Expressing the emotions (1995)

Book Review from the July 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

Against the Current by Christopher Hampton. (Katabasis Press, £5.95.)

There is more than one way to skin a cat. Polemicising against capitalism is good and necessary, but we need to express the felt emotions of an oppressed class as well. Marx learned more about the awful impact of industrial capitalism in France by reading Balzac's novels than from statistical formulae. Poetry, too, is a potent force in the struggle we are waging. As Christopher Hampton writes in his poem, What Words Can Do:

It's not a choice. Words either play

their part in making actions count

(imperative as the pressures mount)

or— caught between— give way,

give up, condone, conform, betray.

Hampton has a fine pedigree of finding the right words for the struggle. His Radical Reader: The Struggle for Change in England, 1381-1914, published in paperback by Penguin in 1984, was a remarkable anthology of fighting words. The Faber Book of Political Verse, edited by Tom Paulin in 1986, added much to the repertoire of our political battle songs: a veritable feast of great poets showing that the capitalists might own the printing presses, but it is from our class that the great literature of our time comes.

Hampton's new anthology of poetry is an invigorating addition to that repertoire. It reflects wide classical knowledge (he is currently working on a novel about Cicero’s radical conservatism in opposition to the true voice of freedom expressed by an ex-slave), and the poems from and about the ugly Eighties, the decade when Thatcherism called upon us to celebrate commerce. is unrestrainedly angry. His poem, The Leash, reminds us of Shelley's fire and will not easily be extinguished in the minds of its readers:

We walk these streets believing we are free.

    We take our roast-beef rolls with beer

and sun ourselves in Little Tilchficld Street

    as if there were no questions to be answered.

Love, its message half unheard in the rhythm

   of a ground-bass beating intermittently

among the chatter and the jostle, binds.

    And at such moments one could be forgiven

for supposing London’s teeming lunchtime air

     was freely ours—not bought or fought for,

not constricted, driven by the chartered laws

    of property, but unconditional and open,

there to move through, in and out, at will.

    Yet all the time, containing us, the abstracts

are at work that keep us all on leash.

With great pleasure we can report that Christopher Hampton will be a participant in the show of Socialist Words and Music currently being organised by our Camden branch. 

Steve Coleman