Fame and fleabites

Pastiche or merely past it? William Wootten on the latest volume of Frank Kuppner's verse, A God's Breakfast
A God's Breakfast by Frank Kuppner

A God's Breakfast
by Frank Kuppner
224pp, Carcanet, £9.95

There's nothing like kicking a great writer when he's down. TS Eliot, villain of stage, screen and literary criticism, is now a popular football for his fellow poets. Tom Paulin let his prose attacks spill into The Invasion Handbook, and even Geoffrey Hill, the most Eliotic of contemporary poets, has been using verse and prose to bad-mouth Four Quartets. However, when it comes to Eliot-bashing, Frank Kuppner makes the competition look like pussycats.

Though he may not have Paulin's fame or Hill's reputation, Kuppner has been one of the most interesting Scottish writers of the past 20 years. The spoof Chinese-in-translation of his first book of verse, A Bad Day for the Sung Dynasty, like the later Second Best Moments in Chinese History, was novel, funny and often rather beautiful. In a very different manner, the prose of A Quiet Street and Something Very Like Murder spliced investigation into old crimes with autobiographical reminiscence to create what approached a new genre. Other books have varied in style from the fanciful and the manically comic to the meditative and argumentative; the titles of Kuppner's volumes Ridiculous! Absurd! Disgusting! and Everything is Strange indicate much of what is captivating and, sometimes, wearying about his varied oeuvre.

A God's Breakfast is three books in one. The first and longest is "The Uninvited Guest", a sequence of hundreds of cod-classical epigrams and fragments; the third, "What Else is There?" a collection of 120 shorter poems. The rest of the volume is given up to "West Åland, or Five Tombeaux for Mr Testoil". At 48 pages, "West Åland" is about as long as The Waste Land and Four Quartets combined and is, I'd reckon, the most protracted dance ever made by one poet upon the grave of another.

In it Eliot's verse is mercilessly caricatured, his faith and thought denounced, and his private life lampooned. While charges that Eliot was a right-wing Christian, had a bad first marriage and was an editor at Faber and Faber are scarcely news, the contention that Eliot wasn't much of a poet comes as more of a surprise. To help persuade us, Kuppner scrawls ruderies on Eliot's lines ("I grow stout ... I grow stout / I shall walk through St Paul's with my balls hanging out", and so on) and tries to convince us that Eliot wrote doggerel and rhetorical waffle by supplying his own.

Kuppner can be an excellent humourist and pasticheur, but, though it prompts the odd schoolboy titter and hits one or two of its numerous targets, on the whole "West Åland" is a repetitive, over-egged and ridiculously over-long affair which diminishes one's respect for Kuppner while doing nothing to lower one's opinion of Eliot.

If there is a justification for "West Åland", it is that it pulls down the trousers of a writer who gave intellectual and artistic respectability to ideas which Kuppner's atheism and critical rationalism find erroneous or repugnant, thereby alerting us to how Eliot concealed wrong-headedness with "verbal mesmerism, a hoping that the music / will be taken for elusive meaning". Eliot's ideas no longer have the currency they once did and Kuppner doesn't show Paulin's outrage at Eliot's anti-semitism. Instead it's this mesmerism - or, to put it another way, poetic talent - that seems to be the chief impetus for Kuppner's jeers. The title poem of Kuppner's 1987 volume The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women asks:

   "What grey divorces have lapped against the walls of his room?
   What seas have slowly rotted into intelligence?
   Where were her various sighs already by my reading?

What does that remind you of? "What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands / What water lapping the bow"? Here it's Eliot's "Marina"; elsewhere in The Intelligent Observation of Naked Women and Everything is Strange, it's Four Quartets that influence a verse that can be as labouriously orotund as Kuppner's invented Eliot. "West Åland" is the sound of someone shouting abuse to stop themselves falling back under the mesmerist's trance.

"The Uninvited Guest" is much better. Its fictitious fragments from anonymous ancient authors contain the erudite and the philosophical as well as the unremarkable and the obscene, as its protagonists think deeply on the meaning of life, the pursuit of sex, of death and fame, and of how little they care for one another.

There is something to offend almost everyone, including a fair amount that is sexist or homophobic, but there's also plenty to illuminate, amuse and instruct. Kuppner likes the role of Diogenes the Cynic: shameless and funny, pointing out his own animal nature and the foolishness and hypocrisy of others. However, it's Karl Popper, the philosopher of science and vehement critic of Plato, who is the guiding genius of this attempt to enter the disputes of the ancient world in order to address the misconceptions of the present.

Kuppner's desire to hammer home old arguments can knock his own art out of shape, and his work tends to be best when it has the least design upon us. In "The Uninvited Guest", however, Kuppner's ideas are at their most interesting and attractive. All of the gripes of "West Åland" - against spurious profundity and obscurantism, against religion, anti-materialism and asceticism - are here. Nevertheless, set free of the grudge against Eliot and placed amid competing voices, they, and the reader, are given space to breathe.

In "West Åland" Kuppner observes that "lyricism can be a knack, much like anything else"; but it's not a knack that he has ever quite acquired. Though he can write a neat enough pentameter, Kuppner hasn't the gift for verbal music and emotional and intellectual intensity of, say, Eliot. Kuppner's abilities are, however, ideally suited to diffuse extended poems and sequences; the best description and defence of works like "The Uninvited Guest" coming in the couplet: "Some good stuff; more indifferent stuff; much rubbish / How else is any book going to catch reality?" The short poems in "What Else is There?", which tend to have much the same consistency as Kuppner's sprawling ones, are thus at something of a disadvantage.

When Kuppner tackles the everyday he has his moments - he does, for instance, continue to write well about his parents. However, there's something slightly disappointing about finding someone who has masqueraded as a Chinese poet of the Sung dynasty, an insect and God, recalling his European holiday or contemplating the view from the office of a writer in residence. So it is the, often anti-religious, parables and flights of fancy that most appeal. In "An Ode Suitable for Almost Any Literary Occasion", Kuppner exhorts the fleas that bit Shakespeare as he went

   "on writing yet another of his appalling poofy sonnets.
   Yes! Bite! Go on! Give him no peace! He deserves none.
   Quite apart from the truly atrocious handwriting.
   And dead at fifty-two - that wasn't too great, was it?
   I mean even Ben effing Jonson managed to beat that out of sight.
   And dead on your birthday to boot! Huh. Happy birthday

As mean-spirited and bilious as anything in "West Åland", but without its tedious self-righteousness, the poem proves that petty envy has its place as a spur for literary endeavour. And that the spectacle of watching lesser poets make fleabites on their betters, while never exactly edifying, can at least be very entertaining.

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