LERNER, Laurence (David)

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Nationality: British. Born: Cape Town, South Africa, 12 December 1925. Education: University of Cape Town, B.A. 1944, M.A. 1945; Pembroke College, Cambridge. B.A. 1949. Family: Married Natalie Winch in 1948; four sons. Career: Schoolmaster, St. George's Grammar School, Cape Town, 1946–47; assistant lecturer, then lecturer in English, University College of the Gold Coast, Legon, Ghana, 1949–53; extra-mural tutor, then lecturer in English, Queen's University of Belfast, 1953–62; lecturer, then reader, 1962–70, and professor of English, 1970–84, University of Sussex, Brighton; Kenan Professor of English, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, 1985–95. Visiting professor, Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana, University of Connecticut, Storrs, 1960–61, University of Illinois, Urbana, 1964, University of Dijon, 1967, University of Munich, 1968–69, 1974–75, University of Paris III 1982, University of Ottawa, 1983, University of Würzburg, 1989–90, and University of Vienna, 1994. Awards: Prudence Farmer prize (New Statesman), 1975; South-East Arts prize, 1979. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1986. Address: Abinger, 1B Gundreda Road, Lewes, East Sussex BN7 1PT, England.

Publications

Poetry

(Poems). Oxford, Fantasy Press, 1955.

Domestic Interior and Other Poems. London, Hutchinson, 1959.

The Directions of Memory: Poems 1958–1963. London, Chatto and Windus, 1963.

Selves. London, Routledge, 1969.

Folio, with others. Frensham, Surrey, Sceptre Press, 1971.

A.R.T.H.U.R.: The Life and Opinions of a Digital Computer. Hassocks, Sussex, Harvester Press, 1974; Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1975.

The Man I Killed. London, Secker and Warburg, 1980.

A.R.T.H.U.R. & M.A.R.T.H.A.; or, The Loves of the Computers. London, Secker and Warburg, 1980.

A Dialogue. Oxford, Pisces Press, 1983.

Chapter and Verse: Bible Poems. London, Secker and Warburg, 1984.

Selected Poems. London, Secker and Warburg, 1984.

Rembrandt's Mirror. London, Secker and Warburg, and Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University Press, 1987.

Play

The Experiment (produced Brighton, 1980).

Novels

The Englishmen. London, Hamish Hamilton, 1959.

A Free Man. London, Chatto and Windus, 1968.

My Grandfather's Grandfather. London, Secker and Warburg, 1985.

Other

English Literature: An Interpretation for Students Abroad. London, Oxford University Press, 1954.

The Truest Poetry: An Essay on the Question: What is Literature? London, Hamish Hamilton, 1960; New York, Horizon Press, 1964.

The Truthtellers: Jane Austen, George Eliot, and D.H. Lawrence. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Schocken, 1967.

The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in Pastoral Poetry. London, Chatto and Windus, and New York, Schocken, 1972.

Thomas Hardy's "The Mayor of Casterbridge": Tragedy or Social History? London, Chatto and Windus, 1975.

An Introduction to English Poetry: Fifteen Poems Discussed. London, Arnold, 1975.

Love and Marriage: Literature and Its Social Context. London, Arnold, 1979.

The Literary Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Brighton, Harvester, and New York, Barnes and Noble, 1982.

The Two Cinnas: Quakerism, Revolution and Poetry: A Dialogue. London, Quaker Home Service, 1984.

The Frontiers of Literature. London, Blackwell, 1988.

Philip Larkin. Plymouth, Northcote House for the British Council, 1997.

Angels & Absences: Child Deaths in the 19th Century. Nashville, Tennessee, and London, Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

Wandering Professor. London, Caliban, 1999.

Editor, Poems, by Milton. London, Penguin, 1953.

Editor, Shakespeare's Tragedies: A Selection of Modern Criticism. London, Penguin, 1963.

Editor, with John Holmstrom, George Eliot and Her Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews. London, Bodley Head, 1966.

Editor, Shakespeare's Comedies: A Selection of Modern Criticism. London, Penguin, 1967.

Editor, with John Holmstrom, Thomas Hardy and His Readers: A Selection of Contemporary Reviews. London, Bodley Head, 1968.

Editor, Poetry South East 2: An Anthology of New Poetry. Tunbridge Wells, Kent, South East Arts Association, 1977.

Editor, The Victorians. London, Methuen, and New York, Holmes and Meier, 1978.

Editor, Reconstructing Literature. Oxford, Blackwell, 1983.

Editor, with Vereen Bell, On Modern Poetry: Essays Presented to Donald Davie. Nashville, Tennessee, Vanderbilt University Press, 1988.

Editor and translator, Baudelaire. London, Everyman's Poetry, 1999.

Translator, Spleen, by Baudelaire. Belfast, Festival, 1966.

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Laurence Lerner comments:

My poems are comprehensible, sad, modern in subject matter rather than form. Some are lyrical and personal; many are dramatic and represent the attempt to enter a variety of selves. In Chapter and Verse I tried to perform the perhaps incompatible tasks of introducing the Bible to the modern secular reader for whom it is no longer culturally central and subverting the traditional stories by means of an unusual viewpoint or unorthodox judgement. If I could write half a dozen more poems as good as "The Merman" or "Raspberries," I would be satisfied. Rembrandt's Mirror deals largely with my family (ancestors and descendants) and their role in the poet's emotional life. It contains a poem in which Rembrandt addresses his mirror, but the title also indicates the intimate and domestic subject matter. My next (and possibly final) project, which may never be completed, is to write a series of poems about philosophers. I love the idea of using poetry to support and subvert reason simultaneously.

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Like the best of his criticism, Laurence Lerner's poetry is sensible, direct, and aware of the complexities of human behavior. Many of the poems in his first collection, Domestic Interior, are reactions to different environments. Their strength lies not so much in description as in the way they establish a mental rapport with the external world, in which closely observed incidentals find their place in a wider pattern of experience:

   While shaping eyes stare from the moving train:
   Or else a water-colour landscape glows
   Grey-green and tawny under a wash of rain,
   Or blue with blobs of cabbages in rows.

Most of these poems are "efficient" and well argued in a sense that reminds one of the best poetry of the 1930s, though occasionally the argument only partly conceals a certain diffuseness of detail. In the more successful ones, however, like the title poem and "Meditation on the Toothache" (in actual fact a meditation on the imagination), a powerful social concern is firmly rooted in the trivia of the individual life and in the means by which these may be absorbed into artistic creation. The dramatic sense is evident in "Domestic Interior" and "Mimesis," both poems in which the subject is approached through a number of protagonists.

Lerner's second collection, The Directions of Memory, is more adventurous in technique and shows a willingness to handle more difficult kinds of experience. Though one still occasionally feels that a poem has not found its ideal form, there is a more subtle sense of construction and a growing skill in the use of imagery. Several of the most striking poems deal with sexual relationships, sometimes from the woman's point of view. These range from the dream of aggression ("Housewife as Judith") to qualified celebration, as in "The Anatomy of Love." In the fine poem "Midnight Swim" a profoundly disturbing situation is conveyed through a brilliantly controlled central metaphor. The same can be said of the most moving poem in the volume, "Years Later," the monologue of an unborn Jewish child, the victim (with its mother) of a Nazi atrocity. These poems show a determination to face up to the more disturbing aspects of life with honesty, intelligence, and, at times, wit.

The same combination of qualities persists, with increasing verbal power, in Selves. The central section of the collection includes a group of monologues in which various victims of human cruelty—a laboratory rat, a monkey involved in a feeding experiment, a battery-reared cockerel—comment on their situations with grimly humorous logic. Though in one sense such poems are a natural extension of Lerner's interest in contemporary psychological theory, their real originality comes from the skill with which they render essentially inarticulate suffering in terms of a recognizable human idiom. In other poems ("The Merman," "Adam Names the Creatures," "Information Theory") the concern with communication extends to the nature of language itself. Here, as in "The Merman," the deliberate assumption of inarticulateness becomes a powerful device for exploring the gap between words and reality:

   When humans talk they split their say in bits
   And bit by bit they step on what they feel.
   They talk in bits, they never talk in all.
 
 
   So live in wetness swimming they call "sea";
   And stand on dry and watch the wet waves call
   They still call "sea".
     Only their waves don't call.

Lerner's continued questioning of the basis of language and perception lies at the root of A.R.T.H.U.R. It would be wrong to dismiss this as a jeu d'esprit. Certainly the poems are ingenious, entertaining, and wittier than anything else he has written, though none of this should blind one to their underlying seriousness. As the introductory poem makes clear, the world of A.R.T.H.U.R. ("Automatic Record Tabulator but Heuristically Unreliable Reasoner") is divided between "metal people" and "movers," in other words, between computers and human beings. This leads to some unusual perspectives: "Movers are constantly bending and running /Through a world of edges and obstacles. Cunning /Their reflexes, but cannot eliminate mourning." From the human point of view the effect is one of "making strange," a process that is carried still further in poems like "Literary Criticism" and "Arthur takes a test for divergent thinking," which are concerned with the properties of language itself. Here the game seems innocent enough. Elsewhere, however, as in certain stories by Borges, there are hints of more frightening possibilities, the sense, for example, that new objects can be brought into existence by the mere fact that it is possible to name them. Hence the ending of "Arthur's reply," with its brilliant final pun: "We can try anything: just turn me on, /Feed me the facts, and wait for trial and terror."

The possibilities of such poems are extended in A.R.T.H.U.R. &M.A.R.T.H.A.; or, The Loves of the Computers, an equally engaging collection in which human sexual relationships are tested almost to destruction by the witty application of scientific metaphor. Both sequences are impressive evidence of Lerner's inventiveness in a mode that few British poets have attempted and that represents, in Edwin Morgan's phrase, "a natural extension of the imagination in an age of science."

Lerner's collections The Man I Killed and Chapter and Verse: Bible Poems mark a partial return to earlier allegiances, though the directness of the best poems may owe something to the pointed simplicity and sureness of rhythm he had been compelled to practice in the "scientific" poems. The former takes its title from "The Experiment," one of Lerner's most powerful poems, in which his earlier preoccupation with the scientific treatment of animals is brought to a head in the imagined victimization of man at his own hands. Here and elsewhere the tone varies between humor, irony, and the deliberately flat statement of the horrific, with notable gains in economy of language and skill in counterpointing conversational rhythms against carefully controlled patterns of repetition. Less spectacularly, though no less forcefully, the spaciousness and verbal richness of the earlier dramatic monologues give way, as in the two Rembrandt poems ("Saskia" and "Youthful Self-Portrait"), to a greater incisiveness in which the heaviest burden falls on the simplest words ("then," "now," "selves") carefully spaced within a verse pattern created largely by natural phrasing and the skillful use of eye rhymes and line breaks.

Though The Man I Killed is the stronger collection, Chapter and Verse (published at the same time as the excellent Selected Poems) brings together and intensifies many of Lerner's earlier preoccupations in the course of re-creating a series of biblical episodes from Genesis to Apocalypse. Though occasionally the commentary becomes a little predictable, the general effect is shrewd, entertaining, and at times (as in the fine poem on Poussin's painting of Saint Matthew) deeply moving. Again, in a poem like "Ishmael" one admires the economy with which scattered hints from Genesis are taken up and welded into a coherent discourse that compels the reader to enter the speaker's subversive mentality and to see things from what, in his own terms, is a legitimate point of view. The deepest irony is that, at certain crucial moments, this point of view is made to overlap with the reader's own. By opening a channel between the present time and that of the speaker, phrases like "God's first Jew" and "What does the future cost?" emphasize both the relevance of the biblical narrative and its power to disturb.

Lerner's volume Rembrandt's Mirror is one of his best. Though the virtues of his earlier collections are very much in evidence—above all the quizzical, critical mind that continues to offer new perspectives on experience—there is an increasing assurance in the use of formal techniques and in the ability to play comic variations on some of his most serious themes. Several poems of this type, like "Starting" and the splendid "A Short Guide to Academic Life," are genuinely funny, and the whole volume shows a fascination with the incongruities of human life that is never allowed to become condescending. Many of the more serious poems enact what at one point Lerner calls "Touching the past of others, testing it /Into existence" ("In Fifteen Years"). It is this that links the accomplished dramatic monologues and the series of poems on painters and their subjects that make up the second part of the book. More important, it accounts for the group of poems on family relationships opening the collection, in which Lerner projects his own personal history into both the past and the imminent future. Though none of these poems is quite as poignant as the marvelous "Raspberries" (from The Man I Killed), the kind of detailed exploration they represent, with its delicate balancing of distance and intimacy, is an impressive achievement, the poetic counterpart to the process recorded in fictional terms in his novel My Grandfather's Grandfather.

Such poems seem to come from a firm and individual center of experience that Lerner has come to take for granted. For some time he has given the impression of a poet who is working hard on himself and who has a great deal of resourcefulness. His publication in 1999 of a substantial selection of Baudelaire in English verse translation is among the most effective versions to have appeared. Lerner's own poetic idiom, with its combination of clarity and passion, seems an ideal vehicle for the older poet. Conversely, one is made aware of the frequent presence of Baudelaire in Lerner's own original poetry, a major source, one would guess, of its particular strengths.

—Arthur Terry