Painting, Poetry, Politics Jim Burns Penniless Press Publications ISBN 978-024-4079-086 Reviewed by John Lucas (review first appeared in Lomdongrip Poetry Review)
In the wrong
hands - and they are many - the word 'interesting' is one of the
least interesting words in the language. Jim Naughtie, until
recently a regular interviewer on the BBC Radio 4 Today' programme,
used it ad nauseam. Some hapless interviewee would venture a
timorous opinion about the state of the nation, or of the weather,
or of fiction at the present time, and Naughtie would say 'Well,
that*s interesting, because ....' and then make some crashingty
obvious remark, so that you wanted to yell at the radio 'It's NOT
interesting, you old bore, it’s completely UNINTERESTING.' Or, to
adapt a good
Jim Burns
often uses the word. But when he does it’s because he's drawing
attention to a genuinely arresting, or intriguing, or curious fact
or author or book or painting or point of view he wants to share
with the reader. For Burns is a man of many interests, all of which
he lays out before you, so that even if you'd known nothing about
the particular subject on which he's writing, and felt you were
quite happy to keep it that way, you feel as you read his commentary
and observations at the very least a stir of - yes – interest. As
here, in an essay 'W.H. Manville: Cool, Hip and Sober.'
It’s
interesting to note that, whereas
Saloon Society was
published as by Bill Manville,
Breaking Up came out
under the name of W.H. Manville. Two later novels.
The
Yes, that is
all interesting, and most interesting of all is that Bums can tell
you so much about a writer I imagine very few of us have heard of,
let alone read.
There are a
good many essays of this kind in
Painting, Poetry, Politics.
I was delighted to see the praise for, among others, the poets Lee
Harwood and, an especial favourite of mine, Gael Turnbull, as well
as the more archaeological digs to find the remains of the likes of
John Sinclair, a Detroit-based artist/entrepreneur who in the 1960s
'ran the Artists' Workshop, and Trans love Energies, and published a
magazine called Work. And
I love the feet that, quite without rancorous finger-wagging. Bums
corrects John Anthony Moretta. the author of a book called
The Hippies: A 1960s History,
by pointing out that Gregory Corso wasn't a
But what
other old beboppers, certain though they might be that the great
Lester Young, while an influence on Parker and Gillespie, didn't
himself play bop, would know enough to produce 'Finks: The CIA and
Writers', one of the most interesting (haI) essays in PPP7 This
essay, ostensibly a review of two books,
Finks: How the CIA Tricked
the World's Best Writers, by Joel Witney, and John Rodden's
Of G-Men and Eggheads: The
FBI and the New York Intellectuals, ought to be required reading
for all those who, as I write, and prompted by the Salisbury
poisonings, are making proud contrasts between the truth-telling
West and the lies of Putin's disinformation machine. I'm not here to
defend Putin. He's a murderous liar right enough. But Western
governments as fearless voices of Truth. Johnson? Trump? Tm old
enough to remember the arguments that erupted in the UK - in
intellectual circles at alt events - at the beginning of the 1960s
when the journal Encounter,
edited by Irving Kristol and Stephen Spender, turned out to be
funded by the Congress of Cultural Freedom, a front for the CIA, who
also financed The Paris
Review. and, believe it or not, the once left-leaning
Partisan Review, though
by then it was edited by Norman Podhorotz, who'd abandoned his
earlier radicalism life as a neo-con.
Did it
matter? After all, the three journals were, or seemed to be,
free-standing cultural enterprises. You bet your boots it mattered.
Burns quotes a CIA operative Tom Braden's response to a statement
put out in 1967 by a number of contributors to the
Partisan Review, in which
they disclaimed any knowledge of CIA funding of 'literary and
intellectual publications and organisations.' 'Of course they knew,'
Braden said. In England Spender also claimed to be a blue-eyed
innocent I remember reading that at a party in London a welt-wined
William Empson followed Spender around taunting him with being a
paid lackey of corrupt sources until the two finally came to blows,
or what, given the drunkenness of the one and the unathletic ways of
the other, was more probably a general flapping of arms, though I
recall being told by someone present that at least one of the
antagonists fell to earth, he knew not where.
More
seriously, the issue was one of editorial freedom - or lack of it
Which, for example, meant not so much who was published in
Encounter as who wasn't
There were certainly mutterings at the time that left-wing writers
were unlikely to be welcomed to the journal's pages, and this was
before anyone knew about the post-war list Orwell had drawn up for
M.I.6 (I think) of 'known' communists who could be considered
enemies of the state. Burns' conclusion to his fascinating piece,
that nothing can 'excuse the machinations of the CIA when it came to
secretly financing cultural activities because of their usefulness
in showing how the West was superior to Russia and her allies,' is
spot on.
'Finks' comes
toward the end of Painting,
Poety, Politics, and precedes a number of pieces about political
matters, including a penetrative account of 'Angel Meadow: Britain's
Savage Slum' (a sizeable review of a book by Dean Kirby on a
particularly brutal nineteenth century Manchester slum area), as
well as a fascinating piece on
1919: Britain's Year of
Revolution, by Simon Webb. This begins: 'My father, who was in
the Royal Navy from 1913 to 1925, served on the Battleship, HMS
Valiant, at one point, and goes on to tell us that the ship,
accompanied by two destroyers, sailed up the Mersey in 1919 in order
to act as deterrents against 'those who were thought to be have been
planning some sort of revolutionary activity.' Characteristically,
Burns adds that he doesn't know if his father was on board ar that
time. The habit of truth-telling and personal information typifies
much, if not all, of what Burns writes, whether he is engaged with
commenting on his responses to painting, poetry, or political
matters. Quite without intrusive, egotistic breast-beating, he
nevertheless makes no attempt to disguise his own convictions, which
are those of an honourable democratic socialist. 'Personally,' he
says in a piece called 'Essayism', I enjoy reviewing, especially
when I have the opportunity to extend what I'm writing to a
review/essay.' What makes his essays so valuable is his ability to
blend personal knowledge and commitment with the reviewer's duty to
report as fairly as possible on the subject and/or author under
review. In PPP he writes about matters as varied as the errant life
of Hank Williams, Australia's Impressionists, and Coal Mine
Disasters in Britain - to choose at random from the more than forty
pieces that make up this, the latest of his ten (ten!) essay
collections - and, it hardly needs saying, wherever you open the
book you find something worth reading. Dr Johnson doesn't give the
word ‘interesting' in his Dictionary, but we can guess the meaning
the great man would provide for the term from how he defines the
verb To interest: To affect; to move; to touch with passion.' This
may seem a shade strong for Burns' characteristically wry prose. But
the wholeheartedness of his engagement with the world of arts and
ideas is unmistakeable. Interesting? I'll say.
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