. And so sometimes, when the balance is tipped toward the self, strange things are said, odd things get into the poem. Because the farther you are from the world that everybody recognizes as the world, the stranger things look. I mean, some novels do this, but most don’t. There are some narrators who insert themselves, as Philip Roth does brilliantly and amazingly. I’m always dazzled by his books. The world is electrically alive in American Pastoral, for example, but he’s there, too: Roth is Zuckerman, and he’s there, he’s telling the story. In a sense, that book is more magical than any poem I’ve read recently.
Mark Strand
WS: What did you mean when you said that a poet’s first responsibility was to the language?
MS: Well, in writing poetry, one wants a certain flexibility in the use of language, a flexibility that can keep alive successes in the language from the past, that is, other poems, and that will also ensure that whatever poetry comes next will capitalize on the successes instead of on the failures. The fact is that we take many of our cues on how to proceed, and our ideas about what is a good line, or a beautiful line, from what we’ve experienced from the poetry of the past. In other words, it would be nice to know that poets in the future will have read the best poets of today and yesterday, that they won’t simply base their poems on news reports or instruction manuals. You know, so that there’s some continuity in the language of poetry. Because it’s complicated, but we’re defined by the best that’s written in our language, and so we want to perpetuate the best that’s written in our language. If poetry becomes just a revision of the newspaper page or the talking heads on TV, that’s not a language that will last; it’s not a language that translates into the future.
Mark Strand
MS: There is only one reason to be envious of the people who write very successful songs with three or four chords, and that is that they earn the kind of money that gives them a kind of freedom that Elliott Carter may not have. So it would be nice for Elliott Carter to go to the restaurants that Elton John can afford. But if the price was that he had to write music exactly like Elton John’s, then he would do without it. And that’s it. If I had to write the kind of sentences that Jacqueline Susann wrote, you know, write the kind of novels that she wrote, I wouldn’t be able to hold my head high anywhere! I’d slink into restaurants—very expensive restaurants—and I’d slink into expensive hotels. And I’d be ashamed to say what it was that I did.
The England that he had previously only encountered through its literature now confronted him as a reality, and he developed a “migrant’s-eye” view of the center from the margins. Thus the erstwhile colonial subject came to develop his own anthropology of the culture of the colonizers. He sought to survive the medieval gloom of Oxford by making common cause with the displaced migrant minority—with the rebel enclaves of demobbed young veterans and national servicemen, Ruskin College trade unionists, and scholarship boys and girls from home and abroad. 12 So far as the dominant forms of British culture were concerned, in this context, as he put it, “What I realized, as soon as I got to Oxford, was that I could never be part of it.… I could study English literature on the page, but I could never be part of that life.” That ambivalent feeling stuck with him throughout his life, and many years later he would still say, “I don’t belong anywhere anymore. Britain is my home, but I’m not English.” 13 This, however, was far from being any simple matter of regret. As he put it when speaking at a conference on the question of identity in London in 1987, “My own sense of identity has always depended on the fact of being a migrant.… [Now] I find myself centered at last. Now that in the postmodern age you all feel so dispersed. I’ve become centered: what I thought of as dispersed and fragmented comes paradoxically, to be the representative modern experience.… Welcome to migranthood!” 14
Many have commented on the perennial warmth of Stuart’s manners, which, in a lived form of the politics of affect, functioned as a complexly articulated complement to his deep intellectual seriousness (as he might perhaps have put it himself). 23 Indeed, for such a rigorous thinker, Hall displayed unusual kindness, tolerance, and generosity of spirit—but this seemingly contradictory combination was in fact central to his character. This combination of personal warmth and intellectual rigor lasted throughout his life and can be seen to telling effect in Isaac Julien’s film of the “Choreographing Capital” event. 24 In one scene in the film, from his wheelchair, Stuart engages David Harvey in public debate about the deficiencies of what he saw as Harvey’s economistic determinism, which, so far as Stuart was concerned, lacked any sense of conjunctural mediation of the manner in which economic factors might have their various effects. In the interview Stuart remains as courteous and well-mannered as ever but is nonetheless relentless in his determination to push his critique of Harvey’s position through to the ultimate conclusion of its own internal logic. At one point he apologizes to Harvey for the discomfort, saying that he recognizes that “I am perhaps pushing you further than you feel comfortable to go.” Yet his sense of intellectual responsibility will not permit him to allow their serious theoretical disagreement (about what role the economic can play in constituting an adequate explanation of events) to be fudged, simply in order to avoid a conflict he regards as intellectually and politically necessary. 25
both legends
Perhaps most notably, Stuart took this cultural analysis of politics forward in his collaboration with Martin Jacques and the members of the Marxism Today collective in producing his pathbreaking analysis of the emergence of the form of politics which from the late 1970s came to dominate the British landscape for the next generation. He and his coauthors argued that any model that used the concept of false consciousness to explain away working-class support for these forms of conservative politics was utterly inadequate. What was needed, he claimed, was an understanding of the capacity of political ideologies such as this to articulate an effective appeal to the lived experience of subordinate groups. 34 In his closing remarks to a British Sociological Association conference in May 1978, Stuart insists that while racism is certainly an ideology which serves the function of refracting quite other problems onto the question of race, it is not “a set of phoney conspiracies in the heads of the ruling class.” He argues that it is not to be seen (and cannot usefully be opposed) simply as a set of “false … or … mistaken … perceptions” but rather that it has its roots “in real … material conditions of existence … and arises because of the concrete problems of different classes and groups in the society … especially in an economy in recession.… [It] has these authentic, material conditions at its roots … involv[ing] the real problems of the people.” 35
The CCCS ’s collectively authored book Policing the Crisis (published in 1978; see chapter 12 of this volume) had identified race as a defining feature of the increasingly conservative form of authoritarian populism developed by Margaret Thatcher. Stuart then coined the term “Thatcherism” in a prescient article, “The Great Moving Right Show,” in Marxism Today (included in this collection, chapter 13 ) in January 1979, some months before Thatcher herself was elected. 36 Up until then, she had been patronized by many on the Left as an insignificant, shrill-sounding housewifely voice espousing an anachronistic form of old-fashioned domestic moralism. However, Stuart recognized her as a person who, in Hegel’s terms, constituted a historic individual—whose politics instantiated, in personal form, and served to crystalize much wider social and political forces that were already in play. To this extent, he rightly recognized that Thatcherism might be able to redefine the public mood, and appeal to the disaffected, through its appeal on moral and cultural grounds that had previously not been considered as part of the political agenda. Thus he argued for the necessity of a corresponding cultural struggle against Thatcherism, and his great regret, twenty years later, in the run-up to the 1997 general election was that Thatcherite arguments, philosophies, and priorities still defined the agenda on which New Labor founded its own appeal. 37 A further decade and a half on, one of his last published works, “After Neoliberalism: Analysing the Present” (jointly written with his longtime Soundings coeditors Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin), once again focused on these same themes, in the attempt to articulate a form of political opposition to the international hegemony of neoliberalism that avoided a return to fundamentalist Leftism. 38
As Kuan-Hsing Chen and I have noted elsewhere, Stuart was never interested in modes of intellectual work that, in absolutist terms, present themselves as definitively superseding all that went before. 39 His concerns were always conjunctural in nature, developing in response to emerging social and political questions. His strengths lay not in making definitive statements but in his capacity to take on new political or theoretical issues and his determination to continually try to move beyond his own previous limits. He always worked to encourage an open-ended approach to debate and the politics of discipleship or denunciation were equally anathema to him. He refused the temptation to enhance his own arguments by rubbishing those of others. His tendency was always toward a productive sort of eclecticism that looked for the best (or most useful) points which could be taken from other positions and then worked on them in a selective, syncretic mode of dialogic inclusiveness. He had no interest in the production of any exclusive orthodoxy—not least because such systems of thought, after enjoying a brief (if absolute) intellectual reign, tend then to be dethroned and discarded in favor of another. In his view, the production of a succession of temporarily fashionable theoretical paradigms offered no useful model of intellectual life. 40