Kenneth Cox’s work is of that rare type one accepts with alacrity and begins with high hopes. And yet, to redeploy the opening of Cox’s assault on Geoffrey Hill, surely it cannot be denied that Kenneth Cox is very limited? Cox writes criticism as he claims Zukofsky wrote poetry: “as if you [have] read everything and no-one had ever written before. ” While this allows him space to offer remarkable readings, it also leads him to make irresponsible claims.
The Art of Language: Selected Essays hews closely to but also differs crucially from the contents of Cox’s Collected Studies in the Use of English, his only book, published by Agenda Editions in 2001. Cox’s Collected Studies consolidated his reputation—the more apt word might be cult—among a subset of experimental poets, the postwar descendants of Modernism in the UK. A glance at the table of contents identifies Cox’s milieu. Editor Jenny Penberthy’s introduction situates him. Cox, a decorated veteran of the Second World War, did not attend university, began publishing in the 1960s and then only in “little magazines,” notably William Cookson’s Agenda and later in Montemora, Maps, and Scripsi, among others. Cox wrote slowly, revised often, crucially changing his mind years, even decades, after offering his meticulous readings of poets’ use of language.
At his best Cox is careful, brilliant, and stylish. Often at his best, his painstaking attention to the works of his favorite authors must equal the pains they took making them. The most characteristic longer pieces are “Hugh MacDiarmid,” the three pieces on Bunting, and “Louis Zukofsky: Tribute to Mallarmé.” Among the shorter reviews, “Gael Turnbull,” “Roy Fisher,” and “August Kleinzahler” stand out. Discussing Bunting’s use of language Cox writes, “It seems the feel of living speech comes through only when the subtlest elements of movement and intonation come together in a meeting governed by rare and unpredictable conditions, such as those which govern the evanescent existence of the elementary particles.” This is beautifully said, and beautifully judged: the movement from “comes through” to “comes together” is as elegant as the rare concatenation it describes.
As often as there is beauty, care, and attention in Cox’s criticism, there is also ignorance, even silliness. He makes wild assertions and offers deeply suspect theories, their offensiveness not lessened by his occasional moue of lament. Here, in a piece about Wyndham Lewis, Cox observes: “Hard as it is to take, both the structure of ideas and the history of individuals show an undeniable line joining Mallarmé’s Tuesdays rue de Rome with Belsen and Auschwitz.” If only Cox had deigned to open John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992), a book that looks into an abyss that Cox tries to leap in a sentence. In “Louis Zukofsky,” Cox goes well past the ridiculous too often found at the far side of the sublime: “The re-emergence of Jewish wisdom and Jewish intellect in the vernaculars of Europe is one of the glories of twentieth-century literature and a phenomenon in the long run more important than the re-establishment of the state of Israel.” Can anyone go with Cox beyond the conjunction “and” after “literature” in a generalization so grand it becomes meaningless? What prompts a writer justly renowned for his scrupulousness about matters of language to risk such claims about history?
Cox makes bizarre, sweeping statements about poetry, too, as kooky and spurious as Louise Glück’s claim in her essay “Against Sincerity” that “the great advantage of formal verse” is that “metrical variation provides a subtext. It does what we now rely on tone to do.” Glück’s “we” excludes. She makes the classic mistake, conflating personal technique and idiosyncratic means for historical necessity and inevitable ends. Compare with Cox, writing about Yeats: “Another constant feature, rhyming, is important. A tawdry ornament of no intrinsic value but great persuasive power Yeats came to rely on it as a means of fortifying his habit of rhetorical expression.” Cox, like Glück, uses criticism of style as a means to make—and enforce—taste and to write history. And from an otherwise careful examination of Roy Fisher, a poet who cannot receive too much attention: “The conventional norms of English versification have collapsed and no sensible person seeks to restore them, unless for occasional antiquarian purposes.” Cox’s sense of history pollutes astute readings even of poets he admires.
The editing of this work gives a curious impression of Cox’s evolution as a critic. Readers may get a mistaken impression that Cox despised the formalist, academic Geoffrey Hill and was happy to skewer Donald Davie, one of the few critics who praised him, but was never anything but judicious and respectful of his favorites. Penberthy writes, “We know that [Cox’s] final judgment of Zukofsky’s work, and indeed person, was damning. He chose to include his late reconsideration, completed in 2000, in his Collected Studies. It is uncharacteristically sour and tendentious, of a piece with other late-in-life cantankerous disparagements of writers such as Bunting and Allen Upward.” Instead, she includes the “brilliant essay Cox wrote [about Zukofsky] in 1979.” It seems unlikely that a writer as meticulous and as committed to revision as Cox didn’t mean what he ultimately concluded about one of the authors he had lived longest with. Reviewing Mark Scroggins’s biography of Zukofsky in the London Review of Books, August Kleinzahler, Cox’s literary executor, endorses Cox’s final assessment: “This is a harsh appraisal [of Zukofsky], and not in every instance justified, but I find it hard to argue with finally. ” Penberthy’s decision risks sanitizing a writer for the sake of broadening his appeal to an audience for which he never would have compromised.
Why omit Cox’s changes of mind about the authors he had read most closely, and include his demolition of Hill, which amounts to a full-blown mid-life disparagement? In Cox’s blinkered view Hill’s project is passé, and this makes him an inviting target. Ironically, in the final paragraph of his hatchet job, Cox perceives the direction Hill’s late work ultimately takes, an intuition few of Hill’s fans would have endorsed at the time he made it. The review’s final sentence reads: “The ingredients [of Mercian Hymns (1971)] are not everywhere equally blended and the thing as a whole may well be a bit of a lark but if so it only shows what Hill can do when he is borne aloof (as he has it in Tenebrae) less by high endeavour and more by high jinks.” After Canaan (1997), savage, satiric high jinks become Hill’s most productive mode, notably in Speech! Speech! (2000), the second volume of a trilogy (some call it his Commedia) that begins with The Triumph of Love (1998) and ends with The Orchards of Syon (2002). Cox deserves credit for his prescience, not for his vitriol.
This Selected Essays lives uncomfortably between the careful introduction and the hagiographic afterword that bookend the volume. While I quibble with Penberthy’s decisions I can take her at her word. I am expected to take Kleinzahler by his reputation, however, and Kleinzahler likes nothing so much as an unapologetic, angry man. His picture of Cox the polymath, retired from the BBC and living alone in a “book-laden, musty flat” is a lovely read: elderly neighbor ladies look in on him from time to time, the story culminating with the Visitation of Lady Natasha Spender. Kleinzahler’s role is that of a renegade magi in bemused attendance. But just as some portrait-painters always find their own features in their subjects, Kleinzahler’s afterword says as much about him as it does about his subject’s lifelong isolation. What Kleinzahler praises as “singularly unaccommodating” in Cox’s criticism sounds more like axe-grinding. When the introduction and the afterword are taken together, Cox comes into focus: brilliant but disappointed, unreconciled to his anonymity, his inability to play well with others counted a virtue only to others with the same lack, he fits a type too common to make an exception for, even in this case.
In her own portrait of Cox, Penberthy stresses his hostility to the academy, but it’s also possible that Cox preferred to strike from the corner that he painted himself into rather than come to terms with a wider world he believed must accept him on his own terms. Cox diagnoses his own problem in a letter quoted by Penberthy: “To a young writer hostile to a polyglot poet, Cox notes that this is ‘the kind of thing that happens when after long close study of a chosen author, you first come face to face with the fact that you and he are fundamentally unlike. The experience is a test of humanity as well as a test of taste.’” On the final page of his afterword, Kleinzahler excerpts a letter that he received from Cox in 2003: “All the same I have good news which cannot be doubted: William Cookson is dead.” Here Cox celebrates the death of the editor who did more than any other to make his work available, and this sentiment makes explicit what the essays suggest: Cox often failed his own test. As often as Cox surpasses the ordinary task of the critic, as often as he makes a lasting contribution to our understanding, he fouls the nest with the sort of nonsense he would never let his subjects get away with. Read him—and bring salt.
July 2017
This review was published in Issue 60:3.