by John Hartley Williams

from Poetry Wales, Spring 2009

When I lived in Cameroon, I employed a cook called Jeannot. He was a man of about forty. The French Embassy no longer required his services so he came to work for me (bringing rather superior notions of what kind of food could decently be served for lunch). It was his custom to do the cooking naked. I was surprised when I saw this for the first time, but when he explained he had to wash his shirt and trousers, and they were hanging out to dry, I saw the point of it. Also it was very hot in the kitchen, there were only us two males in the household, nobody could get offended.

I thought.

My African neighbours urged me to sack Jeannot. He was making a fool of me, they said. It was a disgrace etc. As a matter of fact, I thought it was my neighbours who were trying to make a fool of me. I let Jeannot continue to cook naked.

Today, my neighbours in Berlin probably think that by writing poetry I'm trying to make a fool of them. Obviously poetry-writing has no material value—look at the people who arrive at my house on bicycles, yoo-hooing like banshees—not a serious wage-earner among any of them, you can bet. I also suspect my neighbours have determined that poetry's meaning, assuming it has one at all, must be untrustworthy. You can't understand anything der Williams says. And as for 'alternative' methods of locomotion ... people who ride around on bikes probably have group sex. Oder?

Well, I'd never deny that poetry involves the body and its workings. In his notebook Speculations, T.E. Hulme jotted the following observation:

In Tube lift hearing the phrase 'fed up' and realizing that all our analogies, spiritual and intellectual, are derived from purely physical acts. Nay more, all attributes of the absolute and the abstract are really nothing (in so far as they mean anything) but elaborations of simple passions.

All poetry is an affair of the body—that is, to be real it must affect body.

I agree with that. Even very abstract poetic discourse—take a poem like Shelley's 'Hymn to Intellectual Beauty'—carries the reader along with that characteristic Shelleyan gait of one who is always slightly breathless, running on ahead of himself. The poem embodies in its movement a physical function, even though the concept apostrophised—'intellectual beauty'—dances just beyond our grasp. Philosophical remarks only take hold of our minds (only take hold of my mind) when they get physical. Keats observes: 'Beauty is truth, truth beauty.' The reader, perusing the wild attempted ravishing described in Keats's poem ('What maidens loth? /What mad pursuit? What strugggle to escape?), is left brooding over the sexual force of the phrase.

In the English language, polite, meat-eating society prongs its fork into pork, beef or mutton, and howls from stable or sty come from pig, cow or sheep; Latin or French derived vocabulary provides the mandarin of etiquette, and Saxon words provide the undersong of referential quiddity. The game of diction in English is a constant tussle between a discursive airiness and the concreteness of naming. Take those two words treated by Robert Graves in his poem: 'The Naked and the Nude':

For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.

In its essence, poetry goes naked. Nude is coy, exhibitionistic. Naked has no designs on us. It's without reproach. Nature is naked, and nature, as Heraclitus says, loves to hide. What could be shyer than a bird or a deer? A poem, too, loves to hide—because it is reaching for the most natural form of expression, the one to which everyone aspires. Natural? Yes. Its artifice dismantles artifice to reach the truth. Nudity on the other hand, bent solely on the task of revealing itself, does not hide because flagrant self-assertion is its only mode of being. Nudity's déshabille is clothed in rhetoric. It is, in a rather horrible sense, culture. And poetry's ambition—always—is to wring the neck of rhetoric. Rhetoric is what we uneasily live with in our everyday lives. It manipulates us to buy things we don't need; it underpins the homilies of politicians who disguise their ambitions under a cloak of goodwill. It gives us no time to reflect, because it has already reflected for us, and closes off the issue even as it appears to open it. It's what the headmistress of your school employs, or the boss of your firm. It's only when you finally realise the gap between the sentiments of your superiors, your elders and betters, and the realities of the physical world you live in that you are ready to fall into the arms of poetry.

At practically all the central London tube stations nowadays, they shout Mind the Gap! (Time to fit trains to platforms, maybe?) But no one shouts Mind the Gap! in the academic world. The discourse of criticism employs a form of rhetoric which pretends there are no gaps, so when the matter of nudity arises you'd hardly think anyone was standing around with no clothes on. Cool language is used to discuss the way painters see the human body, even though the subject matter: i.e. what goes on in the mind of one human being when contemplating the unclothedness of another human being, is hardly cool. Critical discourse steers clear of invoking amorous human sweat. Even though a 'breathing human passion' in a sculpture of entwined lovers cannot do otherwise than suggest the 'heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd / A burning forehead, and a parchhing tongue'—decorum rules the discussion of the artwork. How do people manage to contemplate another aroused and naked human body, whatever the sex, and prattle mousily over the latent procreative prowess, the threat of genesis, which trembles before their gaze?

The word 'nude' refers to absences—i.e. clothes—that were there once and now, triiumphantly, are not. The triumph of the nudity lies in your abjection. But the naked, by their refusal to dissimulate or manipulate, hold to the essence of their condition, as poetry does.

And being non-rhetorical, nakedness will know defeat, as the human body in due course is defeated by time. At the same time, its defeat can continue to resound across time, through the pure nakedness of its expression. That is actually what poetry does. And nakedness must be a condition of the language by which poetry is expressed. We can see how truly an affair of the body poetry is, if we look at the word 'naked' in the second line of this famous lyric by Thomas Wyatt. The word has a governing function that controls the rest of the poem.

They fle from me that sometyme did me seke
  With naked fote stalking in my chamber.
I have sene theim gentill, tame and meke
  That now are wyld and do not remembre
  That sometime they put theimself in daunger
To take bred at my hand; and nowe they raunge
Beselly seeking with a continuell chaunge.

Thancked be fortune, it hath ben othrewise
  Twenty tymes better—but ons in speciall,
In thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse,
  When her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall
  And she me caught in her armes long and small,
Therewithall swetely did me kysse,
And softely saide, 'Dere hert, howe like you this?'

It was no dreme: I lay brode waking.
  But all is torned thorough my gentilnes
Into a straunge fasshion of forsaking,
  And I have leve to goo of her goodeness,
  And she also to use new-fangilnes.
But syns that I so kyndely am served,
I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.

Wyatt recalls a woman 'in thyn arraye after a pleasaunt gyse' (a winning scarcity of apparel), and the moment 'when her lose gowne from her shoulders did fall'. She catches him in her slender arms, asks him provocatively: 'Dere hert, howe like you this?' The nakedness of the moment shines. But at the poem's core lies an enigmatic defeat. Everything has turned 'into a straunge fashion of forsaking'. The courtier who once casually swapped partners, finds himself swapped in turn. The poet complains: 'I have leve to goo of her goodeness'.

Knowing of the licence of Henry's court, the reader can only conclude that Wyatt's lover, sensing his desire to roam, has given him his freedom, waived the obligations of love, and the consequences of her 'goodeness' will mean that she too will 'use new-fangilness' A gamut of sexual partners? Liaisons Dangereuses?

The final couplet of the poem contains the phrase 'syns that I so kyndely am served'. Readers are apt, perhaps, to take this as ironically meant. But 'kyndely' carries two meanings—our modern 'kindly' but also 'naturally', 'in the nature of things'. If we read the poem with this latter meaning in our minds (this doesn't preclude the other meaning, of course), the poem takes on a crueller tone. Nature, or nakedness, goes where it listeth. The forked animal that is a subject of its own desires obeys its natural dictates. Fidelity, or rather the wish to embrace it, is powerless against the superior might of naked desire. And the consequence of that leads to the posing of the poem's final (indirect) question: 'I would fain knowe what she hath deserved.'

What has Wyatt's lady deserved? The question churns up a whirl of speculation and association that gives the poem its transhistorical power. Throbbing behind the poem are the power relations attendant on sexual affairs in the orbit of majesty. We may speculate that Wyatt himself was a good friend, perhaps a lover, of Anne Boleyn. He may even have witnessed her beheading from a window of the Tower, in which he was also imprisoned. The poem's electricity resides in its continuing disclosure of motive after centuries, the 'thyn arraye' falling away to reveal the fundamental nakedness of human affairs, illuminating the sad animal who lies 'brode waking'.

Two vocabularies of English perform a courteous exchange in this poem, almost a quadrille. The words: fle, naked, fate, wyld, hand, kysse, hert, dreme, kyndely are different in kind from: chamber, remembre, daunger, raunge, chaunge, served, deserved, gentilness, pleasaunt. Is there a terrible social distinction embedded in the vocabulary of English? Thomas Carlyle considered language to be 'the flesh-garment, the body, of thought.' Maybe it is. Given that the clothes people sport bear no relation to anything except whim, that would explain how thinking turns out so often to be no more than a speciously interlinked series of prejudices. Even something whimsical that has been sanctioned by custom—such as a judge's wig (or a crook's pinstripe)—is no less whimsical for it. A poet, contemplating a judge in full regalia, can only burst out laughing. The preposterous togs of his lordship are the obverse side of nudity, and the language of the law raises rhetoric to the nth power, whereas the poet's language constitutes a war on clothes. The poet's ambition is to capture nakedness and draw the reader into a clearing where what stands there unclothed may properly be contemplated.

A frisson in the forest.

I have a question that relates to Jeannot, my naked cook. During his time in my employment he came and asked me to advance him some money so that he could buy a bicycle and cycle to work across town. I gave him the money and a few days later he appeared with what looked like a new bike. Printed on its down bar in gold capital letters were the words THE RELIGION CYCLE. (Made in Nigeria.) Jeannot explained it was a reliable brand.

That very evening, I sat on my balcony and watched him pedal away up the slight gradient that led to the main road. He turned to wave once or twice. Just before he reached the brow of the hill, though, he stopped abruptly. Something was wrong. He hadn't quite fallen off, but almost. There was something definitely wrong with the bike. Then, crestfallen, he began to walk back down the hill towards me bearing in either hand the two broken halves of the bike.

No, that isn't a question, is it? The trouble is, it ought to be.

About the Author
John Hartley Williams's work includes The Ship (Salt) and Café des Artistes (Jonathan Cape), published in April.

Poetry Wales

Editor: Zoe Skoulding
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