This review/article of John Tripp's Collected Poems 1958-78 (Christopher Davies 1978) originally appeared in Poetry Wales 14.4 (Spring 1979) pp. 72-82.
Rain is everywhere in John Tripp's Wales. It falls as he arrives by diesel in Newport, falls he awaits the landing of a package jet at Rhoose, falls as he stands watching the demolition of his father's forge. It falls as he works, falls as he walks the hills. And maybe it's always fallen, for, as Cromwell's cavalry ploughs through the woods at St Fagans:
the whole
countryside seemed afloat, the horses slithering
under skies like wet mortar.
("Saint Fagan Fight")
And there's not only rain in these poems. Later horses kick up slush as the wagon they're pulling brings a younger Tripp back through the snow from his grandmother's burial. In his tribute to Gwenallt the skull of the dead bard "hovers in the fog / like a Welsh emblem".
Her bad weather, then, is an essential aspect of Tripp's Wales: it causes mud, rust and "weather-smashed walls". It's the perfect complement to the decay and dilapidation he relentlessly describes. For his country's bleakness is due to more than her weather: it's a condition of the way her past has persisted into her present, leaving the latter hugely compromised. And there was not just one 'past' to be inherited: Tripp clearly expresses the uncomfortable truth that Wales has two. On the one hand he sketches a country parish with its "broken farms" and empty streets along which "Another century creeps". Securely within R. S. Thomas territory, you might think: but where the main thrust of early Thomas – "Welsh Landscape" is the locus classicus – is polemical and deliberately provocative, Tripp's poem seems quite without design – it's as if he nudges the reader with no more end in sight than to satisfy himself as to the soundness of his or her sleep. He wouldn't have the village otherwise:
It is all very bleak, dull and deserted.
I hope they keep it this way.
("A Parish")
On the other hand (and to this second "yesterday" the elder poet has paid scant attention) there is the ransacked mining valley whose scars cannot be healed by the simple-minded, if well-meaning, medicaments of bulldozer and grass-seed. The "green Eden" created by rural renovators is in truth a "desolate garden", literally a cover-up job. For the physical abolition of the past may be less a healing than a denial to that "dwindling few" in whose memories it continues to exist: those who now "inherit a shuttered plot, / the commune of ghosts" ("Epitaph at Gilfach Goch").
This Janus of a country has left a doubly disabling inheritance. In "Where the Rainbow Ends", again inspired by a visit to Gilfach Goch, Tripp admits to feeling "diminished always / by yesterday's story". That his own life sometimes appears to him to be, by comparison, comfortably padded, is a source of disturbance: its warmth comes to seem "empty", its coffee-hour pleasantries "soft". The harsh past lours over the coddled present, belittling it.
As these observations should suggest, John Tripp's poetry is typically one of sharp distinctions and contrasts. Set over against (and I think on occasion a little too patly) those Welsh yesterdays that persist into today are that cliché of Anglo-Welsh verse the English tourist (here characterised as "frivolous") and various aspects of upper or upper-middle class English life: cocktail-party sets, cabinet ministers, ivory-tower academics. Tourists come off badly in the early "Diesel to Yesterday"; but in a poem of second thoughts, "Diesel '75", Tripp makes amends: "They are just like us, abroad." Of poems or parts of poems on these various groups, "Ivy Walls" sticks most in my mind: here the poet-observer is half-divided against himself in his response:
At the dregs of the Madeira
I almost envied them: their wit
and learning kept life away.
I shall return to this topic of contrasts.
There's a further sense in which Tripp feels at less than ease with contemporary Wales. He's that unfortunate, separated being the self-aware Anglo-Welshman: by temperament and loyalties a Welshman but cut off from essential Welshness by his lack of the language. In a recurrent image in he sees himself as a borderer, a dweller on the edge. The "border town" he lives in, Whitchurch in Cardiff, is described in "Eglwys Newydd" as a "Gaza Strip where nobody belongs", technically a part of Wales but "neutered of Welshry". Its accent is grotesque, "the authentic one" beginning a mile away in another place. The poem ends:
I don’t know why I live there.
I have been waiting a long time
for my visa to Tongwynlais.
And the dry, laconic tone suggests the unlikelihood of one ever being granted. It may be that Tripp is less than fair to the true borderer here, for the latter (as Raymond Williams for one would argue), despite his cultural placement, is likely to possess as strong a sense of identity in place, as strong a sense of local roots, as the inhabitant of the heartland. Nevertheless, the condition of rootlessness that Tripp's poetry expresses is genuinely felt, and his ability to see his personal predicament in a detached, ironic light provides a necessary guard against any descent into maudlin, self-pitying subjectivity.
His sense of humour is for me one of the most attractive qualities of his verse. Perhaps this is because it strikes me as being very English. It has nothing of the boisterous or expansive about it, nothing of the jocular. On the one occasion he attempts what could be called a comic poem ("Mission"), the result is very poor fare. Patrick Kavanagh believed that Tragedy is "underdeveloped Comedy", a thing "not fully born";1 this I can accept if I can add the rider – which Kavanagh would probably reject – that Comedy in its turn is underdeveloped Tragedy. The two occupy opposite points on the circumference of a circle. If you push one hard enough, it will move around the rim. Do you laugh or cry when Lear expresses his naïve happiness at the prospect of going to jail with Cordelia? Or when Gloster is redeemed by falling, not over the cliff at Dover as he imagines, but into a shallow depression in the ground? A number of Tripp's poems articulate the point at which Comedy and Tragedy fuse to produce something distinctive and valid. "Notes on the Way to the Block" is an enjoyable example. It opens with the poet riding his tumbril through an appreciative crowd:
There's a good crowd here today
to see me off.
I never knew I had so many friends
or enemies. I see several
familiar faces, and breasts.
There's one cariad smiling
whose knickers I took off
long ago in West Tredegar.
I don’t see anyone crying.
At the last, however, there comes a sudden note of sobriety:
... I can hear one woman weeping.
I take a last look at the sky.
And the poem achieves a disturbing poise both through and in spite of its closing flatness of tone. It's one of those poems I imagine its author greatly to have relished writing. The laconic and the sardonic are both at home in his sensibility, and they normally thrive at his own expense. If I find his humour an 'English' aspect of his poetic personality I'm far from suggesting that it sits other than happily with another, and frequently-remarked, characteristic of his verse – the unbuttoned linguistic vitality which (whilst there's precedent enough for it in the English poetic tradition) I'm content to see, in the twentieth century, as his Welsh inheritance.
It's entirely in character that Tripp should be able to picture his own end with such untroubled detachment; also that it should, ironically, take place in Wales. For it's difficult – no, impossible – for me not to feel that the rain, the bleakness, the dilapidation he finds in Wales are other than, in the last analysis, congeniality itself to his angular cast of mind. Disillusioned with his own toleration of the "soft coffee-hour" even as he slumps in a comfortable chair, he will there and then conjure up drenched skies and swimming streets or fields: for, despite his occasional indication of a contrary mode of feeling, it's the unpleasantnesses of life and nature that most vitally feed his creativity. This is, of course, no uncommon paradox in the twentieth century. The more diurnal existence seeks to coddle and insulate the modern poet, the more the poet demands the right to reject (in imagination at least, and not infrequently in reality too) the threat of ease for a more productive misery. He demands the right to think himself unhappy, and thinking something can be tantamount to believing it. In Hamlet's immortal words to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern on Denmark: "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison." The things John Tripp thinks good are notably few in number, and it isn’t in his nature to pen accounts of human contentment.
Living is for him a tough, solitary business. There are not a few pieces in Collected Poems about the lives of individual creative artists, and they tend to emphasise old age, physical ugliness or degeneration, and aloneness. They're consistently impressive, demonstrating that far from being by-products of their author's poetic interest they're central to his endeavour. Turner, Dewi Emrys, Dylan Thomas, Scott Fitzgerald and Alun Lewis are all seen as essentially isolated, either by choice or by temperament. Of the American he writes:
He died alone in the dream-factory,
forgotten by most,
unfinished like his last tycoon.
("Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood")
Though Fitzgerald's "perfect sentences" and "chiselled fiction structures" "redeem... his evening of waste", they cannot conceal the void of those final years. Alun Lewis is seen as a romantic whose "dream" couldn't withstand the test of life's implacable realities. The first section of "Turner in Old Age" is surely one of the best things Tripp has done. Here he's able to indulge – without inviting the accusation of self-indulgence – his taste for wreck and ruin on the grandest scale, that of his Turner's own painterly visions.
Puny man was swallowed by his canvas,
crumpling before nature, the brief split-
second of his span dissolving
against time, and its companion, light:
Yellow flame at morning, crimson
shockbursts of noon, an orange glow
sunk behind a ruined city;
rainbow shafts flooding through glass.
What he glimpsed was a passing
of empire., vainglorious shreds
at sunset, an edifice toppling
in broken masonry. The deluge.
Gondolas prowl through lagoons
between palaces that already sag,
their tapestry mildewed and flaked
like those ramshackle fallacies of hope.
Deny the truth of this if you can! is the poem's challenge. I for one shall not. But the second section of the poem, explanatory where the first is splendidly assertive, overlong and in its closing stanza succumbing to an untypical and (for me) rhythmically unconvincing rhetoric, cannot alas match the first. Given his choice of these particular artists as subjects, it's wholly unsurprising that the one fictional character John Tripp treats is Thomas Mann's Gustave von Aschenbach, here seen meeting his end (inevitably) on a Venetian beach in the rain. Nor is it surprising that in his three poems on animals he should opt for a "black scavenging scrag" of a tomcat, a scarred and tenacious Welsh terrier, and a marauding and murderous badger. The dog – "grizzled on twinge and cramp of age" – and the badger – "Grizzled snouter with the claws and thick white stripe" – are tailor-made for a poet who elsewhere describes himself as a "grizzled ghost". He gives an authentic and unsentimental account of these animal-lives that nevertheless leaves his appreciation of their characteristic qualities in little doubt.
Turner's vision of man's puniness when set against the tremendousness and majesty of nature finds an echo in some of the poems that take Tripp's own feelings and experiences as subjects. One of his best poems, "Stop on a Journey", is in the form of a meditation inspired by his visit to an island abbey. He has been searching for clues regarding the deeds and reasons of those distant ancestors who once inhabited the place. He encounters a desolation. Having consumed an austere, monkish meal, and having mused on the real failure of his expedition (though he has material enough for an article for a glossy), he folds up his notes and delivers the lines:
Now it is a ticket back to carnal friction,
the desirable assault
of woman on the hapless senses;
to the bluster of laddermen, and the rasp of failure;
the morose retrospective between dust-covers;
the coteries prancing to a tune.
Against my grain, it is the phased crumble,
a witnessing of dissolution,
the splinter of ice at the heart of things.
The antithesis between "the desirable assault" and "the hapless senses" is the creation of a shrewd wit. Momentary as this release of black humour is, however, it's sufficient to earn a serious hearing for the grim prospect sketched in the lines that follow. The final image of "the splinter of ice at the heart of things" is as telling as any that Tripp has found succinctly to convey his mordant apprehension of dissolution, and of the emptiness of his own existence.
It's at this point that I must pick up my earlier suggestion that his poetry is typically one that favours sharp distinctions and contrasts. What has to be said is that his habit of presenting a single point of view, one mode of perception, and pushing it to its conclusion – as against that sensibility which delights in setting in motion, within a single poem, an internecine conflict between warring forces or convictions – is responsible both for the strengths and limitations of his verse. This tends to be the case in what, for want of a less charged word, I'll call his nationalistic poems: in "Capital", for instance, where Cardiff is seen as a bastion of conservatism and apathy in direct opposition to rural Wales where the positive is located:
But now, in the distance, I think I hear
the young villagers build our future,
laying the first bricks of change.
This capital means less to them
than the land, where everything stems.
'Wait,' they are saying. 'Wait for us.'
Sounding like second- (or third-) hand R. S. Thomas, and turning on a flat and uninspired metaphor, this, with its admittedly qualified optimism ("I think I hear"), avoids the drum-roll of polemic only to seem broken-backed, half-hearted. Tripp has given it a go, but this is plainly not his sort of thing. In "The Captain's Visit", a piece in memory of David Jones and based on Jones's fine poem "The Tribune's Visitation", the thinness of the imitation is all too obvious. What "The Captain's Visit" lacks – as a footnote almost admits – and what reduces its interest to negligible proportions is the poignancy, the complexity of emotional impulse, to which Jones's tribune's self-dividedness gives rise. These poems suggest the temporary sway in Tripp of the journalist.
Yet if his particular cast of mind is inhospitable to the creation of a dialectic, to the presentation of a mind arguing with itself, it's also true, I think, that his single-mindedness is a major course of his poetic strength, and characterises his best things. In the poems on creative artists that I've already alluded to, as well as in "Stop on a Journey", his tenacious pursuit of a line of thought or mode of perception and feeling leads him to statements of considerable force and cogency. "At Bosherston Ponds" is another such poem. Its opening is memorable:
In November it is desolate, and distant
from the ruck of summer. The mashed carpet of leaves
lie apple-rust in the gravegaps,
their season done. Waves of high grass
wash about the church, drowning
the sunk mounds, the lopsided slabs
askew from weather and dying stock.
Names illegible beneath layered moss
clip me to futility, yet give that mild
pleasure we feel in cemeteries.
These sentences evoke a state of mind as well as a physical place. The last-quoted is the most noteworthy, and surely exactly right: the arresting and audaciously Shakespearean "clip" and the distant invocation of Wordsworth ("The pleasure which there is in life itself" crossed with Wordsworth's fondness for oxymoron – "a gentle shock of mild surprise") deepens its resonance. Those who write Tripp off as merely a journalist-in-verse might also consider the way language is working, and worked, in "the ruck of summer" and "apple-rust in the gravegaps". History (in the shape of Bosherston's ancient lily-ponds) weighs so heavily upon, towers so high above the poet that he and his doings shrink (as they shrink in "Where the Rainbow Ends") to the size of absurdity. In face of so uncompromising an intimation of mortality, his own affairs seem able to offer the mere "illusion of action". Here the single-minded pursuit of poetic truth can convince and carry the reader because the feeling generated is so firmly grounded in an exact time and place.
In its possession of one characteristic, John Tripp's poetry is very Welsh, in its exclusion of another very unWelsh. It is, as much that I've already said and quoted should suggest, given much to the elegiac mode. What it most decidedly is not is a poetry of praise. If it included the possibility of praise it couldn't be described as single-minded. I've testified, for example, that it's full of rain. But when Tripp has occasion to mention the sun (which isn't often) one can only report that it doesn't emerge as a positive force. In "A Province of Spain"
This endless, boring, worshipped sun
plasters everything. We long for rain.
And in "Summer '76", begrudgingly:
I could respect
its ferocity, its terrible ability to shrivel us
like weeds...
The possibility of praise in poetry depends, if not on a poet's belief in a supreme Being, then at least on a capacity to entertain some notion of transcendence. By "praise" I don't mean that he finds birdsong, flowers, waterfalls (for example) very nice, thank you, but that he senses the existence of some power, immanent, extrinsic, or both, that brings them into relationship with him and renders the fact of their co-existence luminous and mysterious. Tripp specifically rejects this possibility: he is antipathetic to "revelation".
"Praise at Llanstephan", the last inclusion in Collected Poems, is about this antipathy. The poet visits a craftsman in stained glass, but remains unmoved by the latter's demonstration of his faith.
The artist was gentle and kind, secure
in his praising skills. I only felt
things were what they appeared to be
and behind them was nothing.
Some readers, and in particular some Welsh readers, might find the absence of praise, of a countervailing mode of feeling to the bleak realism I have described, a serious limitation in Tripp's work. I wouldn't be one of them. T. S. Eliot says somewhere that one ought to be thankful for what a poet can do well; one ought not to count against him what he doesn't pretend to attempt. What Tripp expresses best is the unaccommodating nature of life, the sense that ultimately we are all alone with our failures and our guilts. It's a dour burden. Yet, notwithstanding, my conviction remains that he finds the very uncongenialities of existence paradoxically congenial, congenial especially to his imagination. At the end of "Stop on a Journey", we take our leave of him in a typical limbo:
Waiting for a boat
to the mainland, I am one sodden scrivener
again – hatless, hopeless, in the rain...
We can, I think, elicit a measure of solace from what I take to be the tone of these lines: a dryly self-communing irony. In truth their author wouldn't feel any better elsewhere.
Notes
1 Collected Poems (Martin Brian & O'Keeffe 1972) p. xiv.
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