Conclusion

If a poet gets into conversation with a stranger in a railway coach and the latter asks him: ‘What is your job?’, he will think quickly and say: ‘A schoolteacher, a bee keeper, a bootlegger’, because to tell the truth would cause an incredulous and embarrassing silence.

W. H. Auden, ‘Squares and Oblongs’, 1948.

I never answer ‘writer’ … The most satisfactory … I have discovered, satisfactory because it withers curiosity, is to say Medieval Historian.

W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand, 1963.¹

TIMMS: Sir. I don’t always understand poetry.

HECTOR: You don’t always understand it? Timms, I never understand it. But learn it now and you’ll understand it whenever.

Alan Bennett, The History Boys, 2004.

There’s no incredulity when you say nowadays, on a train, that you’re a historian. If anyone cares enough to ask, they’re interested enough to say: What kind of history? When you mumble something about eighteenthand nineteenth-century social history, mainly British … they ask if you’ve published anything, and then tell you about the BBC 4 history programmes they like best of all. I suppose that Auden didn’t to want engage in conversation in the first place, to be left to read his newspaper in peace; but he said that the potential embarrassment of both parties was the reason, for everyone knew that ‘nobody can earn a living simply by writing poetry’ (as indeed he didn’t, and is the reason for the vast output of reviews and journalism, by which he did).² He didn’t have trouble with the authorities putting the question about trade or profession, for ‘immigration and customs officials know that some kinds of writers make a lot of money’.³ But that was long ago, and I surmise that he was on a US train (‘railway coach’ is a giveaway, let alone ‘bootlegger’). In the twenty-first century UK, anyone who can afford to travel by train is a full citizen of Jorma Kalela’s republic of history – of history-in-society – has an articulate understanding of the role of history in the making of self and identity and can locate you immediately as one of the clerisy. They know exactly how much you earn from your university teaching job, and that what extra you make from your publications will maybe just about enable you to buy a nicer pair of the shoes you have in abundance anyway.⁴

The stranger on a train asks you about the kind of thing you’ve published, and you say something about eighteenth-century domestic servants. A majority of your interlocutors will then tell you that their granny, or their great grandmother, was a servant. Or that their grandfather was a miner, a steel-worker, a bus-driver; their great-grandmother a weaver, a char, worked in the jam factory: was some kind of manual worker. They know that in the republic of history-in-society it is the working class that carries the historical narrative, explaining who they are, now, asking questions on a train. No one, now, tells the story that my imagined Auden-on-a-train just might just possibly once have told, about ‘book-loving, Anglo-Catholic parents of the professional classes’; about the doctor father, the graduate mother, the ‘study full of books … reading aloud in the evenings …’.⁵ Upper middle-class origins don’t tell much of a story anymore about the origins of the self and the social; the social history of the working class inscribes the constitution of the modern republic of history. Historians have an easy or – depending on their disposition – irritated ride compared with travelling poets who would probably evade the question of their métier just as Auden did, in anticipation of blank incomprehension. Yet both historians and poets are workers: they make something, in writing.

The modern word ‘poetry’ is derived from the ancient term for ‘making’ – ‘to make’ (poeisis), so it was first of all a verb to denote an action that transforms and continues the world: keeps the world going. This is a kind of abstract, a-historical, dictionary rendering of the labour theory of value associated with Marxist thought, but given its profoundest – certainly most resonant – articulation in John Locke’s philosophy of labour, in the seventeenth century, avant la lettre of Marxism. In all of Locke’s writing, and particularly in the Two Treatises of Government (1689), man is a maker, and his making makes him a person. People fashion things out of the material of the earth, which is provided by God. Labour transforms His earthly provision into objects of use; those who labour on it have a property in its product. The moment of making, the transfer of property from worker to employer (which will not delay us here for very long), was famously described: ‘the grass my horse has bit, the turfs my servant has cut … become my property … The labour that was mine removing them out of the common state they were in, has fixed my property in them,’ wrote Locke. When Locke wrote about the servant’s labour, an image had occurred to his imagination, and hence sprang the horse and the turfcutter. There is also a more opaque image, of the philosopher, looking up from his writing table (thus eschewing the first metaphor for all manner of philosophers down the ages); he looks out of a window, to see a man and a horse in a lonely field. Dobbin is standing by, the panniers on his back, quietly cropping the grass of the field yet uncut. The pair in the field are the plainest analogy of the appropriation of property and the circulation of labour in an agricultural market economy. We are not to know if the man – the figment of an imagination – was a servant in husbandry on an annual hiring, or a labourer paid by the piece (or the load), or by the day or the week. We do know that in the two centuries and a half to follow, the labourer and the horse will become one and the same in the deep structure of the (English) political and economic imagination.⁶ All writers use metaphors (and similes, and other figures), and while academic industries and deep pleasures of the imagination have been made out of their contemplation, it is always salutary to recognise the contingency of their origin; we need to be reminded, again and again, of the probable lack of intention in the turf-cutting passages of the second Treatise.⁷ But it is worth noting the light a poet shone on them – albeit on the turf, the object of labour, not on the horse or the man. Wordsworth is helpful on turf, ideation, and intentionality: ‘Oft on the dappled turf at ease/I sit, and play with similes,/Loose type of things through all degrees’, he wrote a century after Locke.⁸ He was apostrophising a daisy, not a man or a horse; I do know that. But he draws attention to the slippery, uncontrollable figures used by all writers: philosophers, political scientists, historians, and even on this occasion, a poet, for I presume that he, Wordsworth, had no idea that the merest mention of ‘turf’ would set some historian or other 200 years on, haring after the labour theory of value, tracking it to its lair in John Locke’s poetic imagination.

All writing, including the writing of history, is a form of poeisis. It is the making of something, at the same time as it continues the world of philosophers, turf-cutters, poets, and historians. The making involves changing the material laboured on into something else, something new; but it also sustains something outside itself – the world; a bigger story – in something of the same state. Can I call this thing that I have just made – this book – a history? It is a history in parts, perhaps. It follows the conventions of historical narrative in giving some details about Auden’s childhood and education out of a conviction that social background explains something of artistic production (as, indeed, Auden assumed in his historical report to Lord Byron); thus in parts – but only in parts – it is a narrative that explains something. It is historical, perhaps, in its investigation of popular understandings of history and poetry in the long eighteenth century; it has something to say about an education in history and poetry in twentieth-century Britain. These were all long ways round to understanding, not poetry in society, but the question of history in society raised by some of Auden’s poems, composed for the main part in the 1950s. Understanding – attempting to understand – the working of those artefacts of written language was subordinated to other questions about the making and workings of history (the written artefact; ‘a history’). I do not think that it can be seen as a work of history, for its lack of linerality and chronological cohesion. It is, perhaps, a kind of historiography, particularly in its rather painful discovery that the Clio of Auden’s ‘Homage’, isn’t History; and never was, and simply isn’t there.

And so the anxious question: what has been made? Anxiety is a vague and unpleasant emotion experienced in anticipation of an uncertainly defined misfortune. But the misfortune that lies in wait for this book is not at all ill-defined. It may be read as something like Alexander McCall Smith’s What W. H. Auden Can Do for You.⁹ Smith is illuminating – canny – on a lifetime of reading Auden and the changing shape of a reader’s love over many years. He read Auden’s poetry differently when he was in his 20s from the way he reads now. He also provides a straightforward and simply clever explanation of Auden’s choice of syllabic metre, always with the reader – or reciter – in mind. He writes about the poems as they are lived – used and remade – in countless individual imaginations. He tells how he found resource in the poetry when facing moral dilemmas and in learning how to come to ethical decisions about the public world, or civil society. There is a lot of McCall Smith in his book: the self-portrait and ‘the wisdom and courage he has found in Auden’s poems’ has been appreciated by the great Auden scholar Edward Mendelson and many others, though some have found it short on historical context.¹⁰ A lot of it is in schoolteacher Hector’s voice – or tone of voice – from Alan Bennett’s The History Boys, as when Timms says in class ‘I don’t see how we can understand it [poetry]. Most of the stuff poetry’s about hasn’t happened to us yet’, and the schoolmaster replies ‘But it will, Timms. It will. And then you will have the antidote ready! Grief. Happiness. Even when you’re dying.’¹¹

Bennett had left Oxford by the time Auden came to live in The Brewhouse, Christ College, in 1972, but he had seen him in Hall at Exeter College way back in 1955 (uncannily, the year in which Auden made his Clio). A year later he dutifully attended Auden’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Poetry, because he too wanted to be ‘A Writer’, and out of some impulse of the not-yet-named celebrity culture. ‘I don’t think I’d read much of his poetry or would have understood it if I had’, he wrote in 2009. ‘When Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of … a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a passion for the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this kind of kit inspection, I’d better forget it.’¹² Later, for a rather different audience, he wrote that he ‘would be hard put to say what a great poet is, but part of it, certainly in Auden’s case, is the obscurity … Perhaps he was too clever for the English.’¹³

In What W. H. Auden Can Do for You, McCall Smith has a section headed: ‘He Reminds Us of Community, and of How Our Life May be Given Meaning through Everyday Things’, in which he discusses Auden as a poet in the tradition of Horace, teaching us to give thanks for the quotidian and to be concerned with the personal moral life.¹⁴ Another recent work of poetry-for-self-help is about Horace – nothing to do with Auden – and delivers up Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet. Poet and journalist Harry Eyres, like McCall Smith, dwells on the domestic, on a life lived in some retreat, country or otherwise. He, a poet, thinks that ‘Horace can help us most of all not in leading us to some rural idyll where we can definitely put the city behind us, but in acknowledging the pull in both directions.’¹⁵ The recent efflorescence of work describing a writer’s personal and textual experience of another’s – ‘and Me’ books – has some relationship to the development of sickness memoir. The British Library Catalogue suggests that the first UK title in the genre (Breast Cancer and Me) appeared in 2005; there were two publications using Cancer and Me as a title in the first half of 2016. But the ‘and Me’ title form is much older, appearing first in 1880s Britain when it was almost invariably used for the children’s market and for the parents who bought their books: Little Nell and Me (1885); For Teddy and Me. A Story Book for Little Folk (1910); An ABC for Baby and Me (1919). By the 1920s the form was also being used for love stories, novels, and reminiscences. J. B. Priestley published the pamphlet You and Me and the War in 1935, a political tract in a sea of memoirs about acquaintance with film stars or ghosted for film stars themselves.¹⁶ The ‘and Me’ title signalled familiarity with famous people and notorious ideas, as in Timothy Leary, the Madness of the 60s and Me (1974), Elvis and Me (1985), Ann Frank and Me (1997), Renoir and Me (2010), The Man Within My Head. Graham Greene, My Father and Me (2012). These are not all – not mostly – attempts to attach insignificance to fame, though if I had not used the form myself for the title to Chapter 5 of this book, I might be moved to ponder the childish disingenuousness of the usage ‘and Me’. I wouldn’t worry about the thousand grammarians who since the early nineteenth century have opined that ‘Graham Greene’ and ‘Me’ (for example) are the subjects of the utterance … therefore the subject pronoun, I, is considered correct … ‘me’ is acceptable in spoken English … don’t use it in writing. It’s the coy playfulness, the evasive flirtatiousness of the term, that I dislike; I very much hope that my usage is ironic; that I was trying to raise a laugh, in a pre-emptive strike like Elizabeth Hands’ pre-emptive strike, against sneering at her (my) presumption in doing something with Auden’s poetry in the first place.

There is always another way in which it could have been done; a different book written, a different story told. Reviewing McCall’s What W. H. Auden Can Do for You, Chris Jones (School of English, University of Aberdeen, exponent of Auden’s Anglo-Saxon attitudes and influences) ruminated on the book that wasn’t – that could have been: ‘one that would subsequently narrate McCall Smith’s travels with Auden’, from the time of his first encounter with his poetry in the 1970s when McCall Smith was researching the issue of criminal responsibility, ‘rather than chronologically retrac[ing] some of the familiar facts of Auden’s biography’.¹⁷ It’s true, as Auden said, that no past dies, not even the past of the discarded and half-thought words you might have written; it’s not so much that ‘what is done is done’, as that when you’re actually doing it is so easy to forget the other possible products, because what you’re making is the thing that will have been. This is not the ‘subjunctive history’ that Dakin describes in The History Boys (Dakin is the closest to Alan Bennett’s historiographical avatar the play has – though not the one the playwright actually claims).¹⁸ In the play ‘subjunctive history’ is Dakin’s invention (textually speaking): ‘The subjunctive is the mood you use when something might or might not have happened, when it’s imagined’, he says. ‘Subjunctive history’ appears to have been first used in the early 2000s as an alternative to ‘counterfactual history’: ‘a recounting of the past that purposely locates itself in the realm of the counter-factual: what didn’t actually happen, but rather, what could possibly have happened’. Historians in general dislike it as a form for structuring narrative explanation, though some concede its usefulness in asking historical questions about the past.¹⁹ Indeed, some few think that ‘the idea of conjecturing on what did not happen, or what might have happened, in order to understand what did happen’ is a fundamental of historical thinking.²⁰ I interpret Dakin’s (or Bennett’s) ‘subjunctive’ grammatically (‘a mood’ says that I may), as a form of telling or writing. The subjunctive mood is the verb form used to express a wish, a suggestion, a command, or a condition that is contrary to fact; in English, the subjunctive mood is used to explore conditional or imaginary situations. Here, it’s the might-have-been, or the could-possibly-have-been book we’re talking about; but as you write – make something that has its own shape and form – you very quickly forget all the ‘what ifs’, the ‘could have done it that ways’; they keep getting forgotten as you plod your way through its writing: it is a thing that already has some kind life independent of its maker; it is already that which you have dug out from the material of the past and are making into something new. (‘New’ is not to bestow praise: millions of dove-tail joints have been made over the ages; each is a new one, but it may not be as well executed as that of the joiner working at the bench next to you.) It is a thing made out of the irreducible stuff of the Past, which does not – cannot – die; you, in the happy or unhappy Present ‘recite the Past/like a Poetry lesson till sooner/or later it falter[s] at [a] line …’²¹

The line at which you are permitted to falter is Ben Lerner’s. His book The Hatred of Poetry provides not so much a re-reading, or contemplation, of the might-have-been, as a refashioning of what has already been made and, ultimately, about the making of poetry into prose. In The Hatred of Poetry, the poet recommends working with the feeling many have that, like Timms, they ‘don’t get poetry in general or my poetry in particular and/or believe that poetry is dead’.²² He says that many poets dislike poetry too; he quotes Marianne Moore’s ‘Poetry’ (the 1967 version, he says, in its entirety) for she was another who hated it well. She doesn’t say why she hates it, only that reading it with the contempt it deserves, it is possible, grudgingly, to find something genuine – her word – in it. Lerner has a long and darkly hilarious account of the difficulties of remembering the 1967 version of ‘Poetry’. And he may forget again – in order to make a point, no less – that in its 1919 incarnation, the poem has five stanzas, and began: ‘I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle./Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers that there is in/it after all, a place for the genuine./Hands that can grasp, eyes/that can dilate, hair that can rise/if it must, these things are important …’.²³

Why? And why ‘I too’? Why the dislike of poetry among poets and their readers? It is because poetry ‘arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical’; it’s because poetry wants to reach the transcendent, or the divine; it’s because any poem is always a record of failure to do that: ‘Poetry isn’t hard, it’s impossible.’²⁴ Lerner has extraordinary – revolutionary; frightening – recommendations for getting over it; getting over the hatred of poetry. He praises a contemporary US poet who writes only prose. He shows what you may do with poetry if you make it more like prose by punctuating it. He is brilliant on punctuation (I had attempted it, in fear and trepidation, with a tiny number of Auden lines before I read Lerner’s book, as in the quotation from ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ that is one of its epigraphs: a comma [in square brackets] makes Auden say something about the historian’s perspective from which history gets written: ‘That what we see depends on who’s observing,/And what we think[,] on our activities …’. However, I must, and perforce, recognise that without the inserted comma, Auden could have been expressing the perfectly straightforward Marxist view that material life determines mental life; that ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’; that ‘it is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness …’.²⁵ With the insertion of a comma, I have – possibly – made a general ‘think’, or thinking, into cogitation about history. Punctuation is a powerful thing.

Lerner is racily enthusiastic about the virgule, the ‘/’ which I use all over the place, and not just here and with Auden’s poetry. This is the conventional way of indicating a line break when verse is quoted and set as prose: publishers like it, at least when historians do it, for it cuts down on the cost of typesetting; writers who are historians use it all the time. In the margin, Lerner labels it Virgula Divina.²⁶ He says it is the mark for verse that ‘is not yet, or no longer, or not merely actual’. Poems are always failing us – readers and poets – ‘you can only compose poems that, when read with perfect contempt, clear a place for the genuine Poem that never appears’.²⁷ By punctuation – by inserting punctuation marks, including the virgule – you can make something appear. There has not been a discussion of the divinity of punctuation (of English-language texts) like this since the eighteenth century, when daring, excited, rebellious, and inebriated discussion of what could be done for writers and readers by these printers’ marks took place all over the shop.²⁸ So too did the brilliant and daring footnote, which is about to be discussed, come to the party. ‘[For] the purposes I have in view,/The English eighteenth-century will do’, as it has throughout this book.²⁹

And yet … the divine virgule can make some strongly stressed poetry much harder to read, especially when the poetry it proses (as the 1813 Lady’s Magazine would put it) is placed between inverted commas and makes its appearance on a page that already consists of densely set prose. This was particularly apparent with all the regular and ridiculous imprecations that the eighteenth-century Clio received in Chapter 3. For the ease of readers, including myself, I went back and restored the original setting (as lines of verse) to any quotations longer than four of them (lines). All this mucking about with and remaking of poetry in the manner recommended by Lerner makes one contemplate, yet again, Auden’s opaque pronouncements on the line as the fundamental unit of organisation in English-language verse. The line remains irreducibly something you can’t know about except as a literate person; that objection to it as a means to poetics remains. Nevertheless, there are depths to the line that are yet unplumbed; there will be no end to working on whatever Auden was doing with it, ever. The poetics of history teaches that there may be endings, but that there is no end.

It is anxiety provoking, all this encouragement to remake, reshape, restructure, another’s verse. I wonder if am allowed to do it? What legal and copyright infringements lurk behind the encouragement to remake poetry as prose? What probity, particularly a historian’s probity, is undone by the practice? It is an inviolable rule of historical writing that what you put between inverted commas is exactly what has been written in documents, in transcripts of spoken language, and in the work of other scholars you quote. It is the same kind of rule that prescribes footnotes, and what is sometimes seen as historians’ sad, pedantic obsession with them.³⁰ All scholars employ the apparatus of the note or reference in their writing – of course. But footnotes are the particular declaration of the historian’s honesty; an open, contract-like invitation to readers to check the sources she has used. Or maybe it’s more like the pact that Philippe Lejeune describes in regard to the autobiography and its readers: in opening an autobiography the reader undertakes to believe that the name on the cover of a piece of self-writing is that of the person who wrote it, and that the story found in its pages is the story of that person.³¹ The reader is the dominant, legal partner in the autobiographical pact; but historians force the contract implied in the footnote on their readers. The footnote says: Look, Reader! I have done this: I have taken the train to the distant county town where lies the record office; I have called up DD/CH Bx 16; I have sat reading and note-taking in the search room. You can do the same; you can check my sources, confirm my probity, acknowledge that I have told a true story, or at least a likely story, out of those documents.

To my mind, though endnotes will do, at a pinch, it really should be a footnote. The reader must be able to move swiftly between the text and the single-spaced note at the bottom of the page; must be allowed read with a dual eye, for the story and where the story comes from. I enjoy the very great authority that this appeal to the evidence gives me as a story-teller. I find the printed page of the history I publish aesthetically and rhetorically so very pleasing (though I am very taken with Lerner’s use of italicised marginalia): there is the deep seabed of the references, citations, call numbers, and classmarks, above which my argument sails, a happy ship on a bright sea. As in a child’s crayoned drawing, the printed page of history-with-footnotes shows a clear cross-section through process and product (ocean floor, deep sea, calm surface; little ship sailing on); shows where the historian’s been and what she’s done in the making of the story you read. I get quite upset when asked to use a social-science citation method: no footnotes and a messy, jumbled appearance to the page, which surely must discombobulate readers. And – coming clean – I really don’t like endnotes at all, though publishers prefer them, for reasons of cost, as described in the case of the virgule above, and because some of them underestimate the reading capacities of those who buy their books; publishers find footnotes ‘unsightly, costly, forbidding’.³² But reading with endnotes is like reading that satire on British historical ‘truth’ which is Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800) into all eternity. In this novel, everybody has endnotes: the fictional author, the fictional editor, the servant Thady’s transcribed and edited words. One of the servant’s functions in Western literature is to utter truth to the master’s power – in the back kitchen, behind the door, or in her mind, as she silently brings in the teatray with murder on her face. But any power of the Irish servant to speak truth to English Ascendancy is quite removed in Castle Rackrent, not only by giving him a name that echoes with ‘toady’, but also by the elaborate forms of citation and reference that occlude it.³³ To say that it is the first novel in English to employ the device of an unreliable narrator who does not participate in the action s/he describes, but is its author and editor, doesn’t say the half of it. Moreover, the reading of it is quite deliberately made uncomfortable to the point of impossibility: on my count you have to keep a finger between five places in the text of Castle Rackrent if you read the notes you are (textually) desired to read.³⁴ There is, of course, much commentary on these matters, but nothing suggests, as I do suggest, that Edgeworth’s form subverts the ‘history’ she purports to tell by preventing everyone from actually reading it.³⁵ So – I admit it – reading Rackrent is worse than reading a work of history which employs endnotes, where you only need three fingers, for text, notes (and where are they? At the end of each chapter? Or gathered together at the end? Both are equally impossible), and the bibliography.³⁶

These are some the things to know if you intend to study the linguistic techniques used in history-writing (if you intend a poetics of it). There is also – in some place between writing and politics – a poetics of democracy, or collectivity, that all scholars, including historians, entertain as their ghostly guest (‘ghost’ in the meaning that Avery Gordon has determined) when they write (a footnote is an augury of the ghost’s good intention). Historian Roger Chartier has surely persuaded us that whatever it is they do, authors don’t produce books; they produce piles of manuscript pages (or heaps of notes). Typesetters, editors, copy-editors, proofreaders, translators, make books.³⁷ Any printed and published history is the work of many hands. I, for one, enjoy my editors; I would be mortified if any editor ever said I wasn’t easy to work with. (I am cheerfully compliant with all readers’ reports in the hope that I might be able to ignore fifty percent of their suggestions for changing my prose.) Your readers matter to you the historian in a way they may not matter so much to a poet. They are always irreducibly ever-present (though they may not read your work) in the common understanding of how things work. Not only could you render Herodotus’ Histories as verse and your audience still know it’s history, as Aristotle pointed out, you could tell it backwards and your readers would still know that it happened forwards. Of course, they may not believe that it happened at all, but they know that they are hearing or reading a narrative that happens in one direction, things unfolding until the last moves off stage, out of their field of vision. The story is still there, structured the way it goes. In a poem, the movement is different, even in a narrative poem about history. Nothing leaves the stage; they’re all there, in perpetual tableau: rhyme, stress, alliteration, etc, nodding at each other, responding to each other’s schtick. They are their own summary of the emotional situation of the poem.³⁸ Time and chronology will not affect these shades, forever together in little engine room of their making, the machinery clattering away.

To add to the audience as a factor in the poetics of history, there is the shaping purpose that philosophers have provided for anyone writing it. I have written about this so many times that I have no more to say, and must perforce plagiarise myself: historians make the stuff (or Everything) of the past (no past dies) into a structure or event, a happening or a thing.³⁹ They do this through the activities of thought and writing. What they write (create; force into being) was never actually there, once upon a time, in the first place.⁴⁰ There is a double nothingness in the writing of history and in the analysis of it: it is about something that never did happen in the way it was (at the time) represented, or in the way it is represented 300 years on. The happening exists in the telling or the text; it is made out of a Past undead, but that isn’t there in an archive, or anywhere else. It lives, or exists (no past dies) because we believe in the irreducibility of matter, that nothing goes away; its not-dying is in our imagination, and our writing out of it. We should be entirely unsurprised that literary deconstruction made no difference to this kind of writing. When Jacques Derrida decried (or maybe just described) the historian’s crab-like thinking backwards, he also suggested that her nostalgia for origins and original referents cannot be satisfied, because there is actually nothing there: she is not looking for anything: only silence, the space shaped by what once was; and now is no more.⁴¹ What has survived – the ghost – is not the thing itself, but what has already been said and written about it. ‘There is history’, says Jacques Rancière, ‘because there is the past and a specific passion for the past. And there is history because there is an absence … The status of history depends on the treatment of this twofold absence of the “thing itself” that is no longer there – that is in the past; and that never was – because it never was such as it was told.’⁴² Doing historiography (analysing the principles, theories, methodology, and philosophy of scholarly historical research and presentation) appears, then, to be an activity that falls within the realm of poetics, not the realm of writing history.

I have always wanted to write my own historiography, as I go along. I think the assumption that we should leave the determination of meaning in our writing to the philosophers and social theorists is just a little bit demeaning. But my attempts to do this have made no difference to anyone reading the history I’ve written, for you can always, like the fishwife that historian-readers are trained to be, gut the text, extract the story (the historical information and argument) from the way it is told, and happily ignore all questions of textuality it may raise. Historians do not pause to ask what is this particular text up to? Nothing I do by way of structure, or analogy, or figures of speech – and not all the poetry in the world, not even Auden’s – will prevent this book being subjected to the fishwife’s knife. It would have been better – really; wouldn’t it? – to have invoked Thalia, the Muse of Comedy, rather than Clio in the writing of it. We shouldn’t stand on our dignity, as George Trevelyan suggested a century ago we do in regard to Thalia.⁴³ Eighteenth-century writers made fewer references to Thalia than to her silent sister; but when they did, she was a Muse of wider application and more exhilarating use; she is, in the nicest possible way, a bit of a fishwife herself; she turned up in a wider variety of more interesting settings than did Clio.⁴⁴ She always has a laugh at what she sees and hears, and often, at herself. She has been here as well, though not named: sniggering up her sleeve in the back kitchen; smirking behind a fan when in a drawing room, she has one to hand, at the ridiculousness of what is about to be said; getting ready to smile as she bears with fortitude the puerile observations of her charges, in some schoolroom – fictional 1790s; historical South London 1964; somewhere – deciding before they’re uttered that the observations will not be worth either the smile or the making of verse out of them. She is not named either, in two modern novels that relate how the whole crew – her, and Clio’s sisters and brothers, cousins thrice removed, uncles, aunts … are always here – and there – when anyone attempts to account for stuff happening in the world, past and present; attempts to account for people making moves, altering things.⁴⁵

1 W. H. Auden, ‘Squares and Oblongs’, Prose Volume II. 1939–1948, Edward Mendelson (ed.), Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 2002, pp. 339–350; 346; orig. Squares and Oblongs. Essays Based on the Modern Poetry Collection at the Lockwood Memorial Library, University of Buffalo, 1948; W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand and Other Essays, Faber and Faber, London, 1963, p. 74.

2 Sean O’Brien, ‘Auden in Prose’, Tony Sharpe (ed.), W. H. Auden in Context, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2013, pp. 329–336.

3 Auden, Dyer’s Hand, p. 74.

4 See Alan Bennett – who actually studied medieval history and taught it too, at Oxford – on this point: The History Boys, Faber and Faber, London, 2004, pp. xxiv–xxv.

5 W. H. Auden, ‘Honour [Gresham’s School, Holt]’, Graham Greene (ed.), The Old School. Essays by Divers Hands (1934), Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984, pp. 1–12; W. H. Auden, The Prolific and the Devourer (1976, 1981), Ecco Press, Hopewell NJ, 1994, p. 9, quoted by Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden, Heinemann, London, 1995, p. 14.

6 Carolyn Steedman, ‘The servant’s labour. The business of life, England 1760–1820’, Social History, 29:1 (2004), pp. 1–29, p. 29.

7 Jeremy Waldron, ‘ “The Turfs My Servant Has Cut” ’, Locke Newsletter, 13 (1982), pp. 1–20; James Tully, A Discourse on Property. John Locke and His Adversaries, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1980.

8 William Wordsworth, ‘To the Same Flower’ (1802, 1807), Paul D. Sheets (ed.), The Poetical Works of Wordsworth, Houghton Mifflin, Boston MA, 1982, p. 29.

9 Alexander McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden Can Do for You, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ and Oxford, 2013.

10 Not much space in such a short book ‘for nuanced historical contextualisation, or for biographical criticism of Auden’s poems’, said Chris Jones in The Times Higher Education Supplement (5 December 2013); ‘yet the reader is sometimes offered gestures towards such a big picture that are just blunt enough to cause puzzlement rather than enlightenment’.

11 Bennett, History Boys, p. 30. Also ‘Alan Bennett Writes About His New Play’, London Review of Books, 31:21 (5 November 2009), pp. 15–17.

12 Bennett, History Boys, p. v.

13 ‘Alan Bennett on the Poems that Inspire Him’, Daily Telegraph, 17 June 2015.

14 See above, pp. 201–202; McCall Smith, What W. H. Auden, pp. 131–137.

15 Harry Eyres, Horace and Me. Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet, Bloomsbury, London, 2013, p. 153.

16 J. B. Priestley, You and Me and War, National Peace Council, London, 1935.

17 Note 10, above.

18 Bennett, History Boys, pp. 89–90; p. xxvii for Bennett’s named avatar, Posner. Also Alan Bennett, ‘The History Boy’, London Review of Books, 26:11 (3 June 2004), pp. 20–22. Posner may have an unrequited passion for the very clever Dakin, but Bennett doesn’t approve of the big bow-wow school of history Dakin finds so alluring; of ‘the new breed of historians [who] … all came to prominence under Mrs Thatcher and share some of her characteristics. Having found that taking the contrary view pays dividends, they seem to make this the tone of their customary discourse. A sneer is never far away and there’s a persistently jeering note, perhaps bred by the habit of contention.’ History Boys, p. xxiv. But does Dakin jeer? Really? I think this judgement should be reserved for Irwin, the play’s perfectly ghastly teacher. But then: I am so seduced by Dakin’s cleverness. Also, Alan Bennett, Keeping On Keeping On, Faber and Faber, London, 2016, p. 244.

19 Martin Bunzl, ‘Counterfactual history. A user’s guide’, American Historical Review, 109:3 (2004), pp. 845–858; Richard Evans, Altered Pasts. Counterfactuals in History, Little Brown, London, 2014.

20 Jeremy Black and Donald M. MacRaild, Studying History, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2007, p. 125.

21 ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, ‘In Memory of Sigmund Freud’.

22 Ben Lerner, The Hatred of Poetry, Fitzcarraldo, London, 2016, p. 9.

23 Marianne Moore, ‘Poetry’, Alfred Kreymborg (ed.), Others for 1919. An Anthology of the New Verse, Nicholas L. Brown, New York NY, 1920, pp. 131–132. Lerner refers to The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (1967).

24 Lerner, Hatred, pp. 9–15.

25 Karl Marx, ‘Preface’, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1977. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm (accessed 16 October 2016).

26 Lerner, Hatred, p. 95–103. I know that this is Latin for a divining rod; even Nelly Dean knows that when Lerner tells her so (p. 99). But the virgule is just divine! as in modern US and UK English and Lerner uses it in that way (too).

27 Lerner, Hatred, p. 103.

28 Carolyn Steedman, ‘Poetical maids and cooks who wrote’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 39:1 (2005), pp. 1–27; ‘Sights unseen, cries unheard. Writing the eighteenth-century metropolis’, Representations, 118 (2012), pp. 28–71.

29 W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, Collected Poems (1976), Faber and Faber, London, 1991, p. 100. To explain developments in twentieth-century literary culture to the dead Lord Byron, Auden invited him to ‘what I’ll call the Poet’s Party’ (102).

30 Anthony Grafton, The Footnote. A Curious History (1997), Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA, 1999, pp. 1–33, 62–93 (‘How the Historian Found His Muse’).

31 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Seuil, Paris 1975; On Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 1989.

32 Chuck Zerby, The Devil’s Details. A History of Footnotes, Simon & Schuster, New York NY, 2003, p. 2.

33 The novel is actually pre-Ascendancy in that it is set in Ireland in 1782, before the Act of Union (1801).

34 Maria Edgeworth, Castle Rackrent. An Hibernian Tale Taken from Facts and from the Manners of the Irish Squires before the Year 1782, J. Johnson, London, 1800.

35 Marilyn Butler, ‘Edgeworth’s Ireland. History, popular culture, and secret codes’, Novel, 34:2 (2001), pp. 267–292; Lisa M. Wilson, ‘British women writing satirical works in the romantic period. Gendering authorship and narrative voice’, Romantic Textualities, 17 (2007), pp. 24–46, www.romtext.org.uk/articles/rt17_n02/ (accessed 16 October 2017). Alex Howard, ‘ “The Pains of Attention”. Paratextual reading in Practical Education and Castle Rackrent’, Nineteenth-Century Literature, 69:3 (2014), pp. 293–318; ‘Speaking Subalterns and Scribbling Colonists. Narrative Voice in Castle Rackrent’, nd, http://people.qc.cuny.edu/Faculty/david.Richter/Documents/rackrent.html (accessed 16 October 2017).

36 Chuck Zerby describes well the extreme discomfort of reading with endnotes: The Devil’s Details, p. 122. Grafton does not mention endnotes at all in his Footnote. Neither of them mention the relatively new publishing practice of having no note numbers at all in the text, leaving the reader to find page numbers listed at the end with cursory references to the one you’re on. If it takes eight hours to read an average historical monograph, I reckon that all this fiddling about adds at least another two to reading time.

37 Roger Chartier, The Order of Books. Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe between the 14th and 18th Centuries, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 1992.

38 For the tableau as the visual summary of stage melodrama, Martin Meisel, Representations. Narrative, Theatrical and Pictorial Arts in Nineteenth-Century England, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ, 1983, pp. 45–51.

39 Or, as Naomi Mitchison had it in 1932, in the encyclopedia to which Auden contributed (above, p. 73 ) ‘just as scientists make science, so historians make history’. Editor’s intro. to N. Niemeyer and E. Ashcroft, ‘An Outline of World History’, An Outline for Boys and Girls and their Parents, Gollancz, London, 1932, pp. 395–416.

40 I am well aware of Perry Anderson’s criticism of E. P. Thompson’s belief in ‘history … [as] the record of everything that has happened’. This is ‘a notoriously vacant conclusion’, he says. But I am not proposing it.’ ‘History’ is the written form and narrative extracted from the Everything of the Past. Arguments with English Marxism, NLB and Verso, London, 1980, p. 13.

41 Jacques Derrida, Mal d’archive. Une impression freudienne, Editions Galilée, Paris, 1995, trans. Archive Fever. A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago IL, 1996.

42 Jacques Rancière, The Names of History. On the Poetics of Knowledge (1992), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis MN, 1994, p. 63.

43 ‘The “dignity of history”, whether literary or scientific, is too often afraid of contact with the comic spirit.’ George Macaulay Trevelyan, Clio, A Muse, and Other Essays Literary and Pedestrian, Longmans Green, London, 1913, p. 11.

44 Gentleman of Fortune, The Complete Modern London Spy, for the Present Year, 1781. Or, A Real New, and Universal Disclosure, of the Secret, Nocturnal, and Diurnal Transactions of London and Westminster, Alex. Hogg and T. Lewis, London, 1781, pp. 117–122; The Pocket Magazine of Classic and Polite Literature. Volume 3, John Arliss, London, 1819.

45 Kate Thompson, Down Among the Gods, Virago, London, 1997 (without which this book could not have been written in the way it has been written). Also John Banville, The Infinities, Picador, London, 2009, for their infinite omnipresence.