CHRISTOPHER LOGUE
Logue’s Homer: War Music
Faber £12.00

Whoever or whatever Homer was, The Iliad has a vitality and a capacity to vitalize which is like a power place in nature. To turn to it and to respond to it is not just a literary act. The energetic charge of the more or less ‘settled’ text that we now have must in part derive from the physical and mental energy of the generations of Homeric bards who remembered, spoke and co-created it in their performances, long before it was set down in writing. It is a living thing — like honour in the words of Logue’s Achilles:

Do not tell Agamemnon honour is
No mortal thing, but ever in creation,
Vital, free, like speed, like light,
Like silence, like the gods...
That proves best, best, that only death can reach,
Yet cannot die because it will be said, be sung,
Now, and in time to be, for evermore.

It is that quality of being spoken, even more than being read in silent interiority, which affirms the shared bodily life of humans and what we value. This is why theatre will never be replaced by film and why we gather in strange uncomfortable rooms to hear poems spoken. Logue is an accomplished performer as well as a poet. He was perfectly cast as the Player King in a Hamlet at the Royal Court, speaking the story of the Sack of Troy in the high, effective language that pierces Hamlet and makes him weep. He brings a performer’s edge to the poet’s knowledge of the bodily presence of language. One feels that War Music is the work he was made for.

This single volume collects the three earlier published volumes of Kings, The Husbands and War Music, not in the order of their composition but in the order of the Iliad books they spring from. It calls itself ‘an account’ of Books 1-4, 16-19 of the Iliad and is neither translation nor version but the fruit of a restless and passionate engagement with that work. Like honour in the passage just quoted, it too is ‘ever in creation’: changing in the way that a living organism changes and in the way that the Iliad must have changed and grown in the mouths and bodies of its first speakers. There are differences (not necessarily improvements, just differences) from the texts of the earlier volumes (men get taller, armies larger, lineation altered) and I suspect that this text may not be final. This does not mean that it is not ready to meet its audience.

War Music has had a vital life in performance. My first contact with it was at the Almeida during the early eighties when Christopher Logue and Alan Howard read what is now the last part. There was no set, just a bare stage and chairs for the two men. The audience was completely attentive; really listening and seeing all that the words showed. It was like being in on the birth of theatre. Reading the text of War Music one is reminded at times of more designed productions informing the language. It can be like watching a modern(ish) dress production of Troilus and Cressida when Helen says ‘You see that Greek with the green umbrella?’ or we are told, ‘Raise your binoculars.’

I remember learning about ‘Homeric similes’ (the long ones which contain stories in themselves) when I ‘did’ Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum at school. Exciting to discover this possibility of worlds within worlds, to get caught up in the stories of the similes which told you about themselves and not just the matter they served. There is something generous and imaginatively energetic about this kind of simile which gets engaged and interested in both parts of the equation so that the creaky old labels of ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ don’t apply. Logue’s variant on the Homeric simile makes active demands on us:

Try to recall the pause, thock, pause,
Made by axe blades as they pace
Each other through a valuable wood.
Though the work takes place on the far
Side of a valley, and the axe strokes are
Muted by depths of warm, still standing, air,
They throb, throb, closely in your ear;
And now and then you catch a phrase
Exchanged between the men who work
More than a mile away, with perfect clarity.

Likewise the sound of spear on spear...

War Music is insistently inter-active, peppered with imperatives: ‘See if you can..’ ‘Think of the noise...’ ‘Think of those fields of light that sometimes sheet / Low-tide sands..’ (we do now); ‘Consider planes at touchdown, how they poise..’ ‘Picture a yacht...Change its mast to a man, / Change its boom to a bow, / Change its sail to a shield; / Notice Merionez..’
Logue grabs our attention: (‘Now hear this..’) and insists on holding it. But he holds it in subtle ways too: ‘As we glide through the cleft in the cliff’s face / Goat bells greet sheep bells greet ship’s bell’ — our ears sharpen as we listen to that line, focusing, discerning the different sounds, the vowel shift from ‘sheep bells’ to ‘ship’s bell’.

One of the functions that the Iliad must have served its first hearers was to give information about the world and how to do things in it. Logue does this too. War Music is generous in its communication; interesting because interested in the variousness of the world. We hear about a curious, solitary kind of ocean wave in Antarctica, about hornets’ nests and grubs, about the 50 hats of Napoleon’s Murat. There is a sense of abundance and pleasure in things and the stuff of them. Where Homer gives us the catalogue of ships (readers of the Iliad who try to cut to the chase and skip this miss out) Logue gives us lists of his own — colours, types of bells, sea-nymphs.

He is good on armour, classifying the Greek shields: ‘posy, standard, 8-oval-8 or "tower", / two-to-six plyhide, some decked with bronze’. His description of Achilles’ heaven-built armour is quite wonderful. He avoids taking on Homer’s description of the shield embossed with prophetic scenes (from which arose Auden’s great poem); instead he presents it in its physical nature but with a practical exactness which honours the matter of it and which points beyond the physical. At its best this war-writing has something of the dug-from-clay quality of David Jones or the Rosenberg of ‘Dead Man’s Dump’. Trenchant. The sense of encounter with stuff is intensified by the use of phrases compounded mainly of well-planted monosyllables which give a sense of piled-up density: ‘A slug-white thigh-thick python’, ’the cloche-faced gull-winged gold’, ‘his ilex-napped / Snowcragbackfastness’. I was reminded of Donne’s ‘grim eight-foot-high iron-bound serving-man.’

The huge scale of Homer’s matter takes in not just the scale of capricious but powerful gods but also of mortals who are in every way larger, more full of feeling and power to act, than the more recent humans who remember them in words. Logue creates a different sense of vastness by including the distance between Homer and ourselves in his reference so that we have vastness of time as well as of space and human capacity. In one passage the reference moves from Atlantis to somewhere like an A.D. Bournemouth: ‘Our stillness like the stillness in / Atlantis when the big wave came, / The brim-full basins of abandoned docks, / Or Christmas mornings by the sea.’ The scale of Achilles’ endlessly felt grief at Patroclus’ death is shown in an image of a globe not known to Homer:

Look north.
Achilles on the forepeak of his ship.
He lifts his face to 90; draws his breath;
And from the bottom of his heart emits
So long and loud and terrible a scream
The icy scabs at either end of earth
Winced in their sleep;

Those ‘scabs’ are disturbingly unpleasant: the sense of wretched irritation they evoke is, to my mind, more fitting for Thersites (whom Logue does brilliantly) than Achilles at this moment.

As in Homer, the gods are no more responsible — in fact rather less so — than humans; and their capriciousness reaches further. The sticky language of a petulant child is given here to men and gods: Priam is Hera’s ‘best king’; ‘Witness me glad. Yes. Glad. Extra glad..’ (Achilles); Athene with Zeus (who calls her ‘Chou-Chou’): ‘Pa-pa...The Trojans swore an oath / To which You put Your voice.’ / ‘I did not’/ Father, You did....Did-did-did-did — and no returns.’ My one reservation about War Music is that this tone enters a little too easily and often, and introduces a note of languid superciliousness that can be as wearing in a poem as in conversation. Thetis promises Achilles she will protect Patroclus’ body from ‘the slimy things’. (And will Cassandra start to thqueam and thqueam and thqueam?)

There is a fine line between the kinds of shocks of tone and reference which makes what is seen more present, and a kind of generalised debunking which in the end trivialises. There are small moments when War Music may dip on the wrong side of this line (usually because a joke or an image couldn’t be resisted) but more often the insistent references to present history and places — Bikini, Skopje, Cape Kennedy — have the effect of injecting our world with the Iliad’s largeness of feeling. Some of the most troubling and potent bringings-into-the-present are the least explicit — as when Hera declares ‘I want Troy dead. / Its swimming pools and cellars filled with limbs.’ Logue’s reach is not just in one direction. He can convey a sense of the marvellous and the transcendent. He shows, for example, the qualities of air: ‘There is a certain brightness in the air. / It means the Lord Apollo is too close...’ and later:

The daylight stiffens to translucent horn;
   And through it
Falling
   One sun’s cord
That opened out into a radiant cone around Sarpedon’s corpse;
And him inside that light, as if
A god asleep upon his outstretched hand.

Logue has a sense of ceremony and ritual which is both theatrical and religious. It makes him able to indicate another dimension. (It is rare to find a contemporary poet who might make something of the Paradiso as well as the Inferno but I’ve begun to feel that Logue, who is too busy with Homer to do it, might.) Prayer, if you believe in it, is the most truly performative language act available: ‘Thy will be done’ and it is done. Logue has the confidence to include acts of prayer in his poem without the apologetic dilution of irony.

War Music, as its title would lead one to hope, is highly alert to sound. The sound of the Greek army drawing their swords ‘was heard in Troy / Much like a shire-sized dust-sheet torn in half’; ‘The air near Ajax was so thick with arrows, that, / As they came, their shanks tickered against each other.’ Better still — and this goes with his ability to discern the qualities of air — Logue leads us up to the edge of silence: ‘the Greeks moved on / Down the long slope towards Troy / As silently as if they walked on wool’; and, most wonderfully, a quarrel settles down until ‘All were as quiet as children drawing.’

Elizabeth Cook's poems have appeared in Agenda, The Shop and Tears in the Fence and she has edited the works of John Keats for Oxford University Press. Her Achilles is published by Methuen. Part of it was performed at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival where it won a Fringe First award, and it’s been further performed by Greg Hicks at the National Theatre's Cottesloe Theatre.