White Lies

Helen Mort on Craig Raine

When I think about the relationship between observation and experience in poetry, it’s often Rita Ann Higgins’ maxim that I come back to: "to get at the poetic truth it is not always necessary to tell the what-actually-happened truth. Those times I lie." Interesting, then, to see Craig Raine declare in an October issue of The Guardian:

There has to be a bit of writing that is to do with honesty and telling the truth…That is particularly true of writing about sex. There is more lying about sex than about any other area, so it's very important to be truthful.

It’s a compelling statement and one that merits some consideration, not least because it seems to assume there is a ‘truth’ about the subjective, complex experience of sex that can be grasped; not only grasped but conveyed through poetry, itself a subjective and complex medium. Both sex and poetry blur elements of fantasy and reality, and one might argue it is difficult to establish which has the greater significance to the psyche.

By calling himself a poet, Raine acknowledges that the imaginitive world has its own veracity, which is not always the same as honesty. Poetry does not offer absolute truths, only intuitive ones. And yet, those intuitive truths can seem more deeply true than the truth we glean from the physical world. Indeed, so much of that world only has significance because of the things we attribute to it. Raine’s poetry is as much an imaginative, fictional act as anyone else’s. This is poetry’s strength, rather than its weakness.

I suspect that Craig Raine’s pronouncement is in part a defence of his own approach to writing about sex, which is always direct, engaging and unashamedly brutal. In his verse novel, A La Recherche du Temps Perdu (an elegy for a former lover who died from AIDS), Raine is unflinching in his attention to details that might embarrass. Whether describing his lover’s “long, glowing nipples shabby with hairs”or her “arsehole’s iodines, / hairs like an icon’s / calibrated nimbus.” Raine is committed to exposing her as she was, even the hair on her face (“which you hated and I adored”): “Twenty. Just under the chin. Peroxide / let them flourish in disguise.”

Elsewhere in his elegy, Raine poses the obvious question, “What has all this to do with anyone else? / Why all these intimate details?” and answers it thus: “Details that make you cringe / will make the reader see, / see the self you showed to me.” To Craig Raine, truth is in such cataloguing, all else is a kind of romantic deception. It is a kind of bravery to be so intimate, though one wonders if he mistakes being candid for being close. Intimacy, after all, is not just physical, just as sex is not merely physical and, indeed, can be as much about fantasy as physicality.

As if to illustrate his argument, the Guardian article also features a fragment from one of Raine’s new poems, about his dying mother, which describes plucking hairs from her chin with a pair of tweezers (these are also a recurring motif in A la recherche…): “every time a hair was plucked / she sighed, almost like someone / being slowly fucked.”Defending this strident image (made more brutal by the harsh ‘plucked / fucked’ rhyme), he says “the morality of art is accuracy. Good taste is the enemy of art.”

But “accuracy” in this poem is an imposition: the simile is about the poet’s experience, not the mother’s – we do not know what she felt. In A la recherche... Raine says of his lover: “you taught me sex / was conversation and not a speech”; but the extract in the Guardian is more declaration than conversation – everything is seen through the eyes of the writer. Similarly, in A la recherche... there is really very little in the way of exchange, rather a sense of someone being arranged in a well-executed, if not always tasteful display (again, “good taste is the enemy of art”).

Raine first achieved recognition, as the article notes, for his collection A Martian Sends a Postcard Home, published in 1979, with its brilliant use of imagery to make the everyday seem unfamiliar – in lines like, “Mist is when the sky is tired of flight / and rests its soft machine on the ground”, or, “Rain is when the earth is television” and, “Model T is a room with the lock inside”. It was through what we now refer to as ‘Martian poetry’ that readers came to admire his brilliant eye (leaving aside Michael Donaghy’s opinion of the Martians: “died off when exposed to earth’s bacteria”). Raine animates the world around him with his capacity to see it anew. But seeing in minute detail is not the same as seeing with clarity, seeing it holistically, seeing all its contradictions and uncertainties.

Whenever I'm in search of a truism, I find myself turning to Oscar Wilde, himself a superb observer of relationships and the power imbalances of sexual politics. In typical arch style, Wilde says of the idea of truth in poems: “all bad poetry is sincere.” For once, I don't entirely agree with him. Good poetry is sincere in its intention, but sincerity often involves telling lies, fictions essential to literary art. What else is a metaphor? We don't really believe that “Rain is when the earth is television”, but there's a truth inherent in that comparison that moves us beyond the literal. As critic Harold Bloom notes in The Anxiety of Influence, “literature relies upon troping”; Craig Raine's work often exemplifies the power of the trope, whether he regards it as a kind of untruth or not.

Perhaps Rita Ann Higgins, Oscar Wilde and I are all just seeking to excuse our own fanciful tendencies, our own deceits and exaggerations. During the summer last year, the Guardian printed a feature by psychologist Robert Feldman about lying. Apparently, the average person lies at least three times in the course of a short conversation. I'd wager that the average short poem contains a few more whoppers than that. Sometimes the truth is only acceptable because it has been so fictionalised; the relationship between autobiography and art is a necessarily complicated one. Duplicitous or not, I'll continue to enjoy poetry's delicious lies in all their salacious detail, safe in the knowledge that it's all in the service of a greater truth. Well, that's the story I'm sticking to, right?