IN that marvellously committed and lopsided book, An ABC of Reading, Ezra declares: "The critic who doesn't make a personal statement is merely an unreliable critic. He is not a measurer but a repeater of other men's results." Much of what passes for criticism at present is either unreliable self serving puff or heavy duty world view enforcement. Which is to say, we know the opinion beforehand. It is rare for a literary critic to speak his or her mind about how good a book is and why.
Tom Paulin's television appearances on BBC's Late Review are certainly a measure of his critical forthrightness and willingness to call a dud a dud. However, the vernacular performance of bemused seriousness translates oddly to the page. Some of these essays, reprinted from Paulin's Bloodaxe collection Ireland and the English Crisis, stand up well particularly the politico cultural ones: "The Making of a Loyalist" (1980) on Conor Cruise O'Brien is remarkably prescient, given Dr O'Brien's recent alignments with the absurdly titled UK Unionists; "Paisley's Progress" (1982) is the best thing written on the subject and short pieces on Louis MacNeice and Derek Mahon are sharp, concise and helpful.
The bigger statements seem dated and constrained by polemical self consciousness and a curious anxiety to prove something: "A New Look at the Language Question", "Political Verse" and "Vernacular Verse" brashly identify the intellectual co ordinates of Paulin's extensive reading of poetry. The individual poet's art (never mind personality) fade into a structurally articulated plan of action: Elizabeth Bishop's "sophisticated quietism - or her radical distaste - challenges the democratic Yankee triumphalism of much American verse"; "Blues singers" are seen as "the most authentic American political poets" whose "work challenges the more comfortable written tradition". Yes, but ...
The frank, clear prose and the eye for political deceit and the culturally dubious make Writing to the Moment a powerful gathering of Paulin's formidable and erudite conceptualising of literature, its place in this moment and what he calls, in the title essay, "a refusal of the literary": the enabling (and self dramatising) idea of much of what Paulin writes as both poet and critic. Ireland features quite a bit ("Where the Aran Islands used to be the focus of cultural authenticity, Belfast would now [1987] seem to be the deep navel of ethnic chutzpah." Oops.) as does England, mostly of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Surprisingly, judgments of contemporary poets and prose writers are few and far between. Of Tony Harrison, for instance, a poet and dramatist one would have thought close to Paulin's own artistic and intellectual concerns, there is not much more than a passing reference. The harping on about dialect, local words, argot of one kind or another, and the rattling around for challenges to "the more comfortable written tradition", belie an old fashioned romance with "orality", the spoken tradition, the natural voice, which strays very close to Colour Supplementalese. "Reading these lines `You shall have a fishy/in a little dish you shall have a fishy/when the boat comes in we need to hear `boat' not as bot, but as the Northumbrian bisyllabic bo hut". Paulin's distaste for what he calls southern Irish writers "saccharine gabbiness" is fair enough, but the notion that vernacularity is a sure sign of artistic authenticity and a radically acceptable civic consciousness (in Britain or Ireland) should have been left out to dry some years back.
"A writer who employs a word like `geg' or `gulder' or Kavanagh's lovely `gobshite' [lovely?] will create a form of closed, secret communication with readers who come from the same region. These words act as a kind of secret sign and serve to exclude the outside world. They constitute a dialect of endearment within the wider dialect." For brave hearts read claustrophobia.
These informed and wily essays know exactly what they are about. Paulin's rational discourse is copy book stuff. While at no stage does Paulin actually challenge received reputations or provoke reassessments of forgotten or neglected writers, the spirit of Writing to the Moment is very much of these times and Tom Paul in one of the wizards of "Uz".