The Stranger's Child - Alan Hollinghurst [67]
This large claim seemed rather to evaporate in its later clauses. George glanced at Cecil’s knightly figure and said kindly, “I just wonder if people aren’t growing sick of the War.”
“Oh, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of the War,” said Stokes.
“Well, no,” said George. “And of course much of Cecil’s work was done before the War.”
“Quite so, quite so … but the War made his name, you’d have to agree; when Churchill quoted those lines from ‘Two Acres’ in The Times, Cecil had become a war poet …” Stokes sat down, at the end of the first pew, as though to mitigate the strict air of debate, as well as to show he had time for it.
“And yet,” said George, as he often had before, with a teacher’s persistence, “ ‘Two Acres’ itself was written a full year before war broke out.”
“Yes …,” said Stokes, with something of a committee face. “Yes. But isn’t there often, in our poets and our artists, a prophetic strain?” He smiled in concession: “Or if not that precisely, a fore-knowledge, a sense, perhaps, of the great inevitable that most of us are deaf and blind to?”
“It may be so,” said George, wary of this sweeping talk, which in his view bedevilled too much of what passed as literary criticism. “But to that I’d say two things. You’d agree, I’m sure, that we were all talking about war long before it happened. You didn’t need prophetic gifts to know what was going on, though Cecil certainly, who went to Hamburg and Berlin, and had been sailing up on the Frisian coast, was very much in the picture. My second point is that as I’m sure you know Cecil appended that further little section to ‘Two Acres’ when it came out in New Numbers.”
“ ‘The greyhound in its courses, / The hawk above the hill,’ you mean.”
“ ‘Move not more surely to their end / Than England to the kill,’ ” said George, pleased to cap the quotation, though far from pleased by the words themselves. “Which of course has nothing to do with ‘Two Acres’ the house, though it turns the poem ‘Two Acres’ into a war poem of—in my view—a somewhat depressing kind.”
“It certainly changes the poem,” said Stokes more leniently.
“For us it was a bit like finding a gun-emplacement at the bottom of the garden … But perhaps you think rather better of it. I’m a historian, not a critic.”
“I’m not sure I allow a clear distinction.”
“I mean I’m not a reader of new poetry. I don’t keep up, as you do.”
“Well, I try,” said Stokes. “I admit there are poets writing at this moment whom I don’t fully understand—some of the Americans, perhaps …”
“But you keep up,” George assured him.
Stokes seemed to ponder. “I think more in terms of those individuals I can help,” he said, something at once noble and needy in his tone.
“And now …”
“And now … well, now I must get all Valance’s things up together,” said Stokes, standing up, with the air of someone late for work.
“How much is there, would you say?”
Stokes paused as if considering a further confidence. “Oh, it will be quite a book.”
“A lot of new things …?”
A tiny flinch. “Well, a good many old ones.”
“Mm, you mean the infant effusions.”
Sebby Stokes looked around, with his almost comical air of simultaneous candour and caution. “The infant effusions, as you so justly put it.”
“Not omittable?”
“All addressed to Mamma!”
“Of course …”
“Most unfortunate.”
“Touching, in a way, perhaps?”
“Oh, touching, certainly. Certainly that.”
George giggled ruefully. “And then Marlborough, I suppose?”
“There the view grows a good deal brighter. Some of the schoolboy work we know from Night Wake, of course, but I shall comb the Marlburian with much keenness.”
“But again … later unknown things?”
Stokes looked at